Trackback info

This is a good blog entry that describes trackbacks.

Parsing RSS in PHP

I found this pretty cool project to display RSS feeds in PHP scripts. It is called Magpie RSS. It parses the rss feed, and then allows PHP to display it as you want.

It looks like it supports RSS 0.9 through RSS 1.0. It also parses RSS 1.0's modules, RSS 2.0, and Atom

Here is an example that I created of a php script parsing this blog.

There is another example of this that is availabe with PEAR. But it doesn't appear that XML_RSS has been updated as recently.

New Swiss Army knife

This is a pretty cool upgrade to the old Swiss Army knife. It has a USB key drive, that is removable for travel on airplanes. http://www.victorinox.com/

Test driving cars

This weekend we went looking at cars. We are looking for a vehicle to replace our 93 Nissan Sentra. (I bought his car while I was in college. It has been a great car, and is still running great.)

We were looking at Minivans and midsize SUVs. On Saturday, we went to the Honda dealership, to look at the Pilot and the Odyssey. I had seen a very good review of the Town & Country, so we decided to also go to the Chrysler dealership.

Today we decided to go to the Toyota dealership to check out the Sienna and the Highlander.

AirPort Express

Apple just announced their AirportExpress. This little device is a 802.11b/g base station. The really cool thing about it is that it can stream music from iTunes directly to a stereo wirelessly.

I have read some posts where people like them. I just don't see myself buying one. I think that it would have been so much better if it had a little lcd or video out.

Since this requires iTunes to be running, and in order for someone to change what is playing though this device, they need to use their iTunes interface, most people will put their computer near their stereo. As soon as you do this, you might as well just use an audio cable between your mac and your stereo.

I definitly think that it is great if you don't already have a Access Point. Also if you need to extend the range of your current wireless network with WDS, I could see buying this. I am am happy with my TiVo with the Digital Music Player to access my music.

Rack mounted server

A while ago I was wanted to colocate one of my servers, but I found out that it was pretty expensive if the sever is not rack mounted. I then looked for a relatively inexpensive rack mounted case for this server, but I couldn't find one.

I ended up using a Linux virtual server through TekTonic since it allows me to run Fedora Core, and I can run what ever software I want to run. But there are some limitiations, like I can not get as much performace as I could if I has my own server.

On /. there is a post of someone that created their own 2U rack mounted server. This is the type of computer that I would want to buy or build.

iptables with VPS

I have a virtual private server with TekTonic, and I wanted to set up iptables to secure the server. I then looked on the web for some examples of people who had setup iptables to secure their servers. I found a couple of links:

• http://www.siliconvalleyccie.com/linux-hn/iptables-intro.htm


• http://www.geocities.com/steve93138/


• http://wiki.apache.org/spamassassin/UsingDcc

I started following these examples and I noticed that I wasn't able to use some of these rules. One of the most important one was the state module. I thought that I could fix the problem by installing iptables from rpm. This didn't solve the problem.