arthur.wiebe: October 2005

2005-10-28

Creationism Folly and More

I've been reading some web sites and I noticed something like never before.

When those trying to refute a theory or fact written by a Creationist, they often make the same mistake they are accusing the Creationist of.

After reading for awhile it was just confirmed to me that denial of Creation is only a symptom of the denial of God.
Because if Creation is true God has to be real. And this obviously creates some problems for these people.

We are well on our way to the third world war. This is how we got there:

Throwing away moral principles.
Because we want to live how we please, throw away the Bible and say it's only a story or a nice book.
Throw away prayer because God does not do anything anyway.

What's happening in the US right now is really sad for example. Choosing the Judge. How has faith in God become such a crime?

2005-10-26

MacFlightGear Update 10-2005

Today I did some work on MacFlightGear again. TerraSync is now fully integrated and there are not nearly as many problems with it as there are in the 0.9.8 version.

I've been learning how to work with threading and processes in C++. TerraSync, FGFS, and MacFlightGear all run in their own process which only means good things to those with a Quad or Dual PowerMac.

Next up it Atlas. I'm in the process of downloading the source code and should have something running in the next two days.
In case you're not clued in. Atlas for Mac OS X will be made available for MacFlightGear as an extension. Exactly how it will be integrated yet, I do not know.

Iranian Leader: Israel will be destroyed

Iranian Leader: Israel will be destroyed

When you fight against Israel you fight against God. Men will never be able to destroy Israel.

Happy art thou, O Israel: who is like unto thee, O people saved by the LORD, the shield of thy help, and who is the sword of thy excellency! and thine enemies shall be found liars unto thee; and thou shalt tread upon their high places. Deuteronomy 33:29

The only time the Lord is against Israel is when they obey not His commandments. When they transgress, or break the covenant. But even then it is only to bring them to repentance and in right standing once again.

"Anybody who recognizes Israel will burn in the fire of the Islamic nation's fury, any (Islamic leader) who recognizes the Zionist regime means he is acknowledging the surrender and defeat of the Islamic world," Ahmadinejad said.
"As the Imam said, Israel must be wiped off the map," said Ahmadinejad, who came to power in August.
Ahmadinejad referred to Israel's recent withdrawal from the Gaza Strip as a "trick," saying Gaza is part of the Palestinian territories and the withdrawal was meant to make Islamic states acknowledge Israel.

I hope this shows you at least a little how that you cannot negotiate with these people. They believe in destruction. Anyone who does not believe as they do is an infidel and must needs be destroyed.
This is the reason why Islam is not a peaceful religion, as many people here in Canada seem to think.

For, lo, he that formeth the mountains, and createth the wind, and declareth unto man what is his thought, that maketh the morning darkness, and treadeth upon the high places of the earth, The LORD, The God of hosts, is his name. Amos 4:13

2005-10-24

MachCMS 1.1 - Database

With the introduction of a search system, caching, and more. The database is being used more and more and it will be very difficult to build a php4 version out of mcms 1.1 because of the current exclusive use of SQLite via PDO.
So I have been working on adding support for multiple database systems. For the 1.1 release SQLite3 via PDO and MySQL will be supported. In the future MySQL enhanced may be added as well as SQLite2.

PHP4 compatiblity is an important issue, and yet something I wish wasn't needed. How long will it take for the hosting companies to upgrade?

By the way, I've been trying out other content management systems lately including Drupal, Xaraya, and Joomla.
Xaraya wouldn't even install properly. I believe it's not compatible with PHP 5.1.0RC3.
Joomla's theme system was just to0 complicated. I didn't want to learn a templating language.
Drupal was the best out of the three. I like how easy it is to make themes. You can use three different systems. But in the end I just couldn't customize everything exactly how I wanted it. Although with enough work it would have been possible.
While I could have done what I wanted to do with all three of these CMS's, I wasn't prepared to spend the amount of time needed to do it.

And that's the reason for MachCMS. Power in simplicity, and flexiblity. With MachCMS 1.1 the main focus is to make it more extendable. Over time it will load more features and some people other than myself might even start to deploy it. But work continues.

2005-10-21

UN Gives Green Light for Israel, Syria, Iran War

From the Israel News Agency, UN Gives Green Light for Israel, Syria, Iran War.

I can only think of one thing. I knew it would happen sooner or later, but I never thought it would happen like this.

Flock 0.4.8 - Umm

I tried it, found it unpolished, saw that Yahoo was the default search engine, saw that it did nothing special, quit and uninstalled.

2005-10-20

MachCMS 1.1 - Search

I have not implemented anything yet but here is my plan for the built-in search function in MachCMS 1.1.

