I called the litter warden

litter warden

This morning I discovered a black refuse sack of rubbish had been dumped almost in front of my house. This afternoon it’s still there but I rang the litter warden for South Cork, Jim Dooley at 021-4285417 giving my name, address and phone number. Hopefully they’ll get out here soon and find incriminating details buried in the bag but I don’t hold out much hope of that.

From a brief inspection of it, whoever dropped it doesn’t have the healthiest diet in the world. Packets of crisps, cans of Diet 7UP, plastic wrapping, and of course some of the local dogs have got their jaws into it too. Oh yeah, dogs are supposed to be under the owner’s control? ‘Course they are. The dog warden would have a field day around here too.

Anyway, I’m really pissed off at whoever dumped the rubbish. It’s disgusting, ignorant and completely irresponsible. I’ll update this post if the litter warden shows up. Seething.

WordPress MU 2.7

After a lengthy delay, WordPress MU 2.7 is now available. WordPress MU is the software that runs on WordPress.com and many other sites.

This is a sync of the code from WordPress 2.7 released last December. It’s taken a while but I think it’s worth the wait as there are many bugs fixed. Besides the merge with WordPress 2.7 there are also a few new features, including Viper007bond’s admin bar which is the most user visible addition.
Check the timeline for further info.

Upgrading from WordPress MU 2.6.5 should be as easy as copying over your existing install but please backup everything. Blog databases must be upgraded but that will occur in the background as usual.

I would really like to thank everyone who helped me bring this release out and offered me encouragement along the way. I’d name names but I’m bound to miss someone! It’s great hearing what everyone is doing with WordPress MU. There’s quite a community out there!

WP Super Cache 0.9

WP Super Cache version 0.9 is now available. WP Super Cache is a page caching plugin for WordPress that will significantly speed up your website.

Update – if your blog is installed in a sub directory instead of at the root of your server, the .htaccess file might be wrong. Download and install the development version which corrects this. You’ll have to edit the .htaccess file (anyone want to volunteer to write an auto-upgrader?) and remove the rules between the lines # BEGIN WPSuperCache and # END WPSuperCache. Delete those lines too and visit your admin page. The plugin should do it’s stuff and spit out correct mod_rewrite rules for you. The dev version also has a few other bug fixes so if you’re adventurous have fun upgrading!
There’s no need to touch wp-content/cache/.htaccess

Are we nearing version 1? Possibly. In this release a number of bugs have been fixed and the following new features added:

  1. Mobile user agents are detected and a different cache page created for them. If you use a plugin that displays a different theme to these devices it will hopefully work now. The plugin changes to “half-on” mode because the detection is done by PHP. Thanks to Alex King‘s WordPress Mobile Edition plugin for the detection code.
  2. The number of cache files will be more than halved on a normal site with plenty of anonymous visitors. This should be a huge win for WordPress MU sites and very busy blogs.
  3. The last and next garbage collection times are displayed on the admin page now.
  4. In previous versions the newly generated page was delivered uncompressed to the first visitor even if the browser supported compression. I’ve fixed this but I’m not 100% certain it will work for everyone so it’s disabled by default. Edit wp-content/wp-cache-config.php and add “$wp_cache_gzip_first = 1;” to enable this. It’s enabled here.
  5. If expiry time is longer than 30 minutes, garbage collection will be done every 10 minutes, else it’ll be done 10 seconds after the expiry time.
cache-contents

Unfortunately wp-content/advanced-cache.php will have to be updated again and it’s not as simple as copying the file from the plugin directory. Full instructions are printed on the admin page and it should auto update in most cases.

PS. Test your upgraded blog on Is my blog working, a project by fellow Automattican Alex Shiels.
Here’s the page for this site. 102ms page generation time is rather fast!

WP Super Cache 0.8.9

WP Super Cache version 0.8.9 is now available. WP Super Cache is a page caching plugin for WordPress that will significantly speed up your website.

