One of the best outcomes from November’s Wave Protocol Summit was a proposal for Wave to enter the Apache Software Foundation’s incubator program. Apache has a fantastic reputation for fostering healthy open source communities that create great software. Last week, that proposal was accepted, and we’re spinning up the project infrastructure so that the community can continue to grow in the Apache way.

That’s news straight from the Google Wave Developer Blog.

[Via Mashable]

The open standards won because any kid could download the rules of the game, understand how they work, and make a contribution. — It taught us that we can make government heel.

That’s a quote from Carl Malamud, of Public.Resource.org in Washington’s I.T. Guy in The American Prospect.

Nancy Scola does a wonderful job of profiling Malamud, who is the man behind the SEC’s EDGAR system, among other services.

Malamud stands at the nexus of technology and government in a way that few others do.

But I can’t help but think the new software represents the triumph of hope over experience. Drupal looks great in theory: It’s a powerful way to govern a Web site that is born out of the collective efforts of the community. In practice, it tends to be a bit of a mess. Does that sound like any particular form of government to you?

Chris Wilson in his Slate.com piece Message Error (Via techPresident)

Also see: by Conor McNamara Messenger’s Error(s): Chris Wilson’s flawed rant about Drupal and whitehouse.gov

OpenGoo is a mash-up of sorts, combining several open source projects and packages — such as Reece Calendar, Slimey (presentations) and FCKEditor(text editing) — into one suite. [Via OStatic]

For this tutorial, you will need:

• A Zen Cart-based shopping cart
• A Google Analytics account and the tracking code for both conversions and page views.
• Experience with PHP and MySQL programming

Also check out Google’s support article How do I track e-commerce transactions? and become BFFs with the Zen Cart wiki.

Creating a custom functions file

Create a file to house your custom functions. Name it whatever you’d like (with a PHP extension, of course). Put it in your includes/functions/extra_functions/ directory.

A word of caution: I created these functions with my own SQL, outside of the Zen Cart framework. There may be a better way to do it.

In the file you created above, add the following code:

# get the product ID out of session key
function custom_get_prodId($productkey){
	$pid = explode(':',$productkey);
	return $pid[0];
}

#get the product data
function custom_get_product($prodID,$return='all'){
	global $db;
	reset($data);
	$q = sprintf("SELECT
			pd.products_name,
			pd.products_description,
			cd.categories_name, p.products_price
			FROM categories_description AS cd, products AS p, products_description AS pd
	 		WHERE  p.products_id = 183
   				AND p.master_categories_id = cd.categories_id
   				AND p.products_id = pd.products_id",$prodID);
	$res = $db->Execute($q);
	return $res->fields;
}
# get the current user's data
function custom_get_userinfo($custID){
	global $db;
	reset($data);
	$q = sprintf("SELECT
			ab.entry_street_address,
			ab.entry_postcode,
			ab.entry_city,
			ab.entry_state,
			c.countries_name,
			c.countries_iso_code_2
			FROM address_book AS ab, countries AS c
			WHERE customers_id=%d
			   AND ab.entry_country_id = c.countries_id
				  ",(int)$custID);
	$res = $db->Execute($q);
	return $res->fields;
}

Adjust the names of the tables if you have added a custom table prefix during your Zen Cart configuration. We’ll use these functions to get us the user data and product data we need.

Edit the checkout success and global footer files

Add the conversion tracking code — provided by Google Analytics — to the checkout success page template. It’s located in your templates directory, includes/templates/YOUR_TEMPLATE_DIR/templates/tpl_checkout_success_default.php.

Also add the regular Google Analytics tracking code to your footer file (found in includes/templates/YOUR_TEMPLATE_DIR/common/tpl_footer.php).

Below your Google Analytics code, but also in your footer file, add the code below.

