Just before Christmas, I switched my news aggregator from Bloglines to NewsGator, largely because their iPhone client is better. Being a Mac user, I also grabbed their famous OSX client, NetNewsWire. In all it’s been a very satisfactory switch; NewsGator for iPhone works great for checking my feeds on the train (which was the main driver for my getting the iPhone in the first place,) and NetNewsWire lives up to its reputation - it really does have a great news reading interface. Also, being a Mac only application, it cuts down on the temptation to read during work hours (on my Work PC,) which can only be a good thing.

The only fly in the ointment was that NetNewsWire was shareware, so I was going to have to pay to read my news. After about an hour using it, I knew that it was well worth the asking price and that I wasn’t going to resent paying at all, so that ceased being a problem, and I got stuck into my trial period.

Having already decided that NetNewsWire was worth my money, it came as a bit of a shock to discover that somewhere during my trial period NewsGator have made it free. That’s right during exactly the right thirty days, a fantastic piece of software has transitioned from Shareware to Freeware.

I know I might sometimes overuse the phrase, but, you know what? Sod it, this time it’s really appropriate:

FTW!

Rumours about an Apple “tablet-PC” have been pretty pervasive for the past few years, so I always take them with a pinch of salt, but this one sounds almost credible. I actually don’t know if I want this to be true or not; one the one hand, I’m certain Apple wouldn’t release it unless it worked (good handwriting recognition, decent battery life, a window-manager that feels natural with a touchscreen,) but on the other hand, I don’t see how there’s any way I’d resist buying such a thing, and it would be bound to be expensive.

You remember that map of the internet that xkcd did a while back – the ip4 address space one, not the social networking one? Well, someone’s extended the idea with a full map of every ip4 address, and who owns it. The implementation is still lacking a little polish, but it’s a great idea and it already makes for pretty interesting viewing.

Apple have finally announced plans to allow third party developers to develop for their iPhone platform, bringing the device one step closer to the smartphone it always wanted to be.

If the quality of shareware and freeware available for the Mac platform is anything to go by, this should lead to a plethora of high-quality, reasonably-priced add-ons for the phone, which should really increase it’s appeal to the more tech-savy consumer.

Personally, this combined with actually having seen one the other week is probably enough to sell me one. Now all I need to do is find the money, and convince o2 to let me out of my existing contract early…

Hey, it could happen!

My employer has just launched the open beta of a new website called locatetv. It’s not something I’ve worked on, but I sit next to (and regularly drink with) some of the guys that do. I think it’s a pretty cool site, and encourage anyone with an interesting TV to check it out.

The general idea is that you type in the name of a TV-Show (either the series name, or a specific episode title,) movie or cast member, and the site searches TV listings local to you and shows you a list of the next few times you’ll be able to see what you searched for on TV. That’s pretty cool in itself; it’s a bit more targeted than the numerous TV-guide style websites out there, and the site itself is lightweight and fast to use, so it’s a lot less painful than (say) the Radio Times site.

The really neat feature, though, is the embeds. Designed pretty much specifically for bloggers these allow you to embed a small applet in your own site that links to a specific show or movie or actor. That means that, for example, if I want to talk about a specific episode of Heroes (let’s say Godsend), I can stick this on the site:

That box is generated every time this page is viewed, so it always has up to date (and local to the reader) schedule information in it. In a TV themed blog that would be an extremely useful tool. It means that users who didn’t watch a show, but have their interest piqued by the post find out automatically when they can next catch it (rather than just being told when it was on – maybe in another country,) which in turn increases the chances that they’ll be back to comment on the post, and be more likely to revisit that blog in future since it provides useful information. It makes the reader’s life easier, and generates more traffic and comments for the blog: Everyone’s a winner.

Of course, I don’t often blog about TV, so it’s probably not the most useful tool in the world to me, but there are a lot of sites that would really benefit from this sort of thing and I’d love to see it succeed.

So, it looks like the upcoming firmware upgrade turns unlocked iPhones into bricks. Well, that’s the risk you take when you install unauthorised patches to a device’s firmware; it’s always a dangerous thing to do, and you can’t really expect Apple to pick up the pieces for you when it goes wrong. What does really get to me, though, is the attitude to unlocking your phone; Steve Jobs is on the record as saying “It’s a constant cat and mouse game” against the people who want to do so. OK, what the f*ck has it got to do with him what someone does with their phone once they’ve bought it. Really? All these people want to do is use the thing (for which he’s already got his money) on a different carrier to AT&T. Hell, to get the phone, they’ve already signed up for an AT&T contract (or someone has,) so who’s really losing out?

This attitude that big business has is really, really starting to get to me. Why shouldn’t I mod the firmware in my phone, once I’ve paid for it, to be able to use it on my network of choice? No, forget that, why should I have to? Why can’t I buy an xbox game in the US and play it on my xbox here in the UK? Why should I have to re-buy all my DVDs just because I move to another country and can’t get a region 2 player? Why do I have to worry every time I buy a CD whether it’s going to consent to be put on my iPod?

Where do these big companies get off telling us, the consumers, what we’re allowed to do with things that we have already bought and paid for? It’s utterly out of line, and it’s worrying just how accepted a part of modern life it’s become. Something has to change. It’s time we collectively remembered that without our money, these companies, who presume to control our lives, have no income and no existence. Fundamentally, they only get away with it because we let them. Isn’t it time we didn’t?

Emphasis mine:

possibly the best rpg this year on PC, 25 Jul 2007 By P. Milner - See all my reviews

Fun: 4/5

From what ive seen and read about this game it has the potential to be great!!! it has loads of depth and the graphics are truly great, a good RPG needs to have a great story and gameplay to be great and this looks like it has both over 60 hours of gameplay like the days of Final Fantasy 7.

