Me2 findoo.info

It looks like there’s going to be another point-release of WordPress coming soon. WordPress version 2.6.2-beta1 was just branded in svn a short while ago. Looking over the logs, I don’t see anything major — a fix for the Textpattern importer, a bug fix that prevents an attempt to make a revision of a revision, a new ‘login_redirect’ filter, a new ‘wp_rand()’ function, and a handful of other minor bugfixes.

I’m kind of wondering if there’s something bigger that’s going to be added before release…

Everybody knows that you shouldn’t keep beverages too close to the computer, right? The reason is because eventually, your toddler is going to run up to give you a big hug before she leaves for daycare, and is going to bump your leg. Your leg, in turn, is going to bump the TV tray where you set your coffee cup. The cup is going to tip over and spill several ounces of coffee directly onto the keyboard of your Macbook. And as a consequence, the Macbook is going to cease to function.

Yes, that’s what happened here at Castle Campbell last Friday morning. I tried to disconnect power and battery as quickly as possible, tried using a blowdryer on it, sat it out in direct sunlight for about an hour, and continued to let it air out for quite a while after that. But it still would not power up. I scheduled repair with Apple Care, figuring I’d end up eating just about the full cost of a refurb laptop.

Fortunately, I tried booting once more today, with the power supply connected, and it did boot. It still won’t boot under battery power, but at least I know now that it didn’t fry the entire motherboard. And I can get one last Time Machine backup before I send it off. Hopefully it will be back to normal after Apple cleans up the innards (keyboard, CD drive, etc).

Without the Macbook to work on, I had to fire up my old Sony VAIO laptop. It’s really not a bad machine, despite its age. It’s got a 2.4GHz P4 with 1GB of RAM (the maximum that this model can have, unfortunately). Its biggest problem, hardware-wise, is that the battery won’t hold much of a charge anymore, so I have to stay tethered to the wall. But I do that when I work anyways.

I booted it up, let it install a bazillion updates for Ubuntu 8.04, and restarted. And it ran as slow as molasses. What the? After doing some diagnostics, I discovered that I was running a bunch of services that I didn’t really need. Samba? Netatalk? Winbind? Turn those off, I’m not using them on a regular basis. MT-DAAP, Tomcat, avahi-daemon, tor, and even apache and mysql — not needed right now. Turning all of those off helped a lot.

But the performance still seemed sluggish, especially once I had Thunderbird and Firefox running. My final tweak was to switch from the default GNOME/metacity setup to xfce4. Once I got that configured, the system became much more useable. Even now, with Thunderbird, Firefox, Pidgin, Tomboy, a terminal, and several xfce panel plugins running, almost half of my RAM is still free.

Still, I’ll be glad to have the Mac back. It’s got more screen resolution, a slightly bigger hard drive, and several newer CDs of ours in iTunes that I don’t have ripped on the VAIO. And I’m getting antsy about the fact that I can’t sync my iPhone at the moment. Not that I have anything terribly important that needs to be synced, but it’s the principle of the thing.

So, anyways, let my mistake serve as a lesson to you all. Really keep your beverages faaar away from your equipment. It’s not just the repair cost you have to worry about. For me, the time I’ve wasted in getting another machine set up as my working environment was at least as valuable as what I’ll be paying for repairs. I don’t know about you, but time is something that I can’t spare much of.

We’ll know He’s back when He claims His holy profile on spock.com. (Or, if you know Jesus of Nazareth, you can invite Him.)

In other news, Spock does not let you search people whose names contain accented letters.
Example: as of the writing of this post, you can’t find Gérard Depardieu, even though his profile exists.

So, if Jesus comes back, it would be nice of Him to miraculously fix this issue: in the year 2007, developers still fail at handling non-ASCII characters.

The BlackBerry interface is unapologetically a power user interface. Much of the functionality is only available through keyboard shortcuts or the click wheel (not immediately apparent via buttons, etc.). In contrast, the Palm OS presents almost all of its functionality in on-screen buttons - eschewing menus for the most part.

Once you take make the investment to learn it, you’ll enjoy the BlackBerry’s more efficient screen usage. Google Maps for the BlackBerry 8700 is a great example of this. The entire screen is used to display maps - no buttons, menus, etc. (though overlays are presented in “directions” mode).

I believe that BlackBerry has gotten away with this interface design style choice in part because the majority of their customers are corporate users. They don’t have to sell each user, they sell the company and the company provides the device to the user.

In contrast, the Treo has been a consumer device which has moved into the enterprise. The initial ease of use of the Palm OS helped sell individual consumers on the device.

Now that BlackBerry is creating more consumer direct devices and the Treo is being billed more as a business tool, I’m curious if their respective user interface styles will also begin to converge a little more.

