Older blog entries for wardv (starting at number 10)

Yesterday was the big day - I've released WeSQL 0.50!

This version is a complete rewrite, with many enhancements. In particular the code is now a standard Perl module (installable with the usual 'perl Makefile.PL && make && make test && su && make install'), and there is an RPM for Redhat users. But that's just the packaging, there are also much improvements under the hood.

For instance:

• Extensive logging in web server logs.
• All code has been moved to Perl modules, which results in greater performance and portability.
• The three level structure (WeSQL.pm, yourmodule.pm, action.cgi) has been reduced to 2 perl modules in the Apache namespace: WeSQL.pm and AppHandler.pm, and a number of other modules for the rest of the functionality. Virtually all intelligence is now contained in WeSQL.pm and its helper modules. AppHandler is the only module that needs to be duplicated to run multiple WeSQL sites on one server. See the Apache::WeSQL man page for more information.
• These modules can now also easily be used from ordinary perl programs, bringing the power of all the (journalled) database subs to your scripts!
• A set of subs, available from EVAL blocks, is now available to read/write/delete values from the current session. See the Apache::WeSQL::Journalled man page for more information.
• Much more complete documentation.
• All documentation (except for this changelog) is available as man pages.
• The code is much cleaner!
• ...

Enjoy!

Discovered Brainbench today. Have a look at some of my scores here.

So, some time has passed again. I've released WeSQL v0.28.02 a while back, which is another polishing, bugfix release - but not without some nice new features of course :-) Have a look at the homepage if you want more information. WeSQL is becoming very useful now - I manage to build quite complicated database driven websites with it in very little time - but I have to admit that the documentation is lacking big time. Anyone feel like doing something about that?

I have been checking out some browsers lately. Opera on Linux is a very, very nice browser - still beta, but fast, and lacking only 1 major feature existing in good old NS4.7x: the roaming bookmark support...
Alternatively, Mozilla v0.9 has been released, and though heavier than Opera, it is of course open source, and much improvements have been made on the speed and efficiency front.

One of my friends has started the 'Dave and Dina' project. It will be pretty cool - a home entertainment centre that is fully open source. Have a look at http://davedina.apestaart.org!

Released WeSQL v0.28.01, a maintenance release, with mainly bugfixes, but also 'superuser' support in the journalling code, through a 'suid' field in the database. Upgrade is strongly recommended as this release fixes some more security issues.

Version 0.28 of WeSQL has been released. Finally. It has a brandnew sample application (that is also available online at http://addressbook.wesql.org).

Well, meanwhile it's more than two months later. And unfortunately GWB has won the presidential elections in the US - so we're up for at least four years of shameless exploitation of people, nature and nations all over the world. The damage will be terrible. In addition to this, we're also up for a good battle with Hollywood, that wants to cripple all hard-drives in order to make us pay more for films... Welcome to the world.

But not all is terrible. Finally, Linux 2.4 has been released, and it is remarkably stable. I'm about to retire the last 2.0 server I maintain, and have switched to 2.4 for my new Workstation. It has a nifty Matrox G450 Dual-head graphics card - having a 3200x1280 desktop in X really rules :-)

Oh - and you may expect a new version of WeSQL Real Soon Now (tm). Really. It has many bugfixes and additions, and some clever new features.

Hardware can be really annoying. My workstation at work crashed last week, after 208 days of uptime, because the CPU fan died. I really hate it when things like this happen. In my experience, the things to fail first are power supply/CPU fan, followed by hard-disks. Basically anything mechanical will break first.

I 'discovered' the pronto e-mail client yesterday, and I'm sold. Finally I can throw out my Eudora and that silly excuse for an OS. Just a couple of things need to be improved on pronto, but I can do that myself as it is open source and written in Perl... Check it out at http://www.muhri.net/pronto/

So, tomorrow the big elections in the US. I really hope that we won't have another Republican president elected, because then peace and democracy in the whole world are going to suffer again. If you excuse me for such a blunt political statement. I'm not very fond of Al Gore either, but he's certainly the lesser evil of both. Can you imagine Reagan's Star Wars madness all over again in the 21st century?

Released a development version of WeSQL, v0.28b15, today. It contains many bugfixes and one new feature, the INCLUDE tag. This tag allows inclusion of one WeSQL file in another one. Of course, you want to pass a different set of parameters to this included WeSQL file. Well, you can - just use a prefix :-)

I am working on something really cool, that has almost reached a state of usefullness. Have a look at the code of this development release if you are curious - it contains a few hints. And keep an eye on this spot for more information...

Long silence - I've been away for a while. I released v0.27 of WeSQL a couple of days back, and am already busily working on v0.28. Of course :-)

Any suggestions are very welcome here.

I am a BlackBox fan, when it comes to X user interfaces, but I decided to 'see what all the flap is about' and start installing Gnome/Helix. The installer just crashed on me, and ate 25 megs of diskspace in the process - so far for Helix. I'll try again later, in a couple of months maybe ;-)

Had some fun with NetBSD the other day. It took me a couple of weekends, working around a bug in the Alpha netboot code, lots of advice on #NetBSD from a friendly 'grey-haired hacker' BurnHard, but I finally did manage to install NetBSD on my ancient Alpha Multia without floppy drive (I physically broke that a while back). Now all I need is an application that won't choke this 166 MHz, 32 MB ram, 512 MB hdd box - they are wonderfully integrated but unfortunately much slower than their clockspeed makes one expect...

Just a quick note to say that I've posted v0.26 of WeSQL at http://wesql.org. WeSQL has become cooler, more flexible, more powerful, more useable, in one word better than the previous version. Great.

Furthermore I have been playing around with an ASUS SMP box that refuses to run Linux in a stable manner. Hmmm. And this morning a very nice tool called p0f, passive OS fingerprinting tool, showed up on BugTraq - had to try that immediately, of course. Works quite nicely :-)