I wrote an application some time ago for my company that looks up the longitude and latitude of an address for use in our geocoding initiative. It relied on yahoo_geo(), a function written by PHP creator Rasmus Lerdorf and the Yahoo Maps API. It was largely dependent on this function:

function yahoo_geo($location) {
	$q = 'http://api.local.yahoo.com/MapsService/V1/geocode?appid=rlerdorf&location='
		.rawurlencode($location);
	$tmp = '/tmp/yws_geo_'.md5($q);
	request_cache($q, $tmp, 43200);
	libxml_use_internal_errors(true);
	$xml = simplexml_load_file($tmp);
	$ret['precision'] = (string)$xml->Result['precision'];
	foreach($xml->Result->children() as $key=>$val) {
		if(strlen($val)) $ret[(string)$key] = (string)$val;
	}
	return $ret;
}

This function worked for over two years for us with no problems at all. Then suddenly, in the last month, it started getting spotty. I fixed things by commenting out the caching parts of the function and forcing each execution to run again. Then I got errors about the libxml_use_internal_errors() function, so I commented that out. But today, the function just flat out failed, every single time returning the same error:

Warning: file_get_contents(http://XXXXXXXXXX/XXX) [function.file-get-contents]: failed to open stream: HTTP request failed! in /home/intranet/html/fetch.php on line X

What the heck? This code is all over the web. I’ve tried a million permutations of this function, including using fopen() and ob_get_contents(), and none have worked. And most frustratingly, I could load the URL successfully in Lynx and eLinks, so the machine could quickly and easily fetch the URL.

So I ventured into a sandbox I’ve never really played before: cURL. cURL is an interesting animal. But the interesting thing is, once I got it working, it worked faster than ever! So, without further ado, here is the new and improved yahoo_geo() function:

function yahoo_geo($location) {
	$q = 'http://api.local.yahoo.com/MapsService/V1/geocode?appid=rlerdorf&location='.urlencode(trim($location));
	$ch = curl_init($q);
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
	ob_start();
	curl_exec($ch);
	$stream = ob_get_contents();
	ob_end_clean();
	if($stream) {
		$xml = simplexml_load_string($stream);
		$ret['precision'] = (string)$xml->Result['precision'];
		if($xml) {
			foreach($xml->Result->children() as $key=>$val) {
				if(strlen($val)) $ret[(string)$key] =  (string)$val;
			}
		}
		curl_close($ch);
		return $ret;
	} else {
		return FALSE;
	}
}

Note: If you’re reproducing these functions elsewhere, be careful – WordPress may have converted the quotes into smart quotes that will need to be fixed before this script will run properly.

Let me cut to the chase: it appears the vote has been hacked. Clearly, something fishy is going on here!

The winners are – get this – a cookbook, a sync manager, and a thing that makes your desktop look like the weather. I cannot believe it. I’m stunned. THIS is what Mac users wanted? THIS is the best we could come up with?

One guy dreamt big: you hum into your computer and it pitch corrects and allows you to create a song. Whoa! Cool!

One girl had an interesting idea: you take pictures of your clothes and then can keep a “virtual closet” where you can look at your clothes together and design outfits.” Holy crap – NOTHING I know of does this, even if I don’t have much of a need for it.

But you see, these are REAL apps that are the first of their kind. Who needs a new sync manager? And who but chefs will really use Cookbook? And I couldn’t care less about my desktop wallpaper matching the weather, being as though I can LOOK OUTSIDE if I want to know!

What a letdown.

Read More | Digg Story

received via the firsttube.com API

So I slammed the pedal to the metal and did it. I now have a working API. It currently supports only 1 method reliably – blogger2.newPost() – however, I have tested blogger.getRecentPosts and both corresponding methods under the metaWeblog API. That said, I will probably hack something up that explains how to add an API to your homegrown PHP weblog. There are functions out there that do the hardwork, and there are functions I’ve written that do the rest of the work, so you just need to write the correct queries for your database.

Anyway, I can now post from digg.com, which is cool. Ultimately, if we ever support user blogs on OSNews, we’ll roll out an API so people can comment on OSNews and Digg stories via the API. Could be interesting.