The Battery

Looking at the simplest upgrade first: the battery. There is an excellent free utility called Coconut Battery which allows you to not only see the current battery capacity, but look at the original capacity and the age of the laptop. Newer versions of the application allow saving data points to track the capacity and degradation of the battery.

Lithium Ion (Li-Ion) batteries don’t suffer from the same memory effect as other types of rechargeable such Nickel Cadmium (NiCd) or Nickel-metal Hydride (NiMH). However, as can clearly been see by the screenshots above, Li-Ion batteries still degrade naturally over a period of time. After two and a half years, my laptop battery could barely hold over a third of its original capacity. In addition, it took much longer to charge as well.

Since the new version of Coconut Battery can save data points, I’m hoping by the time I retire this laptop that I’ll be able to be able to chart the capacity pattern of this new battery. I’m predicting it will be a natural logarithmic regression.

One additional thing I learned about the MacBook battery. It can not be removed while the laptop is on, even if it is plugged in. Unlike my old Dell Laptop which had two expansion slots providing for the ability to hot swap two batteries, removing the MacBook battery while hot caused the MacBook to crash and it had to be rebooted.

The Hard Drive

The previous hard drive was the standard 80GB that came with the laptop. I had found myself deleting unused applications and moving media from my laptop just so I could log and transfer video clips for editing. I eventually had to use a 40GB external USB drive as my video scratch disk. With dropping prices for SATA internal drives, I decided to upgrade to a 500GB, giving me more than enough room for all my applications and media clips. In addition, a low cost external SATA to USB enclosure allowed me to still utilize my old 80GB hard drive as an external disk.

Replacing the hard drive was about as simple as replacing the memory. They are both behind a plate on the side of the battery compartment. The hard drive did require a hex-screwdriver, which I did not expect.

The Operating System

One of the biggest reason I wanted to upgrade to MacOS 10.5 was the addition of “spaces” which is basically another term for virtual desktops. In 10.4, third party software such as Desktop Manager had to be used to add in support for virtual desktops. They were buggy at best and different applications would react different to being on a virtual desktop.

Virtual desktops aren’t anything new or innovative. They’ve been available naively on UNIX/Linux systems for over a decade and as third party addons to Windows and Mac for years. The advantage of having “spaces” as part of the operating system layer itself is that newer version of applications will develop around and for the “spaces” rather than third party applications having to accommodate for other programs.

In addition OS X 10.5 does seem to add some speed increases. The visual additions and other small features are nice as well.

Conclusions

The upgrades I made were primarily to make the laptop useful again as a laptop and not just an overpriced desktop. However I did notice speed improvements when playing HD video within editing software. I’m not sure whether to attribute this to a higher efficiency from OS X 10.5 or if the larger hard drive allows the OS to have more swap space to play with (or both). In any case, these small upgrades, which cost under $200, seem to have given me some more life and years out of my laptop.

Introduction

This guide is intended for administrators who are familiar with their operating system (Windows, Linux, Mac), MySQL and, to a lesser extent, PHP. It does have a lot of assumed knowledge, such as that you have successfully installed WordPressMu and know how to access a MySQL console to the database. You may want to read the documentation on WordPressMu website for installation guides and additional assistance.

Installation and Quick Upgrades

If you’re running a dedicated server and have control over the virtual host configuration, you’ll probably point your DocumentRoot of each domain to your WordPressMu installation. For those of you on shared hosting or cloud hosting solutions, you’ll most likely symbolically link the predetermined document root to your WordPressMu install. In either case, it’s good practice to include the version number with the installation directory and use a symbolic link to point to the current version as shown below.

It may seem redundant to have a symbolic link called wordpress which points to the specific production version. Why not just point to the directory with the version number directly? Using the wordpress link allows an administrator to switch over from one one version of WordPressMu to another quickly without having to change a series of other symbolic links or DocumentRoot directives. It also allows for an administrator to test a new version of WordPressMu on just one or two domains. You may even consider setting up a wordpress-dev symbolic link to use for development environments if they happen to be hosted on the same server.

Setting up Multiple Domains

By default the base WordPressMu is intended to allow users to register new blogs and place them in subdomains of the domain for the base blog. I wanted to use WordPressMu for multiple websites each on their own domain. Two plug-ins are offered specifically for domain management in WordPressMu which can be confusing. There is the Domain Mapping plugin and the Multi-Site Manager plugin.

