Tag Archives: software

Tent Flapping

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Spam wall
Went back and forth just now on IntenseDebate plugin for WordPress.org. I thought it might be useful and add some features to my blog that would be nice to have, like After-The-Deadline plugin for comments and such. Everything was going well until I noticed that my Akismet Spam queue was at 74 comments. I tried to open the queue and couldn’t as IntenseDebate had replaced that part of my blog with its own controls. So, with no way to look at my Akismet Spam queue I decided that the pros for the IntenseDebate plugin couldn’t compensate for the way it broke my blog when it came to Akismet Spam queue access. So, there was for a brief time a new comment system, and then there wasn’t.

Which doesn’t mean a lot because people aren’t actually commenting on my blog, they are commenting on Facebook. I do get the one-off Twitter retweet or favorite, but that’s it.

Drafts Changes Workflow

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The more I use the Drafts app for my iPad and iPhone the more I love it and the more I want to use it. It’s actually changed the workflow for my “Post-a-Day” WordPress blogging as well as my regular blogging in general. What I used to do was copy the Post-a-Day prompt emails over to my WordPress blog and set the post type to Drafts and let them sit there. I’ve never been a huge fan of the editor built-in to WordPress, but copying the emails to Drafts and storing them there, syncing them to Simperium which then synchronizes them across all my devices that have Drafts loaded on them, which is now just my iPhone.

The app itself has so many neat features, being able to store multiple drafts and have them swipe-accessible from the left makes switching files a breeze and then when the post is done and ready to be published I can swipe from the right and select as many services as I want to send my drafts off to. It’s the perfect promontory to launch Day One, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and WordPress. Generally speaking, the drafts themselves almost always follow a certain path, first to Day One then to WordPress because then WordPress sends links to Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr on my behalf with the publicize feature. But sometimes I write things that don’t go to my blog, in that case I can send to Day One and Facebook. I have configured the apps representation in Facebook to conform to my “Sharing” security group, so even if I tap the Facebook option I don’t have to worry about my private sharing thoughts leaking out where they don’t belong.

The only thing (yes, there is one of these for every user) that I would really love is a Drafts app for Mac OSX. That would let me hack away on Drafts entries on my iMac without having to clear off workplace desktop space to set up my iPad. I think it’ll just be a matter of time before we see those options start to become available. I would pay $15 for an app like that without even batting an eye.

WordPress Jetpack and Post By Email

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Several days ago, when I had all that trouble working with Jetpack for my WordPress.org blog I couldn’t get stats to work. I sent a support ticket to the developer of Jetpack and it turned out that it was a problem with my web host, iPage. Once they fixed the problem on their side, the stats worked again. There was another problem, one that hasn’t worked for a very long time and I gave up hope almost. There is a feature of Jetpack called “Post By Email” and this feature should work, but never has. I once again opened a support ticket with the developer of Jetpack and told them what was wrong.

Late last night I got an email from a WordPress.org Forum [Post](http://wordpress.org/support/topic/jetpack-post-by-email?replies=13#post-3952121) that I’ve been commenting on stating that the issue is solved if you upgrade your installation of PHP to 5.3 on your web host. So I logged into iPage, found the PHP settings, pushed them to 5.3 and then tried again. My test post worked like a charm!

So much so that I am sending this post via email. It should arrive in moments and then I’ll publish it. Hooray! I love a fix. What a great way to start the day!

For the want of pgrep on Mac OSX

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I’ve got an issue at work, of course. I’ve got a Mac OSX xServer that has grown crotchety and so I’ve gotten to making things better by using killall on various running processes in order to “clean up the mess”. This is all fine and good and these processes respawn and the world goes back to normal and everything is fine, however I also want to renice this pesky command and give it a lower priority. While killall can do a search by name, renice requires a pid. The way you get pids is to run the ‘ps’ command, but this gives you a big pile of data and really all you want is just the pid itself, so you can pass that to renice.

