Posts Tagged ‘ethereye’

New version of EtherEye

Thursday, October 6th, 2005

Yesterday I released a new version of my EtherEye project. This is a really simple PHP-based web application to ping a bunch of machines and tell you which ones are up/down. There’s also an RSS feed for those who wish to keep an eye on things from the comfort of their aggregator or do some kind of automatic monitoring/reporting (EtherEye is designed to be simple above all else, so things like this are left up to the user).

Typically, I ended up making another release today to fix a minor bug… I really must find out why my installation of PHP doesn’t tell me when I do something stupid – I’m so used to typing $_POST that I have a tendency to type $_GLOBALS instead of $GLOBALS… damm all these superglobal arrays.
My screw-up didn’t actually affect the functionality of the code, it just prints an error about an "undefined variable" in every installation of PHP but mine, it seems. So I had to go through all the hassle of packaging up and creating the PGP signatures for a new release to remove an extra ‘_’ from two lines in one file…

While I’m talking about EtherEye, I’ll just fire a link to CodeHelp, which is a fantastic resource for HTML/CSS/PHP/XML run by a fellow DCGLUG member. I’ve learned lots from this site in the past, most recently how to parse XML files with PHP. I then used this new-found knowledge to change EtherEye’s configuration file format to XML in the new release, which makes things much easier to manage now.

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Posted in Web Development, free software | No Comments »

Busy, busy, busy

Wednesday, March 23rd, 2005

There hasn’t been a post here for the last week or so because I’ve been really busy. Firstly I’ve got a weekly commitment of 1800 words for Micro Mart for the next 28 weeks (or something like that); then of course it was just the end of the university term – when every lecturer decides their assignments (all given out at the same time) have to be in for; and I’ve got a load of stuff happening in my web development work. Of course having a “holiday” from uni simply means that I spend a few weeks working harder than usual…

I did however recently manage to polish off version 1.0 of my EtherEye project (formerly called EtherMap), which is basically a web interface to ping a load of machines, giving the output as HTML. The project has become suprisingly popular (not VERY popular, but more than I thought it would be) so I had to give it it’s own website and get the downloads hosted elsewhere.
Shortly after the release of 1.0 I was told that EtherEye was b0rked on Windows systems and was giving “undefined offset” errors. After some investigation, this appears to be a bug in the Windows version of PHP 4.3.9 (maybe other versions too) causing it to do something silly and end up executing loops too many times. I’ve not taken this up with the PHP developers as I don’t have a Windows development system to test on, but I probably should at some stage.

Because I’ve been so busy, work on my BookMe project has stalled, but I still expect to complete it by about this summer.

I’ve also not had the chance to blog about a lot of the stuff I would usually blog about. This includes the announcement from Debian that they would be dropping many architectures from their releases. Despite what the media has been saying, this doesn’t mean that there will be no Debian releases for these architectures, simply that they will be seperate from the main Debian build tree. I use several of these soon-to-be dropped architectures and I think this is a sensible idea to streamline the release process. This has actually been provoking a lot of support for these architectures – most notably the Debian-Alpha port has seen several donations of high-spec machines for use by the project since the announcement.

At some point I will do a full post on Richard Stallman’s comments about copyright at FOSDEM 2005, as copyright law is something I am quite interested in.

I will also do a post about the current state of software patents in Europe and on the results I’ve had from writing to my MEPs (write to yours here).

Oh and I’ll talk about the upcoming elections too and the <insert swear word here> tactics being used by the major parties.

That’s it for now; watch this space for some (hopefully) interesting posts soon!

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Posted in Life, Programming, free software | No Comments »

EtherMap 0.6 and The Internet Archive

Sunday, March 7th, 2004

Today I’ve released version 0.6 Beta of my EtherMap project. It’s not 0.6 stable like I originally decided it would be – I’m going to keep it in beta until we reach 1.0; which I suspect we’ll be reaching very soon! It’ll be announced on FreshMeat, so this site might slow down for a bit over the next few days…

I’ve been playing with the Wayback machine at The Internet Archive recently. It’s really great to be able to go back and see all the various versions of the South West LUG site over the years. There are also archives of the various personal sites I’ve had since I was about 11, but there’s no way I’m posting the links to them here – they’re far to embarrasing!!!