The Domain Mapping plugin is more designed for wrapping subdomains and subdirectories.. For the purpose of having several independent websites, the Multi-Site Manager seemed more appropriate. The Multi-Site Manager still allows for multiple blogs per domain (in subdomains) as well. Explore both plugins in your development environment as your mileage with each may vary. For the purpose of this guide, the Multi-Site Manager will be examined.

With the Multi Domain Plugin, one blog is automatically created when a site is created. It’s a WordPressMu specific plugin and must be installed in the mu-plugins directory. Additional blogs for subdomains and subdirectories can be added later in addition to the base blog. Sites can be created by navigating to Site Admin>Sites from within the administration console. It is important to note when you create new sites you should, at the very least, clone the site_admins and admin_user_id attributes from the base blog. Failure to do so will result in the Site Admin tab not appearing on the new site when logged in as admin.

Forgot to close those essential site variables? That can easily be remedied by issuing the following SQL statement on the WordPressMu database with x being replaced by the appropriate blog_id.

INSERT INTO wp_sitemeta VALUES(NULL,x,'site_admins','a:1:{i:0;s:5:"admin";}');

The value to the key site_admins is a serialized PHP object contain the array of site administrators for the given blog.

Setting up a Development Environment

One of the more trickier tasks is creating a separate and independent development environment that’s setup similar or exactly like production. One would think you could just copy the install and the database to a local server, change the database settings, and the site would run locally. The trouble arises because one install is used by multiple domains and settings about each of those domains is stored directly in the database.

mysql> SELECT option_id,blog_id,option_name,LEFT(option_value,100) as name
    ->  ,autoload FROM wp_5_options HAVING name like '%penguindreams.org%' LIMIT 3;
+-----------+---------+----------------+--------------------------------+----------+
| option_id | blog_id | option_name    | name                           | autoload |
+-----------+---------+----------------+--------------------------------+----------+
|         1 |       0 | siteurl        | http://penguindreams.org/      | yes      |
|        40 |       0 | home           | http://penguindreams.org/      | yes      |
|        80 |       0 | fileupload_url | http://penguindreams.org/files | yes      |
+-----------+---------+----------------+--------------------------------+----------+
3 rows in set (0.01 sec)

In addition, other plugins may also store the site’s domain name for their own purposes. To run the site locally, it would be necessary to creates scripts that would be able to pull a production copy of the site’s database and also change all appropriate fields within each sites wp_n_options table.

One may be tempted to download a FireFox plugin that allows you to modify the Host header transmitted the web browser. This would work to display a single page, but many if not all of the links on the site would direct back to the full address of the production install.

One of the best solutions I have found is to simply modify the hosts file to direct traffic bound for the production install to another machine. This fine can be located in /etc/hosts on Linux/UNIX/Mac and in C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc on Windows.

# /etc/hosts: Local Host Database
#
# This file describes a number of aliases-to-address mappings for the for
# local hosts that share this file.
#
# In the presence of the domain name service or NIS, this file may not be
# consulted at all; see /etc/host.conf for the resolution order.
#

# IPv4 and IPv6 localhost aliases
127.0.0.1       localhost mycomputer
::1             localhost
192.168.12.12   penguindreams.org

In the above example, all requests to penguindreams.org are now forwarded to a server on the local network. It may be necessary to close and reopen the web browser as it may have cached the previous DNS request. There are plugins available for FireFox to clear the DNS cache without restarting the browser.

Unsafe HTML

In a normal WordPress install there is an option to enable unsafe HTML including <iframe> and <embed> tags which are used by some video sites. Typically you don’t want anyone to use such unsafe HTML unless they really know what they’re doing, but the option was available to administrators in WordPress, an option that is entirely missing in WordPressMu. If a writer tries to add an <iframe>, it disappears immediately after saving the post. The solution?

The Unfiltered MU plugin allows anyone with the rights of editor or above or use unsafe HTML. It can be placed in the mu-plugins directory to give every blog this capability. If you don’t trust all your end users, placing it in the regular plugins directory will work, even for this WordPressMu specific plugin, to enable it on a per-blog basis.

Closing Notes

During the migration process, I was forced to deal with a lot of the SQL and became quite familiar with many of the table schemas. Although it isn’t an absolute requirement to be familiar with the underlying tables to administrator a WordPressMu installation, it certainly does help in understanding the underlying system, migrating content and diagnosing problems.

Two other major challenges not covered in this article were migration, both from a standard WordPress install and various other content management systems (outdated versions of Drupal and custom Rails applications) as well as converting existing layouts into WordPress themes.

This isn’t an exhaustive list of all the challenges I faced with installing and maintaining WordPressMu, but these were some of the most frustrating. Overall, I have been very impressed with WordPressMu engine and it’s a welcome change from the other content management systems I’ve either used or created.

