Kyle D. Skrinak

This is a followup to this post.

About 2 months ago, I successfully installed Crunchbang linux on my old kitchen laptop. Why? Puppy is mostly stable and reliable but its built-in power management is bare bones. It has a scant number of packages built for it. (To wit — getting sshd loaded is not trivial, as it should be) Its screensaver is as basic as they come.

I now that Ubuntu won’t install on this laptop, (and — shocking — it’s below their minimum for their support — something that surprises me) so I heard word about a new ubuntu-derived distro, Crunchbang, that might give me more of what is missing above.

After some installation problems (I had to format the hard disk as ext2 only, ext3 fails) I got CB loaded. And, yes, it is a very pretty UI, and I notice other things as well. The LED status lights on my Buffalo Wireless PCMCIA card now works. I have full access to the ubuntu package repos. I have a full-featured screensaver. I can “sudo apt-get install x” for sshd or whatever contents my heart. Everything is snapping together nicely, until…

I leave the laptop idle and move on to the richer elements in my life. After a couple hours, I hear the hard drive being accessed continually. I click the  mouse button, but the screen is slow to respond — taking a couple of minutes before responding to a mouse click to stop the screensaver. After a couple of days, the pattern became clear — the laptop is spending nearly all of it’s time, after bootup, paging memory. The Crunchbang forum had no corrective suggstions (nor apparent interest). The matter was settled when my wife said; “I don’t know what was on before, but put it back. This is useless.”

And so I have. I’m typing this blog post in Puppy right now.

I’ve noticed that the sites we run on GoDaddy are generally slower than non-GD sites. One site is particularly slow (a nearly unmodified Drupal installation) and I’ve been, ahem, corresponding with GD on the matter. I qualify that as the responses are nearly all boilerplate — you can’t miss the pattern after your third email question to their support staff.

My observation isn’t the result of a carefully controlled, documented, and variables-reduced-to-a-statically-insignificant-minimum, but I’ve run some numbers using Firebug and WebKit’s Resources information page to time downloads of various media-rich pages. GD, in a variety of contexts, is slower, sometimes by a factor of 3.

Rather than mount a carefully detailed report on the matter, I thought of a different tact. Think of the GoDaddy ads — to whom do they appeal? College-aged men, basically. So, if you’re a college-aged male looking for a cheap web site for hosting, you’ve found the right vendor.

Skrinak Creative, however, has removed GoDaddy from our roster of approved web hosting providers. The slow migration away for our existing sites will start shortly.

Update: I received a phone call from GoDaddy, with a satisfactory addressing of this issue. As a result, GoDaddy is on our “probation” vendor list for the next 3 months. I’m glad they’ve addressed the matter, but I’d like to think that customer support escalation doesn’t require a blog post.

Another problem, another plugin? Managing CMS plugins can become its own cost center if you’re not prudent about selection and inclusion. Here is my most recent case in point. I need to add unique meta descriptions to WordPress. I’ve already added unique titles to this site via yet another plugin. So I found this page on adding one manually, which gets you 99% of the way there. He actually gets you all the way, but a tweak to his instructions brings it together. You can read why he established his conditionals like he did at that link — and you should read it. I would have commented the correction to his site but his comments are closed, so here goes.

This code works well for my purposes. This consolidates his two step-through examples, and I’ve brought the php start tag up to the html, otherwise, there’s a newline right after the opening double quote for the description text.

Setup:

1. Establish a “description” custom field for your pages. (Perhaps your posts, too, I’m not too worried about those for now, since I’m using WP as a CMS, less so a blog.)
2. Disable any server-side caching, if in use, which should be SOP, right?
3. Modify your theme’s header.php file with the following in the meta section:

<meta name="description" content="<?php if (is_single() || is_page()) {
        # Single post / page.
        # Use the 'description' custom field.
        echo get_post_meta($post->ID, 'description', true);
    } elseif (is_category()) {
        # Category page.
        # Use category's description
        echo trim(strip_tags(category_description()));
    } else {
        # Default meta description
        # Blog's description
        echo bloginfo('description');
    } ?> " />

I enjoy using fink on mac for maintaining my X11/FLOSS packages. However, there are times when binary or package updates are slow to appear. One example is the most excellent ftp client “lftp.” You can read more on my prior comments on lftp here.

Fink distributes an older version of lftp, 3.6.1-2, and there is a problem with that version and my OS X 10.5. When there’s no activity, my CPU activity spikes — and it’s all lftp. I contacted the maintainer but I received no response, so, I took matters into my own hands — I compiled it myself. I’ve had generally uneven and uninspiring experience compiling code myself, but this went smoothly. I followed the fink instructions and the lftp install instructions and — voila! I now have the latest lftp running. No code tweaks necessary (but fink + XCode is required)

lftp is an awesome ftp client — check it out!

FYI: WordPress has a privacy setting that hides your web site from search engines, say, while you’re setting it up. Makes sense, but I was unaware of this until I saw the meta tag “noindex,nofollow” in one of my customer’s sites. You can review it at Settings > Privacy. Oddly, some of my sites had it disabled (meaning, come search me, google!) and others had it enabled — without my explicitly doing so. Suffice to say they are all “exposed” to crawlers now.

Ironically, the one site where Privacy was “enabled” was the one I had put the most effort into SEO-optimization. Feh!

