Tag Archives: software

Thoughts

Gmail, please stop messing with my contacts

When I sync my Gmail Contacts with my Mac’s Address Book, I always discover “uninvited guests” — occasional people with whom I converse but who don’t need to be in my Address Book. What happens is that Gmail will identify people to whom I reply and insert them in my Contacts automatically.

It used to be that it couldn’t be helped, and it was called a “feature”… Now these contacts are grouped together in a separate section called “Suggested Contacts”. Unfortunately, when I run a sync operation, these suggested contacts appear in my Address Book. I don’t want them there. I believe one’s Address Book ought to involve positive effort — effort put toward adding in contacts as they’re needed — not negative effort — effort put toward removing unneeded contacts because software can’t leave things well enough alone.

Gmail's Suggested Contacts

I run the sync operation via my iPod Touch. The sync option is otherwise unavailable to Mac owners, which is unfortunate. There’s something I call the entry tax for being able to run this sync: either you buy an iPod Touch or an iPhone, or you pay for Mobile Me. I don’t like it, but there it is, that’s Apple for you.

There is a company called Soocial which will also let you do this, as well as letting you sync your phone’s contacts with the Address Book. They were in Beta when I looked at them. By now they’ve opened their website to the general public.

At any rate, the problem with Suggested Contacts lies with Gmail, which presents those contacts as part of the normal set of Contacts to the sync software. It should store them separately, aside from the normal contacts, so that the sync software never sees them.

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Reviews

Join MP4 files with Front End Digital Media Workshop

Want an easy way to join MP4 clips together? Front End Media Workshop, a nifty piece of Mac software published by the now defunct K-werkx, can definitely help you out. While the folks that put it together aren’t online any longer, the app is still available for download from CNET.

FE_DMW makes it really easy to join video clips

FE_DMW makes it really easy to join video clips

The app (it shows up as FE_DigitalMediaWorkshop in the Apps folder by the way) is meant to do a bunch of other things, but I found it most useful to join together several MP4 clips from my video collection.

For example, I’d purchased a DVD of “The Curious Adventures of Mr. Wonderbird“, a re-titled version of the 1952 original, La Bergère et Le Ramoneur. The film is little known, and features the dramatic escape of a pair of lovers from the claws of a despotic ruler. A curious bird helps them escape and orchestrates the toppling of the ruler’s oppressive regime, which mirrored, at the time, what was going on behind the iron curtain of Eastern Europe. Peter Ustinov voices the bird and also narrates the story.

At any rate, I’d copied the DVD to my computer only to later realize that I’d done it by chapters instead of copying the entire movie as a single file. Front End Digital Media Workshop allowed me to drag the five or six clips for each chapter onto its main window, drag and drop to arrange them in order, then, within minutes, join them together as a single file. The output was saved to the desktop in a folder (one for each join operation), where I could review, rename and archive it.

Sure, if you have Quicktime Pro, you can join video files there, or you can also import them into iMovie, but a small, single purpose app that does it faster and without a lot of fuss scores higher in my book. I may even use it later to snip clips from the beginning and end of some of my other video files, since I see that it has that feature built in as well.

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How To

Run WordPress by itself or cached?

I’ve been running an experiment for the past three months. I wanted to see how well WordPress would do if I ran it by itself, without any sort of caching. So far, so good.

About four months ago, my web server kept getting pummelled into the ground almost daily, and I couldn’t figure out why it kept happening. After researching the issue, I found the prevailing opinion to side with the need for a caching plugin. People were complaining that it’s just not optimized well, and must be run with the aid of such a plugin, otherwise higher levels of traffic will bring the web server down. Trouble was, I already ran my WP install cached, using WP Super Cache, had been doing so for over a year, and my server still went down. (I should specify it had only recently started to go down.) What was I to do?

I posted a message in the WP forums asking why WordPress doesn’t generate static files. Were there any plans to do so in the future? To my surprise, Matt Mullenweg (WP’s founder) replied to my post, and told me that while there are caching plugins out there, WordPress.com doesn’t run any, and they’re doing just fine hosting millions of blogs. Others chimed in as well, and their replies got me to make the following changes:

  1. Made the switch to a VPS (Virtual Private Server) with SliceHost. Four months later, I’m still very happy about that move.
  2. Doubled the RAM on my web server (to 512MB from 256MB).
  3. Turned off WP Super Cache and started running my site by itself.

Each step followed the other in succession. I wanted to make gradual changes so I could see why my server kept having issues. Switching to a VPS host was good, and it was needed, but for my traffic levels, it wasn’t enough. Doubling the RAM was good and it was needed, and while the new RAM is enough for now, I’d still be having problems if I didn’t also disable my caching plugin.

Here’s where I think the crux of the caching/non-caching issue lies: it has to do with the load placed on the server as cached versions of the pages get created. Normally, that’s a non-issue. But as I monitored my server carefully, I discovered that it went down only as it started to get indexed heavily by search engines. Their bots visited my site in spurts, with traffic peaking, then falling back down. They spawned multiple threads, over ten at times, following links and slurping up the content. It’s when bot traffic peaked that an incredible load was placed on the web server. It kept generating cached versions of pages it hadn’t already cached, RAM and CPU demand increased to unsustainable levels, and it went down.

