Firefly is an open-source media player (iTunes for the poor). I've implemented a plugin that serves up a crossdomain.xml file: this allows Flash "applications" to use Firefly (for streaming music).

The source code is here. Place it in the src/plugins folder of the firefly sources and compile it like so:

  gcc -shared -o crossdomain_xml.so -I.. -I../.. crossdomain_xml.c

Well, I thought I had a novel idea while driving today; turns out someone else had already written (pretty much exactly) what I had in mind.

I refrain from having subversion repositories for my personal documents on a public ("root") server. I rather keep them in repositories on my home network. I don't like the idea of a (constantly exposed) internet-server containing all my documents. That's why there should be a second line of defense in case such a system is hacked. The "obvious" solution would be to use a cryptographic filesystem on the server that has to be mounted before the repository is accessed. However, that approach introduces a whole slew of technical issues (only root can/should mount, has to be manually dismounted, ...). Why not instead implement a new (or extend an existing) SVN backend that provides such cryptographic capabilities? Unfortunately, it looks like this can't be implemented as a source code patch (instead of a plug-in or extension).

On a side note: I recently stumbled across this SQL backend for Subversion (sadly it hasn't been continued and looks incompatible with current releases).

A log entry from my blog's log file:

XXX.XX-get-oneprice-adsl-for-only-R169.cybersmart.co.za

Some online storage (WebDAV) services provide mechanisms to share specific resources with others easily: usually, a link can be generated that allows access to the specified resource within the online storage (but can't be used to access any other resources). That way it's easy to share documents without having to create user accounts, set passwords and apply the corresponding ACL settings. It would be pretty cool if such a feature were to be implemented in mod_dav_svn (actually, mod_dav might be the more suitable module for this).

On another note: SVNIndexXSLT might be a good way to implement HTML output containing RSS feed links for this idea. The benefit would be not having to patch mod_dav_svn's source code (search for "gen_html") and thus to create an independant module that builds upon mod_dav_svn.

Update: As it turns out, using the SVNIndexXSLT is a no-go because there is no practical way to determine the current URL using XSLT in that context: the items in the xml document lack the basepath and unparsed-entity-uri() is not implemented in TransforMiiX (Firefox's XSLT engine) for determining the basepath later on. Sure, using the HTTP referrer on the server-side should work for most use-cases, but that's too hackish for my taste.

Too bad I didn't think of this earlier in the contest: the terms & conditions for the Palm webOS Hot App contest declare no restrictions about the type of app for the contest; I am sure that a "$5.000 Giveaway" app would have good changes of winning (by registering the most downloads). Of course, this money would only be paid if the app does win the contest itself (multiple winners should be drawn if this app would win any of the big $100.000 prizes).