Tag Archives: irishblogs

Go Mobile with Supercache

I’ll be honest, I don’t have much experience with mobile content. I’ve rarely browsed the net on a mobile device. I don’t have an iPhone and don’t intend buying one but lots of people do use mobile devices to browse online.

With that in mind, and after some pestering by Vladimir I modified WP Super Cache so it will support mobile devices and operate in full super caching mode!

The plugin now filters out requests from the most common mobile user agents and serves those requests in “half on” WP-Cache mode while serving the rest of your visitors static html files. As I’ve said many times before, the speed differences between both modes is negligible for normal traffic but it’s a nice safety net in case your site is inundated.

Only thing is, I want people to test it first before making a final release. Grab the development version from the download page and give it a whirl.
Your mod_rewrite rules in the .htaccess file have to be updated but if you delete the “WPSuperCache” rules they can be regenerated by the plugin next time you load the admin page.
There are also a number of other bugfixes and enhancements too so check out the Changelog.txt for more details.

I use WordPress Mobile Edition here and last Sunday I noticed an extra 10,000 requests from Google using odd looking “mobile useragents” like this one:

SAMSUNG-SGH-E250/1.0 Profile/MIDP-2.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.1 UP.Browser/6.2.3.3.c.1.101 (GUI) MMP/2.0 (compatible; Googlebot-Mobile/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)

The actual mobile device changed but the Google bit stayed the same and all requests came from 66.249.71.2
Eventually I figured out that Google was adding my site to the “mobile” section of their index. Presumably to be served from here. Cool, another way of getting to my site.

PS. the development version also has a small modification to make it go faster by not checking file modification time on each request. This could help on really busy servers.

Sudden productivity upsurge ends recession

This just in. Economists worldwide are scratching their heads as the latest figures suggest the global recession may be coming to an end. Global output has suddenly shot up, people are working harder than ever before and they’re getting out to the stores and malls and spending money.
If this trend continues the world may be on it’s way to a boom by the end of the year.

Meanwhile Twitter and Xbox Live are offline on the same day for maintenance.

connecting-to-twitter

Terminator Salvation Review

So, the reviews are mixed but mostly bad but don’t let them put you off. I went to see Terminator Salvation last night and, maybe because of my low expectations, I enjoyed the movie!

The movie won’t strain your brain cells, it’s a pure action film with huge robots, explosions, fights and a mostly straight forward story. If you loved Starship Troopers, I think you’ll like this film!

Zhong Tai, the 250 mile electric SUV

Zhong Tai

I read during the week about the Zhong Tai, a 4 seater car based on the body of the 2006 Daihatsu Terios with a claimed range of 250 miles and thought, “this is a car that would suit my family”.

The Sunday Times has the full scoop as they’re the first western publication to put this Chinese car to the test. They were impressed!

New Power, by contrast, claims to have developed an electric four-seater with a range of 250 miles and plans to bring it to the UK “within the next couple of years”. Known as the Zhong Tai (the name translates roughly as “peace and safety for the people”), it has lithium-ion batteries that can be recharged in 6-8 hours from a conventional socket, or in two hours from a high-power recharging point. With a top speed of 75mph and an estimated price tag of between £16,300 and £20,500 in Britain, the Zhong Tai could be both practical and affordable enough to make drivers part with their internal combustion engines for good.

I wonder what the resale value on electric cars will be like? It’s well known that batteries degrade with time so that component will bring down the price. Then there’s the strides technology is making in this field. Will people want the latest whizz bang gadget?
Hopefully advancements in battery technology will be backwards compatible. An electric motor is an electric motor (I guess), but battery tech is getting so much better all the time.

Is anyone driving an electric car in Ireland?

Sorry I missed you Cllr. Dan Fleming

Cllr Dan Fleming

This message from Cllr. Dan Fleming was stuffed into gates all over my estate this evening. I know they only have so much time on their hands but the letter was rolled up tightly and squashed between the bars on our gate and in the gates of other houses. I’d venture to say that it took as long to roll and fold the letter up as it would to walk to our front door. Oh, and yes, we were in when they “called”. The only other people to stuff literature into our gate are those clothes collectors and they’re possibly more popular than Fianna Fail at this stage.

I’m sure he’s a great guy and he’d have a great chat with you and all that but there’s no sign that he’s a Fianna Fail man. The missing party name strikes again! His website is down but his Fianna Fail page is up however.

I’m still not sure who I’ll vote for but you can hurt Fianna Fail without helping Sinn Fein if you vote carefully.

WordPress MU Catchup: big merge, wpmudev goes gpl and MU support

Exciting times in the world of WordPress and WordPress MU. Last weekend’s announcement by Matt that WordPress MU would merge into WordPress caused a flurry of activity and questions on twitter and on blogs, most notably with speculation that WordPress.org would run on MU and by jeffr0 who asked me on IRC what was happening.

Basically, the thin layer of code that allows WordPress MU to host multiple WordPress blogs will be merged into WordPress. I expect the WordPress MU project itself will come to an end because it won’t be needed any more (which saddens me), but on the other hand many more people will be working on that very same MU code which means more features and more bugfixes and faster too. It also means no more marathon code merging sessions. I certainly won’t miss that.

Meanwhile in the real world, there’s more merging to be done. WordPress 2.8 is expected next Wednesday and it has introduced fancy new stuff I haven’t finished fixing yet in WordPress MU. Expect an MU 2.8 beta sometime next week I hope.