There’s a new article on BBC online which talks about free software vs proprietary and gives a true breakdown of the NUC (nasty un-named company) case. It seems that the BBC have one anti-Linux reporter (Stephen Evans), and one pro-linux reporter (Bill Thompson). That’s one way of achieving a balance I suppose…

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Posted in free software, internet | 1 Comment »

Mandrake 10, EtherMap and speaking English

Saturday, March 6th, 2004

Nice to see that Mandrake Linux 10 has been been released this week. With KDE 3.2 and a 2.6 kernel it seems to be quite attractive. But I’m already running Mandrake 9 on my main machine, which I’ve already upgraded to be about the same as Mandrake 10 so I don’t think I’ll bother getting the new version. I run Mandrake on my main machine, which is a laptop, purely because no other distro would install. I wanted to use Fedora but it, along with every other distro except for Mandrake, crashed as the installer was starting. There must be some strangeness with my laptop’s hardware, which I unfortunately had no choice over as it was an insurance replacement :-(

I’m continuing to work on my EtherMap project which is almost ready for the next release. I’ve now done a lot of clean-ups to the configuration interface and made the whole lot themable, selectable from the configuration interface. I just need to get my head around a nasty collection of embedded for-loops then I can release 0.6.

Now, onto something which really annoys me. This is when people send me e-mail using the English of a three year-old. With no punctuation, no capitalisation and terrible grammar. It’s often not that the person can’t write proper English, it’s just that they can’t be bothered and I find that rather disrespectful. I write in proper English whenever I write anything, be it essays, e-mails or even text messages (although I may abbreviate). If you’re not going to write properly, please don’t write at all.
Anyway, dis rant is mainly an excuse tow link tow an application by Sparkes which translates English into black country dialect. It’s called “Spek“, and in case yow ‘adn’t guessed, dis ‘as bayen translated by it! I promised ‘im sum links if ah goor a mention on LugRadio, baycause ‘e’s upset that ah link tow Jono (note: naat linked) muwer than ah do tow ‘im. Well, ah goor a mention, so ere ya goo!
But by t’way, t’best way tow get me tow link tow yow, is tow link tow me :-)

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Posted in Life, free software, linux | 1 Comment »

LugRadio, Creative Commons – when is free not free?

Thursday, March 4th, 2004

Nice to hear episode two of LugRadio today, named the “Donut Driven Dialogue” – and I even got a mention. Yay! The guys have clearly put in a lot of effort and got (another) great end result. It’s a shame we have to wait two weeks for the next episode!
There’s a bit of talk about *BSD on the show, with some positive and negative comments. My only real experience of BSD was when I had a go with FreeBSD. I soon found myself there compiling my bash shell, GNU Make and basically all the other GNU userspace stuff, which I discovered I just couldn’t live without. So I thought, what the hell, I may as well save myself some time and just stick with Linux! I can see no benefit whatsoever of running FreeBSD over Linux.

I’m currently working on my EtherMap Project adding the new features I promised with the release of 0.05b. So far I’ve implemented the ability to associate names with IP addresses. The next task is to make the result table structure more dynamic (preferebly be removing the tables completely). Then I’ll be ready for the next public release which will be 0.06 stable.

I was reading an article by Jono Bacon in his O’Reilly blog entitled Art, licenses and freedom. He talks about why an Open Commons license was chosen for LugRadio rather than a “truly free” license like the GPL. I agree completely with the points he makes, even though I strongly believe in free software. The reason I think CC is the right license for LugRadio, and for my blog content, is basically because these works simply aren’t designed to be changed by third parties. If someone took LugRadio, or indeed my blog content, they could chop it around and easily misrepresent the opinions and views of the original authors. It’s also quite reasonable to expect to have the work attributed to the author. I don’t think that either of these requirements hinder the end user in any way. As Jono points out, it wouldn’t be considered reasonable for viewers of a film to change the ending to suit themselves. It destroys the original intended meaning of the work, as intended by the writers, cast and director.
Just because something is not GPL, does not mean that it isn’t free. And just because the GPL is great for software, doesn’t mean that its great for everything.

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Posted in Patents & Copyright, free software, linux | 2 Comments »