My first attempt at filming with my HD camcorder, this is video of a ride on the TN Aquarium’s new riverboat. It starts at Ross’s Landing in Chattanooga, TN and continues for about an hour downstream into Georgia.

The camcorder is a Sony CX7. The Vimeo high definition version has fairly decent quality, however the limited streaming bitrates combined with the fast motion and high amount of detail cause parts of the video to look somewhat blocky. An MPEG-4 version is available on the viemo page. Its free to reedit for non-commercial use (see license below) so if you want a high quality version for editing purposes, just e-mail me.



Tennessee River Gorge Explorer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License

The biggest new feature of this release is support for multiple cameras. Not only can you view multiple locally connected cameras, but you can connect to remote cameras and share your cameras with others. This is a beta release so use it an your own risk.

This isn’t the first time I’ve had trouble with BlueHost. They had upgraded their rails installation twice, also without any prior notice, breaking several of my production websites. I’ve read other horror stories concerning BluHhost, including one from my favorite webcomic, but in the several years I had been with them I didn’t have any major issues. It is only this past year that they preformed lots of random upgrades without telling anyone.

When I asked why they hadn’t sent out any notices, the manager on their support line told me they had sent out a notice a year ago that PHP4 would be phased out. I asked repeatedly why they hadn’t sent out a recent notice within the past month or week? He felt as if the notice a year previous had been enough. I checked my e-mail and sure enough, the very last message I ever received from BlueHost was dated November 29, 2007.

The past three week has been spent moving to a much faster and more reliable web hosting solution. I’ve migrated several old legacy applications that were originally managed by Drupal and Ruby on Rails into WordPress. I’ve had a love/hate relationship with Rails so far and with my new host charging extra for Rails, I decided I’m better off migrating those sites to Wordpress. I’ve been impressed with Wordpress and all its functionality and plug-ins. I’ve come to realize I’d rather spend more time doing what I want to do rather than trying to figure out how to do it.

The last time I had to move web hosts was from DarkFiles. They gave their customers plenty of notice when they decided to get out of the web hosting industry. At the time I was in school and had more time to work on the transition (and fewer sites). This transition has helped me deal with a lot of things that needed to be upgraded and changed. In ways I am glad, but the timing couldn’t have been worse. Moving forward, I would highly suggest to anyone using BlueHost to migrate their web hosting provider soon. BlueHost’s service has been absolutely horrible and is only suitable for the smallest and least relevant website. Their hosting may be cheap, but you do get what you pay for.

However, the framework is well structured and sound. I’m hoping I can develop interested from other open source developers who have skills in fields I lack in such as image recognition, analysis and AI. It will be the first project I’ve had where I’m actively seeking developers from the community. Anyone interested in a challenge?

If I can generate a decent amount of interest, I’ll move it over to a full project hosting repository such as SourceForge or Google Code.

/*
 *  combo.cxx - Four Fours Combination Problem Solver
 *              (using brute force)
 *
 *  Solves the simple problem: How do you combine four fours 
 *       using standard arithmetic operations to equal 20.
 *
 *  This program solves this puzzle using brute force and 
 *       shows the answer ignoring order of operations.
 *
 *
 *  Sumit Khanna / http://penguindreams.org
 *    free to modify and redistribute
 */

#include <iostream>
using std::cout;
using std::endl;

int doOp(char op, int a,int b) {
  if(op == '+') {
    return a + b;
  }
  else if(op == '-') {
    return a - b;
  }
  else if(op == '*') {
    return a * b;
  }
  else if(op == '/') {
    return a / b;
  }
  else {
    cout << "Error. Invalid Operation " << op << endl;
    exit(2);
    return 0;
  }
}

int main(int argc, char **argv) {

 char *ops = new char[4];
 ops[0] =  '+';
 ops[1] =  '-';
 ops[2] =  '*';
 ops[3] =  '/';

 for(int i=0; i<4; i++) {
   for(int j=0; j<4; j++) {
     for(int k=0; k<4; k++) {

          int r = doOp(ops[i],4,4); 
          r = doOp(ops[j],r,4);
          r = doOp(ops[k],r,4);

          if(r == 20) {
            cout << " 4 " << ops[i] << " 4 " << ops[j] << " 4 " << ops[k] << " 4 = 20 " <<  endl;
          }

     }
   }
 }
 
 cout << "Note: Solutions ignores order of operations" << endl << endl; 

 delete[] ops;
 exit(0);

}