girtby.net

Some blog updates, the details of which will no doubt enthrall and excite very few of you.

Invisible Changes

Under the covers, the entire girtby site (such as it is) is now stored in an SVK repository depot. SVK is a great little distributed version control system built on top of Subversion. I want to say more about it in future, but for now it is really helping me maintain this site.

I use it like this. First I set up local mirrors of various Subversion repositories. The mephisto repository, the 1-2-stable branch of rails, and the repository for my one and only plugin. With a single svk sync -a, I can download the most recent changes in all of those repositories, and access it locally.

So then I copy the source from each of these repositories into a new local branch. Any changes I make on this local branch are, of course, isolated from the mirrored sources that I just downloaded.

When time comes to update, I can just merge across from the appropriate mirrored repository into my local branch. The really cool thing is that this merge is generally painless because SVK manages to track merge points (a well-known limitation of Subversion). This means it can do a three-way diff and hence get the merge right ninety-nine times out of a hundred. Plus the Mephisto codebase has extensive unit tests that really help the confidence level.

Result: updating to the latest Mephisto, rails, etc is extremely easy. You wordpress guys really should do yaself a favour.

Visible Changes

There have also been some subtle changes to the girtby stylesheet. Hopefully it looks better, although you be the judge.

Thanks to the version control I can tell you in exact detail what was changed, but I’ll spare you from that. Suffice it to say: some font changes, de-cluttering, and general tidyup. There is more to do here.

Of course the most visible change is the new Markdown WYSIWYM comment editor, WMD. Let me know what you think of it. I’m very impressed so far, this is how WYSIWYM editors should be done.

It should be pointed out that the preview mode may not accurately match your comment when it published. This is because WMD uses its own, JavaScript, implementation of Markdown. The rest of the blog uses the ruby implementation, which is not as good, frankly. Until I get around to fixing the ruby version (yeah, right), please accept my apologies if your comment comes out wonky. Or more wonky than you anticipated.

Since the last entry on the .xxx domain proposal, and subsequent discussions in another forum, I’ve been thinking a bit about how content rating should work.

To my mind a key requirement for technologies to rate content on the internet is that it should allow for multiple content classification criteria originating from many different, disparate sources. This is the biggest problem that I see with the .xxx domain: it requires that everyone everywhere agree what sort of content should be classified this way. Such agreement is clearly not likely in all but the most extreme corner cases.

In answer to the question posed in my last post, it seems that the W3C’s preferred replacement for PICS is … RDF. No, not not that RDF, although there probably is a bit of the second kind of RDF going on around the first kind of RDF.

RDF is flexible enough to describe all kinds of metadata, not just content ratings. And when describing content ratings for a site, I believe it can rate against multiple classification schemes.

By way of experiment I obtained a RDF-based content rating for this site using the Family Online Safety Institute classification scheme. They have an online tool to generate the rating and it is pretty straightforward; just fill in a form and they email you the RDF file and instructions on how to add it to the site. You can go to the label tester to see the results.

The labelling guidelines are well described, with the possible exception of the language ratings. These are sufficiently vague that I ended up simply picking the middle-of-the-road rating in lieu of the missing “pretty clean but occasional f-bombs” rating.

But the point is that however imperfect this rating system is, it does at least allow co-existence with others. So I could also use a hypothetical pony-based rating system which classifies sites in terms of exposure to ponies, and rate my site using both FOSI and PONI schemes.

To pick a possibly more useful hypothetical rating system: how about a rating system to declare content that contains images and recordings of deceased persons? I understand that such content is distressing to some Aboriginal people. There are probably many other useful rating systems not yet in existence.

The only missing piece of the puzzle is how to rate other people’s content. The problem of finding a third-party rating for a given site is one that I haven’t seen a solution for. Similarly the ability to attach a rating to a hyperlink (for example, replacing the ubiquitous “[NSFW]” tag) would be useful, and I’m not sure how this would work.

Brendan raised the point that content labelling should be voluntary and I obviously agree with this. It’s a logical extension of the provision that multiple rating systems should be allowed. I would probably go one step further and say that it should be possible for others to label your content, whether or not you choose to do it yourself.

There are lots of security issues relating to this — and RFC 3675 addresses most of them — but I don’t think these are insurmountable. The question of which rating is authoritative for a given site is very similar to the question of which site is appropriate for a given search term. Search engines seem to have sorted out this problem to a reasonable level of approximation.

The ability to aggregate multiple ratings for a given site into some coherent whole seems like a key requirement for any technology that allows distributed rating. When a single agency — either the content author themselves, or a third-party — is solely responsible for rating content, there is the potential for abuse or mistake. This can only be mitigated effectively by allowing multiple independent agencies to rate content. In fact this is a general metadata problem, and I’d be interested to see how this will be addressed.

