Scott Yang's Playground

Google Page Creator — your WYSIWYG site creator in the Ajax style. Loading the site up and playing around with some editing sends my Firefox all the way to 77Mb in memory. Thank you Google, but I’ll take my Vim everyday.

Update 6:30pm: it seems to be sending 404 now when I am half way playing with it. Hopefully I didn’t crash it…

Update 9:00pm: It is up again. Here’s my testing page (yeah I am good at making link farms). It gives you 100Mb of storage for pages and files, and have provided rich selections of templates for those who are not that design inclined. Yes — it does let you edit raw HTML but only the content not the template.

It all starts with Tim Bray’s little rant on PHP a few days ago. Tim can’t stand PHP, because

…all the PHP code I’ve seen in that experience has been messy, unmaintainable crap. Spaghetti SQL wrapped in spaghetti PHP wrapped in spaghetti HTML, replicated in slightly-varying form in dozens of places.

I have seen some well designed PHP code, but generally Tim’s observation stands valid.

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I have finally had a chance to update my Permalink Redirect WordPress plugin. The new release is 0.5 which has some bug fixes as well as new features.

• /author/%author%/ should work properly now. It was broken in WordPress 2.0 due to changes in userdata cache.
• Permalink Redirect page under Options menu. Currently it allows you to put in regular expression patterns for URI to skip matching and redirecting. You might have some special path that you do not wish Permalink Redirect plugin to touch — just put them in there.

Thanks to all who have reported bugs.

52% of Chinese office workers blog, 41% of them prefer MSN Space, and only 27% have their blogs public. Not just office workers but I can see lots of NBFers have their semi-public blogsites on MSN Space. Moreover, “A brave 60 percent of white-collars bloggers criticize their boss on their blogs” Will we see a new wave of “fired for blogging” happening in China? :)

There has been a series of acqusitions amongst database companies. Oracle bought InnoBase Oy and Sleepycat, two makers of transactional storage engine for MySQL. MySQL AB has then acquired Netfrastructure, a web aplication development framework. However, what MySQL AB actually acquired is not just the company + its software, but the main brain behind it. Firebird News reports that Jim Starkey, the founder of Netfrastructure, who also happened to be the father of the once open-sourced Interbase, has left his development on Vulcan, the next generation SMP-capable Firebird, to work full-time on another open source database engine.

That sucks. Especially when you know that your project would greatly benefit from Vulcan which might integrate with the up-coming Firebird 3.0 — provided that Firebird 2.0 is out of door soon. Looks like there will be at least a year away from SMP-capable Firebird.

But all the best Jim! Though I don’t believe that there is no intersection between MySQL and Firebird’s target audiences (especially when MySQL is scaling up for features and Firebird is scaling down for embeded systems), I believe Jim’s work there will bring open source RDBMS to another level, competing with other commercial heavy weights.

The wireless access point that I bought almost 3 years ago is dying! It actually started a few weeks ago, probably around Christmas, that its signal strength just gradually dropping. AP sits inside the study room, and we used to get Good to Excellent connection from our bedroom. But now the signal strength is always “Low” or “Very Low”, and sometimes even totoally undetectable.

And it is not the problem on the receiver end. We have 3 802.11b/g device at home (2x notebook + 1 desktp), and they all have been struggling to get connected to the wireless network. I think it is really on the way to a gradual death…

For those who have WLAN at home — you know how useful wireless connection is. Once you have experienced, having Internet connection several rooms away from your ADSL modem, it is very hard to go back and be tied to CAT5 again.

So I think it is the sign that we need a new wireless access point (right Vivian?! :)

The harder question is — which one should I buy? Should I get something cheap that simply replaces our current unit, like this WLAN router for $79? Or should I get an all-in-one unit that that has ADSL modem, wireless, ethernet switch and VoIP, like the popular Billion 7402VGP? This way, I can upgrade my modem to ADSL2+ compatible, and remove all the tangling wires behind my desk. However, neither of my ADSL modem (old Dlink DSL-300) nor my ethernet hub are broken, just that they are a few generations out of date.

