Archive for Interest
June 18, 2008 at 4:28 pm · Filed under Interest, Recent News, Resources
The Download Day for Mozilla’s Firefox 3 is officially over and the total downloads of Firefox 3 at 3.16PM ET on 18th June 2008 was 8,587,342 despite the initial hiccup. Due to the technical problem Mozilla had yesterday the official start time of the Download Day was moved to 3.16PM ET of 17th June 2008.
Mozilla will now wait for Guinness to review the attempt. It may take few days before we all know if the record was officially entered as Guinness World Record.
June 17, 2008 at 9:03 pm · Filed under Interest, Mac, Recent News, Resources
Finally, all seems to be stable on Mozilla’s side. The sites are running fine now, both Mozilla and Spread Firefox sites. I used FF3 for around 2.5 hours while I was in office, and it didn’t give any problem. No crushing, no hiccups of any sort. The experience is better than FF2, which used to crash every now and then at the beginning.
After I returned home, took dinner and turned on my Mac, I downloaded FF3 for Mac OS X 10.5.3. Sweetly enough, it has not given any problem on my Mac either. When I went to Spread Firefox site, I found a new link to “Fluant It!“. You can enter your name and print a certificate that tells says you’ve successfully downloaded Firefox 3 to help set the record.
Last I checked at 9.04PM ET, total download counts 2,418,235. Around 1.7 million people pledged to participate in the record setting attempt. Total download has clearly passed that number. Exactly 15 hours and 56 minutes to go before the Download Day is over. Mozilla targeted 5 million downloads in 24 hours to set the Guinness World Record, which I think is well within the range and total may as well pass the targeted number.
June 17, 2008 at 3:38 pm · Filed under Interest, Recent News, Resources
It was kind of an excitement to participate in Download Day for Firefox 3. The download was scheduled to start at 1PM ET on 17th June 2008. The hype was so huge that it basically overwhelmed the web server. The main or parent Mozilla site was out of reach for about 20 or 30 minutes after 1PM ET, and the Spread Firefox site is still down (at 3.10PM ET) since the official release time.
I was able to go to Mozilla site to download the latest version. I installed it without any problem, although many have reported that FF3 crashed after installation and had to roll back to FF2. I subscribed to participate in Mozilla’s attempt to set a Guinness World Record. I received the email notification to download FF3 at 3PM. Although I’d already downloaded FF3, I wanted to see if there’s anything different at the link provided in the notification email. The site was unreachable for few minutes, but when I finally got into the page it was showing FF2 logo and link. I downloaded FF3 from the same link, about 15 minutes before I clicked on the link again from the email. The page rolled back to the FF2 download page. I could not stop myself from hitting refresh and the page that loaded after 2 minutes of wait time had Firefox 2 logo, link to download FF3, CSS was broken and all sort of messed up information.
I am sure Mozilla have planned for scalability to adopt to the load, but unfortunately that wasn’t enough. Spread Firefox site is still down. I saw on that site that Mozilla had download parties page, encouraging people to help set the record. I think that has also gone down. I had the feeling this will happen, but was really hopping it wouldn’t.
I hope Mozilla can set the record. If it does, I would know I was part of it. 
May 26, 2008 at 9:13 pm · Filed under Interest, Mac, Resources
After I bought my Mac Book Pro in March, one of the software I installed instantly was Yahoo! Messenger. I use it to talk to my parents everyday, who are in Bangladesh at the moment. Besides that fact, most of my open source community friends are on Yahoo! Messenger, not to mention few of my friends also.
When I installed YIM, it was kind of disappointing. It didn’t have the voice support and, therefore, I had carry my office laptop everyday with me. As Tithi uses her laptop to work on her course works, I needed to bring in office laptop so that I could talk to my parents back home. I used to constantly check Yahoo! Messenger’s blog and kept my eyes open. Finally about couple of weeks ago I found out that they have released a new build for Yahoo! Messenger for Mac 3.0 (BETA). I (literally) started jumping in joy and finally when I talked to my parents later that night, I was really happy. Hope YIM will port all the other fancy features available on Windows version, but I guess I can live with the features offered on the current version. Thank you guys (YIM Team) for making it happen. Keep up the good work.
May 15, 2008 at 12:08 pm · Filed under Interest, Playground, Resources
When I work on my local machine on a website, I usually setup the virtual host on a sub-domain setup on the localhost. I feel comfortable using a sub-domain rather than setting up an Alias. I’ve seen many people know about it, but there are many who don’t, and this is for them.
So what do you have to do to setup a sub-domain on the localhost? It is not a rocket science but one must know where to do it, especially on a Windows box.
On Windows OS browse to {Drive on which your Windows OS is installed}:/{WINDOWS/WINNT}/system32/drivers/etc/. Open “hosts” file into a text editor, and you will see something similar to this:
# Copyright (c) 1993-1999 Microsoft Corp.
#
# This is a sample HOSTS file used by Microsoft TCP/IP for Windows.
#
# This file contains the mappings of IP addresses to host names. Each
# entry should be kept on an individual line. The IP address should
# be placed in the first column followed by the corresponding host name.
# The IP address and the host name should be separated by at least one
# space.
#
# Additionally, comments (such as these) may be inserted on individual
# lines or following the machine name denoted by a '#' symbol.
#
# For example:
#
# 102.54.94.97 rhino.acme.com # source server
# 38.25.63.10 x.acme.com # x client host
127.0.0.1 localhost
The last line represents the hop any request to http://localhost/ will go through. The IP 127.0.0.1 is used (usually) for you localhost, and going to http://localhost/ will access the files under the root of directory setup for it. Now if you want to setup a sub-domain called “myself”, i.e. http://myself.localhost/, then you add the following line at the end of the file.
