Hari's Corner

I'm just back from my four-day long holiday to Kulithalai (my grandmother's native place, in Karur District, Tamil Nadu). The Indian summer has well and truly arrived. Although I'm used to high temperatures, what really gets me is the dryness of the heat in the interior regions of the country. Heat with high humidity I can tolerate, because I sweat a lot and cool off in the process, but the kind of heat you encounter in interior South India in summer has to be experienced to be understood. You can almost see the waves of radiation off the rocky countryside in some places. This is heat of the throat-parching, head-splitting variety, not the sweaty, steam-bath kind which has the effect of sapping your energy, but is otherwise tolerable.

In any case, I'm back home now. Still recovering from the after-effects of the journey though.

Having used PHP as the logical choice for web development, I've always been a little mystified by cgi-bin scripts and never bothered to learn how they work. But no longer.

CGI scripts are nothing but scripts or executable programs. Apache simply executes them and renders the results. Of course, because every CGI program is an external application and requires the web server to start a new process, it makes the whole thing very processor intensive. The modern method of embedding scripts in web pages (most popularly PHP/ASP) which can be directly interpreted by Apache is a far more efficient method and I suppose more logical from a web designer's point of view.

However, there are still a few advantages to CGI scripts: you can use whatever language you wish to (plain shell scripting, Perl, Python and even compiled C executables). This offers many more options to the developer. Also in many cases CGI scripts are not limited to server "modules" and can directly use the underlying Operating System's functionality.

Rather than reinvent the wheel however, I'll point you to Apache's CGI tutorial which is a must read for any webmaster, web developer or server administrator.

Yes, CGI can be intimidating and complex CGI scripts can be a headache to maintain, but it's nevertheless useful to have an idea about how they work since so many websites still utilize this method of delivering dynamic content.

I've written a new blog tool in PHP called LiteDoodle. It's a simple, configuration driven image blogging system, ideal for small webcomics. Doesn't use MySQL or any databases.

Before you test it out, make sure you read the install-readme.html file. It has some useful information. It's a very rough-and-ready tool, so you won't find much polish in the code, but it does the job and is not very complicated.

Download: LiteDoodle.zip (25 kB)

I'm sure that most of you have more than once searched for obscure or little researched information on the internet and come up dry in spite of the power of google and other search engines. I've often run into this situation because there are some topics that are so specialized (or of lesser interest to people in general) that it's well nigh impossible to find authoritative sources of information on them.

Here's where I would like my readers to help out. If you find a lesser-known website on an uncommon subject (examples, but not limited to: rare literature, forgotten authors, great webcomics or less popular FOSS applications) please bring them to my notice. I'll definitely give them a look and post a link here on this blog if I find them worthy.

I've already been doing this, but I would appreciate help from my readers as well.

Well, my next Boxi and Panjo episode is here! This one could be a dream or not. You decide.

Papa Hari News Service

In a revolutionary development that will change the face of the Internet forever, the newly appointed Papa Hari World Government has issued a complete and total ban on internet hyperlinks in their current form. Claiming that the move will result in better Internet browsing habits and help webmasters earn more money with the newly launched innovatively named Papa Hari Internet Advertising Service (PHIAS), a Papa Hari Government spokesman assured internet users that their online rights would not be taken away as a result of this move.

"At present, we noticed that the biggest impediment to poor webmasters making lots of money on the Internet is because of the huge number of non-advertising hyperlinks plastered all over the internet competing with the advertising links. In a sense, by banning hyperlinks in their current form, we're actually helping webmasters make money by ensuring a very high Click-Through Rate!" He continued, "So far online advertising, being optional, has suffered from many disadvantages. It is our innovative idea to make internet advertising compulsory for every single website and that's what we're doing right now."

When asked about how every any internet document will link to another in the future, the spokesman declared a new HTML "tag" that would automatically earn money for the webmaster through the Papa Hari Internet Advertising Service. This new tag, innovatively named <PAPAHARIINTERNETADVERTISINGLINK> will automatically redirect all hyperlinks to the Papa Hari Internet Advertising website and then on to the intended target URL.

"It's really simple to convert existing non-advertising hyperlinks to the Papa Hari advertising hyperlinks," the spokesman added, "Just wrap all your tags with the all new, shiny <PAPAHARIINTERNETADVERTISINGLINK> tag and you're set to go. As a result of this move, every link will earn money for the webmaster! And of course, the Papa Hari Internet Advertising Service will take a service commission on these links."

When asked how a particular popular search engine would react, the Papa Hari Spokesman said that even Search Engines might be banned under the new Papa Hari World Government so the question of competition would become moot.

"By banning search engines we shall leave users with no choice but to click on the high-quality Papa Hari Internet Advertising links to discover new websites. Better still, by launching the Papa Hari Internet Search Engine (PHISE) we will introduce the all new <PAPAHARIINTERNETADVERTISINGLINK> tag on every search result, so we will continue earning even more money that way without having to share our profits with independent webmasters. And if webmasters refuse to implement the new tag on their websites, we reserve our right to arrest and hold them in custody indefinitely. We're working on a new Law towards this end!"

Several internet experts feared that this move would result in a complete monopoly for the Papa Hari World Government on the internet. "We fear that such a move would be totally against human rights!"

Several internet users were shocked at this new edict by the Papa Hari World Government. A few web developers also claimed that the new tag <PAPAHARIINTERNETADVERTISINGLINK> would not be XHTML 1.0 compliant and would break compatibility with existing browsers. "But with the power at the command of the Papa Hari World Government, it would be a matter of days before it becomes an official W3C standard and adopted by all major web browsers," said a bitter blogger who wished to remain anonymous. "But even worse, just imagine how much more typing would be involved to have to wrap this tag around every single link! It's a horrible thought!"

The Papa Hari World Government has denied that it was trying to clamp down on internet users with such a move and said that it was meant to benefit all users. "The new tag has several advantages over the old <A HREF=...> tag," said the Papa Hari government spokesman, "The biggest advantage is that these tags are Papa Hari Government approved and certified." He also dismissed suggestions that the Papa Hari World Government was going to censor the Internet. "We believe in Freedom of Speech and Expression!" he added, "But we also believe in the right of every webmaster to earn a living through internet advertising and that's why we have introduced our revolutionary Papa Hari Internet Advertising Service as the new standard for internet linking!"

In the meantime several unconfirmed rumours were doing the rounds, the most interesting of them being that the next move of the Papa Hari World Government would be to ban Domain Names completely so that people would be forced to remember IP addresses. While the Papa Hari World Government has not responded to this rumour, it is believed that such a move has been contemplated by the higher officials in order to further increase the efficiency of the <PAPAHARIINTERNETADVERTISINGLINK> tag. An internet expert commented: "very soon, I expect web browsers to stop including a navigation bar and a bookmarking feature so that the only way to browse the web would be to click <PAPAHARIINTERNETADVERTISINGLINK>s."