The result of my little prang. Bye bye. You were a great bike.

About once a year I come to the conclusion that Magnum Mac aren't that bad actually. And about once a year they prove me wrong again.

This time it relates to a fix under warranty. My MacBook does an irritating glitchy faulty thing. The day before the warranty runs out, I ring Apple and say "you guys going to cover it" and they say "sure!". So I take it to Magnum Mac to be fixed. They swap the ram out. It goes wrong again. The put my ram back in. It stops going wrong. OK, flag that then, we'll just leave it be. Today I get a bill with "we urgently request payment by return". Errr, no.

So I've phoned them. Let them know. We'll see what happens next....

Dave

Like nearly everyone else I've been playing a bit with Firefox 3 over the last couple of days and have a confession: I actually like it.

The renderer is ten times better looking and must be twice as actually fast. I don't fully get the new address bar yet but dig it anyway. I really like that the back button is bigger than the forward button. I really like that someone could be bothered to both think of it and code it up. And make it look good.

I guess the next version of Safari will have to ship with Snow Leopard so no big changes till then. I've not moved all my stuff off Safari yet, but I might.

If you can't build psycopg2 on osx, failing with

In file included from psycopg/psycopgmodule.c:29In file included from psycopg/psycopgmodule.c:29:
./psycopg/connection.h:27:22: error: libpq-fe.h: No such file or directory

Then you need to download and run the installer package again. I got this after restoring from a time capsule backup. Yes, there is a longer story associated with that.

I come home to discover TelstraClear want to charge more for my broadband connection. Up $6/month. This, in a world where Vodafone keep sending me things saying "FREE BROADBAND" and leaving messages on my phone to the same effect. I had been ignoring them, but perhaps not.

To celebrate I phoned TelstraClear on the provided "Customer Care Team" number, explained how pissy I was and that Vodafone are offering twice the bandwidth and twice the traffic for $1 a month less and could they please put me through to the retention team. Who didn't answer. For five minutes. Then I got the original guy back on the phone who arranged for them to call me back ... some time in the next fourty eight hours.

They've gone completely mad. I give this company over $1000/year for services which they provide at zero marginal cost. I've done this for the last ... eight years? They are millimetres off losing the whole shebang and they decide they might call me back in 48 hours?

Where's David Cunliffe when you need him?

So, I found a ... not so much bug ... as less than right-ism in a piece of code hosted on google projects. If http_error_201 returned fp then the result of the .open would be readable as if it had been returned properly - useful if you're posting to YouTube because then it returns (amongst other things) the location of the uploaded movie. Would be interesting to talk about her results, experiences etc. - particularly since she appears to work for Google and can possibly have some sway in what the API does. But I can't. There doesn't appear to be any way to do this. Bugger.

Amazing. I may feel differently in the morning, but right now I think this is at least five years ahead of the current state of the art. I can only stare at it in slack jawed wonder the same way "Elite" affected a twelve year old boy all those years ago.

Western web designers pay attention - your rounded corners and mirrored logos look very very silly right now.

http://www.uniqlo.jp/uniqlock/

Heh.

I've spent the afternoon engaged in one of my least favourite tasks - creating the sort of half educational, half promotional materials necessary to explain a new technology, service or otherwise to a fresh and 'short of attention' audience. I'm not bad with words, and I'm not bad with general media technology ... image editors, audio editors, video editors ... that sort of thing. Not good either. But this was, just, owwwww. Nasty.

So, a quick post - what went right and what went wrong. Things that went right:

* Starting with a script. Write down what you want to say, pare it down to two or three key salient points then build a script around it. For a 2-3 minute webcast you're looking at about 1/2 a page of A4 so choose your words carefully. Like all forms of planning it eventually saved my arse.

* Using Keynote. It seemed to work to translate approximately a paragraph of text into a single keynote slide with animations. A whole bunch of animation problems that would have been damn hard (tm) in flash also became extremely simple.

