Year: 2005

Dublin Liberty

I was lucky enough to be able to attend the Liberty spon­sor meet­ing in Dub­lin, a couple of weeks ago. I’ve been to Dub­lin before, in October/November 2003, to assist in the Reach PSB Phase 1 pro­cure­ment, and I like the city, so I was glad to get back again, even if it was only three days. Three days is enough time to get to a couple of decent res­taur­ants and a Dub­lin pub (these being upstairs at the Chamele­on Indone­sian res­taur­ant, upstairs again at the Mer­cant­ile pub, and down in the cel­lar at the Thai Papaya res­taur­ant). There was anoth­er res­taur­ant but that was on the first, jet­lagged, night, so I’ve for­got­ten the name. Of course, no vis­it to Dub­lin would be com­plete without the end­less trek through Heath­row Air­port (see Tim’s exeges­is on Heath­row); for­tu­nately this time the escal­at­ors worked and the air­port was mostly empty so the lines for secur­ity and buses were much short­er. My weak knee also decided to be kind to me and not play up so I guess the new Pil­ates exer­cises I have are doing some good!

Back on top­ic… Dub­lin seems to have a lot of old bank build­ings that have been nicely revamped to be pubs (the Mer­cant­ile above) and hotels (the West­in, where the meet­ing was held) but maybe that’s just the way it appears when you first notice the phe­nomen­on. Unlike in many cit­ies where banks were taken over for oth­er uses, the Dub­liners don’t try to hide the her­it­age of the build­ings. I still remem­ber the first McDon­ald’s in Auck­land, New Zea­l­and, which was also in an old bank build­ing. They did a good job there as well (undoubtedly assisted by some loc­al by-laws for­cing the issue), so it is pos­sible to reuse old build­ings and keep the her­it­age aspects con­gru­ent with the new uses.

I’m new to the Liberty meet­ings, so I’m still learn­ing who’s who and how the sys­tem works. Com­pared to W3C and OASIS there appeared to be more Europeans and Japan­ese, and more women. The former makes tim­ing phone calls tricky (Europe, North Amer­ica, Japan pretty much span the globe); the lat­ter enables a cer­tain amount of knit­ting and needle­craft to go on dur­ing the dis­cus­sions (as well, of course, as the typ­ic­al email­ing that always goes on dur­ing meet­ings). The work is done in a slightly dif­fer­ent way to OASIS and W3C. There are a num­ber of dif­fer­ent groups in the Liberty Alli­ance (see Liberty Alli­ance Activ­it­ies) which share the work. So, for example, instead of one tech­nic­al com­mit­tee doing everything from dis­cuss­ing use cases to design­ing the tech­nic­al solu­tion as hap­pens in W3C and OASIS, the Busi­ness & Mar­ket­ing Expert Group comes up with the use cases (the mar­ket require­ments) and the Tech­no­logy Expert Group cre­ates the spe­cific­a­tions to meet those require­ments and sat­is­fy those use cases. This is an inter­est­ing way to split up the work; it seems to work well (syn­chron­iz­a­tion between the two Expert Groups is a neces­sary part of the pro­cess, of course). Over­all, a good crowd of people with lots of tech­nic­al and mar­ket know­ledge about import­ant prob­lems; this is going to be a fun part of my job at Sun.

New XML Conference Site

Up till now, the XML Con­fer­ence web sites have been HTML-based with no con­tent man­age­ment fea­tures. For this year, we decided to take the plunge, so we can more eas­ily add fea­tures such as RSS feeds, col­lab­or­at­ive pages, and news aggreg­a­tion from spon­sors, exhib­it­ors, and speakers. 

With help from Bor­is Mann we have a Drupal-based site, hos­ted by Bryght. The site has been up for a week, and I think we’ve caught most of the bugs, but let Dave Kunkel know if you find any problems.

I’ve been look­ing for­ward to hav­ing these fea­tures for a while. We have aggreg­at­ors that hook to Pub­Sub feeds on “xmlconference.org” and “XMLConf2005”, so if you use one of those your blog entry should show up in the aggreg­at­or. We have an RSS feed for the front page to make it easi­er to keep up with changes. We can put up sub-sites for exhib­it­ors or speak­ers a lot more eas­ily than before. There are lots more fea­tures that we’re still fig­ur­ing out how best to use; sug­ges­tions on what we should do to make the site more use­ful to exhib­it­ors, speak­ers, and attendees, are welcome!

Enabling Thumbnails

A few pit­falls on the way to enabling the thumb­nail func­tion­al­ity in WordPress.

I decided I finally wanted to track down why I could­n’t get the thumb­nails work­ing on Word­Press. I always get the mes­sage “File type not sup­por­ted. Thumb­nail not cre­ated.” even when the file­type is sup­por­ted. I run a stand­ard Debi­an stable sys­tem, with a back­port of MySQL, so my first assump­tion was that it should work. A long week­end is a good chance to try to track down these things, espe­cially when it’s rain­ing as much as it is this week­end in Van­couver. Of course, I start at the Word­Press sup­port for­ums. This leads me to try apt-get install libgd2; the thumb­nails don’t work. As a next approx­im­a­tion, try apt-get install php4-gd2; this also does­n’t work.

