My first late night Winter Olympic kebab

Thoughts

TV inside a kebab restaurant in Sydney showing Winter Olympic skiing

With a pending house inspection imminent, today was largely spent vacuuming, washing floors and removing any trace of evidence that this house is a dwelling people live in. At least one word in that opening was superfluous and unnecessary; ditto this sentence.

It was pretty late into the evening when we realised we hadn't eaten. Finding a restaurant open at 22:00 in suburban Sydney seemed like a long shot, but by chance we saw the Sultan Turkish Pide and Kebab House through the storm gloom.

Huddled in the small family run restaurant, hungrily chowing down, watching winter Olympian skiers thousands of kilometres away was really something. Despite it still being summer in Australia, we joked the athletes were probably warmer than we were!

I've never really been into the Olympics or sport in general, but the winter events seem far more interesting. Some of those skiers were going over 100km/h, something I didn't even think a human could withstand. Clara agreed, and said the ice skating was really quite pretty. Maybe we'll have to watch more of this. Any sites have flowing water downloads, as it were, perhaps?

And that's my story of seeing my first Winter Olympic event.


Valentines 2014

Thoughts

Valentines Rubi, by Clara Tse

Clara and I aren't really into the whole flashy–Valentines thing. Neither of us had anyone for most of our lives, and we're both painfully aware of how small the holiday can make you feel when you don't have someone.

So instead, we spent our evening doing what we did when I first confessed to her: hanging out at Happy Lemon and sipping bubble tea and rock salt cheese coffee. We even discovered an amazing new bakery in Sydney which will be the subject of an upcoming post.

That said, Clara did go out of her way to make me a box of adorable chocolates, and spent an amount of time I'm too afraid to ask about drawing that epic picture of the Rubénerd mascot Rubi above. How she can call herself untalented is absolutely beyond me, though I suppose her modesty was one of the things that attracted me to her in the first place ^_^.


PenguinCoffee: Miku’s takoyaki

Annexe

This originally appeared on PenguinCoffee, Clara’s and my old shared weblog.

Despite the clear and present shimapan, the first thing I saw on this artwork was Miku’s takoyaki~ Wow, I haven’t had that in a long time!

By m55wpfcw on Pixiv


Simple Mavericks WordPress test environment

Software

PHP, Apache, MariaDB, SeaMonkey Broser, OS X Mavericks!

There's more than one way to skin a grape, and so many other tools to use. If you want a quick WordPress test environment without installing a package like MAMP and XAMPP, you could do worse than follow what I did recently. How's that for an intro, and a cliché stack image? ^_^

Ingredients

  • Apache2 in OS X 10.9 Mavericks
  • PHP 5.5 from Homebrew
  • MariaDB from Homebrew
  • WordPress from WordPress.org

Getting Homebrew and Developer Tools

Homebrew is a wonderful new package manager for Mac. Download it as per the site instructions, or just run the following:

$ ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.github.com/mxcl/homebrew/go)"

Then confirm and update all is working:

% brew doctor
% brew update

During the process of installing Homebrew packages, OS X may ask you to download Developer Tools if you don't have them installed. Or you can just download them from the Apple Developer site.

Getting PHP

The lovely josegonzalez maintains a PHP repository we can use, which also requires the dupes repo.

% brew tap homebrew/dupes
% brew tap josegonzalez/homebrew-php
% brew install php55

If you'd rather use nginx here, install php55 like this instead.

% brew install php55 --without-apache --with-fpm

Now we just add our new php install to OS X's Apache2 configuration. If you use TextMate, open it as such:

% sudo mate /etc/apache2/httpd.conf

And add the following line after the block of LoadModules:

LoadModule php5_module /usr/local/opt/php55/libexec/apache2/libphp5.so

Getting MariaDB

MariaDB is an enhanced, drop in replacement for MySQL that is fully compatible with WordPress. It's where the community energy behind the platform seems to be thesedays, though all the installed tools still use the "mysql" moniker for now.

% brew install mariadb

After installing, copy the launch script, and start the server. Many other tutorial sites online have you copy the plist file instead; creating a symlink helps to ensures it will still work if you update your brews.

