Scott Yang's Playground

Stupid thing I did this week:

In the process of moving Bargain Blog back to my own home server, I somehow rsync’ed my entire design/test site, including the robots.txt, which contains deadly commands to forbid all bots/spiders!

No wonder for the last few days my AdSense ads on that site are totally irrelevant, and CTR plumbs all the way below 1% — Google wants to help but can’t! Now I have fixed the file, and please come back media partner bots!

Btw, I use Unison to synchronise content between my design sites and actual sites. Not as sophisticated as Glenn’s Subversion solution as I don’t really care about version control, but it does a much better job than rsync because it has (1) two-way synchronisation (2) comprehensive configuration options, which should have easily solve my stupidity.

SMH: For the cost of putting a baby born in 2006 through private schooling, parents could pay off a mortgage on a two-bedroom suburban Sydney flat. The estimate shows that the cost of an elite school education for a baby born this year will approach $300k. (Btw, congratulation to the Phoons for their baby girl born in 2006!)

Adds 3 year university degree it would be another $140k, bringing the whole education cost to around $430k. That’s a lot of money.

However, note that:

• Not everyone is going to elite school. Alright, not everyone can afford, but at the same time not everyone wants their kids to be educated there. After all, “elite” school cannot be 1337 if everyone goes there.
• Research is done by Australian Scholarships Group, an education investment fund, who is a financial planning organisation. With motto like “Planning ahead helps cover the costs of education”, I am sure they will give unbiased opinion.</sacarsm>

It still does not deny the fact that education won’t be expensive. Actually, education will continue to be expensive in this country if institutions are run by greedy corporate heads that the only sound they want to hear is “chin-chin”!

Gotta save up…

I am talking about hosting and my Bargain Blog. I moved the site to DreamHost more than 2 months ago, but have decided to move it back to my poor old home server yesterday morning.

Problems? There are two. (1) Google (2) DreamHost.

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There are a few annual events that are really influential in the tech world. MacWorld is one of them. Every year Steve Job’s Reality Distortion Field rocks Mac geeks, and this year is no exception. Here is the coverage. Software wise there are Mac OS X 10.4.4, iLife and iWork ’06. They bring in new features that make lives of every Mac zealots easier, but most importantly, they also contain the universal binaries to run on Mac’s latest platforms. So what new products from Apple have been announced?

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Google Fanboy Essentials — actually Google calls it the Google Pack, announced on their official blogsite and press release.

So we created the Google Pack — a one-stop software package that helps you discover, install, and maintain a wide range of essential PC programs. It’s yours today – and it’s something we hope you find to be painless, easy, and even fun (if computer setup can ever be called that). And it’s free.

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Bought a webcam from eBay for $23 — yes one of those $0.01 win + $22.99 posted from China. Very average cam at this price point — 350k pixel CCD that does 640×480 at 15fps or 320×240 at 30fps. Powered by USB with a built in mic, it also sports 6 LED that emits weak blue’ish light when its top senser detects darkness.

It installs as “Vimicro USB PC Camera” (which I guess is the processor inside). Quality is pretty lousy. Serious lag, and image is noisy at low light. I guess that’s what I should expect at that price point anyway.

I am going to use it to use the Skype video to talk to Vivian and Anna when they are away in Hong Kong for 3 weeks over Chinese New Year, as well as talking to my parents in Taiwan.

By the way, Skype 2.0 final was also released today. It is still the same VoIP over its P2P network, but this time it adds video phone support, so that you are not only going to get free phone calls, you are also able to see the person you are talking to. I guess video phone has already been popularised by other IM networks like MSN, but Skype has its “firewall penetration” advantage — I can even use it at work with nothing but port 80/443 through ISA.

My Skype ID is on my contact page. Don’t expect me to have video up all the time though :)

What other use is a cheap webcam?

UPDATE: Due to popular demand, the driver for my webcam is here: vimicro-pc-camera-301x.zip (ZIP, 1,912kb)

Peter Hunt took a look on “How Python wins on the Web”. He argued that framework does not really matter — not all those efforts mimicking Ruby on Rails anyway, as RoR and .NET has already won the hearts of developers. Instead, Pythonists should focus on killer re-usable applications.

Here’s what I propose: screw Web frameworks for now. We won’t win in the Rails generation… For today, let’s work on making generic Python products. Let’s make a kick-ass community forums system, an incredible blogging system, a news script, a CPanel/Webmin clone that people will use because of their features, not their programming language.

However, when you look around searching for re-usable open source web applications, what do you see? PHP applications. When you go to open source application directories like OpenSourceCMS, most the apps (if not all) listed in there are written in PHP.

To me, PHP provides a gentler learning curve — you can easily add PHP tags to existing static HTML files to create dynamic sites. But so is many other Python-based template engines (like Spyce). The language itself is only so-so — Perl’ish, and probably has many more warts than Python, even in its current object-oriented incarnation. I do not think it is as attractive to the developers as 5 years ago when LAMP(HP) was the buzzword. However, PHP-developed applications still rule the market of cheap-ass shared hosting. Why?

Ease of deployment.

Peter said in his post:

And, most importantly, let’s all get behind what I believe is the most pressing and important concept in the Python web development world today: Paste Deploy. What Python needs more than anything is a brainless, quick-and-easy way of connecting applications to gateways.

WordPress guys are proud of their famous 5 minute install. Not just WordPress, there is simply “no step 3″ in many PHP application installations. You upload files into your web-root, point the browser to install.php, and then just follow the steps to set up database, create configuration, initialise super user, etc. There is no need to compile your own Python executable to install easy install so you can download eggs to power your supa-dupa forum application downloaded from sourceforge…

But how do you get ease of deployment? I have no experience with Paste before, so I briefly looked at the Deployment documentation. While it looks very promising, its installation goes like this:

sudo easy_install.py PasteDeploy

Aargh! It seems for those do no think paying for dedicated server or VPS is justifiable, they can only rely on their web hosts to install those libraries for them. Most hosting customers won’t have a clue on compiling their own Python, and it is unlikely that hosting companies will have every possible egg installed, unless there’s enough demand. There will not be demands unless there are enough compelling Python web applications. However, sometimes even a seasoned Python developer will choose to develop his next re-usable killer app in PHP, if he knows how difficult it will be to deploy…

At the end a good framework still matters. Ease of deployment is crucial, but is also a vicious cycle that needs some momentum to break out. RoR has that momentum — look at how many shared hosts are now claiming their support of RoR deployments. We only wish the same can be said about Django and TurboGears.