The JW FLV Player [1] is the Internet’s most popular and flexible media player. It supports playback of any format the Adobe Flash Player can handle (FLV, MP4, MP3, AAC, JPG, PNG and GIF). It also supports RTMP, HTTP, live streaming, various playlists formats, a wide range of settings and an extensive javascript API.

The skinning functionality allows you to completely customize its look and its plugin architecture allows you to easily extend the player with features such as sharing, recommendations, searching, analytics and ad serving.

See also the developer wiki.

[1] http://www.longtailvideo.com/players/jw-flv-player/

GitX [1] is a git GUI specifically for Mac OS X. It currently features a history viewer much like gitk and a commit GUI like git gui. But then in silky smooth OS X style!
Features

• Detailed history viewer
• Nice commit GUI
• Fast
• Nice Aqua interface
• Paste commits to gist.github.com
• Explore tree of any revision
• QuickLook integration

Requirements

GitX is made specifically for Mac OS X 10.5 and higher. Because it uses features like Garbage Collection, you can’t compile it on earlier systems. GitX also requires a fairly recent Git — version 1.5.4 and higher are all supported.

GitX is an open source project. This means that you can help developing or even take the code and develop you own version. GitX is released under a GPL v2 license.

[1] http://git-scm.com/

• Access/connection control
• Banning
• CGI support (including PHP)
• CGI wrapper (run CGI under a diffrerent uid/gid in a secure way)
• Chunked Transfer-encoding
• CommandChannel (control Hiawatha by telnetting to a special port)
• Cookie support
• Cross-site scripting prevention
• Customizable ServerString
• Directory listing with customizable stylesheet
• DoS/flooding protection
• FastCGI support (load-balanced)
• GZip Content-Encoding support
• HTTP authentication (basic and digest)
• If-(Un)Modified-Since header field
• Interface binding control
• Internal file caching
• IPv6 support
• Keep-alive connections
• Large file support
• Logging
• Request pipelining
• Range header field (single range support)
• Referer control for images (prevent external image linking)
• Rootjail
• SSL support
• SQL injection prevention
• Traffic throttling/shaping (control uploadspeed)
• URL rewriting via regular expressions
• Userdirectory support
• Virtual host support
• Volatile object support (for frequently changing objects, like webcam pictures)
• XSLT support

Very interesting are the bolded security features and the build in XSLT support. It does not seem to be in the official repositories of the linux distributions.

Compile and run tests of Hiawatha have successfully been done (by me or others) on Debian, Ubuntu, Gentoo, Fedora, Slackware, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, MacOS X, Solaris and Cygwin. Because of the use of autoconf, it’s very likely that Hiawatha will compile and run on other Unix-clones as well.

A package/port is available for the following operating systems: ArchLinux, Debian, Fedora, FreeBSD, MacOS X, OpenBSD, SUSE and Windows.

Of course this is not bullet proof. If your visitors using proxies located in a different country, anonymizer like TOR or accessing the internet by VPN so GeoIP won’t work as expected.

Geo location of an IP is also known as GeoIP, because the only service most of the people know is named GeoIP by MaxMind.

GeoIP of MaxMind

GeoIP is a very popular service and often in open source software used. MaxMind, the company behind GeoIP provides a binary database monthly updated for free use (but is not open source). Most of the modern programming languages have APIs to this service. Try out the demo.

On modern Linux systems there is a package named geoip-bin:
aptitude install geoip-bin
Download the binary database.
mkdir /usr/local/share/GeoIP
cd /usr/local/share/GeoIP
wget http://www.maxmind.com/download/geoip/database/GeoLiteCity.dat.gz
gunzip GeoLiteCity.dat.gz
ln -s /usr/local/share/GeoIP/GeoLiteCity.dat /usr/share/GeoIP/GeoIPCity.dat
use it
geoiplookup 84.226.106.171

NetOp - DNS based IP location service

DNS is always a good solutions if you want resolve a hostname or ip to something. NetOP.org provides such a DNS based location service. So the website says:

Existing approaches to IP geolocation chose to invent their own non-standard APIs. We feel that is not necessary. DNS is a highly efficient way to export IP-to- datasets.

This is so true.

…
Serving data via DNS, rather than a flat file, guarantees that answers to queries remain fresh.
….
With the country.netop.org service, NetOp demonstrates here that no special APIs are needed. All you need is a standard DNS resolver API.

NetOp runs a service that allows the public Internet to make DNSBL-style queries for a given IPv4 address’s ISO 3166 country code, as stored in a TXT RR

You can simply lookup a IP like this.

If you have a IP 84.226.106.171, make it reverse 171.106.226.84. And then use your preferred dns lookup tool:
dig 171.106.226.84.country.netop.org TXT
You will get a answer like
...
;; ANSWER SECTION:
171.106.226.84.country.netop.org. 604800 IN TXT "CH"
...

As you can see, the IP is located in CH which stands for Switzerland. This service is not very detailed, it only shows countries for IP addresses. But very fast and easy to use.

With PHP this can be used like the following snippet on Linux/Unix. This snippet shows how you can use it:

// Nameserver we want to ask
$nameserver = 'country.netop.org';

// IP which we want to be check
// Normally use: $ip = $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'];
$ip = "201.2.6.141"; // example IP

// Make IP reverse
$rev_ip = implode(array_reverse(explode('.', $ip)), '.');

// Default result
$country = "unknown";

// dns_get_record my not exist on some systems
if (is_callable("dns_get_record")) {
	$result = dns_get_record($rev_ip.'.'.$nameserver, TXT);
	if (!empty($result)) {
		// FIX: Not 100% sure if this works
		$country = $result[0];
	}

// dns_get_record is not available
} else {
	// we use dig on command line instead
	$command = 'dig '.$rev_ip.'.'.$nameserver.' TXT | grep ^[^\;]';
	$result = shell_exec($command);

	// Parse the dig output to only show the 2 letters of country code
	if (preg_match('/"([a-zA-Z]{2,2})"/',$result, $matches)) {
		$country = $matches[1];
	}
}
echo $country;
?>

NetOp is still beta but works great for me. Hope you like it too.