% ln -sfv /usr/local/opt/mariadb/*.plist ~/Library/LaunchAgents
% launchctl load ~/Library/LaunchAgents/homebrew.mxcl.mariadb.plist

Setting up MariaDB for WordPress

Now we can set up our server and tables for WordPress! First, run the secure script and define a root password. You can safely remove the test tables and such:

% mysql_secure_installation

Next, we'll login with our new root credentials:

% mysql -uroot -p

Then create a WordPress database and user to access it. I used "wordpress" to keep things simple, though you should use a better passphrase!

MariaDB [(none)]> CREATE DATABASE wordpress;
MariaDB [(none)]> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON wordpress.* 
TO 'wordpress' IDENTIFIED BY 'passphrase';
MariaDB [(none)]> q

Installing WordPress, starting Apache

Download and extract WordPress into the document root, which is:

% cd /Library/WebServers/Documents/
% sudo -s
# curl -O 'http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz'
# tar xzvf latest.tar.gz

This is optional, but so WordPress wouldn't ask us for FTP credentials when installing plugins or importing posts, I changed the owner of the document root to www:

% sudo chown -R www wordpress

Now we can run Apache, and install WordPress as we would on any web host. Done and done!

% sudo apachectl start

The @dai1313 on Optiplex nostalgia

Hardware

Pentium 4 with HyperThreading

In my previous post, I talked about snagging an old IBM ThinkVision LCD and a 2004 Dell Optiplex desktop; the same machiens my school used back in the day.

@dai1313 replied on Twitter:

I've got a Pentium 4 from my old school in my room. Like actually from the school, grabbed it when they were upgrading to new PC's. It actually gets a hell of a lot of use. Web, word processing and lots internet radio mostly. If it still works ill put it to use!

Indeed! I'm continually amazed by what can be achieved on so–called crappy or ancient hardware. My first gen Mac Pro flies with Mavericks, and the latest Fedora Linux was a pleasure to use on my ThinkPad X40 and X61 laptops. There's honest to goodness life left in so many machines that are being thrown away; an internet radio receiver is a great example.

The Pentium 4 was also a real watershed in CPUs and PCs in general. Arguably the crowened winner of the megahertz wars, the P4 was developed for a time when people bought computers based on clock speed.


Silent swap meets and IT nostalgia

Hardware

One of the more fascinating aspects of living back in Australia has been the bulk collection ritual in suburbia. A few times a year, residents collect items they can't fit into their wheelie bins out onto the kerb, which presumably a large truck rolls by and collects.

You see all manner of items being left out. Bales of yellowing newspapers, crates of empty bottles, kitchen appliances with dangerous–looking burn marks, school artworks (ouch). What I wasn't expecting was the sheer amount of discarded IT equipment; CRTs are the new "discarded sofa" on front yards.

What really surprised me though was the high turnover rate of this stuff. Discarded items you notice walking past in the morning may not be there in the evening. This bulk collection has become a silent swap meet of sorts, where residents leave out what they don't want for others to either take, or to be discarded.

Taking part

A few weeks ago, Clara and walked past a discarded IBM ThinkVision LCD (pictured above). We weren't sure whether it would really work or not. Still, for for development nothing beats a 4:3 aspect ratio display, so I was willing to play the fool and carry it back to test. Surprisingly, it was in near perfect condition and worked!

This afternoon, we have the same experience with a 2004 Dell Optiplex GX270 tower (surprisingly, also pictured above). I have fond memories of these; my school in Singapore standardised on them for all the labs and classrooms. They weren't the prettiest of machines, and they did run Windows, but the sight of them in school meant we'd be breaking the monotony of high school life and doing something fun.

Akwardly carting it home and plugging it in, it booted right up to the familiar Dell splash screen. The Hyperthreaded Pentium 4 logo, the giant tilted blue E, the 1GiB of reported memory, the memories themselves! Would my 16 year old self have thought I'd have my own one of those machines in my house a decade later?

Yes, I'm a nostagic fool, and yes I will be installing all the software we had on those school machines from back in the day. At least, when I have the time. Visual Studio 6, SimCity 3000, NJStar Communicator!


Mozilla Firefox advertiles

Software

Konata from Lucky Star as the Firefox logo

Will this be a case of a storm in a teacup, or the beginning of the end of Firefox?

Sponsored content

Recent versions of Firefox display thumbnails for your nine most frequently accessed pages when you open a new tab. If you've only just installed the browser, you haven't visited enough sites for these boxes to be populated, so they appear blank.

