Installed Ubuntu 9.10 a few days ago. Everything seemed OK (very very nice actually) except for a little network performance glitch that may also bother you.  Canonical has once again taken Linux one step further away from the status of geek-challenge to a user friendly alternative to other OS’es.

One thing bothered me though – general network responsiveness seemed seriously degraded. Digging around i found that IPv6 had taken precedence to IPv4 in a few ways – one being DNS lookup sequence. Apparently all lookups was attempted through IPv6 first. My router and network is in no way configured for IPv6 and therefore every connection-attempt to uncached hosts would have to wait for the IPv6 timeout. Two things gave me responsiveness back.

1. Disable IPv6 at the OS level
2. Disable IPv6 in Firefox (should give more responsiveness for any OS not running on an IPv6 network)

Maybe you would think that the first step would be enough, but Firefox seems more responsive after step 2. Follow this step to disable IPv6 in Firefox.

Ubuntu 9.10 introduces the GRUB2 bootloader on clean installations only. The upgrade process from, say version 9.04, will not upgrade GRUB and will leave you with the previous version.

To disable IPv6 OS wide, i followed this sequence and voila – responsiveness returned to my netbook (and soon to my other Ubuntu installations).

2009-11-22 update: Had to downgrade to 9.04 again – No matter what I did, which forums I visited – I could not get my Huawei 3G Modem to connect.

This is not a complaint – it is the solution to an issue that has been puzzling me over the weekend.

IE8 has been out for a long time – which does not necessarily mean that corporations has implemented it yet. Some large corporations tend to make their business depend on current browser versions – not allowing them to upgrade the browsers on their pc’s without extensive testing and some time expensive application upgrades. I know of at least 5 danish companies who still doesn’t dare to take the plunge from IE6 (!)

I usually develop web-stuff having booted Ubuntu running Firefox – then once in a while boot Windows and test with the latest IE, Safari, Chrome and Firefox. I leave it to others to test on Mac’s. If I am unsure how something renders on other platforms, I can recommend browsershots.org – a cool service that renders a specific URL in any browser on any platform and allow you to see the screenshots after a while.

In this case the client is at IE7. The layout has a header, a content area and a footer – very simple stuff. It looks fine i all browsers – except for IE7. For this particular browser the content section wouldn’t display. Even IE7 displayed the area. The space was allocated but it was blank. This article on webmasterworld.com gave a few tips:

1. add

   * { zoom: 1.0; }

   to the css (this did not make a difference for me)

2. add

   position: relative;

   to the

   #wrapper

   in the css

Tip 2 made all the difference. #wrapper is a div that wraps around all the content on the page. Not knowing the inner workings of IE7, I can only guess why this fixed the issue – just hope Google finds this post for you if you run into the same problem.

Installed Windows 7 RC2 for the first time yesterday.

In Virtual Machine

First installation in a VirtualBox - which worked fine except for the VirtualBox graphics adapter not being accelerated – which meant Solitaire ran extremely slow. Apart from that – no problems.

Dual/triple booting

Once the gut feeling was OK, i made room for Windows 7 on my laptop that already holds a Windows XP and an Ubuntu 9.04 partition. Installing Windows 7 leaves the existing OS’es alone, but the boot manager only supports Windows file-systems. My old GRUB bootloader would allow me to choose between booting Linux or Windows, but after the Windows 7 install, i could no longer boot Linux. The partition is still on the disk, but not in the MS bootloader. A bunch of hours later that was fixed – using the Ubuntu installer, GRUB was installed again – but I am still not quite satisfied; From GRUB i can boot into the MS bootloader. I now have two steps:

1. Choose between booting Linux and Windows and (if choosing Windows)
2. Choose between Windows XP and 7

I’ll try to fix this soon, but the priority of fixing this just dropped as I can now boot into all 3 OS’es.

One other thing: 3G USB modem

The last thing I needed was to the my 3 – 3G Huawei modem to work. In short: It didn’t – and it may not be because of Windows 7. Apparently the modem needs some Adobe Flash stuff and the drivers on the modems flashmemory are not Flash 10-compatible. 3 in Denmark knows and offers a download to fix the issue – It did the trick for me.

