I am please to announce the release of SimpleDB 0.9.1, yet another SimpleDB client for PHP. It was designed with the following in mind:

• bulk query and attribute fetching operations
• bulk upload operations (PutAttributes)
• fast execution of as many queries as possible
• proper understandable return values
• proper and clean exception generation
• providing command line utilities to view and manipulate SimpleDB Domains, Items, and Attributes.
• the ability to set domain prefixes for site testing / development

This SimpleDB client requires the following:

• PHP 5.1.4 or greater (hmac_hash() must be defined)
• The Curl extension compiled in.

Please consult the README for installation instructions.

You must, of course, be a member of the SimpleDB Beta program to actually be able to use this.

• Download SimpleDB-0.9.1.tar.bz2 now.

It was with no small amount of dismay that I recently noticed JustLooking was leaking tonnes of memory on my Leopard machine here at home. When developing the program, I put enormous amounts of time an energy into ensuring the program behaved well and didn’t leak. And yet, browsing through 75 photos from a trip to Hong Kong ground my 2GB system into the ground in a hurry.

Upon further investigation, this appears to be a bug in Leopard—my Tiger machine has absolutely no leaking at all. The bug occurs specifically when using CoreImage and NSImage interchangeably. In effect, CoreImage works entirely on video card RAM, and NSImage works entirely in system RAM. The resizing method I use causes the system to copy some of that memory from the VRAM to the system RAM, and that code leaks a tonne at a time.

The good news is that you can fix this by just having CoreImage do the rotation. The bad news is that this is 100% incompatible with the fade effect transitions I use. So, right now, I have the choice between transitions or memory leaks. Or just using Tiger (for which there are a number of other great arguments).

One of things I had been looking at for JustLooking 3.2 was reworking exactly how I use CoreImage, filters, and the system’s loading code. It looks as though this work has just taken on added urgency.

It is with some amusement that I have recently seen a number of PHP 6 books popping up for sale at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. A while back, I spent some time trying to figure out just how far behind the curve I was on PHP 6 since I hadn’t really been paying too much attention. As I started to investigate how things were coming along and when I should expect it to hit the street, I was honestly a bit surprised at how hard news was to come by.

In short, like most major software projects, it’s “a work in progress”. As a project developed by volunteers and people with other full time jobs, there are periods where it sees serious spurts of development, and other periods when there are lulls. It will be released basically when it’s done and properly tested by the community. Who knows when that will be, but I will wager money that it won’t occur at in 2008 at all.

So, with that and all those PHP 6 books in mind, I, as an author myself, have come up with the following list of other books I’d to see published or that I’ll consider starting to write:

My trip back from Montréal to Beijing was considerably less triumphant than I had hoped, as I was struck by a severe plague and ended up spending 9 very miserable days in bed with a high fever and nasty cough. One might think that being confined to bed for a week would be a nice thing, but the stunning boredom that sets in after a while is quite unbearable. You’re too tired to really work hard, focus on TV or movies, or even really read a book, but so sick of sleeping that you crave doing something.

And so, I updated the chipmunkninja.com website. I’ve long hated my initial design with forums and my crappy del.icio.us tagging scheme, so I finally fixed those up and now have a proper tagging system, some fun stats on the right side, and paging, so you don’t have to view every single article on one page now.

It’s still a rather ugly shade of red and contains the finest in 2005 style, but that’s a project another day ….

Bugs, comments, or suggestions, feel free to add a comment or drop me a line. Always glad to hear from readers.

This year, as part of my annual trip to Canada and the USA, I’ve been asked to give two talks at the annual PHP Québec conference in Montréal. I haven’t been back to that city since 1993 when I graduated from University, and it will be interesting to see how it goes. (Although I suspect that while Beijing basks in nearly 20C (nearly 70F) weather every day and even Seattle and New York were closer to 10C (50F), Montréal is still hanging below freezing most days and has over a metre of snow on the ground).

I will be giving talks on internationalisation (commonly just called i18n) and giving your database servers a break with memcached. If you’re anywhere in the neighbourhood, come on by for some good fun. I’ll be getting back to regular programming content this weekend.

