which – Cyberwizzards World

Why I don’t like Ventrilo

Recently I installed Ventrillo because some red necks decided we needed a voice server for EVE Online and the in-game stuff won’t cut it. Ventrillo advertises with ‘advanced’ features like surround positioning and useless crap like that.

At first glance I’d say the GUI is old-skool, bit too plain and awkward to set up for the first time. It annoys the heck out of me where all panels are placed and how it all comes together.

Perhaps profiles are useful for some but not for me: I need a separate name for all servers I use in voice chats so profiles separate from the server settings is as useful as picking up your hamburger at a different counter from your fries…

Next up is the fact that it won’t minimize into the system tray, leaving me with yet another window to lug around.

Finally it has no Linux client. Seriously. It is in the works (or so the site says) but the do have a linux server, leaving me puzzled why linux is not supported in the first place.

The only cool thing that Ventrillo has (and Teamspeak will get in version 3.0 which is currently beta) is the surround stuff… Which I can’t try because I don’t have a surround setup on this computer…

Ow I long for the days where everyone would just stick to Teamspeak, which is still masterfully better suited for voice chat than all the other programs around…

MoveableType Plugin Joomla! enhanced

Joomla can be used in a blog like manner using the XML-RPC interface. Unfortunately, Joomla only provides a Blogger API plugin which is rather limited.

Luckely, some Japanese people created a plugin which improved the supported XMLRPC API’s. It’s called MoveableType XML-RPC Plugin and can be found on the Joomla site.

Technically this is not only a MoveableType implementation as it supports all functions needed for MetaWeblog and Blogger as well as Google Docs (since version 2.1.0).

The only thing driving me nuts is the fact that some blog tools refuse to work because the plugin refuses to return a list of supported functions (most programs just assume everthing is supported, which is wrong as almost everything is optional).

Fortunately this is solved quickly by adding a few lines of PHP to the plugins/xmlrpc/movabletype.php file. Find the following section (around line 790):

function mt_supportedMethods()    {       return (new xmlrpcresp(new xmlrpcval(array(), "array")));    }

Replace this with the following:

function mt_supportedMethods()    {       global $xmlrpcString, $xmlrpcArray;       $functions = array();       foreach(array_keys(plgXMLRPCMovableType::onGetWebServices()) as $function_name)          $functions[] = new xmlrpcval($function_name, $xmlrpcString);       $struct = new xmlrpcval($functions, $xmlrpcArray);       return new xmlrpcresp($struct);    }

And voila, there you have it, a fully working function listing enabling your favorite blog program to do its job properly…