If you ever use VNC clients on the Mac, check out JollysFastVNC client. Finally, a VNC client that is better than the tightVNC client I’m using (and I still like tightVNC)

It’s so simple that I occassionally forget to do this myself: set up multiple tabs, one each for the most commonly accessed functions. I do this whether I’m in Umbraco, Drupal or WordPress. For example, in WordPress, I’ll have the appropriate “Edit Page” tab open, the rendered page in the second tab, and a related plugin settings in the third. The advantage is I can let one function perform it’s update and switch to another tab while the other task completes. You obviously want to avoid collisions but if your working heavily in the admin console for this CMSs you probably know what that means anyhow.

One more speed tip: use Firefox 3.1, (NOT 3.0.x) Chrome or WebKit on Mac. Their javascript engines are significantly faster than some other browser whose name escapes me at the moment.

We pleased to announce a new site (for a good cause, no less) “Pink Ribbon Racers” but check the site out to learn more about the cause. I’ve forked Shawn Cope’s excellent blankSlate theme and plan to further develop this (and peek in on his changes) You can grab my mod fork from his site and you’re free to curse my ignorance at either site.

I have a client’s MacBook Pro 17″ that needs a OS reinstallation. So, here’s my process for a fresh installation of Mac OS X:

1. Wipe root hard disk clean. using 7x overwriting, using Disk Utility from the installation disk, prior to installation. Why? I’m not clear on this, but by wiping the entire disk with repeated reading and writing to sectors, the disk’s error detection system should disable any defective sectors. I’m thinking of this as a non-BIOS user’s Spinright.(Update: This idea was thoroughly disabused here. Oh, the benefits of journaling, community and the Internet.)
2. I would have liked to have used Mac OS Extended (Case-sensitive) disk formatting for purely arbitrary reasons, but it appears this is a problem with some applications, so I choose Mac OS Extended (Journaled). As we know, I’m not a fan of how Mac manages files, largely due to legacy support.
3. Install Mac OS X 10.5. At the “Install Summary” window, click on “Customize” and turn off all the noise:
   1. Only the HP printers (or printers I would expect to use — these are the most common in my experience)
   2. Only American English language files and fonts (even though I develop for a multi-lingual site — there’s quite a bit of data these packages install)
   3. X11 (for fink, later)
   4. I do let the disk checksum run — yes, it’s slow but it’s helpful knowing there’s no file corruption on the installation DVD.
4. Perform standard computer setup
   1. As a work machine, I’m not entering my Apple account info. Inappropriate for someone else’s business machine
   2. I don’t have a MobileMe account, nor want to spend $99/year on this service.
5. Continue installing packages
   1. Oxford Dictionaries (Optional Installs)
   2. XCode standard installation
   3. While installing XCode installed, Apple downloaded updates. I clicked on “Install and Restart”
6. Run “Software Update” (Install and Restart) until all updates are installed (for me, this was three times)
7. Run “DiskWarrior” to perform its disk review and remedy (in my case, DW found no errors but it has caught issues other times)
8. Install AppFresh (I love the ubuntu model for comprehensive OS and application updating) and check for updates. Here it finds:
   1. XCode (Updating: it’s a big download, so expect to wait. Good news is that it also updates all but X11, below)
      1. Dashcode
      2. Instrumets
      3. Interface Builder
      4. Quartz Composer
   2. X11
9. Download and install fink
   1. Install using the directions at the fink site.
   2. Enable the “unstable” repos.
   3. Run “fink selfupdate” (Updates the fink app to 0.9.0.2
   4. Install zsh
   5. Install svn-clientDon’t fink install svn-client. Rather, leopard’s version is more current than fink. Fink can be so slow at updates. BTW, fink and Mac are at version 1.4.4; svn is now at version 1.6.
   6. Install zsh template files
   7. Make zsh default user shell. Follow directions here.
   8. Run configure_zsh_templates in the shell — much better than the arduous manner zsh has you do this.
10. fink install quanta (the best non-CLI FLOSS HTML editor, but that’s not saying much, a surprising deficiency)
    1. This will install the base kde files, which I’ll use for klinkstatus and
    2. Huh. kdiff3 is missing. There’s a QT4-linked binary here. KDE on Mac is always a challenge; I’m sure it’s me.
11. fink install lftpCompile lftp, NOT fink. See here for why.
12. fink install rsyncAnother myth bits the dust — Apple’s rsync is more current than fink’s — no need to install.
13. fink install p7zip
14. Install MacVim (not fink’s vim — MacVim is so much better.)
    1. Time-saving details: Only copy MacVim.app into the /Applications folder, not the MacVim folder
    2. Copy mvim to /sw/bin
15. Install QuickSilver
    1. Map the keyboard shortcut to “Control-Shift-Spacebar”
    2. Enable “Launch on Startup”
16. Install MenuMeters (a system monitoring utility)
17. Install MacFUSE
18. Install WebKit
19. Install NeoOffice
20. Install gimp (not using fink — the binary here is better)
21. Install VirtualBox (I like VMWare’s Fusion, but the price for VirtualBox is compelling) and my testing OS’s .vdi image. Moving the image isn’t painless, however. More at another post.
22. Get rid of the dreck from the dock: dashboard, mail, safari, ichat, ical, iphoto <eyeroll>, preferences
23. Enable Remote Login in the Sharing Screen
24. Run Disk Warrior again.
25. Update: Install SiteSucker
26. Update: Install Text Wrangler (I love BBEdit but I want to cut that tether to that type of software licensing, so forget TextMate)
27. Update: Foxmarks (Solves a long old problem of cross-browser, cross-platform synchronization)
28. Update: Bitstream Vera Sans fonts. There’s no accounting for taste — this is my favorite mono-spaced font.