In what I first thought was fabulous news, James Farmer has announced that WPMU DEV Premium has been relaunched. The site offered premium support for WordPress MU for a very long time. It also sold proprietary plugins which I’ve never agreed with (because of the conflict with WordPress) but now all plugins are GPL licensed.
Then I found out that you need to signup and pay a subscription fee to download them. I’m conflicted about it, because if I’m honest, while they’re sticking to the letter of the GPL, the spirit may be lacking.
So, should you signup there for a month, download all their plugins and upload them to WordPress.org? It’s tempting isn’t it? But no, you shouldn’t. This is real income for James, Andrew and company. If their plugins are uploaded elsewhere will they be updated? Will you signup for another month and grab them all again and upload each and every one to separate Subversion repositories? Will you provide support when things go wrong? I didn’t think so.
If it really bothers you that GPLed plugins are not available “free as in beer” then write your own and support it. It’s not something to be done lightly.

When we speak of free software, we are referring to freedom, not price. Our General Public Licenses are designed to make sure that you have the freedom to distribute copies of free software (and charge for this service if you wish), that you receive source code or can get it if you want it, that you can change the software or use pieces of it in new free programs; and that you know you can do these things.

(GNU GPL v2.0)

Of course, WPMU DEV aren’t the only MU support people in town. Check out Ron & Andrea’s musupport.net and of course I recommend the Automattic Support Network where you’ll find me and the rest of Automattic.

Tiny Little Kitten

Tiny little kitten

A tiny little kitten wandered into the dog’s kennel this morning and started to meow her heart out. She’s so small I can fit her in one hand. She tried to befriend and approach a local tomcat but he didn’t want anything to do with her. Thankfully Adam kept his distance from the new “baby” and I was able to feed her heavily diluted milk in a syringe.

Not sure what’s going to happen next.

Looking at a WPMU Object Cache

In the good ol’ days WordPress came with a filesystem object cache but it was removed some time ago because it was a pain to maintain, and caused problems for some users, especially those using NFS. Nowadays there is an object cache built in, but the cache only survives for as long as a page is being served.
Other developers have taken up the challenge and produced object cache plugins to fill in the gap. There are the neosmart ones including a filesystem object cache and a memcached one (Read Andy’s notes before installing).

The neosmart filesystem object cache (and the others according to #988) don’t work correctly with WordPress MU so I dug up a patched version of the filesystem object cache I worked on a year ago to look for testers.

Download object-cache.txt, rename to .php and copy into wp-content/. It should start working automatically but if you don’t see files and directories in wp-content/cache/, make sure that directory is writeable by the webserver.

The neosmart version on which this one is based doesn’t handle switching blogs at all. Cache collisions occur with data from one blog’s options polluting the options in others. The version linked above should fix that but I’d appreciate some testing by others.

Oh, check out WordPress MU trunk now. I merged WP 2.8 beta1 and I’m fixing bugs. Please install and try it out on a test server! The get_option() and related code is using the same code as WordPress.org which is one of the main reasons I went digging into the object cache. It leans a lot more on the cache than previously. Please test!

Google does hotel reviews now?

A couple of days ago my wife and I discussed our next holiday and she was quite taken with the idea of going to a particular hotel. I searched for the hotel and when I discovered that Google showed hotel reviews linked right from the search page I had to write about it.
After I had written the post I realised that someone might ring up the hotel and if they were feeling nasty or malicious they might cancel the holiday. Therefore, I’ll use the Radisson SAS in Limerick, an excellent hotel we stayed in a few months ago thanks to SuperValu Breaks.

So, search for the Radisson on Google.

radisson1

Clicking on the reviews link takes you here:

radisson2

I can only echo the good reviews. It’s a 4 star hotel, but book through SuperValu and you’ll get a big discount! (with the appropriate book of stamps of course)

Richard knows more about this sort of thing than I and he blogged about it 2 days ago. Looks like a good change for Irish businesses!

BTW, the break away is booked, the hotel is child friendly, we’re looking forward to it already!

PS. Richard has a post on Google’s local search which is definitely worth a read.

Memories of my first computer

A few weeks ago I splashed out on a 60GB Xbox 360, going for a reasonable 200 Euro in HMV and luckily for me I was able to enjoy the HD graphics of this next gen (next gen? It’s 4 years old now but the hardware specs are impressive!) console. Actually, “enjoy” is putting it lightly. Blown away, gobsmacked and amazed are probably better ways of describing my reaction to some of the graphics I saw this machine throwing about! Sometimes it feels like I’m taking part in one big movie.
I miss the Wiimote, I hope Microsoft do bring out a magic wand sooner or later.

One of the great things about being a late adapter is that I can buy most of the games I want in the pre-owned section. Instead of spending 50 Euro they sometimes cost half that!

I’ve gone searching for Xbox 360 blogs but only found a couple that weren’t full of adverts or blatantly self serving. I must be using the wrong keywords. Xbox fans, what are your favourite Xbox blogs?

30 or so years ago the first computer that I remember was a games console. I don’t remember the brand although my brother says it was an Atari. It was a simple machine, with a slot for a game cartridge. It had two grey boxy analog paddles, each with slender sticks and a small red button. Each controller would slot into a space in the console for easy storage. We only had one cartridge, a compilation of “sports” games, but as the machine used stick graphics they were fairly simplistic.
I remember the tennis game with two bats and a single large white pixel of a ball provided hours upon hours of entertainment for us kids.

What followed after that were more serious computers, the Commodore Vic 20, Speccy 48k, Commodore 64, Amiga 500, various PCs running Win 3.1, win 95, 98, Linux, and finally a Macbook and a Dell laptop running Ubuntu Linux. I didn’t own a console until I bought a Nintendo Wii, and then 2 weeks ago the Xbox 360.

Of the Vic 20, I remember typing in a BASIC programme that displayed a simple animated bird that flew around the screen. As we didn’t have a Datasette I couldn’t save it. I left the Vic 20 on while I went to school!

My son Adam’s first memories of games will probably be the Xbox. A far cry from the black and white stick characters of my youth!

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