The BlackBerry interface is unapologetically a power user interface. Much of the functionality is only available through keyboard shortcuts or the click wheel (not immediately apparent via buttons, etc.). In contrast, the Palm OS presents almost all of its functionality in on-screen buttons - eschewing menus for the most part.

Once you take make the investment to learn it, you’ll enjoy the BlackBerry’s more efficient screen usage. Google Maps for the BlackBerry 8700 is a great example of this. The entire screen is used to display maps - no buttons, menus, etc. (though overlays are presented in “directions” mode).

I believe that BlackBerry has gotten away with this interface design style choice in part because the majority of their customers are corporate users. They don’t have to sell each user, they sell the company and the company provides the device to the user.

In contrast, the Treo has been a consumer device which has moved into the enterprise. The initial ease of use of the Palm OS helped sell individual consumers on the device.

Now that BlackBerry is creating more consumer direct devices and the Treo is being billed more as a business tool, I’m curious if their respective user interface styles will also begin to converge a little more.

There have been a number of interesting suggestions on my post yesterday that attempt to solve the handheld-desktop sync and provide a web view of my calendars. However, many of these do not include editing via the web interface and none of them include a public free-busy only view¹ for my work week that combines all my calendars.

The lack of free-busy baffles me - the data is all there and this has been in Exchange/Outlook for as long as I can remember. Yahoo! Calendar has this too if I remember correctly. Why isn’t this a view people have added to every web calendar interface.

There have been a number of interesting suggestions on my post yesterday that attempt to solve the handheld-desktop sync and provide a web view of my calendars. However, many of these do not include editing via the web interface and none of them include a public free-busy only view¹ for my work week that combines all my calendars.

The lack of free-busy baffles me - the data is all there and this has been in Exchange/Outlook for as long as I can remember. Yahoo! Calendar has this too if I remember correctly. Why isn’t this a view people have added to every web calendar interface.

Ethan does his BlackBerry to multiple-desktop sync solution using a hosted exchange account. Maybe that is the best option at this point² - then the only missing piece of the puzzle is the public free-busy, which maybe I solve via some of my own code.

1. Remember, I do not want to share the calendar events, just the free-busy status. [back]
2. Assuming I’d have web outlook access. [back]

I think I’ve got some pretty basic calendaring needs. I want to be able to access (view/add/edit) my calendar data from any computer including my handheld (using the native handheld app and sync, not a web interface - at least for now) and I want to publish a simple free/busy view of my workday schedule publicly.

I’ve looked at a number of options, but before tainting the discussion I thought I’d ask for suggestions.

Suggestions?

I think I’ve got some pretty basic calendaring needs. I want to be able to access (view/add/edit) my calendar data from any computer including my handheld (using the native handheld app and sync, not a web interface - at least for now) and I want to publish a simple free/busy view of my workday schedule publicly.

I’ve looked at a number of options, but before tainting the discussion I thought I’d ask for suggestions.

Suggestions?

Apple’s WWDC keynote announcements yesterday about Leopard have been talked about pretty much everywhere, but there are a few things I wanted to touch on:

ToDos

I was asked, so I’ll answer. I don’t see the ToDos and Notes implementation in Mail.app as a competitor to Tasks. My target audience is generally “folks who want to access their task list from multiple computers (and even multiple OSes) and want a good interface and some sophisticated functionality”. I don’t see the ToDos feature satisfying this market. On the plus side, perhaps some new folks will try managing their task list on their computer, realize they need more, and find Tasks.

Time Machine

Do people realize the hard drive space implications here? Also, sad to see a number of small developers lose so much income as their products are essentially dead.

Spaces

There goes the major market for the existing virtual desktop apps. Hopefully some of them will stick around. I use You Control: Desktops for example because it has a single killer feature.

E-mail Stationary

I am actually really annoyed about this. HTML e-mail is generally bad. Giving people tools to do bad things more easily is worse.

Leopard Server (Calendaring)

Everything they’ve added in the server is fantastic. Open sourcing the calendar server gives it a real chance IMO. Niall has a nice summary post.

The comments are open…

Apple’s WWDC keynote announcements yesterday about Leopard have been talked about pretty much everywhere, but there are a few things I wanted to touch on:

ToDos

I was asked, so I’ll answer. I don’t see the ToDos and Notes implementation in Mail.app as a competitor to Tasks. My target audience is generally “folks who want to access their task list from multiple computers (and even multiple OSes) and want a good interface and some sophisticated functionality”. I don’t see the ToDos feature satisfying this market. On the plus side, perhaps some new folks will try managing their task list on their computer, realize they need more, and find Tasks.

Time Machine

Do people realize the hard drive space implications here? Also, sad to see a number of small developers lose so much income as their products are essentially dead.

Spaces

There goes the major market for the existing virtual desktop apps. Hopefully some of them will stick around. I use You Control: Desktops for example because it has a single killer feature.

E-mail Stationary

I am actually really annoyed about this. HTML e-mail is generally bad. Giving people tools to do bad things more easily is worse.

