My mail management system (currently codenamed NVMS) is in the backend managing userdb, and the web interface is currently written in PHP. XML-RPC seemed the sensible thing to use, as it is simple and portable, Python and Twisted has excellent and easy-to-use support, and I knew PHP could do it. (Well, not without getting sidetracked to determine which XML-RPC library to use for PHP.) I settled on PEAR's XML_RPC. It's nowhere near as braindeadly simple and nice as Python's xmlrpclib (and Twisted's XML-RPC server support), so here's something I used to make PEAR's XML_RPC slightly easier to work with, and an example of how it works on the other side with Twisted.

Part of my mail server migration is to create a centralised mailing list management location, as this was popular with the previous mail server using ezmlm. This would require http://admin-site.example.org/lists/foo.org/ to manage foo.org lists, and http://admin-site.example.org/lists/bar.org/ to manage bar.org lists. No problem, only a short patch and some RewriteRule hacks necessary. ;)

No 'Wow!', but a great movie. Should probably watch it again. Great shots of Tokyo and Kyoto, showing the various facets of Japan's culture (I consider them: traditional, formal, mass-market, and youth). Bill Murray does well to play an actor some people may associate him with - an aging former star living on his past accomplishments. Scarlett Johansson is destined for great things after this performance. I think Coppola did a great job getting the visuals, the feeling of visitors to Tokyo and its vibrant culture, and getting us to feel for the couple (especially in the stayover/TV-watching scene). Went away from the movie (just over a week ago?) unsure of what exactly I thought, but the elements in combination make it a winner.

Wow! I wish I had watched it in the original French (preferably understanding it, but subtitles would do), the dubbing is about the only thing I can complain about. Again, this movie is not something everyone is going to like, but this outshines Y tu mamá también as the best movie I've seen in memory. I appreciated the wild and complex plot and the characters, the intelligence and the irony throughout. Beautiful imagery, with interesting camera work and style. Will probably watch it again tomorrow morning!

Just got leave approved for graduation and for Africa Source, and picked up my tickets for Namibia this morning. Still have to send in grad paperwork and get the proper hood and book restaurant. I suppose it'd be boring having an empty todo list.

Well, Drac is proving unstable for my new mail server, so I'm having to think of an alternative. As much as I hate log file readers such as exact, I thought I might write a short Python program to do the reading and database management (since it's trivial to write and debug). Here's the tail with following portion of the code:

I've heard back from Rhodes about my credits, and it's good news: I'm graduating in early April. So, this means I'll be in Grahamstown for at least the 2nd and 3rd, and I'll see if I have enough leave to have a proper visit. Yay!

As part of my performance enhancements at work, I've introduced a level of function caching, and on top of the page cache, this gets a bit confusing. Thankfully, Simon Willison noticed a sample chapter on caching from Harry Fuecks' PHP Anthology, which I've passed on to my team. Simon also noticed an article on advanced network I/O (which has a predecessor which covers synchronous and asynchronous network programming in Python, including using my favourite network application framework, Twisted. Ta.

It's just less than 8 hours until James Warren presides over a Superior Court challenge to the San Francisco gay marriages brought on by the Alliance Defense Fund and the Campaign for California "Families". Depending on who you ask, there were about 700-825 marriages performed on Monday, bringing the number of couples married over the past five days to between 2400 and 2500. Kenster999 via morons.org has pictures of the happy couples from the long weekend. Update: More pictures, from ephemera.org.

It has been suggested that Microsoft can use the Windows source code leakage and the ensuing exploits as an argument for security by obscurity by keeping source closed, and thus against the security of source availability inherent to Open Source. But that's just silly...