Logan Buesching

Recently, Adobe released an AIR client for Linux. Some people complained about the need for root privileges for not only installing AIR itself, but also for installing AIR applications. If you are worried about providing your root password to a binary, here is a work around.

1. Download the AIR SDK
2. Unzip the AIR SDK
3. Download your favorite AIR application
4. Unzip the .AIR file (yes, unzip it)
5. /path/to/air_sdk/bin/adl -nodebug /path/to/air_application/META-INF/AIR/application.xml /path/to/air_application

For example, if you were to unzip the AIR sdk to ~/AIR-SDK and unzip Spaz to ~/spaz, the command for #5 would be

~/AIR-SDK/bin/adl -nodebug ~/spaz/META-INF/AIR/application.xml ~/spaz/

Good luck!

Preface

I am not a lawyer. Do not take this as legal advice.

It was brought to my attention that Roommates.com was sued for violating the Fair Housing Act (FHA). This was of extreme interest to me because of my similar roommate finder application, and how it may effect the future of it. The ruling concluded that Roommates.com was not immune by section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Although a ruling of weather or not they are guilty of violating the FHA has not been decided, it has been decided that they are not immune.

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act

Section 230 is what allows a website operator to not be held liable for content that they did not make. Without such a law, the Web 2.0 revolution would not exist. Imagine Reddit.com being sued for a comment someone makes, or Flickr being sued for a picture someone didn’t like.

How It All Began

Before there was section 230, there existed this marvelous new thing called “The Internet”. In order to access this mysterious place, most people had to use a dial up account through a provider. One of those providers happened to be called Prodigy. Prodigy had a message board for various purposes, and from time to time, a moderator would remove offensive posts. Because they were actively monitoring their service, they were put in the same territory as a newspaper publisher and thus legally responsible for all the content that they did not delete. Another provider, CompuServe, did not delete any information, and therefore was not liable for the postings of its users.

After reviewing this case, Congress sought to allow computer services the ability to edit user-generated content without becoming liable for all the content.

Service Providers vs Content Providers

A service provider can be thought of as any interactive site that allows 3rd party user generated content, while a content provider is the actual person/company that generates the content.

Under 230c, a service provider is immune from content generated by a 3rd party provided that

1. The 3rd party content was not created by the service provider itself
2. It is not responsible in whole or in part as to what content is shown
3. Maybe other things… (IANAL)

So Roommates.com can be liable for the content of fake accounts that they create or a drop down menu, but not freely generated responses such as in someone’s description.

The entire reasoning behind section 230 is such that a service provider is immune from removal of user generated content, but not immune from the creation of content.

Why Roommates.com Got The Short Stick

Roommates.com drew the short stick basically because it required users to disclose sensitive information to register and that there was no ability to hide the information. The Fair Housing Council claimed that, “[Roommates.com] created the questions and choice of answers, and designed its website registration process around them. Therefore, Roommate is undoubtedly the ‘information content provider’ for posting them on its website, or for forcing subscribers to answer them as a condition of using its services. as to the questions and can claim no immunity [under section 230].”

What About The Future?

Seeing headlines like this can make a web developer extremely uneasy, especially for someone who is unfamiliar with the law, or who cannot afford a lawyer. Thankfully, in the ruling, they make it pretty clear as to how to be sure that you will be granted immunity under section 230c: “We got it right in Carafano, that ‘[u]nder § 230(c) . . . so long as a third party willingly provides the essential published content, the interactive service provider receives full immunity regardless of the specific editing or selection process.’”

So what I’m going to do in the future is make sure that a user must specifically allow the viewing of such information, or provide a “not specified” option.

* IANAL, get a lawyers opinion as this is not legal advice! *

When attempting to debug my program, zend studio for eclipse wasn’t recognizing that I had my mysql extension installed. I found a small work around.

Go to
[install_path]\plugins\org.zend.php.debug.debugger.win32.x86_5.2.12.v20071210\resources\php5

In there, you will see your php.exe’s and your php.ini that the debugger uses. I just copied my php.ini there for it to work.

Public methods should be deceptively named to foil would-be hackers.

After a few weeks of downtime, and helpful input and comments from my readers, I have finally submitted my Zend_Framework CLA and authored a Zend_Pdf_Cell proposal! Please feel free to read it and comment on any of the functionality! I really hope that this can get integrated within the Zend Framework, as I have put a lot of time into this and hope that the community can gain as much as possible from it.

I want to give everyone a great big thanks for the valuable feedback and excellent encouragement!

As the Active Record class has become increasingly popular due to it’s wild success in Ruby on Rails, it seems as though every framework has an implementation of it. It is no surprise that inside the covers of the MyEPICS framework lives an active record class that I had created. This class has evolved and changed over time, which I am going to share my experiences writing it. It is far from finished, but it has been quite a great learning experience along the way.