No longer. Mozilla's Darren Herman wants these blank tiles replaced with "sponsored" content:

"The sponsored tiles will be clearly labeled as such, while still leading to content we think users will enjoy."

We could consider the ethical implications, or the spin, or their real world need to raise revenue to cover their costs, but we'd be dealing with moot points. If word gets out that installing Firefox will bundle ads, why would someone go out of their way to replace their system's default browser anymore?

Tiles, Metro, am I sensing a trend?

I assume, like Windows 8's Metro, we'll be able to disable this. Third parties and package managers will probably build their own versions without it. Trust nerds to find comfort in pragmatism and routing around the problem. Still, I worry more about the damage to Firefox's reputation, especially given the number of people who've already jumped to competing browsers.

Through the highs of the Phoenix years and the lows of 3.6 memory leaks, I've stuck with Firefox (and back to Mozilla SeaMonkey in 2011). For me it wasn't just a browser choice; I trusted the Mozilla Foundation had my best interests at heart. We may have disagreed on issues like video codecs, but I respected their decisions because they respected me as a user. Is this starting to change?

Personally, they've earned me giving them the benefit of the doubt on this until we get more details, but I am concerned.

Update

As usual, John Gruber says it more succinctly than I could.


Got a little carried away raking

Media

A photo showing a broken rake.

Pretty sure this had a handle at one point.


There’s something about Aperture

Software

Since getting my first digital camera in 2001, I've had a loose system for organising my photos. As I'm sure many of you do, I had a hierarchical series of year and month folders, with individual events under these. Photos retained their original filenames, but with dash separated "tags".

It stood the test of time, but cracks started to appear. If I shot RAW with a JPEG preview, the OS treated them as separate images. If I wanted to modify an image, I had to be careful to duplicate it first, or Save As. I'll admit I clobbered more than a few photos.

None of this will sound (look?) new to seasoned photographers. Not being one though, it was New To Me™, and therefore worth exploring.

The other players

Over the last few years, I've tried digiKam, Shotwell, iPhoto and Aperture 2 with mixed success. All are capable tools that allow you to import your photos, edit them non-destructively, add metadata and organise them.

And yet, after I'd commit to one, I'd slowly drift back to my filesystem based approach. It wasn't a conscious decision; I'd import one day's worth of photos to a folder and tell myself I'd "organise them later". Then another folder. Then another ten. Pretty soon I had three sets of photos; those in the photo organiser, those I had yet to import before, and new ones.

On a deeper level, I must have felt I wasn't getting enough benefit over my primitive directory based system to justify their use.

Aperture 3

And then, on a whim, I decided to try Aperture again.

I don't remember enough about Aperture 2 to make a detailed comparison. So far though, I've taken to it like a certain water–based avian animal takes to the aformentioned aqueos beverage. After taking the time to understand the difference between Projects, Albums and Folders, I've begun importaing all my photos into it.

I can't quite describe it, but it's given me a renewed interested in ameateur photography. Taking photos out in the real world, then organising them in Aperture satistfies my (albeit limited!) creative side, and my manically metadata organisational side. As an IT professional, I should be able to express my love for this software in more concrete, quantitiative terms, but all those seem superficial to how Aperture feels to use.

With apologies to Norma Jeane Baker, we'll see if Aperture overcomes my photo organiser seven day itch.


EscrowSecurityAlert and LaterAgent

Software

Looking at my system processes on Mavericks, two I didn't recognise caught my eye. Though I doubt that's amore.

EscrowSecurityAlert

This sounded more like a service I'd request upon having to transact with a schady [sic] character. According to tyler8541 on the Apple Support Communities:

I've taken a (very) brief look at the EscrowSecurityAlert application's code and it appears to sync your icloud keychain information. The whole process also looks like it might sync other settings with iCloud as well.

LaterAgent

I originally read this as "latté agent". While serving perhaps an equally important purpose to caffeination, part of me was a little disappointed. From Commodore CSixty4:

LaterAgent is an internal library used for system updates. It's what's responsible for nagging you to install updates when you tell it to remind you later.

Both these services have appeared on my Mac Pro, but I've yet to see either on my MacBook Air.

The above photo is of Tokiha Mai looking somewhat bemused at the state of my floor in 2009. That cup would need neither an escrow or an iCloud keychain, and I doubt its lack of coffee or sugar would render it impressed with a latté agent. Besides, a later agent would just make it go cold.