I'm working on geographically distributed computing aka grid computing. Since there are so many resources on this planet, it would be beautiful to see them on the earth graphically. offers this kind of applications could be implemented in a few hours using or . All you need to know are pairs of latitude and longitude to identify where they are. Well, I also want to show the map in full-screen for easily navigating around the globe. In other words, it should resize itself according to browser size. Google doesn't tell me how to do it. Fortunately, I found it!

This is a brief tutorial for calling XML-RPC function in PHP. There are so many XML-RPC implementation in PHP but I will use XML-RPC for PHP 2.0 because it is purely written in PHP.

Let's go to the point. First of all, you have to create an XML-RPC client instance using xmlrpc_client().

$c = new xmlrpc_client('http://192.168.0.1:12345/RPC2');

I have heard that Gaim 2.0 beta 3 has been improved a lots so I would like to try it out on my Ubuntu laptop. Anyway, I'm too lazy to compile it myself because I found [a helpful thread][2]. Well, it is still beta. Don't expect too much. After installing for a few hours, I have downgraded back to 1.5.0. Below is my procedures to install 2.0 beta 3 and to install 1.5 back then.

Since I would like to have a complete system for developing Java application using Eclipse, I initially selected Debian. Anyway, Debian is not as good as I want. Since it should have the latest version of Xserver. Anyway, the default one in Debian is XFree86 but the world moved to X.Org for so long. Then I turned back to Ubuntu. Moreover, I selected Xubuntu because of it seems to have smaller memory footprint. So I install Xubuntu desktop with no doubt. Interestingly, it took me 2 GB for standard installation. I have to remove unused packages manually. Well, it was not easy to slim down so I reinstalled it with Xubuntu Alternative CD and Server profile. The server profile took me 485 MB, not bad. Then I have to install Xfce manually.

Installing java on Debian is a kind of tricky steps. It is not necessary to follow below procedures if you don't care about what Sun will do on your linux box and you don't care about unknown files after uninstallation. You should create a deb package for each Java package for easily management later.

I'm interesting in virtualization idea, especially Virtual Appliances proposed by VMWare. Why? I'm too lazy to install some softwares myself. I can but I don't want to waste my time. It would be extremely easy by just downloading virtual machine image, turning it on, customizing a bit, and it rocks in a right way.