Blogofile - I stumbled upon this while considering what to do. One of the many static blog engines in Python with Git integration. Could potentially be interesting for smaller sites (or e.g. for a metablog).
Archive 12.11.2010 - 22.11.2010
From the "pimp my Vim" department: UltimateVimPythonSetup. I am indeed a Vim fan, and some of the tips in there sound quite interesting. However, some things also go a bit too far for me, my reason for using Vim is precisely that I don't want an IDE, but an editor that mainly does one thing - source editing. But for the one or other out there maybe still (or precisely) interesting.
"A bomb on a plane heading to Germany? Admittedly, I'm just a science journalist, deal with physical phenomena, but frankly, I don't believe this news. It all fits too well. Here in my hotel are the interior ministers, and precisely now it is announced that Germany will soon be the target of a terrorist attack. This smells like a staged event."
via With de Maizière at the breakfast table: The terror is here, the muesli is gone - taz.de.
How I build-in Tumblr in my Drupal install is already very close to what I want to do with Tumblr on my homepage. Now I just need to write a minimal widget and stuff the code in there and instead of the regular posts, only go to the photos. And I'll have Tumblr photos on the homepage again.
Update: those who look to the right can see the Tumblr photos again. So on the homepage. It works quite well and doesn't take up any more time. Someday I'll put together the plugin that I built there, at the moment it's still a bit raw.
Sunday reading: Google Streetview - linked because I'm fed up with all the pro-Streetview talk and the "who pixelates doesn't understand the net" faction. The net is a medium for the whole society and not just a playground for some tech enthusiasts. And whoever ties their net freedom to the permission for unrestricted data collection for a large corporation has a significant understanding deficit. Especially when the sole purpose of this corporation is the systematic evaluation of these data mountains for the optimization of advertising.
API | Tumblr - maybe I want to do more with it than was used in the previous PHP example.
Display photos from Tumblr (using JSON method) is PHP, but I should be able to easily rebuild this in JavaScript and then run it only client-side.
hyphenator I could take a look at, because then the hyphenation simply runs with JavaScript in the browser. It's only interesting for the websites themselves anyway, feed readers have to render themselves.
Update: yeah, looks good. Now I can look at my homepage again without getting pimples, and the integration was very simple with their custom package builder - go through a few checkboxes, build an optimized download version of the library and include it in the head of the blog. As a class, I simply used entry-content, which means that all posts (and only those) are provided with hyphenation. And since it's client-side, it doesn't affect the feed or any other internal paths.
Performance hog ...
... one should not necessarily operate. The Tumblr widget needs about 300ms due to its synchronous access to Tumblr, and the typography plugin needs another 300ms. Ouch. Ok, my text just looks typographically crappy, I don't care.
With the cache, I'm currently at xcache - let's see if it produces strange messages like apc. I suspect conflicts between apc and WP Super Cache for my problems, because every time the problem occurred, I also had these strange GC messages from apc in the log. And no messages from PHP, which indicates that nothing was executed by PHP (which also explains the empty output).
There is support for the object cache of xcache in WordPress. Great, you can activate it with a small plugin. I'll save the link, because without this module the blog is faster (and 27 vs 29 DB queries is not exactly a wildly successful operation of the object cache). With the object cache activated, the blog was immediately back in the 700ms+ zone - quite without time-consuming plugins.
For Tumblr, I will now build a JavaScript-Ajax solution that uses the Tumblr API to find my images and push them into the HTML of the page. It's only for the look and then a Tumblr-Connect problem won't be accidentally cached.
But it's a shame about the quite remarkably well-functioning hyphenation from the typography plugin. You can't have everything. Render times in the range of above half a second I find silly. Maybe I'll change my mind again when I've stared at my blog for a while longer.
WordPress › Support » WP Super Cache sometimes ignites a blank Home Page! Need to restart Apache - sounds exactly like my problem, but it's already a year old. Seems to be some combination of many parts. For now, I've turned off APC, as it also produces strange messages in the error log, for which there are no really satisfying comments on the net to find. Somehow, the whole PHP stuff is really shitty. Too many parts coming from too many different places and all somehow but not quite working together. Basically, everything runs, but as soon as you want to get a grip on the performance problems, there are all sorts of strange and inexplicable effects. All just wild hacks.
