Anatoliy Belsky

Using great Geonames database for geographical data handling

nospam@example.com (Anatoliy Belsky) — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 13:57:19 +0200

This time I needed some geographical data evaluation for one of my current projects. The data used to be opensource and as possible qualitative and complete. After spending some time in front of the famous search engine window there was a solution:

http://www.geonames.org/

That's the first sentence from the site:

The GeoNames geographical database covers all countries and contains over eight million placenames that are available for download free of charge.

Geonames is used by number of sites. Besides data it has also web services and code libraries in many programming languages to access them.
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Turn PHP non public class/object methods available

nospam@example.com (Anatoliy Belsky) — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 22:46:02 +0200

Anyone who did unit testing in PHP knows that private methods are untestable. One workaround for this could be to make no private but protected only members and to call methods using a proxy class. Another approach I'd like to present here is a small extension hack.
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Making server side playlist with PHP

nospam@example.com (Anatoliy Belsky) — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 19:36:35 +0200

Hi again,

whole last week I was mad about hearing music. I've heared tons of mp3's and radio stations over the internet. After a couple of days hearing music at work and at home I was really bored with creating and syncronizing playlists/files. Based on this, I came to the idea to make an online playlist which I would must update only one time and in one place and it would be accessible from anywhere. The idea was easy brougth out with PHP. So just a light reading for you:

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Gender PHP Extension

nospam@example.com (Anatoliy Belsky) — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 21:25:41 +0200

Hi there,

last week I wrote a PHP port for Joerg Michael's gender program. The program stands for gender recognition based on firstnames and has a base of >40000 firstnames from around the world. I hope the stuff is deserved to be accepted on PECL.

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Phurple - per se PHPurple

nospam@example.com (Anatoliy Belsky) — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 23:58:00 +0200

Hey you all (and me too) web developers. The huge important news today is - now we can send IMs from a script running within a web server - isn't it cool? Only one restriction conditioned by libpurple itself is there - use is definitely safe within CGI environment only. The second important news, as you see from the title - the project was renamed to Phurple. Furthermore there are a couple essential changes I was made as refactoring of the code was written so far.

Became interested? Lets look onto most important points in the changelog:

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PHPurple v0.3 alpha released

nospam@example.com (Anatoliy Belsky) — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 18:53:34 +0200

So, new PHPurple version was issued yesterday and is downloadable from sf.net. What's inside:

* PurpleAccount::isConnecting() added
* PurpleAccount::getUserName() added
* PurpleAccount::getPassword() added
* PurpleClient::deleteAccount() added
* PurpleClient::findAccount() added
* PurpleClient::addAccount returns now a PurpleAccount instance (but was null)
* PurpleClient::authorizeRequest() added

The most interesting thing there is of course the remote client authorization.
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Functions vs. inline code

nospam@example.com (Anatoliy Belsky) — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 16:56:22 +0200

Recently I had a little discussion about our style guide with one of the co-workers. And the matter was concerning the line length. Most default is to limit the line length with 79-85 characters - because of terminals, printing etc. But an other question took my head in the middle of the conversation: limiting the line length would mean for example to encapsulate deep included blocks of the code into functions - sounds not bad, but ...

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PHPurple v0.2 alpha released

nospam@example.com (Anatoliy Belsky) — Sat, 31 May 2008 07:44:20 +0200

Today I've maked the second PHPurple release and changed it's status to alpha. The changes, came into it, are:

* fixed zts compatibility
* implemented the loopHeartBeat method
* the runLoop method was changed to set the heartbeat interval
* fixed memory leak on empty alias
* purple.debug_enabled is now boolean

The most interesting on this release is the PurpleClient::loopHeartBeat() story, which is of course implemented with g_timeout_add. Take a look at the new example script to see how it works.

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Postfix+Spamassassin

nospam@example.com (Anatoliy Belsky) — Fri, 02 May 2008 21:02:13 +0200

Referencing my previous article about the mali server configuration, I'm continuing with spam and antivirus scanners setup. On my Debian box i'm installing the following:

BASH:

user@host~$ apt-get install spamassassin

With this groups spamd and clamav are automatically created. Before you start, keep in mind - if something goes wrong, allways check the /var/log/mail.* files.
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Don't underestimate SQL

nospam@example.com (Anatoliy Belsky) — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 21:37:00 +0200

Hi there.

