Dougal Campbell's geek ramblings

WordPress, web development, and world domination.

Timing is everything

Mar032006

Our group’s management has told us before that if there is any kind of work-related training we’d like to take or conferences we’d like to attend, to let them know. So when An Event Apart Atlanta was announced in January, I put in a request the same day. After not hearing anything for about three weeks, I sent a reminder, and let them know that we could still make the deadline for a $50 discount.

Yesterday, I sent this email:

You know that web conference that I wanted to attend next month?

Nevermind.

http://www.aneventapart.com/news/2006/02/aea_atlanta_sells_out.php

:-/

Grrr.

The Lyceum Project: Another multi-blog WordPress implementation

Mar012006

This is quite interesting — the ibiblio folks have announced The Lyceum Project. This is a multi-blog version of WordPress, but it is a different implementation from WordPress MU (which is the basis of wordpress.com). I was curious about what Lyceum was doing differently from WPMU, and that is addressed in their FAQ.

And of course, since it’s based on WordPress, it is also GPLed, which means that the source is freely available. Their bug tracker seems pretty active, which is good. We can surely hope to see some of their enhancements make their way into the main WP core eventually.

Sprint courting bloggers?

Feb282006

I mentioned in yesterday’s post that I’d have something about the Samsung A920 phone coming up. I don’t have the phone yet, but when I do I’ll surely be posting a review. But in the meantime, let me explain how and why I’m getting this phone, and do a little speculation…

Yesterday morning, mixed in amongst my usual slew of automated system emails and the slurry of spams that make it through my filters, was a message from Sprint. My wife and I use Nextel cell service (now owned by Sprint), and I had recently registered on the Sprint web site for their online account management, so getting email from them wasn’t a surprise. However, the subject of the message caught my eye in a curious way: “Attn: Dougal Gunter – Sprint Ambassador Invite”.

Hmmm… First of all, they’ve made the common mistake of thinking that my name is “Dougal Gunter”. And second of all, what’s this about a “Sprint Ambassador Invite”? And lastly, the email was sent to my regular email address, not the one I used to register for the account management stuff. Let’s take a look and see what this is about.

Hi Dougal,

The Sprint Ambassador Team recently visited Dougal.gunters.org and wants to invite you to participate in our Ambassador Program.

As a qualified participant blah, blah, blah, Sprint Power Vision phone with 6 months of free voice and data service, blah, blah, blah, apply here, blah.

Hmm. Based on the name mixup and such, maybe they really did look at my website. Okay, I was interested, so I visited the web site indicated. Some of the verbiage was of the “if you qualify” type, but I went ahead and applied anyways.

Within a short time, I received an automatic response indicating that I should receive a Samsung MM-A920 phone within a few weeks. Reading up on the specs, it’s got Bluetooth, 1.3Mp camera, handles video and music, and EVDO(!). Very cool. One thing it doesn’t have that would be nice is push-to-talk radio service. And what do they want in return for providing me with this? Feedback. That’s all.

Once I actually get the phone and have a chance to use it, I’ll be posting about it here. Which, I’m guessing, is what this Sprint Ambassador Program is aiming for. Giving geeks free toys is always a good way to get some grassroots exposure. You have to take the bad with the good, because if your product is lousy, you’ll get called to the mat. But if your product is decent, this is a great way to sway the crowd. I’ll let you know my verdict on the A920, either way.

Running in place

Feb272006

I’m still here. I’ve just been really busy lately. We’re going through some minor growing pains at my day-job, and it’s kept me really tied up. It’s nothing bad, just that the company is moving from a very loose and informal culture to a slightly more structured one. On the one hand, this means that we can’t have beer in the office anymore. But on the other hand, it means that other groups will quit dumping requests on us developers without any regard to the projects we’re already working on. But during this transition, we’ve gotten a few “gotta-have-yesterday” requests that really do need to be taken care of quickly. I’ve stayed pretty busy working on a few of those.

The weekends have been pretty busy, as well. We just always seem to have something going on. So, there just hasn’t been much time for me to post anything here.

That doesn’t mean that I don’t have anything new to post about, though. Watch this space for new posts soon on topics such as:

  • Hockey
  • WordPress 2.0.2
  • Samsung A-920 phone
  • Science Projects
  • Dogs
  • The WordPress Object Cache API
  • And various funky interwebnet things

Snow

Feb162006

Falling Snow

Snow falling last Monday

I originally wrote this up on Monday the 13th, but didn’t get to post it until now because I wound up tracking down a WordPress bug.

