Technology

The Chronicle‘s Tech Therapy podcast last week featured Libraries vs. IT Departments. (Via.)

I actually use Event Calendar, which has been abandoned for some time. Looking at the alternatives listed in the Plugin Directory, Calendar, Events Calendar, and Gigs Calendar add full calendar management features to WordPress. While ICS Calendar, iCal Events, and Upcoming Events, simply offer the ability to display calendar data from elsewhere.

What I liked about the old Event Calendar plugin is how events were posts. Creating an event started with creating a new post. Searching and browsing events was the same as for posts. I haven’t yet tried any of the alternatives, but if none of them treat events as posts, I may find myself re-working the old plugin for better compatibility with current WordPress.

This Gentoo Wiki page suggests dumping the table and using iconv to convert the characters, then insert the dump into a new table with the new charset.

Alex King solved a different problem: his apps were talking UTF8, but his tables were Latin1. His solution was to dump the tables, change the charset info in the dump file, then re-insert the contents.

I’m working to integrate an application on a remote-hosted IIS server into our CAS environment. CASisapi (svn trunk or svn tags/production) may do the trick, though Phil Sladen struggled with it (in 2005). There’s reason to doubt it. Not only is the sparse information all old, I first learned about it from a page full of broken links and the apparent author recommends against it. There’s a little more information here for those who can read Danish.

UC Davis’ CAS ISAPI client may be a better solution (it certainly looks easy to install). Builder AU talks about .NET + CAS, and Case Western has a lot of documentation. Only partially related: it looks like World of Warcraft uses CAS.

DataPortability – Connect, Control, Share, Remix from Smashcut on Vimeo.

From DataPortability.org:

The DataPortability Project is a group created to promote the idea that individuals have control over their data by determing how they can use it and who can use it. This includes access to data that is under the control of another entity.

• You should be able to decide what you do with that data and how it gets used by others
• Open Source solutions are preferred to closed source proprietary solutions
• Bottom-up distributed solutions are preferred to top down centralized solutions

DataPortability – Join The Conversation from Smashcut on Vimeo.

This two year old post about Rasmus Lerdorf’s PHP scaling tips (slides) is interesting in the context of what we’ve learned since then. APC now seems common, and it’s supposedly built-in to PHP6. Still, I’d be interested in seeing an update. Are MySQL prepared statements still slow?

And that’s where Rasmus’ latest presentation comes in. We don’t learn anything about MySQL prepared statements, but we do learn how to find choke points in our applications using callgrind and other tools. In his examples, he can do a little over 600 transactions per second with both static HTML and simple PHP, but various frameworks — with many inclusions and function calls — can slow that to under 50 transactions per second (I suppose they’d explain that in a TPS report).

Those kwazy kids will quack anything now. Stream ciphers may never have been expected to be that secure, but Adi Shamir’s cube attack breaks them like so many, um, bits of data.

Professional screencast producer Michael Pick has joined Automattic and shuttered Smashcut, his production company.

It’s not all bad, though. He’s been busy making instructional videos for WordPress.com (many of which are useful for WordPress.org users), explaining things like how to manage tags or use the Press This! feature, and answering the question “What should I do first?”

What does this suggest about the pro screencasting marketplace? Pick says “this is a huge underdeveloped niche, [with fewer] screencasters with chops than there are jobs.” For my part, I both glad to see him producing those WordPress how-tos, while sad I can’t tap his skills for my own projects. Who else is out there?

Extra: a few nominations from ReadWriteWeb, and an interview with Pick.

hmm-citation-extractor, ParsCit and FreeCite (not to be confused with FreeCite, the F/OSS EndNote-like app). FreeCite is available as a service and a download.

Still, wouldn’t a simple URL be easier than all these unstructured citation formats?

1. Yum up some packages:

   ``` yum install php-pear php-devel httpd-devel </td> </tr> </table> </div> 2. Install APC using pear (the pear installer is smarter than the pecl installer): When the installer asks about APXS, say ‘no’. </p> <div class="wp_syntax"> <table> <tr> <td class="code"> ``` pear install pecl/apc </td> </tr> </table> </div> Tell PHP to load APC: ``` echo extension=apc.so > /etc/php.d/apc.ini </td> </tr> </table> </div> 4. Restart Apache: <div class="wp_syntax"> <table> <tr> <td class="code"> ``` /sbin/service httpd graceful </td> </tr> </table> </div> Web Form Validation With jQuery Josh Bush’s Masked Input Plugin and Paulo P. Marinas’ AlphaNumeric are both jQuery plugins to prevent input of invalid data in web forms. GreenSQL | Open Source Database Security GreenSQL promises to protect SQL databases against SQL injections. GreenSQL works as a reverse proxy and has built in support for MySQL. The logic is based on evaluation of SQL commands using a risk scoring matrix as well as blocking known db administrative commands (DROP, CREATE, etc). » about 100 words