2.0 Implementation

The MyEPICS 2.0 implementation contained one master database class (ME_DB) which contained generic CRUD functions, and each table contained its own class which would implement the specific CRUD functions for each table (ME_DBO). A sample way to read users with the name ‘bob’ would be the following:

$user=new ME_DBO_User();
$user->read(array('name'=>'bob'));

And to update a person’s last name to “foobar”, you would do the following:

$user->lastname="foobar";
$user->update();

About 90% of each of the ME_DBO classes were the same code, and there was even a script to create a DBO class given a SQL create statement. A major problem with this approach is that for every new table created, you needed to make sure you created a new ME_DBO file, and that the file really only contained such things as which columns were in the table and their default values. We would have about 2k lines of code between 30 files, of which only about 50 lines were different… YUCK! Over Christmas break, I decided that this was a major, major issue that needed to be worked out before MyEPICS 2.1.

MyEPICS 2.1 Implementation

With the 2.1 implementation, I took a step back and attempted to create two classes which would fix the pitfalls of the 2.0 implementation. What I ended up doing was using MBD2’s reverse engineering module in order to find out which fields were available and what their default values were. This reduced the need for a separate file for each table and removed about 1500 lines of code from the Active Record implementation. Now, instead of

$user=new ME_DBO_User();

You would do this instead

$user=ME_Db::factory('User');

This has the main database create a Dbo object with just the right properties that you need.

The only major gripe I have with the current implementation is that I don’t implement anything for relationships. If you need information from a relationship, then you have three options.

1. Cry
2. Write Manual SQL
3. Write many lines of code which does a lot of extra sql queries and is inefficient and crappy

I mainly want to create something so that the relationship table is transparent. A lot of the time, your relationship table doesn’t have anything of value in it, and it only exists for a many to many relationship.

SQL Command Functions

About

One such feature that I see in a lot of Active Record implementations is the ability to use functions named after SQL commands, such as:

$db=new Some_Active_Record_Class();
$db->select('firstname')->from('User')->where('id=5');

Mostly, I had disregarded this need in my Active Record implementation because it seemed like it was a lot of work for very little gain. Why would you need to allow such functionality when creating a simple sql statement would do?

Well, I think I had just stumbled upon the reason for its need.

The Problem

I have a class for a user and contains information pertaining to the user such as first name, last name, e-mail address etc… It has some very useful functions such as getUserWithRole($role) and getPriviliges($user). What I need to be able to do, is extend this information through one of the MyEPICS modules. Such an example is in my Roommate Finder application, which extends the user to give them traits. The user module does not know about the Roommate Finder application, nor should it have to. Now, here’s the problem. What I need to be able to do, is return a result set of all the users’ traits, where the user has a certain role. I already have the code to return all users with a certain role in the Users module, now I just need to attach the trait information to the output of it.

I have come up with a few different solutions that would plug this hole, but not fix the problem, with most of them being some variation of typing up a single sql statement to get me the information. What I don’t want to do, is getUsersWithRole(), then iterate through all of theses picking out the traits for each individual user. This would result in at least one sql statement per user, which is highly innefficient.

I want to be able to execute this functionality in one sql query, without having to tightly couple the User module with the Roommate Finder module, and without duplicating functionality already existing in the User module.

A Solution?

What I have been thinking about that would solve this problem would end up having me creating something like the database command functions. Then, what the getUserWithRoel() function would do, is instead of returning the results, it would return a Dbo object with the sql already added. So that if getUsersWithRole() would normally result in some query like “select role from roles where role=?”, then it would now return an object that represents this statement. What this would allow me to do is chain these functions together, then only execute the query at the end. For example:

//fetch results in an array
$dbo=$userModule->withRole('Tenant')->join('Traits')->fetchArray();

This has several features which I haven’t implemented. Easy relationships, chaining of functions, and the sql commands.

Is it bad that I am never satisfied with what I already have, and always want to refactor to make it better?

Just now, I was about to download OpenOffice.org on my home computer to help with a bug report I made, and realized that I downloaded a 120MB file in about 70 seconds. Yes, I downloaded this puppy at nearly 2 megabytes per second!! Damn my connection is fast when my neighborhood is asleep!

Not only did I get a lot of work done tonight on my Roommate Finder application, but I also have managed to do a lot more in the past four hours.

Currently, I have at least 7 e-mail accounts, of which, I regularly use three. There are plenty of desktop e-mail clients that will allow me to use IMAP to combine all of these applications into a single e-mail inbox, but why isn’t there a service that allows me to have all of this “in the cloud”. I hate it when I am at a different computer other than my own and have to install my mail software and set up 7 different e-mail accounts, or visit 7 different pages in order to get my e-mail. Why isn’t there a web 2.0 e-mail client? I would even pay a small monthly fee in order to use this service!