This post is my first written in Windows 7. Will post further findings..

Oh – and the wallpapers are beeeee-aaaaa-utiful!

This is not about the usual geekyness – it is about a change I am sure is about to happen. Once the benefits are clear – I am quite sure everybody will want an electric car instead of their gas/diesel-one. The concept of having an energy-buffer, in the shape of the cars in a region, to collect surplus energy in low usage periods for use in high usage periods are so compelling. Windmills are cool, but still inefficient in comparison with other sources if the surplus energy isn’t stored. This is in a broad perspective what Better Place wants to do.

I passed a long line of gas stations the other day – What will happen to them? I know the change will not happen overnight – if at all. But how would we prepare for the future if we had a gas station? Better Place says they will prepare the stations for the transition of becoming a battery station, but as I see it – many people will not need them anymore. Why? Because many commuters drive less than 160km per day. According to Better Place, that will be the range of one battery charge – and a key part of the new model is that drivers charge their car at home when the energy is cheap/green – also offering the battery in their car to the common energy buffer.

So – in Denmark anyway – if the gas stations will no longer sell gas and only (let’s guess – unable to find numbers) 10% of the current customer base (those driving more than 160km a day) will need to recharge their cars/switch batteries at the old gas station – can the gas station survive merely as a 7-Eleven store only closed at night?

My guess is that they are looking at a pretty big change in their business model – and I think they can if they embrace the change. If they fight the change they only have to look at the news papers to see how that works out..

What they need to do? Dunno – but one thing that has bothered me for ages now is the inability to find stuff for my car in the shops. If i want chewing gum, porn or soda – the gas station is where to get it. But light bulbs, fuses, polish is hidden away in the far corner of the shops. I think that stuff needs to move up ahead in the shop, so the mindset of the customers in five to ten years won’t be: “The gas station? Ahh – you mean the 7-Eleven that is closed at night!”

Found this little test which gives an indicator as to Javascript performance in your browser.

On my system (Windows XP on two year old Lenovo T60p laptop) i tried to run it ten times on my browsers with all plugins disabled (lower is better):

Google Chrome: 297,7
Firefox 3.5 beta 4: 340
Firefox 3.0.10: 408,9
Internet Explorer 8: 631,3

As the score is time, lower is better. This is interesing because sites uses Javascript more and more, and as we work more and more online with more applications in the cloud, the Javascript engine has a lot to say about our perception of overall performance.

I got a bit disappointed about my Atom-based netbook – specifically Ubuntu 9.04 on that machine. It never went below 1800 (Firefox 3.0.10) and on the same hardware, the Windows-browsers gives me minimums of 1500 and 2800 for Firefox 3.0.10 and IE8 respectively. Gotta find some tweaks there.

Twitter explained by Evan Williams..

Also – at Overskrift.dk, we launched TwitterValg today – a site to track tweets from candidates for the EU parliament election on June 7th.

Actually there is no good reason for this tool not to be an independent piece of software – it doesn’t really need to be part of Firefox. But..

Somehow it just works for apparent reasons. Bloggers do two things a lot: Read blogs and write blogs and that is why ScribeFire is so cool – it’s right in the context where you want it. In Firefox:

1. Go to the Tools-menu
2. Choose Add-ons
3. Choose Get Add-ons
4. Type scribefire in the search box and search
5. Install the add-on

Once installed, Scribefire is running all the time but display/hiding is switched with F8. It works especially well with Wordpress blogs (such as this one) and configuration of one blog is done by entering the address of the blog + username and password.

If you feel inspired, click F8 and start typing. Something else came up, or the phone rang.. tap F8 and continue what you did before – and F8 it again to continue. So far it seems awfully nice.

Writing this on my Lenovo S10e netbook, I am furious. It’s before mid-day and yet I have had two experiences of software designs that did not consider netbooks a platform – or at least the new low screen resolution these computers imply. And before you call me a whiner (besides the fact that you’d be somewhat right), this is just a description of the changes I will make to include netbook users as an audience of software and website in the future.