HostIP

HostIP is an open project. See the examples which show how to use this service, the API uses HTTP GET. But you are also able to download the database (MYSQL DUMP ~25 MB GZIP) by HTTP or even better by RSYNC (MySQL, BDB, CSV) from mirrors.

Note: we are actively looking for rsync mirrors so please shoot us an email if you’re interested!

If you wish to contribute, there is a GIT repo to pull from and of course an e-mail address to send patches to. On this site, you can also find some API Extensions, Firefox extensions, etc.

So, time for a quick example. To only show a flag of the country of your visitors, it is simple as:

<a href="http://www.hostip.info">
<img src="http://api.hostip.info/flag.php" alt="IP Address Lookup" />
</a>

Have phun.

Cherokee [1] (licensed under the GNU General Public License, version 2) is a very fast [2], flexible and easy to configure Web Server. It supports the widespread technologies nowadays: FastCGI, SCGI, PHP, CGI, SSI, TLS and SSL encrypted connections, Virtual hosts, Authentication, on the fly encoding, Load Balancing, Apache compatible log files, Data Base Balancer, Reverse HTTP Proxy and much more.

A user friendly interface called cherokee-admin [3] is provided for a no-hassle configuration of the server. Check out the benchmarks and documentation to learn more, and give it a try to squeeze your hardware to the fullest!

…and…

Cherokee is very light, completely modular and it can be tailored to your specific needs. As such, disk requirements will vary depending on the options selected for the building process. A static build for embedded devices can occupy as little as 200KB, give or take.

In terms of processing power, it has been known to work with as little as 133Mhz ARM processors. It could very well work on something smaller, but we haven’t really had the chance to try it out.

[1] http://www.cherokee-project.com/
[2] http://www.cherokee-project.com/benchmarks.html
[3] http://www.cherokee-project.com/doc/bundle_cherokee-admin.html

BotHunter [1] is a passive network monitoring tool designed to recognize the communication patterns of malware-infected computers within your network perimeter.  Using an advanced infection-dialog-based event correlation engine (patent pending), BotHunter represents the most in-depth network-based malware infection diagnosis system available today.

[1] http://www.bothunter.net/

AtMail [1] (Apache 2.0 Open Source license) is an open source webmail client written in PHP. We aim to provide a elegant Ajax webmail client for existing IMAP mailservers, with less bloat and a focus on an intuitive, simple user interface.

The open source version of AtMail provides users with a lightweight, yet powerful webmail client. The software can be installed on a variety of platforms with ease and without the hassles that most webmail platforms impart.

Traditional desktop mail clients are in decline; the future of email is via a web interface. AtMail is poised to deliver the next generation in Open Source Webmail.

Features:

• Lightweight Ajax Webmail Interface
• Video Mail
• PHP source code
• IMAP support
• Live Spell Check
• Address Book

There is also a full featured commercial version of AtMail webserver and/or webmail client. Look at the demos to see the difference between opensouce and commerical edition.

[1] http://atmail.org/

rsnapshot [1] is a filesystem snapshot utility for making backups of local and remote systems.

Using rsync and hard links, it is possible to keep multiple, full backups instantly available. The disk space required is just a little more than the space of one full backup, plus incrementals.

Depending on your configuration, it is quite possible to set up in just a few minutes. Files can be restored by the users who own them, without the root user getting involved.

There are no tapes to change, so once it’s set up, your backups can happen automatically untouched by human hands. And because rsnapshot only keeps a fixed (but configurable) number of snapshots, the amount of disk space used will not continuously grow.

rsnapshot is written entirely in Perl. It should work on any reasonably modern UNIX compatible OS, including: Debian GNU/Linux, Red Hat Linux, Fedora Linux, SuSE Linux, Gentoo Linux, Slackware Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Solaris, Mac OS X, and even IRIX.

Interesting is also the use of Rsnapshot accessing LVM.

[1] http://www.rsnapshot.org/

Nginx [1] [2] is a high-performance web and proxy server. It has a lot of features, but it’s not for everyone. People generally use Nginx:

• As an Apache replacement that gracefully handles many concurrent connections: Nginx is especially popular among web hosting providers. 50,000 simultaneous connections have been reported, thanks to Nginx’s use of epoll and kqueue.
• As a load-balancing proxy server: Nginx is a popular front-end to Rails and PHP applications, either via FastCGI or HTTP. Written in C, it consumes about a quarter of the CPU that Perlbal uses.
• As a mail proxy server: more of a niche application, but fastmail.fm reports great success.
• As a server with a simple installation process, a clean configuration file, and few bugs: Nginx is easy to get running, and it almost never needs restarting. You can even upgrade the binary with zero downtime.

Nginx is very popular as you can see on Netcraft.

[1] http://nginx.net/
[2] http://wiki.codemongers.com/

Diese Susanne C. kennen wir doch. Ich warte noch heute auf mein Arbeitszeugnis der konkursgegangener Vorgängerfirma…

Ich hatte damals wenigstens das sinkende Schiff vor dem Untergang verlassen. Aber erstaunt bin ich über die neuen Machenschaften eigentlich nicht. Na dann schauen wir mal wie lange es geht bis Susanne C. eine neue Firma gründet. Vielleicht wieder mit Hilfe von Montfort Werbung in Klaus AT?

Update 19.12.2008
Tja, ohne Worte…