No amount of tweaking the Apache and MySQL config files helped with this sort of scenario, or at least it didn’t help me. You see, the difference between peak traffic levels with search engines vs. people is that people will go to a single article or a group of articles that are in demand. A caching plugin works great for those sorts of situations. There’s a limited number of pages to worry about caching, and those pages get served up time and time again. The load is acceptable. When a search engine bot starts indexing your site, it’ll call up any and all available pages that it can find. That can place a huge load on the web server as it scrambles to serve up those pages and build static versions for the caching plugin. I believe that it’s too much for most medium-sized servers to handle, and they will usually go down.

In my case, disabling the caching plugin and making sure no traces were left in the .htaccess file were the only things that helped. Now, I might have up to four different search engine bots crawling my site, each spawning multiple threads, and my server will usually not go down. Sure, there are times when the server will get dangerously low on RAM, and will be unresponsive for 5-10 minutes, but that’s an acceptable scenario for me. And if I should all of a sudden get huge amounts of people traffic to a post, it’s possible that the web server will also become unresponsive, at least for a time. But the great thing about running WordPress by itself is that Apache will usually take care of itself. As the requests die down, Apache will kill the extra threads, the available RAM will go back up again, and the server will recover nicely. That wasn’t possible while I ran the caching plugin. When it went down, it stayed down, and that was a problem.

I realize that what works for me may not work for others. I have not tested what happens with WP Super Cache on a larger server, for example one with more RAM. It’s possible that the larger amount of RAM there will offset the greater demand placed on the server as it builds static versions of the pages, although I’m not sure what to say about the CPU usage. That also peaked as the caching plugin went crazy. Not sure how that’ll work on a more powerful server.

WP Super Cache has some options that allow you to cache more pages and keep them cached for longer periods of time. Perhaps fiddling with those options would have allowed me to keep running the plugin, but I wanted to see how things stood from the other side of the fence. Like I said, so far, so good. Caveats aside, running WordPress by itself was the cure for my persistent web server outages.

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Flash Player 10 breaks teh internets

Shortly after upgrading to Adobe’s new Flash Player, version 10, I noticed I could no longer upload photos to my blogs. And I also noticed that FriendFeed’s image uploader didn’t work the same way. I didn’t relate that to the Flash Player upgrade at first, and tried to rule out problems on my own machine. Then I did a bit of research and discovered that others were in the same boat.

Quoting from this thread on the WP forums:

“The new Flash version 10 is incompatible. The latest version 9 of Flash is what you want. There will be a workaround (ugly hack) for this in WordPress 2.7. But since the problem is actually with Flash 10 itself, stick with Flash 9 for the time being. Hopefully, WordPress 2.8 will get rid of the Flash altogether, since Adobe has made it clear that they consider this problem to be a security fix.”

On FriendFeed (FF), people complained about image uploader issues as well. In that same FF thread, I found out that Adobe archives their old versions of the Flash Player, something which is not readily apparent on their site, nor easy to find. I also found that I need to uninstall Flash Player before downgrading — should I decide to do it — using Adobe’s Flash uninstaller.

Now, we’re faced with an issue: stay with Flash 10 and a non-working image uploader on WP sites, or downgrade to Flash 9? I’ll let each of you decide what to do about that. Since there appears to be a security issue in Flash 9, it’s not something you should take lightly, but at least you’ll have options.

You may think I’m joking in my post title when I say that the new Flash Player broke the internet. Not necessarily. When you consider that there are about 3.8 million blogs at WordPress.com, and at least a few hundred thousand self-hosted WP installs from WordPress.org, that makes over 4 million websites whose WP Image Uploader broke when Flash 10 was released. I’m not sure how many FriendFeed (FF) users there are, but there should be 100,000 or more by now.

The FF developers came up with an alternate image uploader fairly quickly when they discovered the problem with Flash Player 10. WP is going to release a workaround in WP 2.7, then possibly do away with Flash for the Image Uploader in WP 2.8. WP also has an alternate way to upload photos, through the old, form-based browser uploader, where you can only do one photo at a time. That’s what I’ve been using while I wait for the new version of WP to come out.

Still, when you consider that over 4 million internet users were negatively impacted by this new version of the Flash Player, that’s not a number to take lightly. I do wish Adobe had worked with WordPress ahead of time to make the transition smoother or to offer them some sort of workaround. I found out about this the hard way, and my guess is you did, too. That’s not the ideal way to do business when you’ve got Silverlight nipping at your heels.

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Reviews

Google launches video chat, ignores PowerPC Macs

A few days ago, Google launched something that a lot of people had wanted for some time: the ability to do a video chat, right from Gmail. Everyone got really excited, and for good reason. I was very happy too, until I discovered that PowerPC Macs were out of the picture. Why?

Here’s what I get when I access the Google Video Chat site from my Intel MBP:

And here’s what my wife gets when she accesses that very same site:

So while she gets to see this when I’m away from home:

I’ll still only get to see this, which makes me sad:

Why, Google, why?

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