TunnelerX is an application for Mac OS X to let you run a single SSH tunnel from your system menu bar, typically to securely re-route HTTP (web browsing) traffic to a remote proxy server. If you have ever had to run one of the following commands in a little Terminal window in the corner of your screen, then this application is for you:

ssh -N -L 8123:localhost:8123 bobo@theclown.com
ssh -N -D 8123:localhost bobo@theclown.com

Changes for 0.9.5:

• The application is now named TunnelerX instead of Tunneler
• A few bugs have been fixed related to sleeping and waking up the computer
• New graphics and icons for the application. It’s a bit less ghetto looking now.

For the 1.0 release (upcoming), I will add Growl notifications for those who wish them. The Growl website is currently down, so I can’t do much yet.

Downloading

• Download TunnelerX-0.9.5.dmg now (HTTP – San Diego, CA)

This is a bit of a geeky post, but then this is a geeky computer blog, so … so be it. Regular readers of this blog will know that I’m a fan of Nethack, and have been playing it on and off for over fifteen years (mostly off, but recently I’ve rediscovered it again). Well, finally, after all this time, I can say the following:

Goodbye marcw the Demigod...

You went to your reward with 5941448 points,
The Book of the Dead (worth 10000 zorkmids and 25000 points)
Vorpal Blade (worth 4000 zorkmids and 10000 points)
The Heart of Ahriman (worth 2500 zorkmids and 6250 points)
The Bell of Opening (worth 5000 zorkmids and 12500 points)
The Candelabrum of Invocation (worth 5000 zorkmids and 12500 points)
       8 emeralds (worth 20000 zorkmids),
       2 diamonds (worth 8000 zorkmids),
       2 rubies (worth 7000 zorkmids),
       1 amulet of ESP (worth 150 zorkmids),
       1 amulet of unchanging (worth 150 zorkmids),
and 2497 pieces of gold, after 93897 moves.
You were level 22 with a maximum of 95 hit points when you ascended.

 No  Points     Name                                                   Hp [max]
  1    5941448  marcw-Bar-Hum-Mal-Neu ascended to demigod-hood.        95  [95]
  2    2623722  marcw-Val-Hum-Fem-Neu died on the Plane of Fire.
                Dissolved in molten lava (with the Amulet).           129 [287]
  3    1330849  marcw-Val-Hum-Fem-Neu choked on her food in Gehennom
                on level 33.  Choked on a disenchanter corpse.        248 [248]

Interestingly, I almost always play Valkyries, but decided to try Barbarians for a couple of games. The first game, I made it all the way down to level 24 without finding a single altar (except for a non-aligned one in the mines with a nasty priest next to it) before an Arch-Lich and Titan finished me off. The second game was this one. Most of the rest of the time, I do embarrassing things like choke on things or eat something I shouldn’t have. Need to be more careful, I suppose.

Well, that’s all there is to this post, but it’s exciting news for me. I’m still playing, and now trying other classes (read: dying a lot).

Tunneler is an application for Mac OS X to let you run a single SSH tunnel from your system menu bar, typically to securely re-route HTTP (web browsing) traffic to a remote proxy server. If you have ever had to run one of the following commands in a little Terminal window in the corner of your screen, then this application is for you:

ssh -N -L 8123:localhost:8123 bobo@theclown.com
ssh -N -D 8123:localhost bobo@theclown.com

Downloading

• Download Tunneler-0.9.dmg now (HTTP – San Diego, CA)

I’m pleased to announce the immediate availablity of JustLooking 3.1. JustLooking is a program to view pictures and images on your Mac OS X (Tiger) based computer. JustLooking is a Universal Binary, and can be run on both PowerPC and Intel Macs. The program is and will always be very free.

Please note that I pay for my own bandwidth, so please try to use the BitTorrent version of the download if you are able to—it’s about a 3.1MB file and takes about 60 seconds.

• Download JustLooking-3.1.dmg now (BitTorrent – TPB).
• Download JustLooking-3.1.dmg now (HTTP – San Diego, CA)

JustLooking 3.1 contains a number of bug fixes and minor improvements on the 3.0 release.

• The toolbar no longer takes keyboard focus.
• SPACE Advances images in the regular viewer.
• Cmd+I toggles Image Info visibility.
• You can copy images from the context menu of images.
• - and +/= keys can be used to control zoom levels.
• Cmd+Backspace now deletes images.
• New Korean and Catalan translations.

