It seems that someone is and I don’t think it’s anyone involved with the project. That page certainly doesn’t look like spam or a scam me.

I’ve just released a Perl interface to reCAPTCHA. You should be able to find it here:

http://search.cpan.org/dist/Captcha-reCAPTCHA

At the time of writing the US mirror of search.cpan.org doesn’t seem to have updated for a few days so if you need it in a hurry you can also get it here:

http://cpan.hexten.net/modules/by-authors/id/A/AN/ANDYA/

I’ve just released Wiki Widgets 0.2. You can find the download link on this page.

The main new things in this release are:

• GraphViz Widget (alpha, not ready for production use)
• Allow arbitrarily named arguments via the xargs attribute

Thanks to Juan Zubeldia for pointing out the need to pass arguments with non-alphanumeric names to Google Gadgets.

A classic case of yak shaving: too much work on anyway, decided to take a break by turning our local community site into a wiki. Then I thought it’d be nice to embed a Google map showing a few local landmarks. Must be possible, right? Well it probably has been done already but it seemed pretty simple (and an interesting diversion) to write a MediaWiki extension to allow maps to be embedded.

So then you need to let users add points to the map - so the map needs button that spits out a chunk of markup that can be used to add a point. So I wrote some Javascript to do that.

Of course one extension is never enough (just say no kids). I was writing a load of code that’d be useful in other extensions anyway. What about a framework for extensions? Yup, the dreaded ‘f’ word. Oh well.

Anyway, to cut a long story short: Wiki Widgets.

One of the things I wanted to do (you know, once it became a project rather than a displacement activity) was to make widgets that, from the user’s point of view, are discoverable. It’s all very well installing an extension but if users can’t find out about it they won’t use it. Wiki Widgets has a pretty simple take on discoverability: make a blank page and add the markup:

<widget />

to it. When you save or preview the page you’ll get a list of all the installed Wiki Widgets. For each Widget there’s a link that takes you directly to a (wiki) page that explains how to use it. From there you should be able to select the widget you want. Wherever possible I plan to make the individual Widgets support additional discoverability. For example if you add an empty Google Gadget Widget like this:

<widget type="googlegadget" />

you should get a user interface that makes it easy to add the gadget you want and set up its parameters.

Anyway, back to the day job now.

I’m looking for someone to take over maintenance of pam_abl. It doesn’t look as if I’m going to have any time to work on it over the next few months. The urgent task is to get it working on 64 bit systems. I don’t think that will necessarily be hard - but I don’t have a 64 bit machine here to test on and although I’ve had a kind offer of a box to use I don’t really feel inclined to try debugging code that can easily lock out your ssh connection over an ssh connection.

If you’re interested in taking it over let me know. Grab the code and have a look at it before you commit to anything.

I’ve just learnt (thanks Klaus) that the industrious folks at Wintec have released another firmware upgrade for the WBT 100 and WBT 200. It seems that they’ve taken the opportunity to change the data format - so I’m going to have to update gpsbabel again. I’m guessing that eventually they’ll run out of things to add :)

As I write gpsbabel does not support the new format - so don’t upgrade your firmware just yet. I’m working on a fix and will post as soon as I have one.

Update: Or maybe not… The data format doesn’t seem to have changed - but gpsbabel does now sometimes timeout while the device is erasing its flash memory. I’ve changed the timeout and that change should make it into gpsbabel sometime soon.

I’ve just added the most requested feature to mod_log_rotate - the ability to specify a strftime() format string as the log file name. So now you can do something like

and have log files named with a human readable date and time. The source for both Apache 1.3 and Apache 2 (and 2.2) versions here. Steffan at apachelounge.com has made a Win32 binary available here: apachelounge.com/download.

Flickr supports various useful feeds. Flickr supports geocoding (or geotagging in Flickr language). Flickr’s feeds do not however contain GeoRSS markup for geotagged photos.

It’d be sooooooo cool if someone at Flickr noticed and decided to implement GeoRSS. You can nearly work round it now - the feed contains all of an image’s tags as RSS categories. Unfortunately the geotagging tags have punctuation in them, most importantly the decimal point in the longitude and latitude, and Flickr strips punctuation out of the tags that appear in feeds.

Podalyzer is a perl script that analyses web server access logs and produces reports on podcast (mp3 and the like) downloads. Here is a sample of the reports it generates: http://singletrackworld.com/stats/.

It’s released under GPL. Find out more here.

Michael Lang has made an RPM and SRPM for pam_abl available for Centos4 and RHEL4. More details here. Thanks Michael.