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I am a big SecondLife fan. Well, lets rephrase that. There are a lot of things I like about SecondLife, but not really sure where they are heading now. So with all the changes in the official Linden Secondlife, a friend of mine started to look at the OpenSim and the OSGrid, and I just thought that I will try it out.

So now I have my own OpenSim server on my PC. Practically it is not good for anything, I am all alone, noone else can log into the SIM, but that’s one of the reasons that it is a practical solution for builders. In Secondlife the lag is something awful lately, and there are weird bugs sometimes that make building a real torture. Then uploading textures if someone makes tattoos or dresses, can be expensive, it costs money each time until you get it right – for that reason I used the Test server, but that is more full of bugs than the release server.

But if you have your own server then you have no lag, no weird SL bugs, and no cost for uploading textures. So you can build peacefully and match the textures without spending money, then after you are ready, you can move it to Secondlife. The server actually eats less memory than the viewer, so it does not require some extreme PC.

The only downside is that you can’t chat with your friends while you are building. So if you are the builder who builds and IMs his friends, then it is not the best solution. Unless someone comes up with a way to connect the client to more than one servers, one where you log in for real, and the others only for the chat sessions. Then you could chat with all the people on the different servers while being on your own server, building lag free.

Well, I was totally and absolutely unimpressed by him. He had nothing new, nothing inspiring, nothing exciting to say, same old ideas. Plus the outburst against how Cloud Computing is the evil, how DVD is the evil, how… is evil. Then he auctioned off his book for about 200USD – you can download it for free here. And then sold a bunch of lapel pins, buttons, badges, keyrings, etc. Ok, be fair it all went to the Free Software Foundation. But it still was a bit weird for me. Imagine a bearded guy without shoes standing on the stage, auctioning his books and then selling badges. But it must be me.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I like a lot of his ideas. I am all for open-source software, I like the idea of free software, I really like the idea of revisioning the current copyright rules in the favour of artists and the public as opposed to the sole interest of the publishers, but I try to be realistic.

I know that Linux is a good OS, and that by now you can have a passable desktop PC experience with it, still it took the community almost two decades to get to the level of Mac OS or Windows – we can start a big argument here that Linux beats Windows hands down, or Mac pawns all, but it’s beside the point. I know that Apache is the most popular server on the market, and Tomcat is the most popular container, and MySQL and PostgreSQL are big too. As I said, I know that free software can be good, very good indeed.

At the same time I know that big banks are somewhat reluctant to jump completely on the free software bandwagon, and I am not sure you want Heathrow to run on PostgreSQL and that air traffic control systems should be open source and free for all, maintained by a community of interested developers, branching every half a year on issues like “should we differentiate between Spitfires and Cesnas or not?”. I am not sure that we don’t need commercial, proprietary systems where the actual software can not be downloaded freely by all – especially in industries where that given software can give a competitive edge measurable in real dollar value.

Also, I am not sure that if the developers are not paid for developing – because the software is free -, they can maintain their work for long. And while I am aware that there are business models for this, giving away software, selling support, I am not sure that we really want to push the developers of the air traffic control system toward the “we get paid for tracking down bugs and correcting them” business model. I want them to get paid a load of money and I don’t want an enthusiastic bug hunt after deployment of the system, when I am sitting 10 000 meters in the air.

But even if we step back, and talk about not so life-or-death kind of systems, I think there must be a viable way to pay the developers. Stallman never talked about his idea of putting money into the pockets of developers. That just supposed to happen somehow. Or probably one of the “theoretical and non-existent issues”.

Now step away from the development part, and look at the poor user. I am not convinced by the “only software running everything on your own computer is acceptable” argument of Stallman, as I don’t want to bother with maintaining and paying for my own flickr and twitter servers. I don’t even want to know if they need a server. I don’t want to run my own Zoho or Google Doc, so I can use my netbook or iPhone or whatever to look at my data.

And I have some more differences. For example I don’t think that Microsoft or Apple is evil incarnate as Stallman says. I am not a fan of a man who dismisses every real concern or idea that does not align with his point of view with an “I don’t concern myself with theoretical and non-existent issues” statement. Also, while I agree that a lot of people in Hungary has problems when it comes to speak English, mocking your audience for their lack of language skill is not stylish. If you don’t understand the question your response is not “that was an incoherent question which made no sense at all” waiting for the laugh from the audience, but “could you rephrase it, please?”.

These days if I have to go to some office, to the townhall, or to talk with someone about job related stuff, or anything where I may need to write some document, or pull up some e-mail, I take my Acer Aspire One with me.

It’s small, light, and perfect for these things. It boots up fast, and shuts down fast, except.

Today I was checking some mails at Friday’s while I was waiting for my food, and when I finished, I wanted to shut the One down – I don’t like hibernate, it eats the battery. And I could not.

