Category: technology

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

Going Postal over Bandwidth

Arrrrrrrrgggghhhhhh!

I work online. I live online.

I am a customer of Internode (home ADSL, VoIP, via Telstra copper-wire) and Telstra NextG (USB card for remote working). There are two Foxtel digital units in my house. Hosting for this web site is somewhere in the US with Dreamhost. My superannuation fund is a minor Telstra round 3 shareholder. My corporate mobile phone is Telstra NextG; both voice and data services. 

The current arguments back and forth between Telstra and the “group-of-9“, the politicians who have “solved the bandwidth” problem, ACCC and everyone else who is involved in this high-asset, high-customer-volume, highly competitive business; are starting to really piss me off. 

There I said it. Piss me off. Really piss me off. I am almost postal.

Today, I spent 4 hours uploading a video into the corporate cloud. I am attempting to save some carbon atoms from escaping into the atmosphere by doing what was once a potential panacea: tele-commuting. Working online. Earning tax dollars by living in Australia.

Really, it shouldn’t take that long.

What is this FTTN (Fibre to the Node) thing anyway? I see no benefit to the end customer as noone is actually putting a piece of fibre into each house. It seems to be a large charade to divert attention.

Where is the competition? Where is my choice? Do any politicians actually use the internet apart from watching Youtubes of our little Prime Minister? Less regulation, more competition.

I once wanted politicians involved in ICT. Having spoken to some in the Liberal Party on this matter a few years ago, their response was “join the line of issues regarding policy”

Now that they have become involved; only as there is a balancing act between the votes in the bush vs. the investors in Telstra: recent policies and investments seem to have slowed innovation and competition rather than improve services.

So, I regret my thoughts on wanting politicians involved. Stay out of it. Let the market decide. Do something useful and fix the hospitals. KTHXBAI.

In the 19th and 20th Century railways moved our gold, silver, lead, wool and wheat from the productive farms and mines to our overseas markets.

In the 21st Century, the two lines are not the iron lines 5ft 3in apart: they are the twisted copper pairs that connect our brains to the world. Brains, politicians. Not atoms. What is in our head is already more important than atoms.

Instead of our brightest minds taking their brains and ideas to other parts of the world, we need to harness them here – and connect them to the world.

I don’t really care too much about the to-and-fro and political shenangians anymore.

Just open it up. Be brave. Let us all rise, including those rebadged PMGs, to a new world where the tyranny of distance is slain.

Personal Rant Over.