If you’re reading this in a feed aggregator, click on through to enjoy the beautiful new theme that I have spent hours slaving over.

OK it’s the same as the old theme, but don’t let that stop you from having a look. The new theme means that I am finally settling into my new digs, namely the Mephisto blogging engine.

As regular readers will know, late last year I needed to migrate away from Typo, and Mephisto seemed to require the least effort. The migration was (relatively) seamless, and the new platform is a pleasant surprise. It’s better than Typo in many ways, having:

• a powerful model of page and article structure that resembles a lightweight CMS;
• themes based on the liquid template engine and are easy to install and manage;
• AJAXy comment moderation;
• much more active development (and one of the main developers is also a rails committer);
• much less resource usage (with a thumbs-up from my hosting provider); and
• plugins (not as easy to use as wordpress, but plugins nonetheless).

Notwithstanding this there are still some niggling problems, the most visible of which is an intermittent fault which causes a generic Mephisto error “Status: 500 Internal Server Error”. If you see this, please be aware that I know about it and am monitoring it. If you get it while trying to post a comment (sigh), just email me.

In slightly tangential news, I’m exploring the use of SVK to manage the Mephisto codebase and my changes. So far it looks pretty powerful, and I will report back after further investigation.

One more thing: I’m at linux.conf.au this week. If you are too, let’s meet.

If you are reading this, I have converted successfully over to Mephisto.

There are still some outstanding issues to be resolved, such as:

• The theme is the default Mephisto theme, I need to migrate my old theme over to Mephisto. As a result some formatting may look wierd.
• Some older permalinks (specifically the /archives links) won’t work right now.
• Assorted sidebar content is still missing.

Everything else should work OK though. If not, just let me know.

For now I just want to see if the resource usage problems that I was having with Typo are still occurring with Mephisto. If not, then I’ll start working on the above issues.

Just a warning to say that service may be interrupted here on girtby.net over the next few weeks. In fact, outages are likely.

Unfortunately the underlying reason is Typo. Hence I have no choice but to migrate away from it.

My hosting provider has recently contacted me to say that my blog is again using up far too many resources on the shared server. CPU, RAM and database connection usage are all in excess of acceptable limits.

Recently I measured RAM usage at almost 128MB (!). It dropped to about 50MB after restarting, which seems to indicate some kind of memory leak. For now I’ve punted on this problem by restarting the blog engine every day using a cron task. As for the CPU and database connections, there are no quick fixes.

So I expect to soon migrate to Mephisto, another Rails-based blogging engine. This may or may not be any gentler on my hosting provider’s servers, but it *is* a fairly straightforward migration path from Typo. So I’m going to try it and see. It has other advantages over Typo in that it does seem to be under active development (with a working website even) and one of the developers is also on the Rails core team. Which is nice.

The last resort solution is to go back to Wordpress, and I’m not looking forward to that, mainly because there’s no standard for exported blog content. Someone should do something about that.

In any case I’m travelling so it’s unlikely that the migration will be complete before the plug gets pulled on the current site. Santa, can you bring me a new blogging engine for xmas?

OK, I’ve had it with trackbacks.

It’s a good idea. You have a blog, I have a blog. I can post a comment your blog by posting on my blog and sending you a trackback. This is great because it means that I own the comment and can update/correct it in accordance with my own ethical standards.

The only trouble is, it’s not authenticated, so it opens the door to spammers. I’m seeing that about 99.99% of trackbacks I receive are spam. And 99% of spam that I get arrives via trackback. This is in line with what others are seeing.

And there’s not much more that I can see to do about it. They’re already being filtered with Akismet. I could add some content scanning or other heuristics but these seem fairly limited at best. I certainly can’t add CAPTCHA or similar protien-folding tests.

So, screw it. Bye-bye trackbacks. Come back when you’ve got some protection against spam.

Hello, I’m Alastair Rankine.

Well, as revelations go, that’s hardly as exciting as Kiss appearing without makeup for the first time. But I have been expending some effort trying to maintain a degree of anonymity on girtby.net, and so it’s not an easy decision to open the kimono.

I described the original reason for anonymity was to protect myself from inadvertent career limitation: saying something now that I might have cause to regret later. Recently though I’ve come to the realisation that this attitude is too conservative, and that instead of minimising a possible downside to blogging on girtby.net, I have missed out on a potentially large upside.

When a hypothetical future employer googles searches for my (fairly unusual) name on the web, I want them to find some of my offerings and other worthwhile public content. These represent my online resume and are potentially very valuable to my brand.