Just about everyone knows about the blizzard up in the northeast last week. But we were down at the southern end of the weather system, where the snowfall was light, and welcomed as a rare treat by most folks. It began snowing on Saturday night while we were out to dinner. It was only light, dry snow, however, so we didn’t have any real accumulation. There was just enough on Sunday morning for the kids to scoop up a few snowballs off of the back deck. By early afternoon, it had pretty much all melted away, though we continued to see light flurries all day long.

We actually had some heavier snow a week ago — big sticky clumps of slowflakes. I wish we had gotten more of that. But that snow didn’t last very long, only about an hour or so. But at least I got some pictures of it while it lasted.

Problems

Feb152006

Oof. I am having some sort of problem with my server. I was going to make a post on Monday, but something in my PHP and/or MySQL setup has changed in an odd way. (remember I reinstalled/upgraded pretty much everything on the system that is involved with serving web pages a couple of weeks ago)

If I try to post content that contains a single-quote character, I get a database error due to invalid syntax. The WordPress database driver is supposed to auto-escape the content to prevent this, but something seems to be causing that to fail. On the other hand, if I add code to escape the content just before it is saved into the table, then it winds up being double-escaped.

I’m running PHP 4.4.2, and MySQL 5.0.18. PHP reports that magic_quotes_gpc is on, and magic_quotes_runtime is off. I’ve tested on a clean install of WordPress with no plugins activated, and it exhibits the same behavior. Does anybody out there have any ideas on why this is happening?

Downtime

Feb072006

Some of you might have noticed that my site had some downtime over the weekend, and into Monday night. I had upgraded MySQL from version 3.23.x to version 5.0 last week. Everything seemed fine at the time, but when the server ran some maintenance tasks on Saturday night, it turned up some mismatched library versions between PHP and MySQL. And of course, I didn’t know about it until Monday, because an emergency came up that took me out of town all day on Sunday.

So, I finally found time on Monday evening to try to resolve a cascading chain of library dependencies, recompiling just about everything on the server that is related to Apache, PHP, and MySQL. Of course, in the process, a few other things broke for some reason (mainly GD and ImageMagick).

Things seem to be working okay again, as far as I can tell. But if you notice any major errors, let me know.

AT&T Chairman Loses Brain, Misunderstands Internet

Feb022006

The chairman of AT&T has a tunnel-vision problem:

Ed Whitacre, AT&T’s chairman and chief executive, warned on Monday that internet content providers that wanted to use broadband networks to deliver high-quality services such as movie downloads to their customers would have to pay for the service or face the prospect that new investment in high speed networks “will dry up.”

[…]

“I think the content providers should be paying for the use of the network – obviously not the piece from the customer to the network, which has already been paid for by the customer in Internet access fees – but for accessing the so-called Internet cloud.”

Soooo, let’s break down how dumb these statements are.

First of all, the content providers are paying for service already, in the same way that the end-users do. They might not be paying AT&T directly, but they are paying some provider. AT&T connects to other backbone providers via peering arrangements, which are based on mutually beneficial data exchange of similar volumes of traffic. In some cases, where a smaller provider wants to peer, they are probably already being charged a fee.

Second, If an AT&T customer is streaming video from a site that isn’t paying AT&T’s extortive quality-of-service fee, and the download is too slow, the customer is going to blame AT&T. Oh, they may try to shift the blame, but that facade is going to crumble as soon as the customer talks to a friend whose cable-modem works just dandy for streaming video from the same site.

Lastly, if they are trying to bully sites like Google into paying these fees, as some articles claim, that’s just a dumb move. Google’s market cap is $30 billion higher than AT&T’s. “There’s always a bigger fish.”

WordPress 2.0.1

Feb012006

For those of you who never install “dot-zero” software releases, now is probably a good time to upgrade to WordPress 2.0.1.

All in all we’ve closed 114 bugs in the 2.0.1 release, which you’re welcome to check out if you’re curious about every fix. To summarize:

  • You can now specify an upload directory, and whether to use date-based storage or not.
  • Caching has been fixed under certain PHP enviroments.
  • Permalinks have been fixed for weird enviroments as well.
  • XML-RPC uploading works.
  • Compatibility with older versions of PHP.
  • Several WYSIWYG fixes and cleanups.
  • Imports now use much less memory.
  • Now works with MySQL 5.0 in strict mode.

There are also fixes for trackbacks, hosts running PHP in safe_mode, a couple of new API hooks, and various other things.

Birthday Booty

Jan312006

Testify, by P.O.D.

Harry Potter Fizzing Whizbees Packets [12CT Display]

The Princess Bride (Special Edition)

Stuff I got for my birthday:

My thanks go out to my wonderful wife and the rest of my family for such cool gifts! 🙂