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Something interesting..

I was chatting to Mike Culver, Amazon Web Services "Evangelist", after his talk on AWS here in Melbourne the other day. I'd gone up to tell him how great it was that Amazon had implemented their web services with such a well-designed REST interface (I'm quite obsessed with REST at the moment). He made the comment that as far as he was concerned, REST had "won the war" against other architectures such as SOAP, REST-RPC, etc..

I don't think the battle is over yet but it's great to hear that coming from the mouth of someone at one of the biggest players in the Web Service field. REST ftw!

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I've just added a fairly comprehensive round-up of perl fundamentals to Paddypedia. Useful for me because I'm getting heavily stuck into some WebGUI custom Wobject development which is all perl-based.

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I run Australia's biggest wushu website, auswushu.com, and a while back I decided it'd be cool if people could chat in real-time on my website. I found PhpMyChat, a multi-room chat PHP script with a backend database. The script is quite neat, users can log in and chat away as if they are connected to IRC.

PhpMyChat comes with a front page which shows how many users are logged on and in which rooms.

I run AusWushu on PHP-Nuke, so I wanted to integrate this information into my page. There was nothing available on the PhpMyChat page, so I came up with my own PHP-Nuke block by hacking the PhpMyChat front page. Since then I've had quite a few requests from people about how they can integrate PhpMyChat with their PHP-Nuke websites too, so I've decided to clean up the code and make it available for anyone to download.

Installation Instructions

1. Download my PhpMyChat PHP-Nuke block: here
2. Unzip the file and edit block-phpMyChat.php with your favourite text editor, changing the path to your phpMyChat installation as explained in the file
3. Upload block-phpMyChat.php to your PHP-Nuke blocks directory
4. Log in to your PHP-Nuke website as an administrator and go to the Blocks section
5. Under "Add new block" select phpMyChat from the drop-down list, give the block a title and uncheck Activate (don't worry about any of the other fields
6. After you click Create Block you should see the new block in your block list. Click "show" to check that everything is ok (if you get errors you probably need to double-check the path to your phpMyChat installation)
7. If everything is ok click Activate and you're away!

If you want to add more content to your block, as I have on AusWushu, add more HTML to the $content variable. For more information see the PHP-Nuke Blocks documentation.

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<rant>
Most people running Windows these days use Windows Update to continuously patch their buggy OS (I know I do..). The automatic download system is nice, Windows periodically checks for updates and you can instruct your computer to automatically download and install these updates. So far so good, the only thing is practically every update requires a restart, and usually you're in the middle of something when the update finishes and you don't want to reboot immediately. Fine, you can tell Windows to not update right away, but for this is where things get annoying - Windows suddenly goes into Nanny-mode. Every few minutes a message pops up telling you that you *really* should restart right away. This is pretty annoying if you're in the middle of writing something and a stupid message pops up every few minutes to break your chain of thought. Annoying but probably bearable, if it weren't for the fact that if you leave your computer idle for a few minutes, Windows XP will RESTART YOUR COMPUTER FOR YOU. Geez thanks a lot Bill, everyone who was viewing my webpage during the middle of the day just got cut off. What dimwit Engineer designed this system? Or did you assume that the fact that someone's using Windows XP means they couldn't t actually be doing anything useful with their PCs?

I was in a Physics seminar the other day and they were using Windows XP to run their powerpoint presentation. The presenter put up a slide and talked about it for about 15 minutes… just as he turned around to change to the next slide, his computer decided to automatically reboot, leaving the audience staring at a projected image of his PC rebooting. Nice one Microsoft.
</rant>

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