ironing our pants into the universe

Just a reminder that the BayessFF project, run by ICBL at Heriot Watt University, is still ongoing.

They have their own SVN branch in the sux0r SourceForge repository and are doing very interesting things.

One day, when time permits, I will try and merge their efforts into the trunk of the project. For now, check out their work using these setup instructions.

Sux0r 2.1.0 is now available.

Quite simply, this version is all about refactoring and documentation updates for developers. A lot of code changes, no new features.

Cheers.

I use MacOSX . By default, I use .ZIP compression or .DMG images (Death to .SIT files). Every once in a while I have to administer a Linux box and I run into a TAR or a TAR.GZ file, but I alway forget how to uncompress it. As a favour to myself, and to avoid searching for the term "How do I unzip a TAR.GZ file?" I'm jotting, this down for all future generations too lazy to read the man page.

TAR is a compression technology used to create a Tape ARchive files. The resulting file is known as a tarball. To uncompress it use:

tar xvf filename.tar

If the tarball has also been gzipped, it will have the extension TAR.GZ and you can use the following command:

tar xvfz filename.tar.gz

Roll credits:

x = extract files from an archive
v = verbosely list files processed
f = use archive file or device F
z = filter the archive through gzip

Summary of changes: The behavior of the <select> list was changed to make it easier to initially train documents. SQL queries were reduced when doing loginCheck(). The way we ignore indexes was changed to be compatible with XAMPP. The code tries to use iconv //TRANSLIT for RSS feeds. The killSession() function was moved to the suxUser() class. Corrupted stopword files were fixed. An issue with an unwanted ampersand character showing up in photoalbum listings was fixed. JavaScript menus were fixed so that they appear over the slider. Rounded borders were added to the default template. Other minor optimizations were made. Smarty was updated to 2.6.26, and TinyMCE to 3.2.5

While upgrading, I accidentally deleted my data directory. I am thoroughly embarrassed. This means things like photos and avatars have gone missing. Let this be a lesson to do backups. The same kind of lesson you get when being kicked in the genitals. Hopefully the data files will be recovered in the next few days.

Edit: The photos have returned. Horray! Thank you Network Redux, world's greatest web hosting company.

I was recently contacted by Phil Barker, Santy Chumbe and Lisa Rogers of the ICBL in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Long story short, they are working on the The Bayesian Feed Filtering project, they will be using Sux0r for this project, and you should check it out.  The full project proposal is available on the About page.

If things go as planned Sux0r will get a RESTful API out of this. Very exciting! 

Changes in 2.0.6:

• Italian translation by Gilberto "Velenux" Ficara, thanks!
• A few tweaks to make sux0r IIS 7 compatible
• Bugfix: Editing a blog wasn't working with Postgres
• Converted all tables to Innodb, tried to optimize SQL indexes
• Changed link_table_ naming convention to: link__table__
• Updated symbionts: Smarty 2.6.25, TinyMCE 3.2.4.1

In other news, I am a finalist in Microsoft's Web Not War FTW Throwdown competition. Exciting! I'll be in Toronto on Wednesday, representing the bald sweaty developer. Come to #webnotwar and heckle me? Pictures to follow.

I went to yesterday's Montreal PHP + MySql meet-up. I was the clueless guy up front in the black hoodie and the new haircut.

Speakers: Kaj Arnö, Giuseppe Maxia, Morgan Tocker, and Dups. I ate pizza. We learned about social networking communication strategies, 3rd party patches, and performance improvements in MySQL 5.4 beta. Most importantly I learned that mixing MyISAM and InnoDB in the same database is a bad idea and submitted changes to SVN accordingly. I learned that I should read this book.

The good news is that MySQL is moving forward. The bad news is that no one was up for beers after the talk. I must confess that I find the lack of drinking at a Montréal open source event deplorable. Just kidding, maybe.

Thanks to Sun Microsystems for hosting the event. All in all, highly informative.

Spring is in the air and nerds are in the bar. Spent the day at Codefest 3.0 yesterday (I was the guy wearing the Renoise t-shirt) and managed to churn out 2.0.5. Drum-roll for the changelist:

• A rare infinite redirect problem was fixed
• A bug with the bookmarks menu was fixed
• Log buttons in the user administration menu were added
• The suxNaiveBayesian() destructor is not called unless the user is logged in
• A problem was fixed in which an unapproved feed couldn't be edited
• The CAPTCHA system was migrated from jpGraph to Securimage
• jpGraph removed
• htmLawed was updated to 1.1.8 and TinyMCE was updated to 3.2.3

By removing jpGraph the .zip file sux0r is distributed in was reduced from roughly 8MB to 4MB. I had lofty dreams for jpGraph but spring cleaning got the best of me.

I'd also like to thank Microsoft, the unlikeliest of sponsors, for picking up the tab on the pints that fueled this release. That was pretty cool of them to sponsor Codefest. I will take them up on the IIS offer and hopefully do a sux0r compatibility check in the next few months.

Last day of Codefest is today. See you there?

Fathers lock up your dongles because Codefest 3.0 is only 2 weeks away. 

At the Helm in Mile End, the first weekend of May promises to be a productive hunchback of nerding and drinking. TestFest and TikiFest up in there too. I will be representing sux0r.

See you there?

Months passed, reality checked in, and I have come to the unfortunate conclusion that the AGPL was not for me. As of version 2.0.4, sux0r is now GPL software. Those who want to keep it AGPL are free to fork 2.0.3 or below. (Cue the tumbleweeds of no one cares).

The other big change in this version is that I refactored the code. It should now be easier for other programmers to understand what is going on; or at least easier for me to explain if ever anyone asks (Hello world?)

Other changes:

• Added JavaScript menus
• Fixed a bug that was preventing login using WAMP
• Fixed a search highlighting bug
• Fixed a bug where Smarty would crash if an apostrophe was in $title of widget()
• Added the ability to permanently delete a user
• Removed redundant security checks from several modules
• Updated symbionts: htmLawed 1.1.7.2
• Optimizations and bugfixes that came along with the refactoring initiative

Bust a move!