The things I wanna to talk about today are - relational databases building. Particularly I would discuss such the attainments of relational sql as join and subselect. For my experiment I'll take PostgreSQL and Python.

So, lets start:

BASH:

user@host~$ su postgres
postgres@host~$ createuser -P test
Enter password for new role:
Enter it again:
Shall the new role be a superuser? (y/n) n
Shall the new role be allowed to create more new roles? (y/n) n
postgres@host~$ createdb test
postgres@host~$ exit

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Domains avaliability checker

nospam@example.com (Anatoliy Belsky) — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 22:44:06 +0100

About a month ago I've written a simple domain checker, which is using whois.net to get the domains availiable. The main goal was to find free 3-symbols domains.

BASH:

#!/bin/sh 
 
if [ $# -lt 1 ]
then
    echo "usage: `basename $0` extension
Check domains avaliability
 
examples:
`basename $0` com
";
    exit 2;
fi
 
EXT=$1;
LAST_FILENAME=/tmp/dc_$USER$EXT.last
 
if [ -f "$LAST_FILENAME" ]; then LAST_DOMAIN=`cat $LAST_FILENAME`; fi 
 
for DOMAIN in {{0..9},{a..z},-}{{0..9},{a..z},-}{{0..9},{a..z},-}
do
    if [ "$DOMAIN" \< "$LAST_DOMAIN" ]; then continue; fi
 
    trap "echo $DOMAIN > $LAST_FILENAME;exit;" SIGHUP SIGINT SIGTERM
 
    STATUS_STRING=`wget -qO - http://www.whois.net/whois_new.cgi\?d\=$DOMAIN\&tld\=$EXT | grep 'Status'`
 
    echo "$STATUS_STRING" | grep 'free' && 
    echo "$DOMAIN.$EXT" >> ~/domains_found_$EXT.txt && 
    echo "the domain is free: $DOMAIN.$EXT" | mail -c my@mail.com -s "free domain" other@mail.com
 
    sleep 7
 
done

The thing is very simple and the results can be kept on. Additionally it sends mail messages about each found domain. Lets see, what it brought for the .de domains ( about 9000 free domains was found )
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Map objects recursive in perl

nospam@example.com (Anatoliy Belsky) — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 17:19:33 +0100

One interesting thing I've got stucked on - if we have some multilevel arrays/hashes (which aren't the same in perl), there is no standard way to change all the object's values. The only thing I've found usefull is map function, which nevertheless works only for map arrays. However, it could be very usefull, to have a possibility to change each scalar element of some multilevel object. For example, if you ever used XML::Simple, you could observe the following behavior with values, which contain new lines.

XML:

<root>
    <elem>asdf</elem>
</root>

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Relicensing PHPurple

nospam@example.com (Anatoliy Belsky) — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 22:18:36 +0100

Just a short message. PHPurple is falling back to GPL. It will get neither PHP nor any other (commercial) license ever. The ground is simply, the libpurple is GPL'ed itself and the developers count is so much, that there is no chance to get a special permission to do this. If you interested in details of this discussion, take look at the libpurple's developers mailing lists.

PHPurple 0.1.0 pre-alpha

nospam@example.com (Anatoliy Belsky) — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 16:14:37 +0100

The first pre-alpha is released and can be downloaded at http://sourceforge.net/projects/phpurple/. The common documentation I've started to make was placed to http://phpurple.rubay.de/.

The main features implemented are:

- send and recieve IMs
- fully implemented account dsn like string
- ability to make account specific settings
- basic work with buddy, buddy group and buddy list

~~The license was changed to the BSD like proprietary license.~~

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Building static executables on Linux

nospam@example.com (Anatoliy Belsky) — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 19:05:03 +0100

An interesting question I had to answer a couple months ago was - how could I compile an executable statically, so then it works on various linux distributions without the need to install some additional libs. Of course, such the executables are bigger as that, which was compiled in order to use the dynamic libs. But if one wanna to have an independent production executable, this is what one could need.

So, I will explain the thing with the help of an example program, which uses ncurses. First I'm creating the project dir, for example:

BASH:

user@host~$ mkdir ~/programming/static_test
user@host~$ cd ~/programming/static_test

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