This version fixes a number of bugs and adds two new features, but in case you run into problems upgrading, make sure you delete wp-content/advanced-cache.php before copying plugins/wp-super-cache/advanced-cache.php over it. Go on, read that again. Delete that file. Jonathan Dingman didn’t and when he copied the file over the symlink he overwrote wp-super-cache/wp-cache-phase1.php. His site went belly up and he started screaming for my head!!! Err no, he appeared on asking why it didn’t work. Thanks Jonathan for working through the problem with me. My fault for not making the instructions clearer!

If this happens to you, take a deep breath and unzip the plugin again in the plugins folder and delete wp-content/advanced-cache.php

Anyway, the new features are:

  1. Cache rebuild. Serve a static cache file to anonymous users while that file is being generated.
  2. Disable the large global lock that makes every access to the cache atomic.

Besides those, I got rid of the symlinked file in wp-content/, and the plugin now copies a file called “advanced-cache.php” from the plugin directory to simplify things. Especially on operating systems where symlink isn’t available. Yes, that’s Windows.

If your site is horrendously busy and you get a ton of comments every day and you’re too broke to buy a new server, then the cache rebuild feature will help you a lot. You should see the load on your server go way down if you enable this. Anonymous users who visit a page where a comment has just been left will be served a static cache file from the supercache instead of all the requests trying to generate a brand new page. The page served to them might be a few seconds out of date but that trade off is worth it.
Here’s the original thread that inspired the idea. Thanks Tigertech for writing the patch and for sharing the performance graphs. Check out the load on his server, before and after the rebuild function was switch on:

wp super cache load graph

If you’ve had problems with deleting the cache on your blog it *might* be because of file locks. Some hosts just have problems with them. The file locking in the plugin is very coarse. When the plugin wants to do any sort of write operation it grabs a lock, does the writes (which could include clearing expired files, or creating wp-cache and supercache cache files), and then releases the lock.
Any other process running the plugin that tries that won’t get a lock: new cache files won’t be created, and cache files won’t be cleared.
It isn’t a huge problem that the lock is so coarse because the writes don’t take very long (the lock is enabled after the page is generated), but some very busy sites take quite a while to clear their cache files.
On the downside, disabling the file lock won’t stop multiple cached files being generated simultaneously (great), but it also won’t stop multiple “clear cache” attempts either (boo!)
From what I recall of looking at the other cache plugins for WordPress, most of them don’t have any file locking and seem to do just fine.

I almost forgot! There is also a new debug mode. Edit wp-content/wp-cache-config.php and look for “$wp_cache_debug” and follow the instructions. It will send you a few emails when things don’t go right and may help track down any problems.

As a final note, I would like to sincerely thank Robert Wolf who spruced up the admin page and gave it a nice lick of paint and Michael Torbert for helping me debug the plugin a while back.

WordPress MU 2.7 beta

A beta version of WordPress MU 2.7, the multi blog version of WordPress that runs on such sites as WordPress.com has just been uploaded and is available here.

This is quite a stable release and has been tested by many but it’s not the final 2.7 release so there are probably bugs we haven’t found yet. Don’t put it into production just yet, but if you’re working on a new site, you’re better off using this rather than 2.6.5 as the final WordPress MU 2.7 will be along soon.

Check the timeline for more info, there are still plenty of open tickets and keep an eye on the forums and please help out if you can.

I also want to extend a big thank you to everyone who has helped with this release, be it entering tickets, updating them, creating patches, or helping out on the forums and of course the WordPress community. This software wouldn’t be where it is today without you.

Lots of Irish in Texas

After I found out that Waterford had moved to Kilkenny (thanks ILUG!) on Google Maps I became curious and searched for Blarney and found Blarney Stone Street in Tyler, Texas. Check out all the street names!

Irish in Texas

You could travel all over Ireland by walking up and down a few streets in that town! Dublin, Limerick, Ulster, Blarney. I have to wonder who named a street, “Irish Moss St.” Sounds like something you get at a garden centre!