I could have started afresh with a new blog (and the exhausting search for a new domain name), but this would have meant coming up with new, fresh, offerings to bolster my online reputation. This would be needed if in fact I had already tarnished the credibility of the girtby.net identity. Which is possible, but unlikely in my subjective opinion. A good spray once in a while shouldn’t do anyone any harm.

The other reason for decloaking on girtby.net was that my identity had already leaked anyway. Yes, this post on OddThinking was written by me. Maintaining anonymity is hard.

Henceforth, girtby.net will be the public representation of Alastair Rankine. It will be “officially” focused on mostly serious, but not exclusively technical, topics. Not much change, in other words. I had long ago abandoned the practice of blogging every passing thought or URL or movie recommendation.

If you care about such eminations of inconsequence from me, you’ll need to look at my other blog. Yes, that’s right, I have set up a blog which is a completely separate identity and uses a pseudonym. It’s open to all girtby.net readers, current and future, but you will need to email me to get the URL. The mildly ironic consequence of this is that you will need to decloak (or at least de-lurk) in order to read my new blog. I wish there was another way, but I can’t think of it.

So all the chaos with the Typo migration seems to have settled down. I’ve upgraded to the latest 4.0.2 release with all security patches applied. I’ve also fixed up some of the old RSS URLs, so hopefully the 10 Bloglines users who are currently seeing a red exclamation mark next to their girtby.net subscription will start to get some updates soon.

So now it’s time to ask the question: why did I do this?

Learning Rails

The main justification for switching to Typo was to learn more about Ruby on Rails. This is a very interesting web framework which, from what I have seen so far, does seem worthy of at least some of the hype that surrounds it.

Typo is an excellent blogging engine, although still a bit immature. While it has all the features that I need, there is plenty of opportunity to expand. This is a good thing.

I want to start contributing more in the way of software to the world, and with a Rails-based blogging engine I get to learn more about Rails in the process. In the past I have been deliberately avoiding contributing to Wordpress because I had no interest in PHP.

Watch this space for some offerings to the Typo community, and the blogosphere at large.

Wordpress Gripes

Less important, but still worthy of mention, were some gripes that I had with Wordpress. Don’t get me wrong, I still regard Wordpress very highly, and it’s probably still my default recommendation to people. Nevertheless, the following shortcomings in Wordpress were persistently annoying, enough to make me jump ship:

• Overly-agressive enclosures. Link to an MP3 on someone else’s site and it becomes an enclosure in your feed. This is BAD, and it will apparently not be fixed.
• No comment preview! OK, it’s available as a plugin, but this really should built-in.
• No Atom 1.0 support. Hello!? Atom was standardised almost 9 months ago.
• No per-post formatting. Not a huge problem I suppose, but kind of annoying if you try a new markup language and then decide you don’t like it.
• A wierd post “summary” feature. Basically it takes the first few sentances of your post, rips out the markup and uses this in various places (archive pages, RSS feeds). I never could understand why it did this, and how to disable it permanently, everywhere.

There are some other minor things, but those are the main problems I see.

If you are subscribed to the comments feed I apologise for the recent influx of spam. I upgraded to the latest Typo last night and something has obviously gone wrong. Could be due to PEBKAC, admittedly. I’ll try to keep control of it manually until I find out what’s going on. Thanks to Aristotle for the heads up.

In related news, spam continues to get more sophisticated, or at least desperate. I’ve just seen some comments from “Nik” which are on topic. Not exactly Noel Coward, but at least relevant to the post. Check it:

• On Must. See. Movies., Nik writes: “long lis, but we’ll try :)”.

• Regarding Creative, Uncommon, Nik says: “I’ll listen that, thanks”.

• Nik agrees “Nice phone! :)” on the subject of the Nokia N70.

• He even responds to a comment of mine confirming that “alastair, yep, preview is working now”.

But in all of these he gives a URL for an AOL-hosted site for (presumably) buying pharmaceuticals. In one instance he even gives his name as “Buy (whatever)”. Definitely a spammer.

So my theory is that this is either a very sophisticated spammer with some kind of algorithm to generate a relevant comment based on keyword matching on the article, or the spammers have resorted to manual entry. Given the subtle variations in capitalisation of his name (eg “NIk” versus “Nik”), I’m leaning towards the latter.

Manual entry of spam! They must be desperate. Does this mean that we’re, well, winning?

Welcome to the new Girtby.net, same as the old Girtby.net, but now 100% Web 2.0 compliant.

Yes, I’ve finally made good on my threat to migrate the blog to Typo, the blogging package built with Ruby On Rails. Typo 4.0 was released a few days ago and I’m happy to be an early adopter.