Whine #1: Twice I’ve been cripled by software that saw the low screen resolution as a handicap – one of them on purpose. First I installed Pidgin - the cool cross-platform/cross-protocol IM and IRC client. I like it a lot, but on Windows some dialogs are too big and will not allow me to navigate to the OK/Cancel buttons at the bottomof the settings dialog. Fortunately this is Open Source stuff, so I can just participate and actively fix this myself.

Whine #2: I had to install a printer driver for my HP Photosmart 2575 printer – the install took over one hour because of some “ingenious” package system. That obviously poor user experience decision aside – the minimum requirement for the printer driver is a screen resolution of 800×600 pixels. My S10e runs at 1024 x 576. The consequence – I cannot print from my netbook in Windows because the printer driver won’t finish installing, as it has an irrelevant requirement. Fortunately I am dual-booting with Ubuntu, which has excellent support for my printer (without the requirement)

I’ve read somewhere that 20% of all computers that will be sold in 2009 will be netbooks. Some producers (including Asus) will stop production of 8.9″ -screen netbooks. The 10-inchers seems to dominate right now, and probably for the rest of the year (note: my guess only). Every company designing software will have to take this into account before they ship the next version of any product with a user interface.

I’ve worked on so many web projects with art directors saying: “Nobody runs 640×480 or 800×600 anymore”. Hey we know – but do you know how many users run with their browser maximized because a designer thought up a design that required it? Web designers don’t own the real estate of the users screen resolution – they can only hope to own the area the browser is sized to – and you have to count on users having at least one open history/bookmarks sidebar and/or plug-in and/or Google/MSN/Web developer toolbar enabled.

My point should be rather obvious: It is vital to include netbooks as testplatforms for serious UI-designers or your product will no longer be compatible with the equipment of the customers you want. The rules have changed – live with it.

You may argue that netbook users are asking for it, but if the competing website or software support the netbooks and you don’t – the users is no longer making the decision of leaving you.

Seems like a very cool plugin to enhance the userexperience – performance wise, plus it seems to prepare Wordpress blogs for high traffic spikes.

Bug found: Links to posts from archives seems to cache PHP-code – not the resulting HTML. There’s gotta be a simple fix. Was a bit quick there. The bug is in my theme – not in WP Super Cache.

Edit: Also – the issues may have to do with my host who seems to mess with their user database right now..

This post is written on my new netbook – a Lenovo ideapad s10e. Actually I had given up on netbooks. My first one was an Asus EEE PC 900 with SSD and that machine was a serious disappointment. I have always liked Asus hardware, mainly because it is extremly well updated with software. That was also the case with the eee 900, but in order to make it cheap enough a cut was made on the CPU and on the keyboard. Actually I think I could live with the somewhat slow Dothan CPU (Celeron’ish), but combined with the poor keyboard the experience was like:

I don’t know if the machine refuses to react on my keypress because the stroke wasn’t registered on the keyboard or because I am waiting for the CPU.

That is of course not acceptable. So the too-cheap netbook has been gathering dust for a while now.

Some colleagues also purchased netbooks. One of them a Medion Akoya (looks very much like the MSI Wind – which 95% of the hardware probably is). It had an Intel Atom processor, which seems to do A LOT for these small laptops. The price did get an extra nudge compared to the Asus eee PC 900, but that can actually mean the difference between a usable and an unusable netbook.

The Lenovo machine is Atom-based, responsive and so far a really really nice piece of machinery. I dual-boot Windows and Ubuntu Linux on it and have yet to encounter missing drivers or missing responsiveness from the keyboard.

As with anything, you get what you pay for and you actually don’t have to pay that much more for a netbook that actually behaves as you would expect.

My brother is now a fairly long time Mac-user. I haven’t gone down that road (yet). Last night he was here and i showed him my Asus EEE (which is currently running Ubuntu 8.10).

“Cool” – he said. “It supports two-finger-scrolling”. I didn’t know, but he is right. Googling for it found me this. Apparently the touchpad is new enough in the Asus EEE to support two finger scrolling. Nice to find hidden coolness.

..the Del.icio.us add-on was announced.

Ever asked yourself what actually happens when you perform a certain thing in a certain program? Which files are read, created, updated and what goes on in my registry.