* Keynote will also record you speaking while advancing the animations using mouse clicks in real time. The trick here is to print out your script; go through the presentation and the script together using a highlighter pen to highlight when to click; then hit the record button and go through just reading your script while clicking when you hit the highlights and trust that you have it right. Compile it, as it were. Don't look up or you'll lose your place. Don't rush it. Use this to export to quicktime noting that for some reason Keynote doesn't export to h.264 so you'll have to recompress at some point. I'll come back to that.

* Adding some background music. Drag the exported video from Keynote into GarageBand. Note that by now there's nothing you can do about the timings so if you rushed through the keynote timings, you're now stuck with them. This is unfortunate to say the least and very like working in the 'real' post-production industry. I.e. retarded and irritating. Garage band also appears to be able to export properly, although to be honest I'd given up on h.264 at this point and was using Mpeg-4 as a lowest common denominator. I guess the world has moved on after all.

What didn't go well?

* Using my own voice and the microphone in the MacBook Pro. By far the most amateur aspect of the whole production was the daft sounding and less than entirely clear voice the audience are being asked to listen to. I may have to re-do the process and, effectively, ADR the whole thing in GarageBand (which does appear to have awesome albeit rudimentary support for such activities). It took countless takes to do the whole recording in one shot and I am not happy with the outcome.

* GarageBand's loops are too short, too few, unimaginative, clichéd and lame. Probably saves me right for wanting to just wedge the thing out the door.

* For some reason Keynote felt the urge to make the final frame black. I can presumably fix this by cutting the last frame off but for some reason that seemed just too simple. Again, I think I'm going to have to go back and have a second crack at it to get this right.

But, still, it's a startup right (the presentation was a quick introduction to Atomic Droplet) and it's more important to get it working at all than to get it working beautifully so it'll ship. For now. But I'm telling you - that was damn nearly all day, and it hurt.

There keep being articles, blog posts or whatever detailing how whatever.com's architecture changed as the company grew. And they all say the same thing - we started with a LAMP stack, threw hardware at it, when the databases ran out of steam we used memcached and just accepted that data served would be stale, old and wrong.

So it was nice to read about LinkedIn's architecture - where the headlines are:

* Mostly Java. Java might be hysterically slow, but in this space it's considered nearly as coding in assembler.
* The *entire* network graph is held in RAM (12 GB) and runs as a C++ application. This must be very many thousands of times faster than building a network graph by firing a number of SQL queries at a database.

Certainly the idea of keeping complex data structures just in RAM is one that has appealed to me for a long time. After all, 12GB - that's, what, $500 now? Having said that, RAM might be cheap, but RAM bandwidth is not. It's still going to be a lot quicker than hitting the database.

Just on the offchance, does anyone know what's happened to planet.nztech.org? My feed has been dead for a week or so now and it was a *really* useful resource. The email address listed on whois also has a dead mx server. Hmmmm.

It does exactly what it says on the packet.

We have three macs at home now. One is old, runs 10.4, won't run 10.5, and is connected via 802.11b and so can be considered a non-player as far as Time Machine goes. The other two are an Air (we don't have the lame-o ethernet adaptor) and a MacBook Pro. The aim, with buying a Time Capsule, was fourfold: Get faster and more reliable networking for the two laptops; Replace our repeatedly falling over and crap router; Make iChat, screen sharing, and all that bumf that uses NAT-PMP work properly; and free up the disk that we were using as a backup disk to go in the (full) media server.

Now, when the Airport Extreme was released there was much bitching and whining about the file serving performance and apocryphal tales led me to believe this had been fixed in the latest firmware and/or in Time Capsule. Basically speaking this is the case. I ran some file copies onto the internal disk and got the following numbers:

* Write, over GigE, 13-14MB/sec
* Read, over GigE, 18-19MB/sec
* Write, over 802.11n, 6-7MB/sec
* Read, over 802.11n, 7-8MB/sec

So nothing spectacular, but certainly not shoddy. The same network gets 23MB/sec from a Linux Samba server (running on an Epia M10000).

