Kerem Erkan’s blog

Hi again,

I have received a lot of mails about both PHP DRM Packager class and Check Quota plugin for SquirrelMail. For the last months, I have not been able to concentrate on anything and I could not reply your mails. I apologize for that from all of you.

For the PHP DRM Packager, while I would love to share the code with the rest of the world as open source, I am not able to do that for the time being. Sorry. I hope in the future, I will be able to do it.

I have started playing amateur darts nearly a year ago. I love the game and I have a darts board in my house. I have recently replaced the parquet floors with a wall to wall carpet and I did not want to place some lath or masking tape on my new carpet.

So I ended up with a laser marked toe line. You can see the pictures of it in my Facebook photo album by following this link.

I have released Check Quota 2.2 today, with help from Paul Lesniewski of SquirrelMail Development Team. With this release, all Check Quota versions prior to this one and Quota Usage plugin maintained by Bill Shupp and Paul are obsoleted. The two plugins are now completely and officially merged.

The biggest change in Check Quota 2.2 is complete support of SquirrelMail 1.5.2 branch. Other changes are mostly bugfixes and optimizations, as well as new language strings. This means, translations of Check Quota 2.x will not work for Check Quota 2.2, so they are removed from the plugin.

This week two translations for Show User and IP 3.3 have arrived and added. They are Bahasa Melayu (ms_MY) and Norwegian (nb_NO). You can find the repacked plugin file from Downloads page. Thanks to Muhd Zamri MS and Arnt Gronas for giving their precious time to these translations.

Today I am releasing PHP Captcha 1.0.

The main difference of PHP Captcha from other free or paid PHP implementations is, that it is written to utilize ImageMagick functions through the wonderful MagickWand PHP API to create CAPTCHA images that are hard enough for bots to crack, while more readable by humans than the others.

According to Aleksey Kolupaev of OCR Research Team, to whom I am thankful for his help on PHP Captcha, “Everything can be cracked, but this one is a hard nut.”

Output of default configuration:

Output of a custom (a little too unpractical) configuration:

UPDATE: PHP Captcha 1.0 is released. Thanks to all who beta tested it.

I have started a new project named PHP Captcha which will be released as open source.

It will be a PHP Captcha implementation which will use ImageMagick instead of standard PHP GD libraries. It purpose is to create less crackable CAPTCHAs than the ones created with the readily available implementations that use GD.

I need beta testers who have some free time to test PHP Captcha. All you need to do is go to http://www.keremerkan.net/captchatest.php and solve the CAPTCHA that is written there. Please solve as many as you can, so that I can optimize the configuration.

Today, I am releasing Check Quota 2.1, which includes new updates. With this release, you will be able to check UNIX quotas when your SquirrelMail and IMAP servers are on different machines. I have added a thorough explanation of achieving this in the INSTALL file of the plugin.

I have also added SquirrelMail 1.5.2 support. The plugin hooks and outputs have been changed a lot in 1.5.2, so most of the plugins designed for 1.5.1 and below will not work in 1.5.2.

And last, the first translations for Check Quota 2.x have arrived and added, which are Hungarian (hu_HU), thanks to Csezsy Laszlo of Frugalware and Brasilian Portuguese (pt_BR), thanks to Mauricio Severich.

If you have read my earlier posts, you must have seen that I am excited about implementing QR Code to my projects. These mostly include my work projects.

Today I have discovered that Fukuchi Kentaro, who is an assistant professor has written a very useful QR Code library to use on UNIX based systems. I have immediately downloaded the library and compiled it. It ran smoothly on my server, so I created a little PHP function to use with this library, for real time QR Code generation.

I have put a page on my server for you to use the function. You can call that page supplying a base64 encoded URL and it will create a QR Code PNG on the fly.

UPDATE: I had to remove the demo page for reasons I cannot specify here. I hope that I can put it back online in the future.

I have set up a demo page for my packager class. You will be able to give the URL of a content file and get it DRM packed to your phone. As this is a demo, it has some limitations. You will only be able to pack video/3gpp, audio/3gpp, image/gif and image/jpeg files. That is, you will be able to pack 3GP audio and video files and GIF or JPEG images.

You can test the class at the following page:

http://www.keremerkan.net/drm

Yesterday, I have finished Check Quota 2.0, and today I am releasing it for your use. I hope everyone who have used Check Quota or Disk Quota plugins for SquirrelMail before, will like this new one. Nearly everything has changed in this release and those who are using Check Quota 1.4 should try this one.

You can download the plugin from here:

Here are the changes:

• New release. Rewritten from top to bottom.
• The plugin functions are wrapped in a class now. They are called easier this way.
• Rewritten UNIX quota checker from scratch. It is more efficient and stable.