I dig a bit deep­er in the for­ums and find that a new­er ver­sion of PHP might solve the prob­lem; the Debi­an stable ver­sion is 4.1.2 and a ver­sion > 4.3 is recom­men­ded as the GD lib­rary is included by default. The oth­er advant­age to upgrad­ing PHP4 is that there are quite a few secur­ity holes fixed in ver­sion 4.3.9 and up; these may have been back­por­ted to 4.1.2, of course. So I look in backports.org because I already know how to use those; no new­er ver­sion of php4 there. Next I try dotdeb.org; this back­port site has a new­er ver­sion of PHP4 and a new­er ver­sion of MySQL. I add the magic line deb http://packages.dotdeb.org ./ to the /etc/apt/sources.list file. I also change the pin pri­or­ity in the pref­er­ences file to use dotdeb.org rather than backports.org. This upgrades my MySQL to dot­de­b’s 4.0 ver­sion nicely, but does­n’t touch the PHP4 install­a­tion. Seems odd to me since they should both be upgraded in the same way, I would have thought. Edd Dum­bill (Debi­an guru) gives me a couple of oth­er things to try in the pref­er­ences file; noth­ing seems cap­able of rais­ing the pri­or­ity of the dot­deb php4 install over the cur­rent stable installed ver­sion. Edd sug­gests installing each .deb by brute force; that breaks on unmet dependencies.

So I think about installing the unstable ver­sion of PHP4; maybe that will work bet­ter. I set up the pin pri­or­it­ies in the preferences file, and use apt-get -t unstable install php4. It threatens to install lots of things, so I decide to install a little at a time and make sure noth­ing breaks, or at least ensure I know what has broken if it does. First off, I make backups of httpd.conf, access.conf, the fire­wall script, and the PPPOE set­tings. Just in case. Not that I’m para­noid or anything.

  1. I install the unstable ver­sion of libexpat1; this installs libc6 and talks about hav­ing to restart the X11 serv­er. Since I’m not run­ning X, this isn’t a prob­lem. Then it decides it also needs to restart apache but the restart fails so I have to start apache by hand. For a while it looks like that failed too and I’m men­tally curs­ing but it does even­tu­ally restart.
  2. Then I decide, rather than the piece­meal approach, to do the full install with apt-get -t unstable install php4. As a side-effect it looks like I also get perl updated to 5.8.4, and it upgrades apache (just as well I saved those conf files!). The install script tells me about changes to apache con­fig files, which has me a little wor­ried… I decide to install the pack­age main­tain­er­’s ver­sion of httpd.conf and add in any needed changes later. Everything seems to keep on run­ning after­wards, though, so this upgrade was bet­ter than the last dist-upgrade I did, which did­n’t apply my changes to httpd.conf.

Now phpinfo.php shows that I have php4.3.10 installed on my sys­tem; time to try out the thumb­nail func­tion­al­ity. It still does­n’t work. Rein­stall php4-gd2. Thumb­nails still don’t work. Try apt-get -t unstable install php4-gd, which also seems to uninstall/reinstall/install a whole bunch of pack­ages. I con­sole myself that I’m half-way to sarge, if and when that ver­sion of Debi­an ever makes it to stable. Hmm, the install script just asked me what size paper should be the default on my sys­tem. I guess it has some reas­on for want­ing to know.

Since the thumb­nail gen­er­a­tion still does­n’t work, and I have no idea what to try next, I decide to give up and post on the Word­Press sup­port for­um. I hope someone there knows what the prob­lem might be! In the mean­time I cre­ate the thumb­nail I need using Imagema­gick­’s convert func­tion. This takes one com­mand line and approx­im­ately 0.01 seconds.

Later… on the Word­Press sup­port for­um someone tells me to search the for­ums. Since I’d star­ted by doing that (and quoted for­um searches in my post), that was­n’t par­tic­u­larly help­ful. Then I remem­ber I have SpamKarma installed, which has a captcha script (not that I want to use it, but it should be a good test). The error mes­sage on the captcha test page says the GD lib­rary isn’t enabled. A bit of Googling turns up the idea that maybe I need to restart apache yet again. I had­n’t thought of this before because the Debi­an upgrade/install pro­cess usu­ally restarts everything that needs to be restar­ted, includ­ing apache. I run apachectl restart and find I can finally click the magic but­ton on image upload to cre­ate thumbnails!

So the les­son appears to be: if in doubt, restart apache. Three times, prefer­ably. Any less just may not work.

Inspiration 5443

My first post about knit­ting — item 5443 from Inspir­a­tion 75 (and no, I guess they could­n’t come up with a bet­ter name for it).