JustLooking 3.0 pretty much contains more new features and code than all the previous versions of JustLooking combined! New features include:

I’m pleased to announce the immediate availablity of JustLooking 3.0. JustLooking is a program to view pictures and images on your Mac OS X (Tiger) based computer. JustLooking is a Universal Binary, and can be run on both PowerPC and Intel Macs. The program is and will always be very free.

Please note that I pay for my own bandwidth, so please try to use the BitTorrent version of the download if you are able to—it’s about a 2MB file and takes about 45 seconds.

• Download JustLooking-3.0.dmg now (BitTorrent – TPB).
• Download JustLooking-3.0.dmg now (HTTP – San Diego, CA)

JustLooking 3.0 pretty much contains more new features and code than all the previous versions of JustLooking combined! New features include:

• New transition effects in full screen mode.
• A thumbnails / preview window with thumbnails of all windows in the same directory.
• Image resizing support.
• Recent Images file menu.
• A new look and feel for the toolbar.
• Toolbar buttons can be made small or large.
• An Update Checking system to look for new versions of JustLooking (including automatic updates).
• Saving of Images to a number of different formats with configurable settings (including animated GIFs).
• (optional) Honouring Exif Orientation value when showing images.
• (optional) The mouse wheel can move between images now.
• Stretch to Window mode has been added. It can be the default mode.
• (optional) Disable Screen Saver in Full Screen Slide Mode.
• Hide Cursor in full screen slide show.
• (optional) When returning from slide show, viewer window moves to same image.
• DEL key deletes images.
• Arrow keys now work in full screen mode.
• Delete confirmation is optional now (preferences).
• There is a new Image Info Window.
• (optional) Automatically open first file in last folder visited.
• (optional) program can go directly to full screen slide show.
• A new context menu has been added.
• Background colour can be changed.
• Set as Desktop Background option.
• File Associations preference has been fixed.
• Lots of bug fixes.

Note that image saving has been expanded to allow you to save files in any of 5 supported formats (more coming). I currently do not preserve meta-data (EXIF, PNG info, etc), nor do I support animated GIFs, but will support this in the next version hopefully. You can now also scale and save images, which will be quite convenient.

With version 2.5 being a lot easier than I thought, I began working on version 3 of JustLooking sometime in late June, and the results are almost ready for public consumption. I finished coding up major new features last Monday, and am now just waiting for help from translator volunteeers (thank you!) and will fix some bugs before releasing the final version of 3.0 in the next couple of weeks.

I use it every day on my machine already, and it’s more useful than ever.

In addition to a newer, nicer looking ToolBar, I have added a Thumbnails window to let you browse other images in the same directory:

For the last 17 years or so, I’ve been a huge fan of the various BSD-inspired operating systems, starting with SunOS 4.1.x, and then moving on towards the various free flavours available for the PC, such as Bill Jolitz’s 386bsd, then FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD. For a while, even I was a regular contributer to the NetBSD community, and enjoyed playing with them all.

When I started installing and running my own servers for mail and web application purposes about 8 years ago, there was an abortive few-month attempt to use Microsoft Windows Server, but since then it’s all been FreeBSD, with the latest lanfear.com server being FreeBSD 4.9-RELEASE (and with an uptime of 2 years, which would have been nearly 3 had my ISP not hacked and rebooted my machine one day).

To this date, various SYSV-inspired features, such as initd and their directory structure leave me with a bad taste in my mouth. I have repeatedly stuck with types of linux such as SuSE (before it sucked), and Ubuntu, that still gave me /etc/rc and familiar directory structures. Mac OS X still gives me warm tingly feelings to this day.

So, it is with some sadness that I recently decided to move from my own dedicated server to a virtual server hosting solution. I’m simply never in the USA any more, and I don’t want to have to worry about my computer going down. A virtual server comes with a guarantee that all hardware problems are the ISPs, and is a bit cheaper to boot. I usually hover around a 0.00 load average, so serious computing power isn’t a necessity for me.