I have been a big supporter of Subversion for a long time. I have used it off and on for about 3 years now and have never really had very many troubles while using it. It has always suited my needs and actually allowed me to really learn what version control is, why it’s useful and how to use it. Until recently, I have been very satisfied with its capabilities.

A Distributed Problem

When I created the MyEPICS 2.0 application, I had a vision to make a general framework which can be used outside the context of a service learning management program. Well, fast forward about two years later and I feel I have a stellar framework. I have one tiny problem though, which is that I need to make modifications inside the framework’s directory structure, without changing the main subversion repository. In other words, I have a project that I want to base upon the MyEPICS Framework, but I don’t want to use the main Subversion repository for its version control because not everything I do is going to back into the framework.

An example directory structure is below:

/
-/ME
--Core.php
--...
-/Modules
--/<--- Here is where I want to change things

Purely Subversion Option

If I were to want to do something like this, I would have to check out each Module directory individually from my own repository, and manually do each svn command in each module directory to get up to speed. Not to mention, if I want to update it server side, I must update each directory individually.

On the other hand, I could just set up a new repository for my own work, and any changes outside of the Modules directory I could manually generate a diff, and apply it to the main repository and commit, and vice versa for getting changes from the main repository. It’s tedious, but can work.

Mercurial managed

With using a mercurial managed repository, I can check out the repository to some directory, and make a mercurial repository on top of that. From there, I can hg clone the repository to do any of my own work. I can play around with the modules directory, do all of my own changes, without effecting the main Subversion repository. Any time I have a change to add to the main Subversion repository, I just svn commit them. If I have a change to pull from the main Subversion repository, I just
svn update
hg commit

And I have an updated repository! The only downside is that for some reason, any clone of my main mercurial repository doesn’t allow me to do my Subversion commands, such as updating and committing. There are a few directories that Mercurial doesn’t see in the .svn directory, which I will have to find out why at a later date.

Making the Switch

No Central Repository

Probably the biggest difference is that there is no “central” repository to work with. This means, that any changes you create can be isolated to your environment. You can totally fork an entire project and set up your own version control, and sync up with it whenever you want w/o them really knowing. In fact, that’s the entire problem that I’ve had working with Subversion… I couldn’t find a way to do this. Now, trying to argue that there isn’t a “main” repository and you’ll just be wasting energy. In every project, there has to be some “official” repository which contains the “official” code. In the Linux kernel, that’s Linus’ repository. For other projects, they may have an “official” repository which is delegated by a select group of people.

Ignoring Files

Mercurial uses a file named .hgignore to tell it to ignore files, as opposed to Subversion using a property on the file, namely svn:ignore. In this file, you can either add single files, or regular expressions. The man page on hgignore is helpful in this case.

Meta Repositories, Tagging, and Branching OH MY!

In the case of Subversion, it is recommended that each repository contain all the tags and branches in it’s repository layout, and even allows for multiple repositories contained within one large repository, thus making a meta-repository.

In Mercurial, there is no repository layout. Your repository is just your project itself, so there is no trunk, branches or tag directory. In subversion, if you wanted to branch or tag, you just copy a directory in the repository to the branches or tags and work from there. In Mercurial if you wish to make a branch, you simply hg clone hg branch (thanks luke!) it. When you want your changes to be seen, you push it back or wait for someone to pull from you. If you want to tag something, it’s accomplished via hg tag.

Helpful Hint

While I was reading the mercurial red-bean book, I came across such an excellent note, I’m going to repeat it verbatim:

Note: If you’re new to Mercurial, you should keep in mind a common “error”, which is to use the “hg pull” command without any options. By default, the “hg pull” command does not update the working directory, so you’ll bring new changesets into your repository, but the working directory will stay synced at the same changeset as before the pull. If you make some changes and commit afterwards, you’ll thus create a new head, because your working directory isn’t synced to whatever the current tip is.

I put the word “error” in quotes because all that you need to do to rectify this situation is “hg merge”, then “hg commit”. In other words, this almost never has negative consequences; it just surprises people. I’ll discuss other ways to avoid this behaviour, and why Mercurial behaves in this initially surprising way, later on.

Conclusion

After working with Mercurial for a few weeks, I have a little bit better of an understanding of how it works, and enjoy using much better than I did when working on the Rubix Cube project. For now, this will allow me to have my own version control while keeping in sync with the main Subversion repository.

In response to a post by Luke, I thought that I would give some insight my current PC setup, past setups, and reasons for what I have right now.