But first let me clarify something.
Hard pages are pages located on the hard disk in the pages folder.
Virtual pages are pages stored in a local database file. Previously these were referred to as WIKI type pages.

In hard pages, you can use the search functions like this:
$search = new Search;
$search->for('chocolate'); // This will search all the pages for chocolate.
$search->showResults(); // Display the results of the most recent search in HTML.
$myResults = $search->getResults(); // Return array of results which you can use as you wish.
$search->displayForm(); // Display an HTML search box.

Now how is the search going to work? We are going to use indexing and caching for speed. Whenever virtual pages are saved the index will be updated and there will be a crawl script which goes through all the hard pages and updates the index as needed. The crawler can be run in the background or initiated at will.
The index will be stored in an SQLite database and so will the cache.

The cache will simply store searches and their results so that the index does not have to be searched through again.
Whenever the index is updated, and if the cache references that updated section that part of the cache is removed.

There will be some plugins included as part of this search function. The main reason being PHP code does not work in virtual pages and yet you might want to use search in them.
In hard pages you can still use the plugins but using the PHP classes is a lot more flexible.

Somewhat off topic but there is one more thing to be added about plugins.
What if a plugin wants input?
[plugin:[myPlugin('input string')]] For now only one parameter will be allowed. But how will it be delivered to the plugin?

In the PluginName.plugin folder, if your plugin excepts input you must have another file named start.php.
This simple PHP file will define a function which is called by load_plugin().
For example:

global $pluginInput = NULL;
function machcms_PluginName_start($myInput) {
global $pluginInput;
$pluginInput = $myInput;
}

Then in your PluginName.php file you can access the input as $pluginInput. Of course this start function can contain any valid PHP and so can do anything you want before the actual plugin is initiated.

2005-10-18

MachCMS 1.1 - Plugins

Soon after I deployed MachCMS 1.0, a feature I need was plugins. So here is my plan.

There will be a plugins folder. This folder contains plugins with this mapping.

PluginFolder.plugin
- PluginFolder.php

This will allow a few basic things. The .plugin folder extension simply identifies it as a plugin to the user installing it.
Inside this folder there must be a PHP file with the same name as the folder with the extension. This PHP file can load other files inside this plugin folder.

The plugin's PHP file can contain any valid PHP code and simply outputs everything directly which is caught by an output buffer.

Now how do pages use these plugins? In a virtual page, you can embed a plugin using this syntax:
[plugin:[myPlugin1][myPlugin2]...]
Like this you can embed more than one plugin in a single area. There are loaded in the order specified.

In a hard page you can use this syntax:
load_plugins('myPlugin1,myPlugin2 ...');

Now to implement this in an efficient way...

2005-10-16

Debian Versus Ubuntu

Ubuntu seems to be the most popular Linux distribution these days. And in my opinion the best choice on the desktop PowerPC platform.
And it was my first choice on the x86 laptop I purchased. But the major problem was that my sound card would just not work. No matter what I tried.

So I downloaded the Debian Sarge netinstall cd image, burned and used it to install Sarge and the sound card still didn't work.

Upgraded the kernel to 2.6.12 and it worked fine.

2005-10-15

Atlas and FlightGear on Mac

So... in the MacFlightGear forums and via email there's been a lot of talk and questions about Atlas on Mac OS X recently.
While personally I don't care much for it. It is currently at the top of my todo list next to using threading for terrasync (and atlas). But now I have one question for you as users, the ones who want this.

Should Atlas be bundled with the default FlightGear installation, be offered as a MacFlightGear extension, or some other method?

Currently my plan is to offer it as an extension which will require me writing an installer.

2005-10-08

It's ACal aGain

The acal3 trunk has a lot more bugs that I had thought. Now I found a major flaw in the acal_alarm script where it can't open the database when the value is UNDER_DOCUMENT_ROOT. The good thing is it's easy to fix and will get fixed today.

Other than that I cleaned up code and fixed other bugs lately. So what exactly is my current plan to get to the final 3.0 release?

Beta Release October 15th
Release Candidate October 22
Final release somtime the next week

I hope you don't expect it to happen exactly like that :)

2005-10-06

ACal 3.0 - Some more work

Today I worked on ACal a little. The trunk now includes ie7 0.9.0 and the source now conforms to PHP strict standards.
But a major problem is that now my time zone code does not work at all. It seems to be all messed up with PHP 5.1 which has it's own time zone support.

So I have a question. What should I do?

[Update]
Problem solved. How? I added a check so that if the PHP version is less than 5.1.0 it will use the old date class. But if the PHP version is 5.1.0 or greater it will use PHP's new builtin time zone features.
This is done using a seperate class for each method. It works great too!