However, the cheapest package with the best bandwidth means my server will, henceforth, be running Ubuntu Server. It is reasonably familiar to me … I can still add things to /etc/rc.local, and the rest of /etc isn’t too alien, and the apt-get scheme seems to work reasonably well. My needs are less these days, as I slowly admit defeat in the email world and let people like Google do it for me, so as long as I can run web apps and a few other fun things, I’m happy. All of my sites and addresses have already been moved to the new server.

The old FreeBSD 1U Dell server will be shut down by the old ISP on Thursday, and put in a box for a friend to go pick up sometime after that. I’ll miss it.

I recently spent two weeks converting JustLooking, my Mac OS X Image Viewing program, from NSImage to CoreImage and friends. This experience was overall much easier than I expected, and I have learned a bunch of things, some of which might have been handy to have known in advance.

The good news is that it mostly lives up to the hype. The bad news is that it’s not without tricks and traps of its own. Here are some notes and comments.

I’m pleased to announce the immediate availablity of JustLooking 2.5. JustLooking is a program to view pictures and images on your Mac OS X (Tiger) based computer. JustLooking is a Universal Binary, and can be run on both PowerPC and Intel Macs. The program is and will always be very free.

Please note that I pay for my own bandwidth, so please try to use the BitTorrent version of the download if you are able to—it’s about a 2MB file and takes about 45 seconds. (The HTTP link contains 2.5.1, which contains some minor language updates for the Dutch, French, and Traditional Chinese versions).

• Download JustLooking-2.5.dmg now (BitTorrent – TPB).
• Download JustLooking-2.5.dmg now (HTTP).

While JustLooking 2.5 looks completely unchanged from version 2.0, most of the important plumbing underneath has been replaced! I have completely substituted all of the NSImage based drawing in the old versions with new Core Image, OpenGL, and Quartz image handling code. This has made JustLooking significanly faster at processing images, and transitions between images should now be extremely smooth, even on slower G4 (and hopefully G3 machines too). I have tested the new code on a Mac Book Pro, PowerBook G4 (1.67) and a MacBook with shared video RAM. All were quite responsive and smooth.

There has been one “regression” in the program because of this, and that is that the main graphics viewing area is no longer transparent. It turns out that making the OpenGL window do this is quite tricky, and given how many people weren’t thrilled about the semi-transparent background, I figured it would be okay to ship with this “limitation”. Do you really miss it? Add a comment and let me know.

I am now going to begin working in earnest on version 3.0. In addition to all sorts of new features that users have been requesting for a long time, there are a few ugly things in the current version that I simply have to fix:

• The scroll bars are always out of place.
• The default scaling algorithm, while fast, is totally ghetto and looks like crap.
• The current saving of rotated images is extremely primitive (except for the lossless JPEG rotation) and really needs to be fixed.

New for Version 2.5:

• Core Image, OpenGL, and Quartz drawing for faster image processing and transitions.
• Deleting the last image in a directory caused an exception an error message bug fixed.
• Rotating zoomed images not updating scroll bars bug fixed.
• Dutch/Flemish version added (thanks to Olaf de Vries).
• Added some people to the credits whom I had forgotten. Apologies Emmanuel and Mathias!

There are lots of ways in which a website can be annoying. Favourite methods include: rotating and blinking animated GIFs (or worse, Flash), popup advertising windows, unexpected background music files, or just plain all around atrociously ugly page design. (I’ve been quite guilty of this in the past!)

But until you’ve lived in China, or at least spent some time browsing around websites here on the mainland, there’s probably one way to annoy the living bejeezus out of people that you’ve never thought of.

To demonstrate, simply visit any Chinese website, such as the Bank of China or something else such as Chinaren. Don’t worry if you can’t see the characters, they’re not important for this experiment. (Windows XP users can add them by going to Control Panel /International and installing the Asian Font Pack, while Vista and Mac users will have all these fonts installed already).

Once you have one of these pages up in your browser window, click on a link or two. Click on some more links on those pages. Try to get back to where you came from. Within minutes, you’ll have at least a dozen browser windows littering your desktop, or at best, for those Firefox users with the correct settings, dozens of tabs.

You could be forgiven for thinking that this was specific to a few sites with particularly bad design. And you’d be totally wrong. This is completely endemic here in local website design, and is how the locals think that the “Internets” should work. Indeed, there is almost no concept of forward or back button usage any more, and it is not uncommon to see users with well over twenty browser windows littering their desktop at any given time. While Windows users can at least expect the Task Bar to group similar windows, Mac users just end up using the mouse to move the windows out of the way until needed later, or until they just close the browser application completely.