So here’s how to get your cake and eat it too on Mac OSX Leopard Server:

1) First, change your shell – the default for root is /bin/sh, do this by issuing this command:

chsh -s /bin/bash root

2) Then you’ll need to give bash a profile, create a new file call it .bash_profile and fill it with this text:

[[ -s ~/.bashrc ]] && source ~/.bashrc

3) Next you’ll need to fill out that .bashrc because that contains the function you need to replicate pgrep:

pgrep() for arg; do ps aux|grep $1|grep -v grep|awk '{print $2}';done;

4) Log out and log back in and you’ll end up in bash, not sh, and you’ll have a new command at your disposal, pgrep. You can then use pgrep CommandName and it’ll spit out the pid related to what you are after.

5) Then you can use this new function with renice this way:

renice 20 `pgrep CommandName`

One thing to note here is that the ` character is the backtick character. You’ll find this hiding out in the upper left corner of your keyboard, it’s the unshifted tilde button.

FBackup: Free Is Good

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At work I was asked to put together a server on the cheap which I’m fine with as long as everyone understands that doing so has some implicated risk. A server cast on a desktop machine is a risky proposition. You don’t have power support from redundant power supplies, you don’t have RAID which can protect you from hard drive failure, and the machine is not designed to be a very robust server in any stretch of the imagination – it just lacks the processing and RAM that would really answer the need strongly. However, once I covered those risks, everyone was still on-board with me moving forward. I rolled a server out, used an Operating System that would be best to not speak about and set up the software.

Being a part of the technology from the great beast, of course it didn’t work well at first. There were hidden requirements, annoying requirements. Requirements with “dots” in their name. Once I figured out the how and got the thing running I took it down from the lab place I was working on it in and moved it to its permanent home in our machine room. From the point of deployment which was a few days ago I’ve had a niggling worry that the thing is going to fail, as any machine could when it relies on just one hard drive. I needed a backup solution.

The built-in backup solution in the “product” that I was “using” as an “operating system” was just not going to work. I needed something that would work well and be free above all else. I went to the great sage and eminent junkie Google and eventually ran across FBackup. It’s not glorious, it’s not complicated, but it is exactly what I was looking for. So now with that software installed, and it’s quite good in fact for the “operating system” I was using I don’t have to worry so much about that “server” going down. If it does, eh, who cares, at least the data will be safe. For those that wonder where I put my backups, I have a NAS, a handy dandy DroboNAS that isn’t the fastest tool in the shed, but at 16TB, it certainly has a lot of space and it’s RAID means that I don’t have to worry so much about hardware failure with that box.

So, hooray for FBackup. It’s free, and while I can’t spare any change for it, what I can do is recommend it. If you are looking for something handy and you can’t get your hands on a native installation of ‘tar’ like you should be using, this is quite good. It’s not Backup Exec of course, but then, I would rather chew a lightbulb than even hear the words “Backup Exec” spoken aloud.

Jetpack Failure

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I recently upgraded my installation of Jetpack for WordPress.org on my blog here and right after I did that the damn thing stopped working. Verison 2.2 with WordPress 3.5.1. Everything should be 5×5 but it isn’t. I’ve contacted Jetpack support and I’m waiting to hear from them what my next steps should be but I figured it made sense to blog about this since it touches on WordPress and well, here we are.

The first thing I did was disconnect my Jetpack from WordPress.com, that went very easy. Then I tried to re-engage with WordPress.com and got an SSL timeout error. I then went onto Google and found a bunch of others who were having this problem. After I engaged with the Jetpack support people they asked me to run the a href=http://plugins.svn.wordpress.org/jetpack/branches/jetpack-compatibility-test.zip target=_blankJetpack Compatibility Test plugin/a. I did that, it generated content and I sent it off for analysis.

So I don’t have Jetpack running and I leaned back and wondered if things would be so bad without it. I mean, if an update breaks it perhaps it’s not meant to be used. So, if there is a solution, that’s fine and dandy, and if there isn’t, living without Jetpack is also fine and dandy.

I’ll be updating this post with new details as they unfold. What’s really irking is Jetpack worked for a long long time up until the last update, then poof.

strongUPDATE/strong: I tried to connect to WordPress on a lark and it worked. So, if the Jetpack support fellows did something, then thank you guys for your help!