The Sysinternals Process Monitor tool does this. Filter the events any way you need and you will be able to release registry updates quickly. I just used it to identify the registry changes performed as I changed the cache settings of IE, so a registry update file can be made and distributed to anyone who needs the same settings. It took about 10 minutes to learn to use Process Monitor and identify the key in question.

MagpieRSS IS great – I like it a lot, and it almost does exactly what you need to aggregate RSS feeds from PHP. MagpieRSS has one achilles heel in Snoopy. MagpieRSS relies on Snoopy as the HTTP-client (browser-component) that fetches feeds from websites – be it RSS or Atom formatted – It fetches files from a webserver.

The latests Snoopy release was in 2005 (as was the latest MagpieRSS), which could indicate that the development community has abandoned the code. The problem with Snoopy is that it has low tolerance to the use of carriage-return and linefeed characters in the header of HTTP responses from webservers. For some requests that means certain files, though rich in content, appear empty if they are fetched using Snoopy.

At first I tried downloading the latest Snoopy release from Sourceforge. It seemed to do the trick for some feeds, but aparently not all. Arnold Daniels came to my rescue. He has devised a wrapper – on the “outside” it appears to be Snoopy – but on the inside PHP’s Curl library has taken the place of a lot of the original Snoopy code. Give his alternative library a spin if you are using MagpieRSS for anything the should be somewhat resistant to deviations from standards.

For a web project I needed to create invoices, to be downloaded or e-mailed to clients in PDF format. The platform is PHP and the documentation for this almost exclusively describe PDFLib for this purpose. I am sure PDFLib is fine, and the tutorials that come with the package looks really good.

But..

You pay for PDFLib – I don’t mind paying for software, you should pay for usable high-quality stuff, which I am sure PDFLib is. US$ 995 is a little steep though – compared to free. The FAQ however mentions a few free alternatives. Right now I am looking into FPDF – which seem to do the trick.

Actually I found out that my previous ISP (invoicing their customers only by PDF invoices via E-mail) use FPDF. This tells me that FPDF is more than ready for production. I’ll let you know if I something disappoints me – although I would hate to bash a truly free initiative such as this one. Oh – and by the way it has another edge to PDFLib – It is written in PFP and does not need server reconfiguration to work. If you want a head start, there are quite an extensive list of code examples available.

Wanna know how Mac og Linux users running rare browsers view your website? Then check out http://browsershots.org/. Queue up your URL and depending on the current load, the screenshouts will begin pouring in over the next couple of minutes. Why, oh why should we wait soo many years for a service like this?

The shots are of course static, so it is not possible for you to actually check how your site performs and functions without running the actual browser on the actual OS you want to test. It can however save you A LOT of time, getting rid of the most common errors early in the layout debugging process.

The site features quite a few languages, and more a being added all the time

I originally learned about this MySQL shortcoming in the book High Performance MySQL, and luckily I remembered it for an issue that struck me today.

I have two tables – one containing blog-posts, and one containing a record for each tag on these posts. Now the requirement was to show a blog post AND to show the five latest related posts. Related posts in this scenario are other posts that share one or more tags with this post.

Now, it does not take one second to find a blog post, and it does not take one second to find tags related to it. And actually it does not even take a second to find a list of posts having a list of tags. The reason why all these requests take less than a second is because the tables have been supplied with efficient indexes – the table of blogposts has more than 3.5 million records and there are about 700.000 tags.

The problem was that when we tried to generate a list of related posts, the query took up to twelve seconds to run. It sucked and looked like this:

SELECT distinctrow i.id, i.item_title, i.item_url
FROM rss_items_master i
INNER JOIN rss_item_tag t ON i.id=t.item_id
WHERE t.item_tag IN (SELECT item_tag FROM rss_item_tag WHERE item_id=$itemid)
AND t.item_id != $itemid
ORDER BY i.item_date DESC
LIMIT 5;