What problem am I trying to solve? Why the problem of not running a blog with Ruby on Rails, of course. Also there are some longstanding Wordpress gripes which I will go into in more detail later (except to say: Atom 1.0!) Lastly it gave me the impetus to clean up the theme, and I think you’ll agree it looks nicer than the old one.

All URLs should be cool, with the exception of per-article comment feeds. All other existing feeds should still work.

Some things I still need to fix are:

• Sometimes the Markdown formatting doesn’t work right. I think this is a bug in BlueCloth (Ruby implementation of Markdown).
• Registered users didn’t make the transition. There were only a couple of you, so please re-register if this is important to you.
• Firefox/Mac users will notice that the post dates are displayed in MM/DD/YYYY format, regardless of your locale. This seems to be a browser bug.
• The site is slow while my hosting provider (who BTW deserve props) migrates to mongrel.

If you notice anything else strange — or stranger than usual — please let me know by posting a comment below or email.

Being added to someone's blogroll is usually quite a sincere form of flattery. But I just can't help but wonder if there's been a mistake of some sort here.

Ernie Chambers has me added to his blogroll of almost exclusively right-wing whackos like Instapundit, Powerline and Tim Blair. Surely Ernie can't mean to put me in with that lot? It must be a typo.

And ooh it makes me wonder. Maybe there is a right-wing politics blog which is only a typo away from girtby. It wouldn't be the first time that questionable content had come uncomfortably close.

Wow. You don't get more authoritative than Google. Number one hit, no less!

Thanks to Frances for the tip.

For some weeks now I haven't blogged much, but I have had little projects and events going on in the background. Individually these aren't blogworthy, but together I'm hoping that they reach a bloggable mass.

• My post from late last year internet explorer makes me ☹ has been getting a bit of attention from the wider blogosphere. It was noticed at IEBlog, where comments indicate that IE 7.0 will fix the unicode rendering problems I described. Yaay! Linkage also from uber-blogger Tim Bray, thanks.

• The fan on the CPU cooler on my PC was making noises, so I replaced it. The cooler I mean, not the PC, although I was tempted. Anyway, woah, check out the hardware pr0n! Phwoar, look at the size of it! 752 grams of copper and aluminum. (See also the before shot) I think these days it's fair to say that you install a motherboard onto a CPU cooler rather than the other way round. The cooler itself is the differently-named Thermaltake Golden Orb II. A good (if garish) performer, but it required a worrying amount of brute force to install. Holy cracked CPU cores, Batman.

• I've had some more ports and updates accepted to DarwinPorts and FreeBSD Ports. Which is quite gratifying.

• Paul Asadoorian, of the Pauldotcom security weekly podcast, wrote me back a polite reply even after I chastised him for not knowing what shell scripts are. He patiently explained that he had actually said shell code not shell scripts. Oops!

• My latest toy is a Nokia N70 on the Three network (review forthcoming). Over the weekend I discovered that eBay was available via Three's walled garden of mobile internet access. I eagerly signed up, only to find that a) it was a pain in the arse to re-enter my username and password every 20 minutes or so on the tiny keypad, b) the password was sent in the clear in the URL of each page accessed, and c) there was a mysterious API error when trying to bid on an item. Could these facts have anything to do with the eBay service being unavailable as of today? I hope they get it all sorted out, and glad to see that Three are realising that there's more to mobile content than bloody ringtones.

Bloggable mass? Maybe just bloggable mess. Take your pick. G'night.

Happy anniversary, Girtby.net, you're one year old today!

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Recently I had to censor -- that is, delete -- a legitimate comment on this blog. I don't feel good about it. Here is an attempt to explain why I did it, and under what circumstances I would do it again.

I won't say which post triggered the comment, suffice it to say I was taking a potshot at someone I read about in the media. A comment was posted that was started off making some remarks even less complimentary than my own, followed by an accusation that the person in question was in fact a pedophile. Specifics involving schools and a certain town were mentioned. In short, there was an attempt to air some pretty dirty laundry on my humble blog.

I emailed the person making the comment to say that I have no way of verifying whether or not their claims are true, and frankly, even if it were possible I wouldn't care to do so. It's just not worth the risk of potentially defaming this person. I am not a lawyer and I don't know if I have any legal protection against defamatory comments posted on my blog. All I do know is that I don't care to find out. Happy to take the risk and responsibility for myself, but not for anyone else.

If girtby.net were a Real Website I would put up a privacy statement or some other legal arse coverage. It may well come to that.

In the meantime the about page has been updated to state for the record that:

• Defamatory comments posted here will be removed
• Spam (according to my own definition which I will not share) will be removed
• Other types of comments probably won't be modified, except perhaps to clean HTML markup
• I will share anything and everything with the authorities if they so ask
• I will try to do the right thing, but if you want to keep something private don't send it to me