**UPDATE 2**: Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water, the post-by-email bit of Jetpack doesn’t seem to like me. Sent several messages and nothing posted to the blog. Perhaps a sneaky firewall issue, or gnomes. 😉

Cloze

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Discovered a neat new site and I sent invites out to everyone who I thought initially might find it useful. The site is called Cloze and it combines email and social networking in one view. There are free apps for iPhone and iPad as well. So if you got some email from me and you weren’t expecting it, now you know who it was from. I had to use my work email because many of the addressees on the mail were work contacts and they wouldn’t know who I am if I used my gmail account.

Abandoning Google Plus

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Yesterday I opened my Google Plus page and discovered to my surprise and initial pleasure that Google had brought a new interface to their social network system. As I started to explore this new interface I started to immediately notice that things had changed not for the better, but rather for the worse. Google had unilaterally included their chat system on the right side of my browser window, it’s something I rarely ever use so that system is all wasted space. I noticed that the stories in my circles, the things I really care about are now shuffled off to the left in a column that lost 10% of space on the leftmost and 50% on the rightmost, being moved over for some controls at the very top of the page that now occupy this dreaded whitespace region on my Google Plus page.

It’s this whitespace, and the meaningless chat talker system that I can’t stand. Facebook attempted a similar move by presenting me with a chat-talker screen on the left side as well months ago, when I still used Facebook. When they made the changes to their interface, along with privacy concerns and workplace issues with social networking I left Facebook. Now it just languishes as an identity marker, if content gets on my Facebook page it’s wholly accidental. Twitter’s web page also underwent this columnar approach, as they reconfigured the entire interface out from underneath their users. For Twitter, I stopped using that because it was more noisy than useful, the people I wanted to engage with were just human billboards, and the interface changes were really the straw that broke the camel’s back.

So what is there to do? Complaints about the interface changes are really the only channel you have to express how much you dislike when a service does this to you – but you have no real power. Just complaining is one easily ignored tiny little voice in the darkness and doesn’t amount to anything at all. The only real power that any single user has is the power of choice. In the end, the only choice I have to make is, do I want to still use the system? It’s actually a matter of abandonment. I abandoned Facebook. I abandoned Twitter. Because they changed the interface and made it less useful to me, I am facing the idea of abandoning Google Plus. I don’t need these social network systems to give my life meaning. They need me, or rather, they need aggregate me’s, lots of people, to give what they do meaning. The less people use a socially networked system the less appealing that system is to everyone else. Facebook is only compelling because everyone uses it. There is no real value inherent in Facebook itself. This is a lesson that the classic business models these companies use can’t take into account – that their popularity defines their success. If they make a grossly unpopular change to the interface, then people will flee and their success will go tits up.

I don’t care to encourage other people to abandon these systems if they like them. Each of us has to make these kinds of decisions on a wholly personal level. I find it obnoxious that Google, and Facebook, and Twitter for that matter all force interface changes on users without giving the user any control whatsoever. It would be more elegant if there were a batch of controls we could select from and build our own interface. Put the bits and pieces where we want, opt out of things we don’t care for and make the interface work best for us, as the users. None of these sites have done that, they all behave as if they have global fiat to make changes willy-nilly. The end user who has to contend with these changes can’t do anything really except make that singular choice surrounding the issue of abandonment.

So where do I go now? It’s comic, but in many ways I am looking forward to going backwards. There is one system that I’ve used, mostly as a category but the people behind what I currently use I regard as being the platonic form of that category, and that is WordPress. Going back to blogging. What does the WordPress infrastructure have that attracts me? It’s got stable themes, the site looks very much like it always has. There are changes, but they aren’t as gross in scope as these other systems have perpetrated. I can share links on WordPress, I can write long posts, short status updates, and WordPress has a competent comment system already in place.