In plain english we request a list of items that does not match the specific post, but they must have at least one tag that match one of the tags from the specific post. The nested SELECT-statement produce a list of tags to look for, and the outer SELECT statement pulls blog posts containing tags found in the nested SELECT. This does not perform, because only one index can be used per query – so either the index from the rss_item_tag table or from the rss_items_master table is ignored (i did not bother figuring out which one was ignored). To fix it, I split the SQL in two (PHP example):

$sql_tags = "SELECT item_tag FROM rss_item_tag WHERE item_id=$itemid;";
$arr_tags = query_array($sql_tags, $link);
// $tag_o will be an array of tags from the original post.
$tag_o = Array();
foreach($arr_tags as $tag_i) {
array_push($tag_o, mysql_real_escape_string($tag_i[0]));
}
$tags = implode("','", $tag_o);

Now $tags contain a list og tags to look for – actually it contains exactly what the nested SELECT-part did in the slow query. Now these two queries will actually complete in less than a second:

select distinctrow i.id, i.item_title, i.item_url
from rss_items_master i inner join rss_item_tag t on i.id=t.item_id
and t.item_tag in ('$tags')
and t.item_id != $itemid
order by i.item_date desc
limit 5;

So even though the SQL has been split in two, and even though we are passing a lot of information through variables that we have to build from the first query and added quite a lot of code – this outperforms the first single query by a factor larger than 10 – simply because it enables MySQL to use the indexes it should.

For more MySQL performance tips, check out MySQL Performance Blog.

Amazon profiles you by the books you buy. Google sponsored links are displayed by the contents of your gmail e-mails and general website interests. All “Big Brother” considerations aside – this is clever – or at least technically interesting. There are risks of evil marketeers profiling you down to the bone, but on the other hand you probably only see stuff that is interesting to you – as opposed to receiving a load of Viagra spam e-mails. I know – The fact that something really sucks, does not make something that sucks a bit less excellent..

A group is in the process of specifying the APML format. APML is short for Attention Profile Markup Language and will specify a fileformat to express your interests ranked. OPML can already be considered an APML subset describing your feed subscriptions, but APML i more of an aggregation of your interests also including e-mail, browser history and bookmarks.

An important thing about your attention profile is, that is has value – to you as well as to others. Check out AttentionTrust for more..

I was looking for an XML editor to perform a few simple tasks. Since i worked heavily with XML a few years ago, the Windows XML editor of choice is apparently still the Altova XML Spy. You can get it to do anything with XML (except – i think – transform XML to coffee). Negative minds would probably call it bloated and expensive. Positive minds would look for a cheap agile alternative.

Using the Open Source Alternative-site it is possible to find applications doing somewhat the same as commercial products. For the XML Spy query, the result is XML Copy Editor – a SourceForge application that has currently reached version 1.0.9. My needs were met as it:

1. color-codes XML
2. beautify/pretty-print XML with consistent indentations to increase readability
3. opens files directly from URL’s

Also it XSLT transforms and has a small set of other features you may or may not need. Before you venture into extensive license bill-paying, you may try out this nifty little XML editor.

I am a Wiki-virgin. Not in the sense of being a wiki-reader/contributor, but today I set up my first Wiki which is about to go online. Wiki’s based on the MediaWiki software (which is also used for WikiPedia) are actually skinable, but as content usually is king in Wiki land, very few operators make an effort to change skin before going online. The well known default Monobook skin is used almost everywhere (you know – the one where the monochrome image of an book is the back-drop).

This has one obvious benefit: People recognize it as being a Wiki-type site immediately. Indeed a strong argument to keep things as they are. I may be running my mouth of as the green first day Wiki operator, and maybe I have actually used Wiki based sites that I did not recognize because it used some great unknown skin. But doesn’t the Wiki deserve it’s Kubrick skin – which was considered the defacto blog-look a few years back. People would look at the skin (which is beautiful) and say “Ahh – that’s a weblog”. These days I (and probably a few other) say “Yuck – It’s a Wiki”.

Michael Heilemann did such a great job with Kubrick. Isn’t it time for Wiki’s to have their own updated slick skin? Do you have it or know where to get it? There is one Wiki-skin I like: Cavendish. I would love to be able to create one myself, but my graphic skills are unfortunately only focused around my eyes – not in my hands.