Turns out McAfee started an update in the background – without any notice – and when I tried to shut my netbook down it just popped a message box “McAfee is installing some updates, don’t shut down or restart your machine until the procedure is finished”.

It lost of course. Actually, I pressed the nice button with the green light and closed the lid – the machine shut down. Probably the McAfee Security Center was not happy about this. I honestly don’t care.

Dear McAfee. It is one of the most stupid, most obnoxious things I’ve ever seen. How dare you decide when I can shut my netbook down? How dare you to force me to shut down unsafe? How dare you to start such a procedure without asking first?

I am a lazy guy and probably would have kept your product on my netbook. But not anymore. You have lost a customer. Because you had the audacity, you had the effrontery to prevent me from quickly shut my netbook down when I wanted to.

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When I finally showed the head logo of the main page (heszroland.hu) to a friend he instantly critized the font set I used – distance beetwen letter, kernelling, and so on – and offered his help to play around with it. Naturally I accepted the offer and he returned me a better version, explaining what he did and what font-set he used.

I was very glad, but there was a few things I wanted to try/change, so I went to get the font set – Minion Pro. It turns out that you can get it from Adobe for 199.00 USD. Needless to say I did not buy it – it was cheaper to make the changes and send it back to my friend so he can do it with the right fonts.

But this prompted a longer discussion in the evening about the fonts, the prevalence of the Arial and other not-so nice looking default fonts, the price of the custom fonts, their general usability and so on.

The current situation is that you can set any kind of fonts for the texts of your website, but what will be displayed depends on the system of the people who see you website.

For example, if I buy the Minion Pro font set, and set it as the font used on my page you will see Arial most likely, unless you bought the font set too, and installed it on your computer.

As people don’t buy font sets, it is basically irrelevant what custom fonts you use for your site. This means, that not many people buy these font sets so the price is high.

What we would really need is – went my argument – is some kind of read only font types, which would be free, widely and frequently distributed and easily available. These read only font sets would be good only for displaying the fonts but not usable to edit and create new things – yes, probably in about 3 days there would be a method to “break” the read only property, but then you can download the font sets even today, so it’s not a problem.

That would mean that if I want to use some exotic font set for my website I could be pretty sure that the people who come to my site will see those exact letters. It would be an incentive for me to use these fonts. It would mean that a lot of people who are building quality websites would get these fonts because that would not be a useless effort.

And accidentally that would mean that instead of the current X professional designer lets say 100x people would buy the font – I think the 100x is not an over-, rather an underestimation, thus the price of the custom font could be much lower – which means te price of the font sets could be lowered.
When I go to Adobe, I see they sell font sets for an average of 35USD / type (35USD for bold capital, 35USD for italic regular, etc.).
The Chaparral font set has 8 types which cost 35USD apiece, 199USD for the whole set, the same for the Minion Pro.
If displaying custom fonts on web pages would be really easy and effective, and the interest in getting these fonts grown as a result, these could cost 1USD per type, or 5USD for a pack. Would you shell out 5 dollars to get a quality font for your website knowing that everyone can see the exact same fonts you put there?
I think a lot of people would.

Now, I am not 100% sure that this is the way with every font. But since the web content is growing, almost everyone and their dog is writing a blog, create a website, and I think a lot of people want a site that looks good, different, personal, etc., I think there is a growing market for everything that is needed for a good webdesign. Including custom fonts.
We had a pretty good discussion there, and agreed that it could be like that – if only there was the neccessary technology.

As life has it sometimes, next day ZenElements shared his new post on Plurk. I checked it out, and what a coincidence, the post is presenting the CSS3 technique: font embedding – btw, Alex has a whole series of pretty good posts on the CSS3 standard and their use. Check them out.
What it is about: basically with the use of the @font-face command you force the browser to use the font set that can be found on the hosting server. That means that I can use whatever font I want on my page, all I have to do is put the font file into the correct directory on your server and the browser will load it from there.

There are still a few problems with the solution:

1. Awfully slow.
2. So far only Safari supports the CSS3 standards, so it does not work with any other browsers yet.
3. There is no way – as far as I know – to check first if the user has the font on his PC to avoid the download if the answer is yes.

This is a way to achieve the “read only” font set. If the speed can be boosted somehow then it will be a really handy thing. Now the question is, whether it will prompt people to use more custom fonts, and the font sellers to lower their prices to attract more buyers.

I am not sure. But I hope it will happen – mainly because I don’t want to shell out 1,024.00 USD for a font set I will use occasionally.
A note for the end: this post does not want to appear comprehensive, and technical and all. Just some thoughts about a problem we ran into last week, and the resulting discussion, brainstorming.