127.0.0.1 myself.localhost
On a Linux box, “hosts” file is located under /etc/. You will require “root” access to edit this file or the user access who has priviledge to edit this file. Similar to Windows system, add the following line into the file:
127.0.0.1 myself.localhost
You don’t have to restart your web server for this change to take effect. But you will have to setup the virtual host to point to this sub-domain, which will require you to restart the web server.
Thank You.
May 15, 2008 at 11:39 am · Filed under Interest, Playground, Resources
Ever wanted to redirect users from one domain to other or one sub-domain to other without compromising the the file path or query string variables? I’ve come across the requirement when I published my WordPress blog.
For testing, I initially installed WordPress on a testing sub-domain, where I imported all the blog entries and added blog-roll links. After doing so, PHPClasses.org picked up my entries for Grab Yahoo, LinkMeIn and MySpace profile updater as track-back links. Later when I switched to my main sub-domain, I’d to find a way to keep the track-back links as is, and redirect users to the proper locations. The trick was done by .htaccess file.
After reading the apache’s documentation on mod_rewrite module, I’ve successfully implemented it. If you want people accessing http://sub1.yourdomain.com/2/12/some-post-of-yours/ to go to http://sub2.yourdomain.com/2/12/some-post-of-yours/ then in the root of sub1 (first sub-domain) create a .htaccess file and add the following lines:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule (.*) http://sub2.yourdomain.com/$1
I have not read much and not sure if there’s any other option to do this more efficiently; but this trick has served my purpose.
May 14, 2008 at 9:10 pm · Filed under Interest, Playground
My blog is now powered by WordPress. Since I launched my website, since 2000, I’ve always maintained my own design; even I’ve developed a blog so that I can shape it the way I want. But these days I don’t even have time to write something on my blog and to come up with a new design is something that is kind of IMPOSSIBLE.
So, the thing I’ve decided to do is what you see now. I’ve installed WordPress on my server and just finished importing all my blog entries, setup the pages and, of course, choose the theme. Choosing theme was one of the biggest and time consuming part of this whole process. I always like simple but eye catching design. I don’t know if this design is eye catching to you (the reader) but I really liked it. First time I saw this theme on Lokesh Dhakar’s website, developer of Lightbox script used to overlay images.
After installing WordPress, I’ve been trying to explore different things it offers; different plug-ins, themes, widgets etc. I’ve never used WordPress but the experience so far is good. It has some nice features, which I’ve always wanted to implement on my custom made blog. Now that I’ve decided to use WordPress, it will make my life easier, I hope. I know to add a new page or post is going to be smooth but not sure about choosing new theme. I don’t like to hang around with a single design for a long time. I hope that will be smooth as well
Thank you!
August 31, 2007 at 11:32 am · Filed under Interest, Playground, Resources
Today my new class LinkMeIn was released on PHPClasses.org. I have developed this class about couple of months back but did not have enough time to sit and arrange the files to upload on PHPClasses.org. After Grab Yahoo and MySpace Profile Updater classes this is my third class for same type. This class allows any registered LinkedIn.com user to enter their login information and get the contact list. The list is returned as an array or RSS 2.0 format.
I will update LinkMeIn class in future to add more functionalities to it. For the time being if you want to test it, please visit the LinkMeIn Demo location. To report any bug please use PHPClasses.org Support Forum and if you want to contact me directly please go to the Contact section.
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Thank you
August 24, 2007 at 10:07 pm · Filed under Interest, Playground, Resources
I have added a new functionality for the Grab Yahoo class. Soon after I released the patch, I figured out that I could add this new functionality which did not take me much time to implement. This new feature will allow you to grab your Yahoo! Calendar in an array format.
Using Yahoo’s calendar export feature, I grab the CSV file and parse it to form an array. This was a very simple addition as it uses same method as Address Book parsing. Only thing that was different was the way I had to parse the CSV, which Yahoo creates for Outlook. I don’t have any further plan to upgrade this class but do have other plans to build similar web service based classes.
Please download the latest version of grab yahoo class (v.1.3) here.
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Thank you.
August 20, 2007 at 10:57 pm · Filed under Interest, Playground, Resources
Last week suddenly my Grab Yahoo class stopped working for Address Book section. After Mr Mandy Singh reported the bug on phpclasses.org discussion board I started digging to resolve the issue.
When requesting the address book CSV from Yahoo a value for the key “crumb” is sent in the query string. Earlier Yahoo never checked for the validity of the variable but they have changed the way it is used. Now they check if the value for “crumb” is valid or not. As my script was using a predefined value and it has expired, Yahoo server could not validate. Yahoo was showing an error stating “Invalid or missing crumb”.
I modified my class so that it first loads the page from where request for the CSV is made. From the source of the page, it locates the latest value for crumb assigned by Yahoo and uses that value to send request for the address book CSV file. It is now working as expected. If you find any bug please report it on phpclasses.org discussion board.
Please download the latest version of Grab Yahoo class (v. 1.2.1) here.
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Thank you.
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