Another one that I am waiting for is Billion 7401VGP, which is exactly the same as the more expensive 7402VGP, but with 1 FXS instead of 2, and no SIP gateway support. The price however, is around $60 lower — except they won’t be one the market for another week, as it is just about to be released.

Still, the idea of wireless access point failing is annoying me. I know it is almost 3 years, but I would expect my electronic purchases can last forever (not literally, of couse).

I played guitar at FOCUS church this morning. The earth would have been on the mary go around a few times since the last time I played there. The fact that (1) my finger hurts after only 5 songs (2) quite a few people told me later on that they did not know I can play guitar, confirms really how long I have not been playing. Thomas said after the meeting that I should play more (atually I played sometimes at MBF), but I don’t think I want to take that challenge. Practise with other musicians + getting to church early is really cutting through my time this week. Besides, there are many fine guitar players at FOCUS.

Later this afternoon Vivian came back from the Phoon’s, and relayed Mun’s words that I can bring my guitar and jam with him anytime. Well, I looked at my fingers again. It is not 1996 anymore. Although I still enjoy working on the fretboard, I do not think guitar playing is a hobby that I can sustain. You need continous practise, otherwise it’ll get very rusty. You need hard working and more practise to improve. But I am just too lazy, having too many things to do, and wanting to do too many other things. I think I’ll just keep up at a level that is “good enough” for congregational/fellowship playing…

So instead of accepting Mun’s invitation, we (or Vivian) sort of replied that we shall try to organise doing some exercise as well. Tennis? That’s another thing that I really enjoyed and played well 10 years ago. Now days, I just do not think I have enough time to sustain this hobby. You need to pick up racquets and balls, drive all the way to the court, getting yourself sweaty, drive all the way back, take shower and all that — yet you still need to find someone who equally has free time to hit some balls! For the 2-3 hours spent on sustaining this hobby, I could have, hmmm, blog a few entries?!

I guess that is the main problem. I have way too many things that I want to do, and new hobbies seem to chew through my time originally allocated to older hobbies. Music and sports are on the way to the “hibernated mode”. I haven’t done painting since high school. I haven’t even been able to do some programming that I would love to get done.

Another said fact about growing old?

Flash tennis game — play as top woman pro players. Gotta be one of the most addictive online flash game I have ever played. Just use arrow key to move your player (be that Seles, Venus or Hingis), and spacebar to hit the ball, but beating the game requires some skill (I haven’t even got through semi’s). Perfect for me who still haven’t managed get back to the game. Note: only works on IE… Update 19 Feb: Actually it wasn’t that hard. Hingis beats Sabatini 3 games to 1 and won the final.

Last night

Upgraded my test box’s lighty to the latest 1.4.10 via Gentoo portage (I have lighttpd keyword masked). And then suddenly none of my CGI works. It just kept on complaining:

2006-02-16 23:24:18: (mod_cgi.c.1186) cgi died ?
2006-02-16 23:27:07: (mod_cgi.c.1186) cgi died ?
2006-02-16 23:27:14: (mod_cgi.c.1186) cgi died ?
2006-02-16 23:32:19: (mod_cgi.c.1186) cgi died ?

I couldn’t work out why — 1.4.10 was supposed to have CGI working again (after it is broken in 1.4.9), and I don’t even have SCGI module loaded. So instead of doing some coding, I played around with various configuration for an hour, gave up, and re-emerged 1.4.8 which was my last known-working version. CGI is happy again.

(Update: Another way to get 1.4.10 working is by starting mod_fastcgi before mod_cgi.)