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Well, seems times are achanging, and now Jerry Yang, CEO of Yahoo! advises Steve Ballmer that Microsoft should really, really buy Yahoo!, pretty please.
See, after Yahoo! running around, trying to make a business with everyone they could find, finally they come back, as the prodigal son, sending a bright eyed message to Microsoft: You should buy us, just say the word and I am at the table, with pens in hands.

Isn’t it just pathetic?

And should Microsoft buy Yahoo!? Would it make sense – maybe, although not many were convinced that Yahoo! would help Microsoft with the internet business -, or would it be just burning money?

There will be several people working on it, Zoli for sure, Krishnan Subramanian, Ben Kepes and Dan Morrill, and a couple more I think, so it will be interesting.

And for some reason Zoli thought that he will give me a chance to write there, which will be an interesting thing to see, but hopefully they will have a high level of quality control, and won’t let the more embarrassing pieces get published. Or at least they will correct the spelling and the grammar.

So, there is a new place to go and read, and go for it, for I think there will be good articles from the people. So don’t forget, go and take a walk down on Cloud Avenue for some window shopping. Who knows, maybe you will find something you like.

Now, there are a lot of WiFi in London, that’s true. There is The Cloud, BTOpen, T-Mobile, etc., and yes, if you are on a business trip you probably can afford the prices – 2p per minute for BTOpen, or 5 pounds for 30 minutes at T-Mobile, or you can you register with them and get a regular subscription – however there is still one problem left.

The quality of the WiFi is incredibly low. I paid for the WiFi at the hotel, and in theory I had internet access, but it was so slow that it took about 40-70 seconds to load one simple page, so I gave up.
I went to several Starbucks, and I went to Wetherspoon – I heard they have free WiFi access, that day they did not have -, and I tried, and spend actual money on the internet, but I had limited resources so to speak, so after it turned out that even the paid WiFi is uselessly slow I gave up, and sent the mail after I got home.

So, yes, theoretically I could keep all my stuff on the net. I could compute in the Cloud.
And when I am not at home or in the office with a broadband, I can rest without any worry that I will be e-mailed to work in the Cloud.
Because there is a good chance that I will not have any way to fly that high.

]]> http://fracturedbloughts.rolandhesz.com/2008/08/23/cloud-computing-in-a-bunker/feed/ 0 http://fracturedbloughts.rolandhesz.com/2008/07/26/some-tips-on-working-with-a-self-hosted-wordpress-blog/ http://fracturedbloughts.rolandhesz.com/2008/07/26/some-tips-on-working-with-a-self-hosted-wordpress-blog/#comments Sat, 26 Jul 2008 14:23:00 +0000 Roland Hesz http://fracturedbloughts.heszroland.hu/?p=186 Joanna Young moved from Typepad to a self-hosted WordPress blog, and wrote a manual on how to do it.

That’s a pretty good write up, if you are planning something like this, moving to self-hosted blog, I say you go and read it. She naturally ran into some problems, and noted those too. As I read her frequently I thought I will share my thoughts, but after a few minutes I decided that the comment would be too long, and I decided to write a blogpost instead. So here we go…

I have been on a self-hosted WordPress blog since the January of 2006 and since then I worked out some really handy tricks. So if you try to move your blog, or even if you just have a self-hosted WordPress blog, I share some tips you can use.

1. Go to http://www.wampserver.com, download and then install wamp server. By default it will install in the c:wamp directory. From now on, you have an Apache server with PHP5 and MySQL on your computer, congratulations. (This first step works only on Windows, on Linux it is a tad bit more complicated – as usual. )
2. Your next step is to go the c:wampwww directory and extract your WordPress here under whatever folder you want to. I recommend you to install everything you would install on your site, every theme, plug-in, etc.
3. Start your wamp server and on the system tray left click on it’s icon (a green arch like thingie) and on the pop-up menu click on the Start All Services. It will start Apache and MySQL.
4. Start your favourite browser and go to http://localhost.
   It will bring up the Wamp server page with Apache and PHP version and everything.
5. Under Your Projects you will see the WordPress directory, but first go to phpmyadmin (it’s under the heading Tools) and create a database for your WordPress blog.
6. When you are finished with that, go to your WordPress site, and do whatever it tells you to do, which will be the same thing you have to do on your self-hosted real blog.
7. If you intend to move your blog, now is the time to go and migrate it, like Joanna wrote in her tutorial. When you are finished you have everything set up as if it were a real blog site.
8. Now you have your posts, comments, etc. migrated, you can start to play around, and tweak it to your hearts content.
9. When you feel like you are glad with the result, go to your WordPress admin page, go to Manage->Export and export your blog. When you are ready go to your live site and Import the whole stuff.
10. When you are ready and imported everything, check your site – you will have to use the IP address for this but it worth it – and finally go and turn your domain name over to your new IP address.

