Linde002::PHP

When I recently checked my logs for this server I was greeted by an endless list of lines containing:

[sshd] Failed password for illegal user student from 204.11.235.142 port 50208 ssh2
[sshd] Illegal user student from 204.11.235.142
[sshd] Failed password for illegal user student from 204.11.235.142 port 50339 ssh2
[sshd] Illegal user student from 204.11.235.142

Even though my password is of the ‘hard to bruteforce’ variety this still isn’t a situation you want to have happening on a constant basis. It makes the server give up smoke, and when the smoke gets out of the computer, it stops responding.

The solution is SSHBlack which works as a log analyzing daemon that scans for failed login attempts. After a previous set limit of failed attempts it blocks the IP address from connection for a set duration (in my case, forever).

I get about 4 blacklisted ip’s a day now and server activity is much lower.

As a lot of people outside of IT like to say. We IT people are “different”. As a recent post by Catherine Devlin stated:

Given a choice between spending an hour doing a task manually, or spending three hours writing a program to do it automatically… a geek will write the program, every single time.

Combine this with the “10 Ways IT employees are different from everyone else” by Ericka Chickowki and you get a glimpse into this special group of employees.

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I was working on a small webapp a couple of months ago that would help my girlfriend manage her research data on horses. Amongst her wishes was that she would be able to view the selected horse’s family tree.

Now this is a specific wish that contains two generic problems.

• Retrieving hierarchical data from flat dataset
• Representing hierarchial / genealogical data in a browser

More info after the jump:
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So I recently started another assignment for my employer which entails a big webapp for the government (queue black helicopters). As you would expect for government work the office is based in The Hague, which means another x weeks of hotels. Luckily for me, instead of a industrial/commercial area without a lot going on like my last assignment this is in a big city. And even luckier, The Hague is near the sea. So after a long day of cursing at technology idiosyncrasies I left promptly at 4P.M to work on my tan.

After the jump you can see the life in IT isn’t always that bad.

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At the end of each day there is an hour of lightning talks, 5 minutes per person and you can ramble on about whatever strikes you.

The highlights for me were the geek-my-ride talk and the SQL magic talk.

Geek my ride consists of a Mazda R8 (or something sporty like that) that has an inbuilt computer, 3G data uplink and some usb ports that connect to the engine management system. The cool thing was that he SSH’ed into his car while giving the talk. He could read out Voltages, Air intake, speeed, etc.

The second cool thing was the guy who used bizarre SQL to create fractals as a resultset and solved the travelling salesmen problem using pure SQL.

So another session I visited yesterday was given by a hydrodynamical engineer (if I recall correctly) that used PHP to help him generate floodmodels. At first this didn’t sound like a task you would consider PHP to be good for but then he explained how he used it.

He has written a library that ‘glues’ all the seperate FORTRAN / C programs together using PHP so he can input raw data at the beginning and at the end it comes out the way he wants to without the need for him to input-output-input-outpunt-etc all the data into every seperate program. In between he uses MySQL and flat text files to save the intermediate data.

After all the processing is finished he then takes PHP with the GD extension and creates charts, animations and even small animated flooding movies from the data he has stored in the database.

The actual work, even though impressive, wasn’t that interesting to me, the interesting thing is that this engineer took PHP to do a job that it was good at, glueing components together. Utilising it strengths and acknowledging it’s weaknesses allowed the engineer to make his life easier. This should be a good lessen for all of you.

The second workshops of google’s hackathon centered around opensourcing mapping applications. None of the top 4 mapping providers, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Mapquest, have opensourced their mapping applications. So if you want to develop open source geographically aware applications you need to use open source alternatives like Openstreetmap in combination with OSMA render.

If you want to be able to abstract your map coding from the data provider and / or the tile renderer you can use either OpenLayers, which is an open source JS/UI that works together with open source data providers and tile renderers to create map that can be used within your applicaition, or MapStraction, which is an abstraction layer for other javascript UI’s like Googles or Microsofts mapping applications.

A fun fact was that OpenLayer is often used in combination with Google Maps because it provides better event hooks than the Google API.

OSDC 2008 started today with the Google Hackathon, an all day hackfest based around google technologies and specifically geared towards the open source crowd.

It started with an overview of Google’s OpenSocial technology, a standardized API for creating social networking ‘gadgets’ (not widgets, not sprockets, not wadgets, etc). The technique is centered around XML specifications that contain the HTML, CSS and JS neccesary to run your gadget within a OpenSocial container.

This OpenSocial container contains the ’social’ information that makes a application social like friendslists, if the current viewer is the owner or just a viewer, relationships etc.

After you’ve finished writing your XML file you upload it to a publicly availble URL and add it to your OpenSocial enabled social network to make your app work.

The link to the hackathon site (and from there to the opensocial tutorials) is: tinyurl.com/osdchackathon

For a project for the PHP expertise group at Sogeti that I’m doing I’ve started to work with jQuery and the Google Maps API, something I should’ve done way earlier but I just didn’t get around to it. First of all let me say that both jQuery and the GMaps API are excellent pieces of software*,  they are both easy to implement and use and there’s tons of documentation available (something that we can’t say for all public API’s…. Yes, I’m looking at you hyves).

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My very first article got published today, and on Devzone no less! It’s a small article about creating and extending widgets with PHP-GTK and I’d love to get some feedback on it. I’m currently working on a piece about PHP-IDS but I’m not sure when / if that’s going up.

My presentation for ZendCon is coming along nicely. Keywords there are Pyramids, Roman facades and other architectural funnies.