Time Machine: the dreaded "initial backup" took probably around 12 hours from the Air. However, the machine remained usable all the time and once the shock of seeing the progress bar move one pixel every ten minutes or so wears off, it's really not a problem. I did an initial backup of the MBP over GigE and that was much faster, three/four hours or so, and (again) there was no problem using the machine while it was doing it.

The router aspect of it is much like many other Apple products. It has a fairly basic feature set, but that which is there is really easy to set up and works perfectly. The setup integrates nicely with the Air Port Utility (picture left) to create a mini-NOC for, now, our entire network. I was concerned that it wouldn't the ability to set NAT pinholes, but it does, and would appear to be able to build tunnels for more challenging protocols like FTP too. Little touches make the setup the 'next generation' type experience that Apple owners have come to expect .... like IP addresses having the network side of the address greyed out when you go to edit them. I've not actually tested NAT-PMP yet, but am happy assuming that a lot of our iChat file transfer, screen sharing and video conferencing problems will disappear. Stay posted, I guess.

The internal disk can be shared as just a disk, and this led to the only significant disappointment of the whole experience. It works, perfectly, but there's no way of limiting the size of Time Machine backups so it can be assumed they will grow to fill the whole disk and eventually using it as a 'scratch' drive or similar storage will become impossible. This seems a serious omission to me and something that surely is on some developers todo list somewhere in Apple.

I've not tried hooking either a disk or a printer into the USB port (you can apparently use a hub to do both too) and so can't really comment on it. We will probably be hooking a printer in though, when I get it back from John :)

So, all in all, a victory. It does everything I hoped it would. My broadband connection no longer falls over; we are still backing up and without having to fiddle with USB cables and the little door thing on the Air; wireless is faster and more reliable; and I have another 250Gig in the server to play with.

Edit: NAT-PMP works fine. It makes iChat work. I don't know if it makes anything else work.

I find myself getting into Death Cab for Cutie. This is alarming because I can't decide if it's borderline pretentious crap, or actual pretentious crap with the border being long past. But it sounds nice, and I'm a sucker for well played drums.

One of those "so search engines can find it" posts: If you find XCode spinning (and, if sharked, spending it's time in TokenBuffer::nextToken), you need to rebuild the code sense index. Get the project properties, and it's at the bottom of the "General" tab.

So, I spent the "half hour before tea time on Sunday" playing with gzipping content - as much fearing the wrath of John as anything else. Using Apache's mod_deflate, a curious thing happened: I followed the instructions, it worked. I removed the magic line from my VirtualHost container and it still worked. Kinda. On closer inspection (via the wonderful Eavesdrop) the default install was still gzipping text/html but not text/css or application/x-javascript. The line "AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/css application/x-javascript" added to the virtual host container fixed that, but is certainly doesn't help that Apache's docs don't recommend it, or even mention anywhere that you might like to. All a little concerning, really.

Ah! Heh! At least Yahoo agree with me (slide 59)

Looking at ETags next I found that while images were seeming to be served with ETags, includes like prototype.js were not. I made a location container and put "FileETag All" in there and that seemed to do the trick. Note that YSlow regards etags as being a bad thing (and expires headers as a good thing). This is because Yahoo use very many servers and coordinating etags between them gets 'too hard'. I, on the other hand, have only one server and am planning to do so for the foreseeable future so I don't feel this really applies.

Anyway. Site seems *really* snappy now. Gotta love that :) Now on with the serious business of actually finishing it. Heh.

I've just spent ... too long ... fighting to get the MEDIA_ROOT and other stuff working properly on my test django install. It seems quite a bit of stuff has changed in 'setup.py install' since I last played with it and basically it doesn't work. What does work is the following trunk method. Basically you:

1, Check out a copy of the source tree.
2, Put a symbolic link into the site packages to point at the source tree.

Under OSX the magic command for (2) is "ln -s /Users/davep/django-trunk/django/ /Library/Python/2.5/site-packages/django" ... where you'll have to change your username, obviously.