Schinckel.net

Well, this is not a good start to my hosting on a new host. I’ve been there less than a week, and already there has been a significant downtime (approx 2 hours). Hopefully this is not a habit…

With a proper host, I have finally achieved the ability to do proper analysis of my logfiles. Since my traffic amount has been fairly high, I thought I would try to find out where all of my megabytes went! I’m using Analog, since that was free and did sort of what I want. I started writing my own tool, but got bored with that pretty quickly. 27% of my usage was in the XMLRPC.php file. Which had me stumped, until I remembered I’d used ecto to backup all of my posts, a couple of times as it turned out. This was 14 Mb, which I shouldn’t have to do all of the time. There’s still more stuff for me to find out - like how much of my bandwidth is being used up by Blogsome users who haven’t changed stuff within their template and I had pointing to mine.

Prélude No. 3 For Clavier • Dominic Miller • Shapes

I tend to keep the packages I install from Apple, just incase I need to reinstall stuff, so when I went to reinstall iTunes on the iMac G4, I remembered reading about the error I got when I tried to run the package: Betalogue » Blog Archive » iTunes 7.3 update: Weird package problem:
It still holds for 7.3.1, and it applied to downloading the package only, or installing and keeping it and then trying to reinstall it again.

The Santa Rosa MacBook Pros have an issue where, depending on the type of wireless access point, if you use WPA (or perhaps even WEP, although why you would even bother is beyond me), when you run on battery power you get a kernel panic. The latest firmware update seems to have fixed this issue. It also seems to have fixed the issue where my machine wouldn’t automatically connect to a wireless network when waking up from sleep. Finally, the third issue I had, with not being able to permanently trust a certificate because I don’t have the root certificate, also seems to be fixed. Finally, painless wireless networking.

Here’s an interesting little bug. Create a copy of a timed event in iCal (or just go to any timed event, I’m just making a copy so I can delete it later). Edit the start or finish time or date. When you are finished editing, press Tab. The time or date change will stick. If you chose a start time, the end time will adjust so the event is the same length. This is very cool, if, like me, you have lots of fixed-time events. Okay, now edit the time again. This time, instead of pressing Tab when you are finished, press Enter instead. Notice how the edit was actually discarded? This is crazy, crazy behaviour. The sort of thing you should be shot for. I mean, since when does Enter imply “ignore the edits I just made”? I mean, seriously. And this is before the fact that most of my friends hate me sending iCal invitations, as they don’t see the link for them to click on. I have to resort to sending gCal invites if I want responses!

With netatalk, I can serve AppleShare Filing Protocol shares from my Ubuntu box. Since this is where all of my media files are stored, this is kind of nice. So, why use AFP over SMB (or NFS, for that matter)? Well, I still haven’t been able to get NFS shares to work properly from my MacBook Pro. It just sits there Connecting to nfs://poul … forever. So NFS is out. (I have configured the shares under Ubuntu, or at least, I think I have. I did use the GUI tool, which as you’ll read below, didn’t fully set up the shares for SMB either…) As I mentioned in a previous post, if you use the GUI tool to set up Samba (SMB) shares, you also need to use the smbpasswd -a [username] command. Finder doesn’t handle Samba shares very well. It takes an age to connect to them, and if they disconnect (ie, the network disconnects, such as when you move from one location to another, and change WiFi network; or the server restarts) you get a long Finder hang while it looks for the connection. OS X also used to disconnect Samba shares when you went to sleep, or if you slept for a long time. (This may have been the server, I don’t know) I can reconnect to an AFS share almost immediately. This means I can wake my MacBook Pro from sleep, wait a few seconds while it reconnects to the Airport network, and then press play on iTunes. All of my music lives on an AFP share, but it started playing immediately. It is little things like this that make computing nice again.

Well, I’ve moved over from Blogsome to NearlyFreeSpeech.net It’s very cool, and looks to be pretty cheap. I might have a high bandwidth bill for the last two days as I had to keep uploading SQL dump files (much faster than editing using nano over ssh!). When I imported all of my comments, the posts weren’t updated with the number of comments they each had, so I needed to run the following PHP script:

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    <?php  
    require_once('admin.php');  
    
    echo "Approving comments...";  
    
    // Approve all comments  
    
    $wpdb->query("UPDATE $wpdb->comments SET comment_approved = '1'");  
    
    echo "Updating post counts...";  
    
    // Populate comment_count field of posts table  
    
    $comments = $wpdb->get_results( "SELECT comment_post_ID, COUNT(*) as c FROM $wpdb->comments WHERE comment_approved = '1' GROUP BY comment_post_ID" );  
    
    if( is_array( $comments ) ) {  
    
    foreach ($comments as $comment) {  
    
    $wpdb->query( "UPDATE $wpdb->posts SET comment_count = $comment->c WHERE ID = '$comment->comment_post_ID'" );  
    
    }  
    
    }  
    
    echo "Done.";  
    
    ?>

I’m really liking the look of the Nokia E65 as my next phone. It has WiFi, Bluetooth, and Nokia also supply an iSync plugin. And it works with Salling Clicker, which looks like the must have phone/Mac interface program. Edit: Had N65 in the body, meant E65.

I like John Gruber, who writes for Daring Fireball. He usually hits the mark, but recently he’s been really harking on about the iPhone. Since they aren’t likely to be available over here in Oz for sometime, I’m not that interested, just yet. His latest post, Daring Fireball: On Top reverts back to a less iPhone topic, Top Posting in email replies. I ‘grew up’ using text-only interfaces on the internet, so email and usenet were king (and queen). I used to be a bottom/middle posting advocate, but have stopped for one very good reason. People think you haven’t replied at all when you bottom post. They don’t read down when they see that there is no response at the top. It’s as simple as that. I really prefer bottom/middle posting, it makes it much easier to structure a decent response to someone, yet it had really fallen out of favour. Perhaps I’ll restart this ancient practice. Except that every email client available nowadays is configured to automatically top post. Oh well. It just occurred to me that IM is much more mid-posting-like. You respond immediately to an argument, and the threads are mixed. Email is dead anyway (any situation where you receive 100 times as much Spam as Ham has passed its usefulness).

Well, I’ve actually felt like I outgrown Blogsome for some time. Don’t get me wrong, she’s been excellent to me, but there is lots of stuff I can’t really do properly that I want. For instance, I have some serious javascript hackery going on to get the data I want displayed. Stuff that does find and replace on dates, for instance. It would be much nicer to have this all done in PHP on the server. But some of it is very cumbersome to do in Smarty Tags, which are all Blogsome allows. I also have stuff scattered across various servers. The scripts for this site, for instance live at http://scripts.schinckel.net, which is just a redirect to somewhere else. http://files.schinckel.net is also another redirect. So, I’ve considered a hosting plan. When I originally registered schinckel.net, it came with 12 months of free hosting with DreamHost (originally, it appeared to be free for life, but as soon as I realised it wasn’t, I didn’t bother using it), and I’ve looked at them for hosting this, and several other domains. From what I can understand, you can point limitless domains there, and host them all under the one account. I’ve read the terms and conditions, and from them I also think I can resell my hosting space. That is, I can be webmaster for other domains, and have them all under the one hosting plan. Their data limits are far more generous than other hosts I have come across, and they are also rather inexpensive. $9.95/month for monthly payments, which drops to $7.95/month if you pay 2 years in advance. I might set up one of these accounts, unless anyone knows of a better place to host. And by better, I mean cheaper, with similar data limits (ie, very large), whilst still fairly stable.