If you do it this way, your blog will be up and running, accessible to the whole world while you hammer away backstage, and the only time it goes down is while your domain name is routed to your new address.

Another thing, which is quite important. You should set your WordPress to backup your site each day, and if you have a gmail account, make it to e-mail the backup file to you.

And, as you have your local WordPress blog set up, you can try the plug-ins and themes and all the usual stuff that has a chance to mess up your site safely.

The same thing can be achieved on Linux too, only Apache, PHP5 and MySQL has to be installed and configured independently, from there it’s the same.

I hope this tip was helpful a bit.

UPDATE: Ok, I just knew I will forgot something. So, if you run Wamp and all it shows is a blank page when you try to open http://localhost, don’t forget to check if Skype is running. If you run Skype and it is set to <i>Use port 80 and 443 as alternatives for incoming connections</i> it will hog up the port that Apache uses. This problem can be solved in several ways:

1. in Skype go to Tools->Options->Advance->Connection, and there set the checkbox <i>Use port 80 and 443 as alternatives for incoming connections</i> to false)
2. Quit Skype
3. , or bye starting Wamp first and Skype second – in this case, Skype will fall back to use a different port as the default one is used up by Wamp.

If you chose the 1st or 2nd solution, don’t forget to restart the server (left click on the tray icon of Wamp and choose either Start all services or Restart all services).

UPDATE 2: For all those who are using a Mac, read this post, and try MAMP instead of WAMP.

I don’t know, I’ve never been the fan of the put everything in the browser and “fly me to the clouds” movement, for several reasons. First, in my opinion the web browser is called browser and not “advanced data manipulation and browsing and knitting interface” for a reason.

The second is that well, if you put everything in the cloud, what do you do when it starts to rain? Dare Obasanjo certainly has a point that a 99.9% uptime means almost 9 hours of downtime a year. Some posts are not really using the same math as I do, they calculate with a worse service level, and that completely undermines the complaint (99% uptime means almost 88 hours of downtime a year, so 6 hours is not that bad). And if you are here, go and read Om Malik’s opinion, he has a long post on the topic.

So, Amazon is promising almost 9 hours of downtime. If that 9 hours happen to arrive on a quiet Sunday – or over several quiet Sundays – then it’s no problem really.

But what do you do if that 9 hours drive accross the last day of a critical project phase?
I like the idea of cloud computing, and I don’t want to say that you should not use Amazon S3, or Zoho or GoogleDoc, or whatever service you are using. I just would like to know what will happen to your service when the cloud gets dark?

On LinkedIn there was a question on why people want technical documentation in PDF, on paper, in Word, when all information can be put on internal wikis, blogs, etc. Most of the answers pointed to the neccessity to reach the things offline.

And not only when the server goes down. Interesting thing I read on JibberJobber, LinkedIn for example does not have a backup of your profile. If it disappears for whatever reason, you are toast. Have to start from scratch. That’s a good reason to save all your contacts, and your profile on your PC regularly – i.e. whenever there is a change.

Internet access is not 100% around the world, and the internet does not have 100% uptime. Bits go down regularly. I bet there are a couple intranets down even right now. Also there are 3 things in life that are certain: death, taxes and data loss.

I don’t talk against cloud computing – who am I to talk against it anyway -, I just want to point out that when you go near the clouds, you better have an umbrella, just in case.

Then Tivadar Puskás ((I asked on Twitter what the world ‘Hallo’means. According to wikipedia, it comes from ‘Hallom’which means ‘I hear it’in Hungarian, shouted by the excited Puskás I can believe it, because the word does not mean anything in English. )) invented the telephone exchange, which became a reality in Boston, in 1877.

That was the Telephone 1.0.

The following years has brought great popularity to the phone service, and slowly, it has spread around the world, to the extent that simple people acquired the ability to call each other from their own home, and several services has been built around the phone, the toll free numbers has been invented, the tone mode has been invented which allowed the use of IVR menus, and a lot of other, more or less useful services and supporting technologies.
That was Telephone 2.0
Later, the phones lost their cords, and moved into people’s pocket, and now they could send text messages, actually bringing back the joy of writing a letter – a pre-phone communication technology – on the phone, sending it from one device to the other, and even more additional services has been introduced.
That was the Telephone 3.0

Except, nobody ever say it, because that seems kind of weird. Neither do we use the expression with the television set, which has improved a lot from the first black and white sets to the modern TiVo.
Then why, why do we insist saying things like Web2.0 and now Web3.0?

It is the same thing as it was, only there is more of it, more users, more servers, more services, and we have learned a lot of new things we can do with the same web.
Should not we say “Web User 2.0″ instead? But then, would not it be extremely weird?

Josh Catone hit the nail right on the head with his post: There is no Web3.0, there is no Web2.0 – there is just Web.