Ultimately, the problem becomes such that, if you want to fix the site design to not do things this way, you will confuse your user. When they click to go to a new page, and they then subsequently finish visiting it, they will close the browser window and proceed to go looking through their other browser windows until they find the one from whence (they hope) they came.

The only thing I can say? At least blatent ripoffs of other sites on the internet don’t seem to have felt compelled to introduce this behaviour into their clones. For everybody else, it’s going to take a while to change this design.

Well, sometime in the last week or so, JustLooking broke the 25 000 download barrier. It’s hard to be sure exactly when, since a lot of the downloads are via bittorrent, and I don’t have exact stats on all the places that it’s been uploaded to, but I have counted at least 6 500 torrent downloads in addition to the 20 000+ direct HTTP downloads on my actual server.

For a program of only six months of life, I’m reasonably pleased with this. It started out with only English, French, Italian, and Spanish in version 1.0, and has since added (in addition to doing those languages correctly): Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, Russian, and Portuguese.

The program itself has gone from being a rather ugly little clone of the windows Win32 image viewing application to something a bit more Mac-like, and with its own growing feature set. While it’s definitely not for everybody (it is far better suited to people who like to manage images by hand in various directories on their machine), there does seem to be a growing user base, and I hope to most people happy with future versions!

I’m already beginning to plan out the next major version of the program, and while I won’t spoil all the fun, I’ve been reading everybody’s comments in the various articles on this blog. So this is your last chance: If there’s anything you would really like to see in version 3, add a comment to this article, and I just might add it!

I’d like to give a special thanks to those people who have helped me localise the program, thus far: Stefanie Schau, Laurent Molina, Roberto Bellina, Carola Clavo, Sergey Melnik, Markus Peltomäki, Emmanuel Lemor, Geir Werner Hagen, Mathias Sjöström, Henrik Östlund, Zhang Tongzhu, Emma Liu, Marco Frasca, Nitoc Taiwan, and Helvécio Mafra. Special thanks are also due to Yann le Coroller, who has been helping out with various user interface suggestions and ideas.

Here’s looking forward to the next 25 000 downloads and beyond, and to hoping that the program doesn’t get so popular that I can’t afford to host it any more on my servers!

Thanks to everybody for making this happen!

I’m pleased to announce the immediate availablity of JustLooking 2.0.2. JustLooking is a program to view pictures and images on your Mac OS X (Tiger) based computer. JustLooking is a Universal Binary, and can be run on both PowerPC and Intel Macs. The program is and will always be very free.

Please note that I pay for my own bandwidth, so please try to use the BitTorrent version of the download if you are able to—it’s a 2MB file and takes about 45 seconds.

• Download JustLooking-2.0.2.dmg now (BitTorrent – TPB).
• Download JustLooking-2.0.2.dmg now (HTTP).

New for Version 2.0.2:

• The arrow key navigation problem that some, but not all, users have been seeing has been fixed.
• Support for the following languages has been added:
  • Portuguese (Brasilian)
  • Chinese (Traditional, Taiwan)

New for Version 2.0.1:

• The following localisations have been added or updated:
  • Norwegian
  • Swedish
  • Simplified Chinese
  • Italian (updated)
  • German (updated)
  • French (updated)
• I have been working on adding accessibilty features to JustLooking, but the docs on this are kinda monstrous, and it’s taking some time to work through.
• There are no major bug fixes in the 2.0.1 release. I am investigating a couple of common problems relating to arrow keys on certain older macs, and will post a fix for that as soon as possible.

New for Version 2.0:

• Based on the suggestions and feedback from some users, I have completely redesigned and rewritten the user interface for JustLooking, implementing the smoked-black look that a lot of applications are moving towards in Leopard.
• Image resizing has been made significantly faster and less memory intensive. Image rendering is also much quicker.
• There is now remote control support in slide show mode:
  • next/prev image
  • pause/restart
  • exit
  • increase/decrease show time by 2 sec
• Basic saving of rotated images for PNG, GIF (non-animated only), JPEG, TIFF, and BMP file formats.
• GIF file support has been completely fixed and is now properly working for all animated and transparent images.
• Hold down “option” key on startup causes app to go to full screen slide show.
• I have fixed a number of bugs in the program.