<?php
# do this on the checkout success page only.
if($_GET['main_page'] == 'checkout_success'): 

$userdata = $_SESSION['cart'];
$moreud = custom_get_userinfo($_SESSION['customer_id']);
?>
<script type="text/javascript">
pageTracker._addTrans(
    "<?=$userdata->cartID; ?>",
    "www.YOURDOMAINNAME.com",
    "<?=$userdata->total; ?>",
    "",
    "<?=$_SESSION['shipping']['cost']; ?>",
    "<?=$moreud['entry_city'];?>",
    "<?=$moreud['entry_state'];?>",
    "<?=$moreud['countries_name'];?>"
  );
<?
# for each product ID key in the userdata session
foreach($userdata->contents as $k=>$v):
	/*
	the product id gets stored as an array key as xxx:funkymd5key
	ex: 183:fw920e8ktw327uio67xew9mn. custom_get_prodId extracts
	the product id part of that key.
	*/
	$pid = custom_get_prodId($k);
	$data = custom_get_product($pid,'all');
?>

 pageTracker._addItem(
    "<?=$userdata->cartID; ?>",
    "<?=getProdId($k); ?>",
    "<?=strip_tags($data['products_name']);?>",
    "<?=$data['categories_name'];?>",
    "<?=number_format($data['products_price'],2);?>",
    "<?=$v['qty']; ?>"
  );
<? endforeach; ?>
pageTracker._trackTrans();
</script>

<?php endif;
} // flag_disable_footer
?>

From Ars Technica:

A federal appeals court has overruled a lower court ruling that, if sustained, would have severely hampered the enforceability of free software licenses. The lower court had found that redistributing software in violation of the terms of a free software license could constitute a breach of contract, but was not copyright infringement. The difference matters because copyright law affords much stronger remedies against infringement than does contract law. If allowed to stand, the decision could have neutered popular copyleft licenses such as the GPL and Creative Commons licenses. The district court decision was overturned on Wednesday by the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.

According to “Condition or Covenant, and Why Should You Care?” from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, key point was whether ‘copyleft’ licenses — in this case, Artistic License 1.0 — are covenants or conditions (read the EFF article to learn the difference).

The court ruled that the license in question specified certain conditions that had to be satisfied in order for the user to be a licensee. In a nutshell: if you don’t meet those conditions, you are not licensed, and are violating the author’s copyright.

Related: Jacobson v Katzer decision [PDF Link]

OS X comes with its own encryption feature known as FileVault. But in my experience, FileVault can cause some performance issues. If you don’t regularly log out of your machine, you may find yourself running out of hard-drive space faster than you should. Recovering that space is easy, but can take half an hour or more in some cases.

TrueCrypt avoids FileVault’s disk space issue by giving you the option to encrypt your data one file at a time. [Via Lifehacker]

What do you get in the pro edition that’s not available in the community version?

• JSON support
• Support for secure FTP connections (via SSH & SSL)
• JavaScript debugging for Internet Explorer
• Project reporting engine
• Priority support for one year
• Access to preview and nightly builds

Earlier, no-cost releases of Aptana supported SFTP server connections. I’m disappointed to see that change with the release of a professional version.

Aptana is, without question, one of the best front-end development environments available (I haven’t used its server-side language features much). At $99, it hits a sweet-spot between affordable text editors like Panic’s Coda (Mac only; currently $79; regularly $99), BBEdit (Mac-only; $125), or NoteTab (Window only; $29.95) and pricier editors such as Dreamweaver (Mac / Win; $399).

At its full $199 price, however, it becomes harder to justify its purchase. For $100 less, Coda gives you many of Aptana’s core features and adds some sexy bits (like a built-in shell emulator and CSS color picker) of its own. For $74 less, BBEdit gives you a wider range of language support and a deliciously uncluttered interface. Plus there are some powerful free text editors such as jEdit (Java-based; cross-platform) and HTML-Kit (Windows only) that are good enough for many developers.

What’s your take? Have you used Aptana? Would you consider a professional license? Are you too wedded to your current text editor to switch?

Related posts:

• Open source favorites
• What’s your favorite text editor or IDE?
• Aptana IDE: Is it the text editor you’ve been looking for?