Scott Yang's Playground

Via Hacker News. Fred Wilson talked about Being Present, because “you have about ten to twelve years to connect with your kids and then they turn into teenagers…” That’s a message to the hard working entrepreneur-parents out there. In fact working 9-5 can feel missing out, let along getting back home at almost 8pm each day? Time for a change. Seriously.

Just ran this on my various blogs:

$ svn switch http://core.svn.wordpress.org/tags/3.0

And navigate to the Admin pages of the blog. Done — WordPress upgraded to the latest and the greatest within seconds. Would be faster if something like git is used instead of subversion (which I found slower and slower than git or hg), but certainly no complain here.

As of WordPress 3.0 — not much changed on the surface. I am pretty sure Matt and gang have done the heart transplant under the bonnet, but these days I am so out of touch with the latest WordPress development I seriously have no idea what has been changed. It does chew up a bit more memory, which can be a problem if you are running tiny virtual servers.

So far so good.

It arrived today and I’ve switched. From my Nokia E71 of 18 months to this.

1GHz Snapdragon processor. WSVGA AMOLED display. 512MB memory + 4GB SD card. Android 2.1.

First impression from Anna when I went home. “Wow iPhone!” (arrghhh!)

So far so good. Installed a few apps to get the VoIP working. I do miss the nice QWERTY keyboard on E71 though. Typing on Nexus One on the first day is awkward (and super slow comparing to E71). Fingers are too clumsy I guess. Can’t wait to get onto Swype beta and hopefully that will help out with my slow typing.

Just tweet about my recent bad experience with VPSLink’s migration from Seattle to Boston (which this blog is hosted on), and noticed that Twitter is not displaying my number of tweets correctly. Saying 828 there but I know very well that there are 3,200+ tweets there, as I ran a scheduled script that backs up all my tweets (which I still not have ported to use OAuth ARGHHHH!)

That reminds me not to trust the said company to backup all my status updates. It is much easier to locate what you have blogged about than what you have tweeted, if they have not yet archived it to the non-retrievable ether.

Update: It is actually reported on Twitter status so it’s a known issue and they are fixing it now. Except at the same time they are also having availability issues. D’oh.

For the past 12 months OzBargain has been running on a single Linode 720 at Linode, in their Fremont data centre. I thought it was pretty good for a Drupal website getting 5 million page views per month, especially renting that VPS is pretty much free to me :) Due to surge in traffic as end of financial year draws close, it has been struggling though. Loadavg will go over 1 regularly during day time, and can peak at 3-4 in evening hours. It was so bad at one stage that Nginx would stop serving FastCGI requests.

So I went and got another Linode 720 at Fremont running Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, and migrated the database (~700MB so far) at 1:30am yesterday morning. There was around 10 minutes of downtime for me to copy the database around and reconfigure the files. And now OzBargain is running on two $39.95/month servers, one running Nginx + PHP-FastCGI, and the other running MySQL. Here’s the loadavg of the web server (taken from Cacti)

Note the big drop of load on the 12^th. Two are indeed better than one :)

Looking at hitting 6 million page views this month and I know everything is going to die down a bit until around October/November. Let’s see how long this setup will last.

The year so far has been hectic, and this blog has so far been neglected since mid last year. Indeed there has been quite a lot of things happening in life over the last 12 months.

• Moved back to Kennedy Street due to house renovation.
• Married for 10 years on 8 April 2010.
• Visited Google the 2^nd time and learned lots about Wave.
• Stalked online last year and even police was involved.
• Anna is now going to Kindergarten.
• etc etc

Life just goes on, and it was such as waste to record those on archive-less social websites like Facebook and Twitter. I think it’s time for me to get back to blogging again. Just managed to clean my 150+ pending comments on this site, and it looks like a good start. There will be more interesting events and changes over the next 12 months. Stay tuned.

In one of the project at work we have been using OpenOffice.org running in headless mode to do document format conversions in the background, i.e. converting to and from various MS Office formats OpenDocument formats and PDF. One problem of using standalone OpenOffice.org installation as backend is that you can only run one instance at a time. So while you can have a multi-user front end doing various processing, we used to be able to run document format conversion one at a time.

That sucks.

Here’s a trick to run multiple OpenOffice.org instances concurrently, all from one single installation, on Windows. Assuming the latest OpenOffice.org 3.x is installed. It’s actually pretty simple — just change the USERPROFILE environment variable! Or HOME on Linux/Solaris.

For example, in Java

ProcessBuilder pb = new ProcessBuilder("c:\\Program Files\\OpenOffice.org 3\\program\\soffice.exe",
    "-accept=socket,host=localhost,port=7999;urp;StarOffice.ServiceManager",
    "-invisible", "-headless", "-nologo", "-nofirststartwizard");
Map<String, String> env = pb.environment();
if (windoze) {
    env.put("USERPROFILE", "c:\\temp\\12345");
} else {
    env.put("HOME", "/tmp/12345");
}
Process ooo = pb.start();

Yeah I am putting this here because the search result on Google is pretty junky. And I just realised that I have not blogged for yonks. Busy buys busy.

Got it on WordPress’ Twitter status:

WordPress 2.8 “Baker” is now live to the world! http://bit.ly/wordpress28 (spread the good word)

Yup. It is here, and you can read more about the new features here. To upgrade to the latest version using subversion while Automattic haven’t tagged the 2.8 –

1. Go into your previously checked-out WordPress directory
2. Run svn switch -r 11549 http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/trunk/
3. Navigate to http://yourblob/wp-admin/upgrade.php

Done! You are running WordPress 2.8! Of course some plugins and themes might not work but who cares. You are now using the latest and greatest :) Most new features are admin panel related, but the one that interests me the most is:

• Support timezones and automatic daylight savings time adjustment

Yes — it’s about time!