Is the NATO strategy the problem or the solution? An examination of NATO, its composition and position in the world, and an assessment of its position paper and strategy - especially considering the dominance of the USA in this alliance. Surprisingly critical for a contribution from the public broadcasting sector.
Logisim could have saved me a lot of DM in my youth, which I spent on TTL chips (after I had previously and in between burned the same TTL chips).
Pure CSS GUI icons (experimental) are an excellent example of what you shouldn't do with CSS. Painting with box models is rather unproductive. But somehow it's still fascinating what some people do with their time ...
Have we found the universe that existed before the Big Bang?. At first, I thought here comes another fringe physicist with crazy ideas or unproven claims. And then I read Roger Penrose in the article. Ooops.
BBC - Earth News - Attack of the rats. Why every 50 years in India giant hordes of rats destroy the harvest. All because of the biological clock of bamboo. Fascinating.
[WordPress › Support » [[Plugin: WP Super Cache]] Blank Pages - 500 Error - in Dashboard (sometimes the site too)](http://wordpress.org/support/topic/plugin-wp-super-cache-blank-pages-500-errror-in-dashboard-sometimes-the-site-too). Describes my current problem since I have SuperCache - maybe this is also my solution. Otherwise, SuperCache will just be removed, because before that it actually ran well, just slowly. If it's dark (uh, white) in between, it might be due to my problem and I'm still analyzing.
Long Live the Web: Scientific American by Tim Berners-Lee. Why the web is so important to us and why and what we must protect it. Because more and more interest groups are trying to reduce the openness of the web for their purposes, ostensibly often to protect users or rights or other great and positively sounding reasons - but behind it all is simply the grab for power that one wants or fears to lose.
pyfpdf provides PDF generation without dependencies on other packages. However, it says "ported from PHP" up front. But if that doesn't deter you and you want to produce simple PDF outputs, you might not be so badly served with it.
Processing.js v1.0 Released and it is still a really nice toy. Now it is almost on par with the big Processing in terms of features.
Is My Blog Working? This is a question you ask yourself quite often. And the answer is not always as simple as just looking at it - for example, what about caching? This tool provides some information, but there is even more at RedBot and Cacheability. Especially for cache information, the last two are better than the first link.
Owl Content in new home
The Owl Content is now also running on the new box. It wasn't particularly complicated, the hairiest part was a silly bug in the Feedparser used (a terribly old version, it's quite possible that newer versions have already fixed this) and an incompatibility of the PHP gettext implementation, which is still used by Wordpress 1.5. Otherwise, it actually did pretty much everything needed right away. It may be that some hits are still running on the old system until the nameserver changes have spread around, but that should grow out in the next few days. And quite incidentally, the owl now has much stronger wings. It should be enough for the next 8000 posts.
With certainty: Calls for stricter laws | tagesschau.de - already absurd that federal ministers from the Union and FDP clearly oppose state ministers and their populist saber-rattling. Even more absurd that even SPD ministers are calling for something that has been rejected by the Federal Constitutional Court. And as the basis for all this, only claims without evidence and without verifiability. With this, the terrorists have already won, and these prole feeders are making themselves into errand boys. Can we please have them monitored by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution now? Their anti-constitutional stance is clearly documented ...
WP Super Cache is highly recommended if you use several plugins like I do (and possibly access external services like the Tumblr plugin). Okay, there is a risk that a broken status from Tumblr might be cached in the sidebar, but this will resolve itself after a while. However, the runtime of a fully loaded WordPress is indeed a bit sluggish.
offline_messages for OpenSim here in a PHP version. I should take a look at it, actually I should be able to build something in Python from it that I can then use.
I've now activated the wp-Typography plugin on my blog for testing. While I haven't seen many good hyphenation algorithms for German before, this one might work reasonably well. It certainly makes sense to prevent widows and orphans. And in the first test, the text already looks very pleasant.