So I will give Google Plus until May 1st to do something better with their interface, to recognize the value in the stream and give us users the choice of what systems we want to see on our Google Plus page. Google should give us the ability to turn off the whitespace region, we should be able to turn off the chat talker region, so that we can maximize the stream region. If they fail to correct these glaring human interface deficits I will do to Google Plus what I did to Facebook. I will abandon Google Plus. I will keep the account running but I will no longer actively use it. Things that end up on Google Plus will end up being the same sort of things that end up washing up on Twitter, specifically links to content on my WordPress blog. Google’s loss will be WordPress’ gain. WordPress has always done right by me, and I respect them. I do not respect Twitter, nor do I respect Facebook. My respect for Google is quixotic at best. I used to believe in their “Do No Evil” company mantra, but that has been shed as Google has done some very evil acts, they aren’t what they once were and this sullying of their image makes the pending abandonment easy.

Will my abandonment hurt Google? No, of course not. I’m not so full of myself as to think that me leaving will change anything about the service, that Google will even notice my absence. However if I can inspire other people to give another look at WordPress, maybe see that progress forward can be achieved by regressing to earlier systems may be a worthy pursuit if what you get in the trade is interface stability. That this single raindrop encourages others to fall. The raindrop doesn’t believe it is responsible for the flood. I can only hope that I help the flood along. These massive changes that these social network sites perpetrate on their usership should be punished! We want it all, we want to use the service and we want to control it as well. We want the interface to be regular, logical, useful and static. When we want to make a change, we want to be the ones making it. We do not want to be victims of someones good intentions, Google! I would say this for Facebook as well, but that’s a lost cause.

So time is ticking away. If Google does not act, then the stream on that service is terminal. If that comes to pass, I will be migrating to my WordPress blog.

I hope to see some of you there.

Hindsight – 2/5/2004

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As I was looking over my old LiveJournal posts I found this gem from 2/5/2004, a whole 7 years ago! Gosh how time flies! Enjoy!

Busy Busy Busy… Buzz Buzz Buzz

Whew! Just got done polishing the new chrome on the new database system here at work. We had a rep from the vendor come in to deliver the first cut of the converted database and then walk us through all the errors that came up in conversion so we can take specific steps to make sure our database that goes into the second (and final) cut is as good as it’ll ever be.

Of course, the road to happiness is riddled with potholes. The rep, Yvonne, arrived, installed the new database but nobody told us that the new database was ZIP’ed using WinZip 9 beta and all we had was WinZip 8.1, so we couldn’t unzip the database. Adding insult to injury, the server we were working on was so well secured that getting WinZip 9 beta proved to be herculean in its own regard. We eventually got it, unpacked the database and installed it. >mini-fanfare< Then we fiddled around with establishing OLAP cubes for a subsystem that might only be used by at most 2 people – then once that was done we went back to Walwood and I worked on getting our replicated database on our report server to work.

The rep from our vendor came in and created a queue for us and told us that it would work. I then spent the next two days listening to all the errors present in the data and in-between times when we weren’t talking about the conversion errors I was working on getting the replicated report server to work as it should. For three days I was smacking my forehead against a brick wall, errors ranging from “can’t login” to “can’t add NULL value to table yada yada yada” and I even went so far to discover to my chagrin that a database I thought I needed wouldn’t replicate in a merge dynamic properly, only transactionally. This semi-solution would break down when you deleted or added any report criteria, since it would add a table to the primary server and then cause the replication process to panic. As it turns out, one of the settings the rep from the vendor made was wholly incorrect, instead of pointing to our report server it should have been pointing to our main database server instead. Once I fixed the setting I realized that I didn’t need to replicate the report database at all and once I fixed that – everything fell into its proper position – now you can add and edit and delete criteria willy-nilly without causing replication errors because there is no need to replicate that part of the database. Whew. After three days of being unable to make any of the replicated server work I had a little Eureka moment and did a happy dance.

What I thought would take nearly all day today was done by 9:30am. I still have a very busy day but at least now with a major part of it deflated it doesn’t seem like such an impossible task. A part of me gets all twitchy that I, an untrained yo-yo can figure out the vendors product and fix what the rep broke. A part of me is glimmering tho, when the rep was here she asked me “So, did you go to class for SQL 2000?”, “No.”, “Do you at least have a manual or a guidebook?”, “No.”, “Well, how did you figure out how to do what you are doing?”, “I just did it, didn’t seem too hard to me…” and of course she just sat there staring at me like I was growing antlers.

And people wonder why I question the value of certifications. Bah. 😉