Whew! That was close. My wife forgot our wedding anniversary as well... 

So Google have a SOAP API. This was just the excuse I needed to start playing with SOAP in PHP. And thus the game began.

First I had to choose a SOAP implementation. It turns out that php-PEAR has one that seems to be based on the well respected SOAPX4 I also wanted to start experimenting with some other libraries in PEAR and the code has a sort of quasi-stamp of approval from PHP as it's now in the main distributions. But for some reason PEAR wasn't installed on my hosting machine probably because I did it.

So the next stage is to update PHP from 1.0 to 1.2 and thereby hangs a tale. Now I host with Interland with their cheapest hosting package that gives me more or less full control. I get a virtual root in a sandbox but can access httpd.conf and such like. Interland told me that I couldn't update php because I needed full su root access. Hah! What do they know? Download php, untar it, work out what config parameters I need from phpinfo(), run ./configure etc, run make, run make install and let it fail. Sure enough, there is libphp4.so in the libs directory. Copy it to my own lib directory and then adjust httpd.conf so that the LoadModule php4_module line points at my copy instead of libexec. Restart apache and Bingo! php 4.12.

So now the next stage is to work out what happened to PEAR. It ought to go into /usr/libs but I don't have write access there. But I can see all the PEAR libraries in the php source tree. If I put it in usr/local/dah/dah/dah/libs then maybe I can get php to find it. Sure enough the php.ini file needs an entry include_path = ".:/usr/local/dah/dah/dah/lib/php/pear" Restart apache, run a short web page test for the pear DB library and it works. Bingo 2!

Now of course, so far I've glossed over several hours of trial and error and inspired guesswork, but the plan is coming together.

So now for SOAP. PEAR SOAP isn't in the php distribution but a quick Google search does turn up some minimal documentation and evidence of it being in the PEAR CVS. There's supposed to be a PEAR package manager that makes getting a new package easy. This is the point where you hit a web page on CVS PEAR install that says "This page not written yet". So finally I find the installed pear.in script that has to be moved and renamed pear and the instruction that says you need php to run it. Oh well, back to step 2 while I build a stand alone copy of php. Ok so I can see the executable. It's got execute rights. I type php, hit enter and get command not found. huh? It's right there. It takes me several minutes to realize that in Unix that should be ./php (stop laughing at the back) Makes complete sense. I have to tell it to run this php right here, not any old php it might find in the path.

So now php works, I can change the #! line at the top of the pear script to my copy, run ./pear So. list-available looks like a good option. Bang! xmlrpc support not loaded, error, error, error. ok, so we'll come back to that.

Then I remembered a note on a page about accessing Google API from php. "To use this code you will need both PEAR and the PEAR SOAP package installed somewhere on your php include path. You can get the SOAP package from CVS:" Have we got CVS? Yes. Type in the suggested lines. Bang! Some stupid CVS error that I can't be bothered to debug. OK. type the same lines into WinCVS locally. It all works, there's SOAP/, ftp it into the server's PEAR tree, fire up the sample php file, BINGO! Google search results! Try another search, Bang! No results. Ah-Hah! So when the note in the top of the example file said some returns don't work due to a bug in PEAR/SOAP parser it meant it.

So the next day, I have another look and the file now says "The PEAR SOAP package bug which caused some search terms to fail has now been fixed." So WinCVS, update, ftp, try again and Bingo!

So now I've got Google search results coming out of php code. Amazing.

But what was all that stuff about xmlrpc, package managers and such like. Well it appears that php now includes support for xmlrpc using Dan Libby's epi library. And because of that the PEAR guys assume it's there and use it in the package manager. And the php install docs say just use --xmlrpc(=DIR) as a config parameter. Well of course, I'd tidied up all the source, so download and untar the php source again. Add the parameter, check ./configure. Except that some of the xmlrpc responses look incomplete. Run make anyway, Bang! iconv.h missing. What? What happened then? Maybe I'm supposed to install xmlrpc-epi.c first. Download that, untar, configure, make, Bang! The Makefile borks with some impenetrable message. So it's off to the sourceforge pages, where I find a whole lot of equally impenetrable messages about how maybe FreeBSD is odd. Or maybe this or maybe that. But nothing that says "Do it like this and it'll work"

Now core PHP is really good. The docs are great, the code works, the install works. But step off the beaten track and we're back into Nerdland where it's assumed that you "Have a Clue", can debug other people's makefiles and can just know what to do by some weird telepathic osmosis.

Postscript: What I really wanted to do is put some cool Googley SOAP code into Theecademy.com But I have even less control there and they're running php 4.0.6 with no hope of getting an upgrade and no PEAR. But I copied all the useful files across, used a line in .htaccess to set the include_path. The test code said "requires PHP 4.1 or higher". Oh really? Comment out that check and it says array_key_exists() not found. And the php manual says "The name of this function is key_exists() in PHP version 4.0.6" So global search and replace through all of PEAR/SOAP and Bingo! Googley search results.

Netmaster 10baseT is in the house It's the BOFH Rap!