Leopard Server (Calendaring)

Everything they’ve added in the server is fantastic. Open sourcing the calendar server gives it a real chance IMO. Niall has a nice summary post.

The comments are open…

When I switched to my new Slicehost server, I spent a while trying to decide what I wanted to do about email for my domains. I contemplated using Google’s domain email service, or some other third-party email hosting. But I just hated giving up that much control of my email setup. I’ve been administering my own email for (…thinking…) almost 15 years now. So, in the end, I just ended up routing email to my new web server.

The problem was that this added a significant amount of processing load to the server. Maily because I have been using the SpamBouncer procmail rules to filter my email. This set of procmail rules does a pretty good job of reducing the amount of spam that makes it to my inbox, but procmail is a notorious CPU hog. Whenever a batch of spam emails would arrive (when you host email for several domains and users, you notice that spam often arrives in ‘clumps’), several procmail processes would kick off, and the system load would shoot up by an order of magnitude for a brief time. The machine seemed to handle it okay, but it bugged me.

Recently, however, I was contacted by one Brad Garrison. He was also a customer with Slicehost, but he wasn’t as satisfied with them as I was. Brad was having some sort of problem with load on his server, and decided to try a different hosting provider. But he had some pre-paid credit that he could not get refunded. Being a visitor to my site, and seeing that I was at Slicehost, he generously arranged to transfer the remainder of his credit to my account (thanks, Brad!).

I decided to put this windfall to use by adding a second server to my account, to act as a dedicated email gateway and spam filter. First, I added a 256 Slice to my account, and set it up with Ubuntu 8.04. Once I had the base system up and running, with a few personal tweaks, I followed the instructions on HowToForge for building a SpamSnake server. When I was done, my server was running the Postfix MTA, MailScanner, Spamassassin, ClamAV, and MailWatch. I had problems with the greylist server, so I disabled gld and removed the associated bits from my postfix config.

Once it was all configured, I pointed the MX records for one of my lesser-used domains to the new server. Then I was able to send some test emails (which is how I ended up disabling gld), adjust and fix things I had missed in the initial setup, and get everything working just right. Once I was happy with it, I updated the DNS for the rest of my domains, to use the new server as their MX (Mail eXchange). After letting it run for a day, however, I found that the load on the new server was through the roof. MailScanner uses a *lot* of RAM, so the machine was in constant swap. So I upgraded the slice to 512MB of RAM. This process went smoothly. It probably took about 15 minutes from my initial request to the point that the machine was running in the new configuration, and it was only down for about 5 of those minutes. Score one for Xen virtual machines!

With the increased RAM, the machine was now happily munching on email, spitting the spams and virii into the bit bucket, and passing the rest of the messages along to my main server. I did, notice, however, that certain spammers were still sending emails directly to my mailbox server, instead of to the spamsnake gateway server. Naughty, naughty spammers! I fixed this by configuring the mailbox server to only accept connections from the gateway server. This took a little bit of research, but a user named Simon on the #exim channel in Freenode IRC pointed me in the right direction for setting up the ACL rules.

So, now my web server is happier because of the lower CPU load. And my inbox is happier because I get much less spam making it through filtering. I went from about 150 uncaught spams per night to about 12. I don’t even want to think about how many messages are getting blocked before I ever see a statistic on them (e.g., blocked by DNSBL, or other fingerprints, before any anti-spam content scanning takes place). For a while, I was actually worried that I had broken something, because I had been going so long without seeing new messages. I almost missed the constant dribble of spams! Almost

The release of WordPress 2.6 is now official. In addition to the features I highlighted previously, Ryan has details on his blog about the improved support for SSL, and some new helper functions which will be useful for plugin and theme authors. And the official dev blog post has details on other new features. One of the more interesting things that I didn’t yet know about was that the Press This bookmarklet has some nifty autodetection which will make it easy to automatically embed content from sites like YouTube and Flickr.

In addition to the new features, I’d also like to point out that there has been a recent effort to improve the inline source documentation (using PHPdoc). I, for one, certainly appreciate the work that is going into documenting the parameters, return values, and purpose of each function. It make things much easier when you have to trace back through the call stack to figure out where certain things happen.

I’m surprised that I haven’t seen mention o' this from other channels yet (official or unofficial), but two days ago, SVN revision 8561 o' th' WordPress 2.6 branch were labled as WordPress version 2.6.1-beta1. The log messages reveal that most changes since th' 2.6 release are minor bug and typo fixes. A few o' th' more interestin' bits that jump out at me are:

• Allow disablin' password reset per-user.
• Query functions now allow a comma-separated list o' post_status values.
• Several more link generation bits are made SSL-aware.
• Advertise th' Atom 1.0 feed in th' default theme.
• Atom API uses th' newer WP authentication functions.
• Fix fer an object cachin' bug in plugin updates.