Number magic at retirement age: Trick 67 - taz.de - because the intention behind it is simply to cut pensions. None of the prolethicians in Berlin really believe that workers can last until 67. That was never the goal, not even for Münte and the other liars of the SPD.
Moving Status
It's finally happening - the static extraction of my old blog for the archive took several days, but now I have created a complete backup, redirected the nameservers, and in the next few days, everything should be on the static part. I am redirecting some of the links directly, for example, the main feed and the homepage itself. Maybe I will gradually redirect other things to the new blog if I notice it's worth it.
The Meta-Owl is still on the old server, I'm afraid I have to tackle that next and see if it can be made to fly on a new system. And then there are the various photo galleries of my subtenants - at least I have already prepared everything for that, the rest is mainly copying all the files and then a bit of layout adjustment.
It looks like I can shut down the old machine in the near future (maybe even by the end of the month?). The machine has served me well for many years, but it is now a bit outdated. But I will put the last backups aside somewhere, because as I know myself, I will realize shortly after shutting it down that I have stored something somewhere that I urgently need ...
The Front-end Editor is a very useful plugin for Wordpress. You can directly edit many elements in the front end with a double click. Since I usually only notice typos and formatting errors when I look at my blog from the front end, I can edit directly there without going through the admin. It's much faster for me.
The Icon Search Engine is probably known to everyone except me, but since I needed an icon again, it was quite practical. I always find it quite strange when icons that are supposedly free suddenly cost money on some sites, so a site with a clear indication of the license and documented origin is quite nice.
F# in MonoDevelop and cross-platform web sites & screencasts | Blog | TomasP.Net contains a lot of information about F# on Mono for Linux and OSX.
JQTreeTable does not use DataTables, but it is still quite interesting as it provides a Finder-like table representation for hierarchical data.
'Super-secret' debugger discovered in AMD CPUs • The Register. Wow. Hardware Backdoor.
'Space Quest' Lands on the iPad — Courtesy of Safari | Touch Arcade - eat shit, Adobe. Who still wants Flash?.
jQuery lightBox plugin is very nice. It doesn't use Prototype or Scriptaculous, but simply jQuery - which is very helpful if a site already uses jQuery. And with the jQuery LightBox Plugin for Wordpress you can easily use it for displaying images in your own blog.
Twenty Ten Weaver is a more flexible child theme for Twenty Ten. However, it overloads some of the PHP files from Twenty Ten, so you depend on whether the developer continues to maintain it. But it can customize a lot of things on its own, which I have currently done with my own theme.
Dynamic Widgets | Qurl is a very practical WordPress plugin that enables dynamic rules for widgets. With this, for example, the "latest articles" can be suppressed on the homepage (since they are all there anyway and that would be redundant) and, for example, my Tumblr photos can also be suppressed on gallery pages (so they don't distract from the actual image content - and, for example, black and white photos don't suddenly become colorful just because of Tumblr).
kbhomes's TextCaptchaBreaker shows why text CAPTCHAs are basically bananas. They are often too easy to crack and especially automated - and this code shows a very nice implementation of it. My old blog still has text CAPTCHAs and gets along quite well with them, but that's probably due to the low traffic - in the last few weeks, more and more spam comments have been posted there and I'm not sure if they weren't placed by bots.
Word This - Google Chrome Extension Gallery is very helpful, as Chrome is so stupidly designed that bookmarklets run in the same security context as the current website. This means you have to allow a website to run JavaScript if you want to use a bookmarklet like Wordpress's "Press This". With this extension, blogging moves to its own icon and out of the bookmarks bar.
JLOUIS Ramblings: On Erlang, State and Crashes explains well what the "in case of error, crash" mantra of Erlang is really about - namely the construction of an application as layers of supervisor processes and error handlers. The essential part is the structure of the application - just crashing is not enough, the architecture must also be prepared for it.
atomo - very interesting language, very flexible and compact. I stumbled upon it because someone built a Mongrel2 Adapter for it. What is interesting about atomo for me is that it is yet another new language with prototype-based object orientation. Something that is tried far too rarely (other languages in this area are Slate, Self, Io, Newtonscript and JavaScript).