Yah gotta love this. Automatic blog entry creation with .:Autolog:.. For those days when you feel uninspired...

A dystopian vision of Life On the Net in 2004

Have you noticed how people have started referring to Yahoo! as Y!. Should this be pronounced Why Shriek? or Why Bang?

And what about the characters often found at the top of perl and shell scripts #! Is that Hash Bang ?

Microsoft has announced pricing for their MapPoint.NET service; yikes. And the uptime is only three nines. Hopefully MapQuest or Vicinity will come out with a service that supports the same API so we can get some price competition going. [thanks, Hack the Planet] Is this the first example of chargeable public web services? Platform Access Fee = $15,000.00 USD, Per User License = $299.00 USD, Per Transaction = $0.01 USD with a 45 day free trial. Presumably MS will release a toolkit to help others copy this approach. As HTP says, it will be interesting to see if equivalent services from other providers can provide realistic competition and drive the price down.

Demo: Reconfigurable Robots PARC's Mark Yim shows off his robots, which reassemble themsleves to slink like snakes, roll like wheels or scamper like lizards. [thanks, Technology Review - Computers and Electronics] Yummy. I love this stuff.

Tim O'Reilly reports back from the Alpha Geeks on the front lines.
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/network/2002/04/09/future.html
"The future is here. It's just not evenly distributed yet"

1. Wireless. Don't be Wired, be Wireless
2. Next Generation Search Engines. The one after Google.
3. Weblogs. Journalism 3.0. The readers fight back.
4. Instant Messaging. With APIs for programmers
5. File Sharing. Napster died but free music lives on.
6. Grid Computing. That's Seti, Protein folding and code cracking. What's
next.
7. Web Spidering. the Internet is huge and it's all mine.

All this seems awfully familiar, Tim. I thought you said this was the future?

Geographic guesswork about where you are physically, based on hints in your tcp/ip from Threering.net Click here now

Limited Pie. A Home for Scarce Thought on the Net : A Modest Post-Napster Proposal Rather wonderful proposal in the spirit of Swift to deal with music copyright, by producing, storing and copywriting every possible 4 minute song in MP3 format with distributed computing and storage. An MP3 is just a very long binary number. Cycle through every possible binary number of this length and you have all possible songs. Unfortunately the math is a little out, but it's still within the bounds of possibility.

A photocopier for CDs   Australian convenience-stores install coin-operated CD duplicators. The machines are able to operate under the same legislation as public photocopiers, where the burden of responsibility for copyright breaches lies with the user and not the owner of the equipment.Link [thanks, bOing bOing] Unbelievable! But it makes perfect sense, why not?

The Republic of FreeA couple of Aussie teenagers  have planted a flag on the abandoned Tuvalan island of Asau (which is sinking) and have declared The Republic of Free, a sovereign nation.  [thanks, bOing bOing] You know that big iceberg that separated off from the Antarctic? Has anyone claimed that yet? This is prime Loompanics stuff. There's still "Free" land out there if you're prepared to search for it.

Borg Journalism - We are the Blogs. Journalism will be Assimilated. As a journalist covering the weblog beat, I officially love weblogs. But sometimes that love can be sorely tested. Weblogs scoop you at every turn,  [thanks, Microcontent News] Excellent analysis of what it means to be a journalist competing with the Blog hive mind to cover an internet story. One thing I think it points up is the need for better Blog aggregators to provide the 10,000 foot overview of what the Blog Hive mind is up to. Blogdex, Daypop, Weblogs.com are all excellent first attempts, but they are just that, first attempts.

The EFF starts using blog technology to highlight particular issues. See Consensus at Lawyerpoint

Another of those puzzling questions (like how do you know what time you went to sleep?). Where are all the French websites? I stumble over German websites quite often. And there's plenty of Polish websites selling Delphi shareware. I find quite a lot of Japanese and Italian websites when looking for motorcycle information. But I never seem to see French ones. 

A Spyware free version of Kazaa. KaZaA Lite

According to Andrew Orlowski The Register (1-April-2002 ), AOL has bought two hundred of the most popular blogs. "In related news, MetaFilter was said to be signing a merger agreement with Kuro5hin to pool content between the two sites. We'll bring you more news as soon as we hear it.".

But shouldn't this be on NTK? "In-jokes for outcasts".

Do you belong to lots of Yahoo! Mailing lists? Do you have a Yahoo! account? Then go to "Account Info, Edit your marketing preferences." You will probably want to set all the options to NO. You have about 55 days to do this, before they start spamming you.

Deaddog's doo-wop rarities I just got a shipment of fantastic doo-wop and swing rarities from Deaddog music, a microlabel bringing back old 78s and singles. ... I have one other disk of his stuff, but most of his vast catalog of 78s is lost to history.[thanks, bOing bOing] I wonder if there's a thing like the Gutenberg Project, but instead of digitizing and archiving, doing the same for early recorded music. If there isn't there should be. A quick Google turned up the Mutopia project to digitize music scores, but I'm thinking of a library of MP3s of old out of copyright 78s for free download.