3 different endings which you have control over on your actions in the game….. RPG fans this is a must!!

im really looking forward to this and will be counting the days!!! i gave this 4 stars because i never give 5 unless ive played and liked it.

Here’s a thought: how about you don’t review it or rate it at all unless you’ve played it? Do you even know what “review” means? Muppet.

Oh, it’s a review of The Witcher, by the way.

The observant amongst you will have noticed that I went for option 3. MT was just not doing what I needed it to, and when I installed Wordpress in parallel to trial it, it did everything I need more or less without fail.

It’s taken me a couple of days to transition (which, combined with a new job, is why the blog has been quiet,) but I’m there now, and shouldn’t be changing again¹. Expect the blog to be back to normal(ish) levels of posting.

1. Until the next big thing comes along. [↩]

About a month ago, I upgraded the blog to run on the new release of Movable Type: 4.0. It has a nicer interface, plenty of neat features out of the box (without having to manage a host of plugins) and features some handy improvements to the template language it uses to build pages. It delivers on everything it promised, and in all, I’d call it a good upgrade over the venerable version 3, which I had been using. Of course this is technology and there are no absolutes, and MT4 has some serious gotchas, which I’m having a varying degree of success working around.

The first thing I noticed when I upgraded was all those improvements to the template language made my existing templates obsolete. This one’s not a deal-breaker; I just picked my favourite stock theme and ran with it; I can change it later. In fact, you could call this a win, since my existing templates were a mess, and had been hacked together before I really knew what I was doing; this is a chance to make a clean start – isn’t that what every developer always wants?

Slightly more seriously many of the well known and popular community plugins don’t work with MT4 - they’ve changed the way certain things work, and that means trouble for any plugin that relied on things happening the old way. The big loss is the blogroll plugin. There’s an upgrade to the plugin on the way, and I can live without it for a while, I just wish I didn’t have to. Actually, I’m not sure why SixApart haven’t rolled that particular plugin into the main distribution yet. Many of the new features present in MT4 are actually just plugins that have been made part of the default distribution, so why not something so widely used as the blogroll plugin? Beats me.

Of course, if all of the problems were little issues like that, which will go away with a bit of time and/or effort, I wouldn’t even be writing this. There’s a great big chunking problem that is actually starting to make me regret going with MT: performance.

MT4 is slow, and when I say slow, I mean really slow. It pre-generates the site (the much maligned re-building step you’ll hear the Wordpress users going on about,) so the user facing side of the site remains nice and quick, but the administrative interface feels like it’s running on a ZX-81. When I first installed the MT4 upgrade, the dashboard took about 6 seconds to load, compared to well under a second for any of the generated pages, so I know it’s the MT backend cgi scripts that are at fault, rather than my webserver or the network infrastructure between here and my host. Installing memcached and moving my virtual server to a much faster machine have made a noticeable difference, but it’s still taking 3-4 seconds to load any of the administrative pages, and when you’ve got a few things to do that gets really annoying, really quickly.

Enter FastCGI. This is an apache extension that keeps the perl runtime and compiled perl code of cgi scripts in memory, drastically reducing the start-up time of those scripts. Creating and starting a new process is a relatively time consuming operation, and compiling the perl code takes time too, so taking those two actions out of the startup of a cgi script can have a dramatic effect on the time taken to serve requests. I’ve trialled this, and it makes a huge difference: combined with memcached to cache the database connection, it makes the admin pages run about as quickly as the static pages. That’s impressive, but it comes with a cost.

Because FastCGI keeps CGI scripts in memory between runs, any memory that they allocate stays allocated too. That’s not a problem in the normal case, but it means that if your CGI script has a memory leak, that the leaked memory is lost for the duration of the FastCGI session (which is usually a couple of hours, at least,) and worse, is lost again every time the script is executed.

Predictably enough, MT4 has a memory leak. It seems to lose about a megabyte of memory every time it’s called under FastCGI, which isn’t a massive proportion of my server’s total memory, but it’s a lot to just lose while generating a web page to display, and it does add up. Unless it’s periodically freed, I’m going to run out of memory eventually – after about 1,000 administrative page views.

So, what can I do? There are three options, none of them ideal:

Live with the delay

It’s a real possibility. The user-facing side of the site runs fine, and I’m not going to actually die for want of a few seconds lost loading a web page. It doesn’t sit well with my geeky nature though, especially since playing around with FastCGI has proved that there’s no need for the pages to be so slow.

Fix MT

I’m sure I could – eventually – track down the memory leak and remove it, and possibly even get the fix put back into the mainline of MT. The question is how long it’s going to take and how much effort it will be. Also, if the fix doesn’t find it’s way back into SixApart’s code-base them I’m stuck having to hack every upgrade release in the same way, which sounds like a nightmare to me.

Dump MT

A bit extreme perhaps, but it would avoid the problem. Everything I’ve read suggests that Wordpress (the obvious other candidate) doesn’t have performance issues. I’m reluctant to take this step now (although if I was setting up from scratch, knowing what I know now, I’d use it over MT,) simply because I have a lot invested in MT; I know how to use it, I’ve got it configured, and it lets me edit my posts in MarkDown, which my googling has suggested doesn’t work so well in Wordpress. So I don’t want to change, but if I can’t fix MT, and I can’t live with the annoyance, it might yet come to it.

OK, so – as far as I know – no one can plug a machine into your head that will teach you Kung-Fu, but a Russian Artist has one that will make the whole world look like it’s made of green ascii-art. Which is pretty much the next best thing, right?

Right?