I’ve been knit­ting for most of my life, except for a long gap in the 1990s. I took it up again about 3 years ago and, due in no little part to Eve’s encour­age­ment, am going to start show­ing off some of what I’ve done and am doing. Maybe blog­ging will even encour­age me to fin­ish things soon­er — I tend to do most of a piece but not get around to fin­ish­ing it for some time.

my version of 5443 pattern view of 5443 All that being said, here’s my first blog entry on the sub­ject of crafts, my ver­sion of item 5443 in a pat­tern book called Inspir­a­tion 75. One would think that a book that calls itself “inspir­a­tion” could come up with inspired names for the pat­terns with­in it, rather than just num­bers. In the book the top looks like the image on the left (note the link leads to an online retail­er for the pat­tern books and yarn; I have no idea wheth­er they’re any good or not but they did have all the images). Instead of the recom­men­ded yarn, I used Schoeller­’s Micro-Cablé in col­our 23 (yet anoth­er unin­spired name). The link there is to Wise Needle, a great site if you want to fig­ure out which yarns to sub­sti­tute for that hard-to-find yarn from Europe. Tim took the photo of the res­ults on a mini-golf course in Maui, hence the “shot on loc­a­tion” look. 

Favourite Recipe Book

A review of my cur­rent favour­ite recipe book, Deborah Madis­on’s “Veget­ari­an Cook­ing for Everyone”.

I don’t usu­ally wax lyr­ic­al about recipe books, although I do have a few, but I was brows­ing through my favour­ite the oth­er day look­ing for some­thing to make and figured it’s well worth a recommendation.

Deborah Madis­on’s Veget­ari­an Cook­ing for Every­one fea­tures this quote on the front cover: 

The 1,400 recipes in this book are those that I like to cook. If you’re a com­mit­ted veget­ari­an, you can pre­pare every recipe in this book. If you are a vegan, you can cook most of them. If you don’t attach a title to your eat­ing style, you can cook everything in this book and serve it with meat, fish, or fowl.

The focus of this book is enjoy­ing cook­ing and enjoy­ing the food that is pro­duced. There are no lec­tures on being a veget­ari­an; there is inform­a­tion on basic cook­ing tech­niques and what vari­ous ingredi­ents are and how they work. The wide range of recipes cov­ers almost everything I’ve ever wanted to cook (except for meat-based meals, of course). And the recipes work. They’re not neces­sar­ily quick, but the clear explan­a­tions ensure that the res­ults are worth eat­ing. I was look­ing through the book while writ­ing this review, and found myself temp­ted to make things on every page (cot­tage cheese and nut­meg pan­cakes, any­one?). Hmmm, I think it’s time for lunch.

Jerzy Kosinski’s “Being There”

Jerzy Kos­in­ski’s Being There was a reas­on­ably pop­u­lar book­club book, at least in part because it’s short and thus most people could read it in full (and some even read it twice!). Sev­er­al of us had also seen the film (screen­play also by Jerzy Kos­in­ski). Reac­tions to the book at book­club var­ied, from those who found it deeply pro­found to those (includ­ing me) who did­n’t quite get it and wer­en’t sure what they were meant to “get” either.

A brief syn­op­sis: Chance is a sim­pleton who works as a garden­er for an old man (rela­tion­ship unspe­cified) and spends his spare time watch­ing tele­vi­sion. His exist­ence is com­pletely unknown out­side of the house and garden where he lives and works (no birth cer­ti­fic­ate, no record of exist­ence any­where), and when the Old Man dies, the law­yers who take pos­ses­sion of the prop­erty evict him. Through luck, Chance is taken into the house of a rich, influ­en­tial couple, who assume he is someone of know­ledge and power because of his calmness and the high qual­ity of the hand-me-down clothes from the Old Man. His state­ments about life in the garden are assumed to be deeply mean­ing­ful alleg­or­ies; his know­ledge of human beha­viour as shown on tele­vi­sion meshes with the expect­a­tions of those around him, and he is feted by both report­ers and politicians.

Reviews on Amazon talk about the bit­ing satire evid­enced in the book; the book­club mem­bers spent more time talk­ing about the meta­phors. Chance goes from being lit­er­ally nobody, with no iden­ti­fic­a­tion, and no real name, to some­body import­ant simply due to luck — an exag­ger­ated ver­sion of Andy War­hol’s 15 minutes of fame. People see in him what they wish to see — the wife of the busi­ness­man invents a romantic past for him, the Soviet Ambas­sad­or thinks he speaks Rus­si­an and under­stands Krylov, the US Pres­id­ent con­siders him as the next can­did­ate for Vice-Pres­id­ent — des­pite there being no actu­al basis for any of these assumptions. 

I found the book rather too over the top for my taste; the film was bet­ter and more detailed. Peter Sellers made Chance believ­able where the book shows the holes in the fable. Oth­er book­club mem­bers loved the book though and enjoyed fig­ur­ing out the meta­phors and won­der­ing which bits of the book were inspired by which parts of Jerzy Kos­in­ski’s life. We spent a bit of time dis­cuss­ing what changes would have been required in the book were it writ­ten today, rather than in 1971. Tele­vi­sion is a lot less coy now and Chance’s reac­tions to the attemp­ted seduc­tions might be dif­fer­ent. All in all, I’d rather see the film again than read the book again.