Also interesting: atomo is embedded in Haskell and thus provides a dynamic scripting language for Haskell environments and of course a good integration into the Haskell world. There was something similar with one of the first Perl6 prototypes, which was also built in Haskell (Pugs).
WordPress › WPtouch « WordPress Plugins - no idea if I want something like that. Could be quite interesting though, after all I have such a touch device myself. On the other hand, Mobile Safari also displays normal websites well. Moreover, there is still a problem: the nginx cache knows nothing about it and would potentially cache the wrong pages. In any case, I'm not sure that these mobile extensions get along well with caches.
Unionsminister: Sitzblockierer sollen Polizei-Einsatz bezahlen | tagesschau.de - which would also help to control the annoying demonstrators, because hey, it's simple: demonstrators in general or even strikers cause costs and then you can get them from them and then people will think twice about whether they go out on the street!
The erosion of democracy has always worked quite well through the wallet.
Autumn
Just pictures from autumn. These are still from Papenburg, so a few weeks old. By now, it looks a bit gloomier.
Introducing Thirty Ten, my guide to creating a Twenty Ten Child Theme | aaron.jorb.inaaron.jorb.in. I need to take a closer look at this to customize my site a bit more without having to do everything myself. Update: it works. My current layout is set up as a child theme for Twenty Ten.
WordPress › WordPress Nginx proxy cache integrator « WordPress Plugins. I use it on my box to speed up my WordPress. WordPress itself runs in a KVM with a standard stack and an Nginx in front as a cache. Does it hold up?
Bitrot reloaded
It's time to start over and rebuild. This is an attempt to work with WordPress again. After my own software was rendered obsolete by years of not updating the requirements under the blog, this time there's standard off-the-shelf software. Let's see how it goes.
rfc1437 | Content-type: matter-transport/sentient-life-form - Strong trends towards "throw away with archive and start over" with slight options for "throw away, static archive and maybe shovel a part into the new platform if I find the time". The link shows where I'm currently playing around. Wordpress with a few small plugins and an nginx caching front.
Bitrot
Got me too. My old blog software probably won't be able to survive unchanged. Old Python version (2.3), old (very old) Django (0.91), old PsycoPG driver (1.0), old PostgreSQL (7.4) and all of that on an old Debian (a wild mix of various versions with backports and custom programs and several failed upgrade attempts). Argh.
Well, I'm still torn between "rewriting" and "throwing away". The latter has the charm that I won't have to carry all that junk around anymore. And honestly, nothing particularly interesting ever happened on my blog anyway. Maybe I can set up a wget mirror beforehand and dump the whole thing somewhere statically, as an archive.
Rewriting also has a lot of charm, but converting thousands of old entries (over 4000 articles and over 4000 links, plus almost 200 images) from 8 years (first entry on November 3, 2002) doesn't sound like fun. And probably thousands of the links are outdated and obsolete anyway.
No idea what I'm going to do, maybe I'll try to bring the Metaeule to the new box first, where I only have the problem that PHP4 is no longer in the Ubuntu repository for 10.04 and I therefore have to force the owl to PHP5 (and that with code based on Wordpress 1.5 - I must really be crazy).
Or I try to install an old Debian with the packages used at that time - the box doesn't run in the front, but behind other machines, so the hacking risk is rather low at that point. The Metaeule of course also has a few thousand posts in the archive (only 8291, that's almost nothing), but if I can keep the old software running (some security patches have been added over time, so it can actually continue to potter along), I don't necessarily have to tackle it.
Somehow, the internet was also such a really bad idea ...
Questions and Answers about the Health Reform | tagesschau.de - I find it quite astonishing that the politicians in Berlin still have to engage in "hard negotiations" to decide how much the contributors can be fleeced. The fact that the negotiations no longer discuss savings on doctors' fees, hospital costs, and drug prices is, however, not surprising. The pretended saber-rattling by the Federal Health Administrator is just a show for the media.