B2Links – link organiser for b2, and other updates

I mentioned B2Links before but it’s been renamed. The one final feature missing from it is polling weblogs.com to see if each link has been updated in the last x minutes/hours. I might take a look at this next week!

On the b2++ front – I discovered a bug when new users register. Sometimes their blog template isn’t copied over properly. Just login (at the b2login.php url sent to you in the email) and choose another template. A fix will be in the next snapshot, maybe tonight.
I should also make more checks for mod_rewrite in the install process, as at least person had trouble with it. That should be a simple 3 line fix though!
Tim mailed me a long list of features he’d like to see in b2++, as well as suggesting a name change for the project as it’s diverging quite a bit from the original b2. Leave a comment if you have any ideas!
I’d also like to hear from b2 mod/hack authors as the plugin system of b2++ will make it quite easy for original b2 hacks to be incorporated and distributed. When I get around to Smartyising the backend, it’ll be much easier to add stuff there!

imgSeek

imgSeek is a most useful application! I’m importing my photo collection in there. That’s taking a while, as there’s a few gigs of data to work through! Sketching is fun, and could be useful as you can refine your sketch and it’ll keep updating the matching photos. Selecting an existing photo, and looking through the similar photos it like the first time you went online.
You find a photo, it displays “similar” ones, right-click on another photo and find similar ones to that which displays more photos.. It’s a nice way to look through a huge collection of photographs!
What are you still doing reading this, go try it out now!

imgSeek is a photo collection manager and viewer with content-based search and many other features. The query is expressed either as a rough sketch painted by the user or as another image you supply (or an image in your collection). The searching algorithm makes use of multiresolution wavelet decomposition of the query and database images.

(via Ice Walkers)

ssh login attack

Looking through my log reports this morning I was shocked to see lots of failed logins for users such as root, ftp, nobody, apache, operator, amanda, mysql, etc. All originated from one host, ns1.webmediaworks.net, A visit to their website explained everything..

TechTeaM OwnZ u box dollarz@bol.com.br

Unfortunately, the whois db seems to be down so I can’t even contact the webmedia site owners..

model view controller pattern

I’m still working away at a registration process using the MVC pattern. It’s coming along very nicely in fact! Here’s an article describing it in some depth.
I’ve hijacked the idea somewhat for my project. I have one controller, and multiple views/models. There’s one model and view for each page. The view is split between PHP code and Smarty templates. The PHP code doesn’t do much beyond assigning variables for the Smarty templates but I wouldn’t put those assign calls into the model, as then the model would have to know about Smarty. This makes it easy to figure out where something is going wrong, and where I need to _put_ code.
How many of you have “super” classes with thousands of lines of code? That sucks for maintainability.
While some of the Java examples I’ve seen redirect the browser to the new view, I simply unset the old model and view and create the new model and view. The single solitary display() call at the end of the controller takes care of displaying whatever view is active!
Must post some example PHP code later.

Max Payne – Hero

As featured on slashdot already, this movie is excellent. If you’ve ever played Max Payne you’ll really like this movie. If you haven’t, you’ll still like it!
On a side note, the fileshack registration process is quite nice, enter a username and email address, hit submit, then click on the link they send to enter your password. hmm… 🙂

SCO – modem configuration

I know a hell of a lot more now about SCO than I did 24 hours ago. I know all about “Modem Manager”, /usr/lib/uucp/Devices and /usr/lib/uucp/Dialers – Argh! It’s so archaic! For those of you in the Windows world, imagine having to debug or use a Windows 3.1 application. That’s what SCO looked and felt like compared to the modern Linux systems I use everyday. Even a 4 year old Linux box is friendlier to the developer/user.
Finally, thank you Google for finding most of the information I needed. A few hints from a SCO applications developer in Dublin helped too. (“Have you tried 9600? Our modems have trouble connecting at different speeds” *ding*)
It was funny to see a Netscape icon on the desktop and ridiculous to see ncsa-httpd in the output of “ps”. Of course the guys in the office had no idea there was a webserver on the machine…
(Topic is Linux, close enough to Unix to not matter :P)

SCO Unix and PPP

<donncha> question… how hard d’you think it’d be to get dialup networking working on a SCO Unix box?
<pron> donncha: how long is a piece of string ?
<Baud> donncha: are you mad?
<pron> donncha: Seriously though … internal or external modem ?
<Zoso> donncha: dialup to or from the SCO box ?
<Baud> donncha: take a long period of time, double it, and it’ll be about a quarter of the time required
<Zoso> donncha: Well I’ve had to (i.e. not my choice) config & troubleshoot uucp dialup connections on SCO boxes 3 or 4 years ago and that certainly wasn’t fun
* elrond shudders at the very idea of trying to get a sco box doing PPP.
<pron> donncha: install Linux ?
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