In Like Mike

WW2 Fun emplacement, Godley Head

Uncle Mike talked about this last week: why you tag your photos (cc) and geotag your photos.

Unlike other large corporations who have mis-used (cc) licensed photos, Schmap correctly asked and obtained permission to use one of my photos on their site:

Schmap Christchurch Third Edition: Photo Inclusion

Hi Nick,
I am delighted to let you know that your two submitted photos have been selected for inclusion in the newly released third edition of our Schmap Christchurch Guide:
Godley Head
www.schmap.com/christchurch/sights_attractions/p=174111/i=174111_2.jpg
Godley Head
www.schmap.com/christchurch/sights_attractions/p=174111/i=174111_3.jpg
If you like the guide and have a website, blog or personal page, then please also check out our schmapplets – customizable widgetized versions of our Schmap Christchurch Guide, complete with your published photos:
www.schmap.com/schmapplets/p=37473564N00/c=SE51033694
Thanks so much for letting us include your photos – please enjoy the guide!

Like all pictures, there is a back story, too.

Note: 11th September

(cc) Creative Commons Australia has further discussion

live.com search integration

Yes, at the present time have Google adsense on my blog. It barely pays for the hosting of www.nickhodge.com. Virtually no revenue stems from the embedded Google Search.

Search is important as I’ve just destroyed my old navigation hierarchy in the transition from the old CMS to a 100% WordPress system.

Time to change my search provider.

Over to http://dev.live.com/livesearch/ and specifically http://search.live.com/siteowner.

Tweak my searchform in WordPress. Done.

There were two edits required in the HTML snippet: one to insert a "code page" (for next time: putting in obscure numbers is not a good UX!) and my site URL.

From random thought to implementation: 3 minutes.

De-commissioning old Content Management System

Notes from De-commissioning old Content Management System: The MungenetEngine. The engine has rendered 10 million image views and 2.5 million page views from handcoded MySQL and PHP.

  1. “coding” in PHP feels wrong, wrong, wrong. A little dirty. After 6 months, I feel I should be writing in C#, IronPython; at least something decent. Not PHP. It’s too lose. Like Visual Basic. Sadly, this will probably the last time I use PHP for a significant amount of time as I move to CLR/DLR style languages and platforms.
  2. The code to complete the transition was a mere 138 lines of PHP; referencing some opensource XML-RPC libraries (to insert blog entries over the wire), and 2110 lines in the base library that acts as the old engine.
  3. Turning off http://twitter.com/nickhodge for a few days helped productivity. Also working at home during the shenanigans of APEC 2007 helped productivity, too.  I also stopped being as responsive on email, voicemail etc to get some good “focus” time to get this happening.
  4. The code I am putting out to pasture was largely written in 2001-2. Small pieces were tweaked through 2002-7. It has survived PHP 4.0.x to 5.2.x pretty unscathed. http://nickhodge.com/mn8/section/23/ details the history and philosophy of the self-written and maintained CMS.
  5. WordPress is not the final step. It is just a good time to move a platform I transition to other places in the future, somewhere in the cloud.
  6. As Joel Pobar says, “having no policy on cache is a memory leak”. In my instance, the smartness of a cache for production use to reduce hits on MySQL resulted in a bug that took 45 minutes to track down. Not as a memory leak, just unexpected behavior.
  7. Strategy: get images from the database into a fixed file system under http://media.nickhodge.com/. As per the wise guidance of UncleMike, this futureproofs my data. A part of the strategy is to move the rss feeds to a local feed system as I am not trusting feedburner and feedjumbler for stats right now.
  8. Rendered pages: best thing to do is “wrap” what is content with markers, render the page via CURL, and persist what is wrapped into the WordPress CMS. The how came to me in an afternoon nana nap. Conscious brain was on hold, and the real smarts came to the fore. 
  9. Regular Expressions. Why-oh-why where they invented to make my brain explode? Thankfully, the intarwebs helps.
  10. A shim of the MungenetEngine will remain in place to “301” old URLs to new URLs. Full page rendering and image/binary rendering will be turned off. Therefore, the import mode will not be WordPress RSS style import. Using http://www.dentedreality.com.au/bloggerapi/ to post via XML-RPC
  11. Mangling dates, and doing hand-crafted fixes to my WordPress XML-RPC (note: this is patched for 2.3, evidently) took some hours.
  12. There are 761 blog entries prior to transition.  From an earlier blog transition on August 8th 2006, the count was 371. There have been 390 entries since. Post transition, there are now 940 posts.
  13. Raw transfer complete at 6:50pm 5th September 2007.
  14. To complete: neater classification of the new entries.

The Ongoing Bit Drought

Will Hughes has an excellent perspective. Especially on the Tiering, and impact on cross-ISP charging.

Found Simon Hackett’s framework for discussion: FTTN and other topics (linked from Whirlpool)

We are still in a drought here. A drought that is going to have a dramatic effect on our kids, and Australia’s future economy.

Prayer will not magically make the heavens rain down with more bits. We need a firm yet benevolent hand of our elected members to let free market competition happen.

IM IN UR HISTREE, DESTROYIN UR CRED

bindie-and-bonnie

My parents sent me the above photo. This was taken circa 1984.

The cat is a tabby/white chested cat we called Bindy. Way before the Irwins used that name. And the Mac 128K’s name was Bonny. Yes, the boxes of disks to the right of the photo are geniune Apple 3.5″ disks – each disk being worth about AU$7.00 at the time.

Cats, Computers – a combination that lives through the ages.

Channel 9 / Scott Guthrie Cat