Recent Blog Posts
Blogs ยป Archive for September, 2004
September Wrapup
Some interesting things I have found this month on Fedora, SELinux, Google competition perhaps and more…
1) A way to get an insider look at Fedora aside from the RedHat sponsored site is through the Fedora People blog.
2) SELinux is now in the 2.6 kernel and has some interesting updated capabilities with securing the filesystem through extended attributes and security labels. To insure comprehensive coverage, there is a method to preserve these extended attributes when backing up by using star in place of tar. See the Linux Journal article.
3) The New York Times today ran a piece (free registration) looking at Vivisimo — a company that has honed a clustering search engine technology within corporate environments. They now plan to release clusty.com, which features their functionality that seeks to help users find more useful information faster when large numbers of results are returned in a search. The article is here and here are Clusty and Vivisimo.
Finally, I discovered an interesting new blog that has a nice balance of open source, development, Macintosh-centric material and blogging tips/hacks talk (especially if you use WordPress and Ecto like I do). Johann Richard’s taking the red …
Another CF Blogger
Damon Cooper is now blogging. He’s the for Director of Engineering for Coldfusion at Macromedia.
He just started out so his posts are sporadic and few but if he’s like anything like Tim we should expect to see great things.
Encrypt your entire site
One of the great things about ColdFusion is the ability to encrypt your code so you can have some level of secruity when you sell it or give it out. CFEncode.exe is included with all CF servers so there is no extra “cost”, other than time.
Thanks to a link on Andy’s blog I’ve now found this great script which will make a complete copy of your site which is encrypted.
Typically you’d have to either do this one file at a time by hand or write your own script to do this task.
MySQL Migrations and More..
There are probably several ways to discuss migrating MySQL — however — the most rewarding was surely spending some time with Tyson Lowery. Lowery is the owner and administrator of simdynasty.com, a fantasy baseball site.
The site started as a hobby and testing ground while Lowery was a Java developer with General Electric. Now Lowery runs the site on a daily basis sans a day job and has shared some of his experiences in moving from MySQL 3 to 4. Check out the column here.
On a separate note – sorry for the short notice – but Slashdot noted that the request for comments on email authentication as an anti-spam measure expires tomorrow! Read about the summit at Groklaw, and also see the federal register notice attached to this post.
(for those reading this in the blogs section — see the forum thread version here with a database poll and the attachment. (http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.php?t=198959)
Spam has been a thorn in many an admins side as they manage mail servers of all stripes. This is a chance to get your real world comments heard.
Iris and Wipe Transition Panel for Flash MX 2004 Professional
Well, the last in a series of transitional based panel effects for Flash MX 2004 has arrived, and in this Flash Panel we have 2 more scripted effects that take advantage of the built in screen transitions and automatically writes all the code for you:
Download Iris / Wipe Transition Panel for Flash MX 2004 Professional >>
Iris: A simple Iris transitional effect for your Movie Clips, giving you control over the duration, easing, start location of the iris transition (’top center’, ‘bottom center’ etc), as well as the shape (’square’ or ‘circle’)
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View Staggered Iris Example >>
Wipe: The industry standard wipe, with control of duration, easing and start location.
View Staggered Wipe Example >>
Download Iris / Wipe Transition Panel for Flash MX 2004 Professional >>
How to build a company and flip it for $12 million
http://www.business2.com/b2/web/articles/0,17863,696229,00.html?cnn=yes
The above article from Business 2.0 is well worth reading (but hurry because they have a habit of posting articles and quickly limiting full access to paid subscribers).
It is about a new trend in software development: building a company quickly and flipping it. The key point is that lots of developers now are finding niches to add to products of larger companies, and then getting bought out for lots of money.
The strategy is to start small and cheap, invest 12 months in product development, 12 months in sales and marketing, and then either sell the company or move on to another idea.
So now you have to market not only your product, but also your enterprise. And this means thinking ahead of product ideas that have natural corporate buyers.
So check out this article, and I’d appreciate posts from anyone on the path of following this strategy….
Open Source Cobalt Destinations
Cobalt is living on through the release of the ROM and OS to open source enabling fans of the custom Linux build to run clones of the famous glowing blue boxes.
I had mentioned some time ago in Open Sourcery that since Sun’s release of Cobalt to the open source community – hosting numbers had seen a slight uptick to just over 900,000 on the platform (Netcraft stats). While not a ton of buzz has been circulating – there are plenty of active forums answering Cobalt questions and concerns arise when sources of update packages beocme unavailable.
There are a few sites dedicated to Cobalt – one of the most active being a Japanese site — Blue Quartz — where the porting and maintenance activity surrounding its open source evolution is taking place.
In addition – the original ROM is available at Sourceforge, which enables the Cobalt system to run on x86 architecture.
Finally, a professional consulting firm from Amsterdam — RaqTweak — is running a Cobalt-friendly operation internationally. I am working to get some comments from them on their current take of the Cobalt community and perhaps a perspective on its future, and bring it to the Open …
The Battle tonight
The PHP User Group meets tonight for the Battle of the Books. One weighty hardback vs. two well balanced softbacks. Following that Derick Rethans. Location: eToy tank, 6pm
Saturation Blend Mode in Photoshop
We’re in the home stretch of the Photoshop Blending Modes series (good heavens, that means I have to come up with more topics to write about!), and today’s blog looks at the Saturation Blend Mode.
Recall how the Hue blending mode kept everything the same on the base layers, but applied the hue (color) from the blend layer. Saturation mode is similar, where everything stays the same on the base layer, except the saturation from the blend layer is applied.
Try this example on for size: Start with my cherry blossom picture –
Add this blend layer, which has a highly-saturated blue and a not-very-saturated blue:
Setting the blend layer to Saturation mode produces this effect:
As expected, the top half (the light, not-very-saturated blue) results in a less-saturated flower image, while the bottom half is very saturated.
Now for a practical application. I’ll start with my standard rose image and then add a radial gradient to produce this blend layer, using a not-very-saturated color:
(To do this, I had to open the Gradient Editor by clicking on the gradient preview in the top toolbar, and make a new gradient from the foreground-to-transparent gradient, then flip the sliders that …
Run Your Own Spider
I came across Carlos Perez’s blog, manageability.org, while Googling for some research today. Carlos had a great list of open source web crawlers that included JSpider, a tool I have used for error checking on web sites.
JSpider is written entirely in Java and can be configured extensively for spidering, error checking and downloading. It of course obeys robots.txt files (http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/norobots-rfc.txt) and additional options included in configuration.
I thought the added downloading option was nice as I had been using a separate application to pull down entire web sites for offline use. Now this can be accomplished with the JSpider engine.
The tool has a plug-in architecture that opens the door for custom development from users to extend JSpider to meet their needs (and perhaps contribute to the project). JSpider is released under the LGPL license.
JSpider does require J2SE 1.3+ Runtime and an XMLParser (Xerces, …) installed (comes with JDK1.4). The app will run on any system supporting Java and these requirements.
There is even a simple sample site JSpider has created for testing purposes once you get up and running. Additionally, a fairly comprehensive 120 page user manual is available in PDF format.