Background

I put together a pretty decent desktop computer 6 years ago, which would eventually evolve into an Athlon ~2000 (can’t exactly remember) with 1 gb of ram and ~800gb of disk space. When I went to college, I wanted a brand spakin’ new laptop, so I got myself a Dell 600m (1.5ghz centrino w/ 768mb RAM). Until recently, this was all I had. My desktop was sufficient for whatever gaming purposes I had, and my laptop did a pretty good job of running whatever I put on it.

Past Setups

I’ve had a lot of past setups with varying degrees of usefulness. Each setup has brought new experiences and has delighted me in several different ways.

Desktop (Win)/ Laptop (Win)

This was my initial setup before I started college and before I really got into Linux. I would mainly use my desktop for gaming / torrenting, while my laptop I used for going to class and portability. Once I started learning Linux and realizing that all my assignments for the rest of my college life would be in a Unix environment, I decided to put Linux on my laptop and finally start to learn it. It took awhile to get use to using Linux (Ubuntu was an infant and not very popular at the time), so I went through almost every major distro attempting to get my wireless card to work. I think I settled on Fedora Core 1.

Desktop (Win)/ Laptop (Linux)

With this setup, I used my Linux laptop for all my CS uses and my desktop gaming purposes. I also ended up using my desktop for non-CS school work because of Microsoft Office. I have never quite enjoyed using OpenOffice or AbiWord, which is why I don’t use Linux for any office-related activities. Another use for my desktop was for multimedia. Not only did I have better stereo equipment on my desktop, but I also enjoyed Windows Media Player. The only downside to having the Linux Laptop was that wireless at Purdue’s campus has never been kind towards Linux. Ever.

Desktop (Server & Router & Desktop)/ Laptop (Linux)

After I realized that I was pretty much solely using my laptop and had stopped playing games/watching movies, I decided to dive into how to create a router / webserver / mail server. This setup lasted for around 6 months while I toyed with DNS, CUPS, Apache and many different firewall applications. I learned to cope with the Linux media players, and decided that a stable wireless connection at Purdue was over rated, and pretty much only used my desktop machine for storage. I was primarily a laptop user at this time, working solely in Linux. The only game I played was Warcraft 3, which worked fine under Wine.

Laptop Only (Linux)

My server had started to become really flaky due to hardware issues that I believe I found to be a faulty north bridge fan (yes, I have a fan on my north bridge). I would eventually move all of my internal storage drives to external enclosures, and anything that connected to my desktop I connected to my laptop. I had an external mouse, 3 hard drives, speakers, microphone, headphones, a USB TV connection, and thumb drives. Every single time that I wanted to move, I had to unmount and unplug all that stuff. The wireless connection on campus didn’t help either - so whenever I did take my laptop to campus, I would be able to be on the internet for about 5 minutes before the signal dropped. This became cumbersome so I ended up not taking my laptop with me everywhere I went - thus losing the exact portability that they are suppose to provide. I sure as hell wish I had a docking station for this exact purpose. When I did take it with me on my trips home, it would take a book bag and 1/2 to carry around all the drives and peripherals.

My New Apple

Starting my senior year, I was getting tired of my current laptop as it was quite under powered for my usage and my desktop machine was getting really, really flaky. After the north bridge fan finally gave out, I decided that I needed a new computer. Yes, a $20 part made me purchase something 2 orders of magnitude more than what I needed to spend to fix the problem. I had around $2k to spend on a new machine and didn’t know what to get. I decided to get an Apple 24″ iMac for several reasons, but the most profound is that I wanted to see what all of the apple fanboys were raving about. With Leopard coming out, I thought that it would be the perfect timing, and I would be able to run Vista on it.

After about 2 months of using my new Apple, I must say that I haven’t had too many complaints. It took me awhile to learn “The Apple Way” of doing a few things such as menu bar’s and their use of ctrl/alt/apple keys. A big reason why I decided to go with Apple was because the OS was based on Unix, which gave me my beloved command line. I thought that this was the Holy Grail; I get nice usability combined with the powerful command line, what more could I want? Well, fast forward two months and I barely use the command line as it is right now. The mappings of the terminal aren’t the same mappings as they are on linux, and I find that they sometimes conflict with OSX bindings. I know that it’s something that I can fix, but it’s a hassle and nullifies a huge selling point.

Why I Changed to Only Using My Desktop

As of recently, I have basically stopped using my laptop entirely. One of the biggest reasons is because of the flaky wireless connection on campus, and that I don’t do anything on my local machine anymore. I guess I can install my LAMP setup on my laptop again to not need the wireless but then I have to worry about syncing up all my databases and start needing to do partial SVN commits for when I want to switch the machine that I’m working on - not fun. I think I’m going to go back to dual booting my laptop to Windows and Linux, and use Windows while on campus and Linux when at home.

Another reason for my sole desktop usage, my laptop doesn’t have the screen space that I have grown to love. I have a 19″ LG monitor, and a 24″ Apple monitor th