You never know, I might visit Tyler in Texas some day.

Zavvi

zavvi

Sometime last year Virgin sold it’s retail music business and was renamed Zavvi. The first I knew of it was when the Cork store had this strange forgettable green brand name plastered over the door. I could never remember the name, not a good sign for a retail chain.

They didn’t last long unfortunately. The notice above is displayed in their front window. The company appointed a liquidator on December 30th. If you go in there now they have some great sales. 30% off games, lots of DVDs and CDs slashed in price. Long queues at the cash registers though and I wouldn’t count on getting a refund quickly if they’re liquidating stock.

Control Ubuntu and Mac OS X from one computer

I just installed Synergy on my Ubuntu and Mac OS X laptops and now I can control both from one keyboard and mouse. It works fairly well, although I do wonder:

  1. What are the special Mac keys mapped to on my beige PC keyboard?
  2. I’ll have to stretch if I move my Macbook away from my desk. (joking)

It’s easy enough to install, on Ubuntu the Linux version is already in the repositories, so the following will install a simple gui tool to configure and run a server.

aptitude install quicksynergy

That will install Synergy as well.
Run “quicksynergy” from a terminal, go to the “Use” tab and give it the IP address of your machine. Then enter the hostname of your second (or third or fourth..) computer in whichever direction you want. My Macbook is on the left.
screenshot-quicksynergy

Before clicking “Execute”, I downloaded the Mac OS X version of Synergy, untarred it and after reading the documentation, fired up the client with:

./synergyc -f 192.168.1.20

Moments later, the following message popped up on my Ubuntu terminal,

NOTE: CServer.cpp,278: client “donncha-o-caoimhs-macbook.local” has connected

Now I can move the mouse cursor off the left side of my Ubuntu screen and it starts moving on my Macbook!

I don’t think I’ll use it full time as I’d strain my back or neck typing on a keyboard in front of me and twisting my neck to see my Macbook but it’s a nice tool to have. Over WiFi moving the mouse cursor stuttered a small bit, so it’s unlikely you’ll want to do intricate pixel work with it.
I’ll have to try a day’s work with it to judge it properly.

Stop the Killing

gaza-protest

A protest march in Cork today against the Israeli invasion of Gaza. Plenty of photographers covering the event, I wouldn’t be surprised to see photos appear on Flickr soon.

gaza-protest-23

A leaflet urged the reader to boycott Israeli products and listed many well known brands. Unfortunately if I was to do that I wouldn’t be able to use my Intel powered laptop, and I wouldn’t be able to use WordPress because Israeli citizens have contributed to it. Oh wait, you probably shouldn’t even use the Internet. Log off now please.

gaza-protest-16

At the end of the march, the speaker pictured above told the crowd that there would be another march next weekend. Ominously he said all shops in Cork should not sell Israeli produce and whatever it takes will be done to force them to do that. He added that only lawful pressure would be applied, that “we must stay on this side of the law”.
How is that really going to hurt Israel? The produce is already bought and paid for by the retailer. Irish shop keepers are reeling from the worst Christmas sales in years and they want to put more pressure on them? You’re only going to hurt the local economy if you go ahead with that boycott. Insane!

I have so much sympathy for the people in Gaza and Israel. Innocent people get killed and maimed on both sides and the cycle of violence goes on and on and on and …

WP Super Cache 0.8.7

WP Super Cache version 0.8.7 is now available. WP Super Cache is a page caching plugin for WordPress that will significantly speed up your website.

This release addresses some issues large or busy sites had with deleting expired cache files. Some sites generated so many cache files that there were two many files generated, even when those files were cleared out every hour. To fix that I limited the recursive function that deletes the files to 100 deletions at a time. That function is called until all the cache files are deleted (or strictly speaking, no files are deleted. That’s how the expired file cleanup works).
It’s also possible to set the garbage collection interval to 10 minutes now which will also help.