I have released JustLooking in all of the following languages:

• English
• Russian
• French
• Italian
• German
• Spanish
• Finnish
• Swedish
• Norwegian
• Chinese (Simplified)
• Portuguese (Brasilian)
• Chinese (Traditional)

Note that a few of the translations have a few missing strings. If you speak one of these languages fluently and are willing to help out translate about 25 strings, let me know and I’ll be grateful for the help! (if you speak any other language and are willing to help, let me know!)

I’m pleased to announce the immediate availablity of JustLooking 2.0.1. JustLooking is a program to view pictures and images on your Mac OS X (Tiger) based computer. JustLooking is and will always be very free.

• Download JustLooking-2.0.1.dmg now (HTTP).

New for Version 2.0.1:

• The following localisations have been added or updated:
  • Norwegian
  • Swedish
  • Simplified Chinese
  • Italian (updated)
  • German (updated)
  • French (updated)
• I have been working on adding accessibilty features to JustLooking, but the docs on this are kinda monstrous, and it’s taking some time to work through.
• There are no major bug fixes in the 2.0.1 release. I am investigating a couple of common problems relating to arrow keys on certain older macs, and will post a fix for that as soon as possible.

New for Version 2.0:

• Based on the suggestions and feedback from some users, I have completely redesigned and rewritten the user interface for JustLooking, implementing the smoked-black look that a lot of applications are moving towards in Leopard.
• Image resizing has been made significantly faster and less memory intensive. Image rendering is also much quicker.
• There is now remote control support in slide show mode:
  • next/prev image
  • pause/restart
  • exit
  • increase/decrease show time by 2 sec
• Basic saving of rotated images for PNG, GIF (non-animated only), JPEG, TIFF, and BMP file formats.
• GIF file support has been completely fixed and is now properly working for all animated and transparent images.
• Hold down “option” key on startup causes app to go to full screen slide show.
• I have fixed a number of bugs in the program.

I have released JustLooking in all of the following languages:

• English
• Russian
• French
• Italian
• German
• Spanish
• Finnish
• Swedish
• Norwegian
• Chinese (Simplified)

Note that a few of the translations have a few missing strings. If you speak one of these languages fluently and are willing to help out translate about 25 strings, let me know and I’ll be grateful for the help! (if you speak any other language and are willing to help, let me know!)

The Setup

Imagine, if you will, the following scenario:

• You design a whole new database schema for your cool new scalable web-application. You’re using MySQL and the InnoDB datbase engine for everything, because your schema is so cool it uses all sorts of foreign keys and transactions and the like.
• You quickly set up MySQL and get your application going with your new schema on your development staging machine.
• You get MySQL up and running on your live server, play around with it for a bit to make sure it’s working, and then set up a my.cnf file with all sorts of caching and security goodies in it.
• You do a backup from your dev machine, restore it to the live server, and ta-daa!!! Your web application is up and running on your live server.

What you might not have noticed, especially if you – like me – have a few thousands rows of data, is that MySQL might have screwed you along the way and not really told you all that clearly.

I recently had the oppportunity (necessity) to set up a web application that interacted with many of the users through SMS messages in addition to the more traditional HTML interface. While there are a number of possible software solutions for GSM modems on Windows, on Unix-like platforms the most commonly used one is Kannel. It also has the advantage of being open source and thus very, very free.

However, setting, configuring, and using Kannel tends to be a bit tricky. I’m writing this article (almost a HOWTO) in an attempt to help out anybody who’s undertaking the process themselves and might be able to get some tips and tricks from this. I expect this to not be a terribly popular article, but if I ever need to set this stuff up myself in the future, then I’ll have it written down somewhere at least!

Most of the instructions here will work on any Unix platform, such as Linux, FreeBSD, or Mac OS X. It’s worth noting that I got nearly everything working with OS X, only to be thwarted at the very end because Mac’s no longer have serial ports to use GSM modems. You could, however, easily use some of the more advaned HTTP based SMS services on a Mac server of some sort.