What a waste of time…

This morning

Upgraded our work’s public webserver this morning (something that I should have done yonks ago) from Apache 2.0.54 to 2.0.55 and because Gentoo changed the Apache configuration path somewhere in the middle, I ended up having to upgrade other things like PHP (which then triggers other upgrades). Lucky with Gentoo you can compile the upgrade into binary packages first without emerging, so that you can do a quick incompatible upgrade. Our public site came back up in under a minute. Not bad.

But that’s the end of my good luck.

Suddenly none of our CGIs are working! All there is in the error_log is “Premature end of script headers” with nothing else written to stderr! Putting debugging statements into our CGI shows that they have never been executed, and then I found out that suexec wrapper is spilling dummies.

It appears that suexec compiled by Gentoo has minimum UID set to 1000, but our server was set up in the good old Mandrake days when UID starts from 500 — no wonder it kept on complaining. Commenting out loading the suexec_module doesn’t seem to work so I ended up having to re-emerge Apache again with minimum UID adjusted. Aargh!

Then there are reports saying upload files via Apache reverse proxy to our application server has stopped working. Putting in tcpdump shows that HTTP header got all jumbled up with the actual content, and I couldn’t figure out what’s going on. Search on Google reveals this mod_proxy + mod_ssl bug. That basically means:

You cannot use Apache 2.0.55 as reverse proxy + SSL handler for your application server!

I thought this usage pattern would be very common but apparently it wasn’t discovered when 2.0.55 was released. So again I re-emerged 2.0.54 and everyone is happy again.

What a waste of time… Actually it took me whole morning getting this issue resolved, where initially I thought I could upgrade the web server in 5 minutes.

Verdict

Open source web servers — more eyeballs looking through the code doesn’t mean that it is bug free. Upgrading without testing can mean disaster and waste of time — don’t assume that everything is well tested when a new version is released.

But I’ll still pick apache or lighty if I need to choose between them and IIS and ISA.

Discussion on how Apache prefork MPM handles HTTP keep alive can kill a site under Slashdot effect. That’s the price to pay when each httpd process is stuck handling one pending connection, and that’s why I am keen to migrate my server to lighty + PHP on FastCGI.

Camino 1.0 has been released. Best browser on a Mac — at least for those of us who stuck in older version of Mac OS X. And yeah, there is one more thing that Camino, the Gecko-based browser, kicks Safari 2.0′s ass — XUL.

Yahoo! UI Library, recently released by Yahoo! under BSD license, is quite a shining piece of web development toolkit. It has all the nifty Javascript utility functions/classes to build your next Web 2.0 application, in a similar fashion to other toolkits like Script.aculo.us or Rico, but backed by one of the largest company on the web.

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MacSlash: Why Apple Really Ditched PowerPC. Because Intel can provide what Motorola/IBM cannot provide to Apple? It tells me nothing more than “Why I should no longer read MacSlash editorial”. And what stops Intel from also staling from its desktop CPU development? Better question to ask is — who will be the next chip maker to be found in bed with Apple (after Intel cannot deliver promised 5Ghz Core Quad that consumes 10watt)?

What has been predicted is now here. iPod Nano now has a new member in the family — the junior 1Gb version that sells for AUD219 here in Australia.

With 1,000 megabytes of storage that is capable of only storing 140 songs, the obvious question is why bother, when the cheaper iPod Shuffle 1Gb has its price reduced to AUD$149? Same storage, $70 less, and fewer buttons to fool around! But I guess that’s why they did not hire me as Apple’s marketing executive.

People buy Nano not because they want a MP3 player to store their entire music collection, but because it is cool. It’s their fashion statement. Something you wear outside on the street to show that you are “in”.

Something this old code monkey cannot comprehend.

Via Neil A, CMS has put their 2006 Summer School talks MP3 on the net for free download. It is Peter O’Brien on Ephesians, and each talk is around 10-12Mb. I have always enjoyed CMS summer school talks, and it is great they have offered the talks for free, for those who have not been able to attend. Now, how shall I convince Joshua to put his sermons on the net for free access…