Tag: open source

Your Photos, Your Way

I’m funding PressGram on Kickstarter and you should too.

I like Open Source. Surprise!

I don’t mind paying for products (as witnessed by the fact that I have paid for this theme, and even the old DevPress and ThemeHybrid ones I don’t use anymore. I have a slew of plugins I paid for, and all in all, I think every dime was money well spent. Paying for open source makes sense.

So there’s this guy I know from the Internet, John Saddington, who likes taking photos, and he likes social media, but he wonders, like I often do, what happens when those outlets go away? Where are all my photos if TwitPic or YFrog vanishes? Or if Facebook deletes my account?

They’re gone.

John loves WordPress. So do I. John loves photos. Well. I fiddle around with them, but the point is he wants to built something that is way more than ‘just’ a plugin. He wants to make a free iPhone app… look, this is what he wants:

The premise is simple: I wanted to post filtered photos from my iPhone 5 but without worrying about any privacy or licensing issues (and we’re not interested in asking you to upload photo IDs). In other words, I wanted complete and total creative control of my images and content (as well as the pageviews).

And this will post to WordPress, which is so simple, we have a one-click installer at DreamHost for you to use to make it. Imagine that. You could have a photoblog with a couple clicks.

When I read that John was making PressGram, I had to poke at it, even though it’s not Open Source. It’s an Apple iOS app. I’m not shocked that it’s not open source, and after consideration, I don’t mind. It doesn’t have to be. As long as the plugin is open source (and frankly, given WordPress’s API, I can easily envision how it would be without stepping on closed source apps), it’s good to go.

John knows his shit. He shares the same concerns and doubts about social media as I do, he rails on Facebook for the same things I do. He’s a guy whose ethics I can get behind. And he’s a guy whose code I can get behind. Remember I review plugins. I’ve seen his code. It’s good.

So yeah, I’m supporting him so you can have a free app. Go figure. And as with most of the things I kickstart, I get no swag back (I think I get a kudos and a link somewhere), because I like to give for the spirit of giving most of the time. I’ll be getting the Veronica Mars DVD, but I’d be buying that anyway.

Give in. You know you want this. Pay $5 instead of risking your content belonging to someone else.

6 April, 2013
Chrome Dumps Webkit

Chromium, the machine behind Chrome, has dumped Webkit.

This speaks for us all:

Chrome is no longer using webkit. Every developer in the world:http://t.co/3wIT6XCaxO

— soully (@soully) April 3, 2013

I’m not sure what’s going viral first, that gif or a ‘Don’t blink’ joke that someone has yet to make up. Oh, the new system is called Blink, and it’s open source.

We know that the introduction of a new rendering engine can have significant implications for the web. Nevertheless, we believe that having multiple rendering engines—similar to having multiple browsers—will spur innovation and over time improve the health of the entire open web ecosystem.

Yes, this means we all get to use even more browsers to make sure our sites look okay on all of them. Again. Thanks. And while they say it’s ‘based on’ webkit, that’s about as ‘related to’ as when Law & Order would say ‘The following episode is based on a true story, only names have been changed…’

This prompted my coworker Shredder to opine “Are Google and Mozilla late-april-fooling us?”

Did you miss the Mozilla/Samsung partnership? ~~Or maybe you didn’t notice that Opera moved too Webkit in February.~~ No wait! OPERA SWITCHES TO BLINK

Okay, Rarst is right: They’re out to screw over Apple.

Well, I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait to see the new ways in which my sites break!

3 April, 2013
Trading APC for Zend
The last thing I did before Passover was a totally unannounced, not telling anyone, surprise flip from my old standby, APC, to the new hotness, Zend.

As of PHP 5.5, Zend Optimizer+ will be included. Back in 2009, I decided to use APC for a couple reasons: It was made by the PHP blokes and it worked well with mod_php and MediaWiki. Since PHP decided to change, I joined in. Why the change? Zend went open source.

Installing Zend

I grabbed the latest tagged version from the official GitHub repository, since I don’t cotton to using bleeding edge all the time.
```
$ wget https://github.com/zend-dev/ZendOptimizerPlus/archive/v7.0.1.zip
$ unzip v7.0.1
$ cd ZendOptimizerPlus-7.0.1/
$ phpize
$ ./configure
$ make
$ make install
```
That gave me the final output of: Installing shared extensions: /usr/local/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-20100525/ You want to hang on to that path, because we’re going to edit php.ini and put this in below the line for IonCube, if you have that installed:
```
 zend_extension=/usr/local/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-20100525/opcache.so
```
Replace the path with your own.

I also followed their advice on the recommended config and put this in my php.ini as well:
```
[Zend]
opcache.memory_consumption=128
opcache.interned_strings_buffer=8
opcache.max_accelerated_files=4000
opcache.revalidate_freq=60
opcache.fast_shutdown=1
opcache.enable_cli=1
```
Since I had APC there before, I removed all those lines while I was at it. Restarted PHP (well, httpd in my case, I like a clean slate) and I was done.

Cleanup

As I mentioned before, I removed the APC lines while I was in the php.ini and, since I installed it via a downloaded pecl, I just removed the apc.so file from the same folder where opcache.so was installed.

On WordPress, I also removed the APC Object Cache Backend plugin from the two sites that had it, since I’m not using APC. There doesn’t appear to be an equivilent for Zend, but I may or may not need that.

For MediaWiki, I had to edit LocalSettings.php and remove $wgMainCacheType = CACHE_ACCEL; as that’s no longer being used. Then I went into my maintenance folder and ran php rebuildLocalisationCache.php --force to flush everything and my errors went away. MediaWiki has a pretty different cache method than other apps, and for yonks flat out didn’t work with Zend. It does now, and there seemed to be no speed loss without an OpCode cache.

None of my other apps seemed to care, so I moved on to see how this all played out.

Results

Much like the ManageWP guys, I saw an immediate drop in memory and CPU. And I’m still on PHP 5.4! There was an initial spike while I was mucking around, which I expected, and then everything dropped. Some things did not so much drop as level out and change my ‘spike’ range. Normally my load average for 1 minute would spike at 0.8 or so every hour. Now it’s spiking at 0.5, give or take, which is a success in my book.

Can you guess when Zend went on?

Before someone points out that, hey, this is hardly a real check, I want to note that I was having one of those 200% traffic days. Actually I was having a few of them in a row, and I know it’s going to go up from there. Here’s a quick look at my traffic:

The real test will be tonight and tomorrow, though, as I push some large data (videos) on a popular topic, but frankly, this is looking good.

The benchmarks used in the ticket to include Zend in PHP (why are they using WP 2? I have no idea) were startling compared to normal PHP. Compared to APC it’s a minimal kick in the pants, but the assurance of bundling to come speaks for itself. This is where PHP is going.

Credit: Dimitry

I’m not yet on PHP 5.5, but I’ve already found that 5.4 is a notable kick to my speed. Zend took me from a B to an A in PageSpeed and YSlow (when you tell YSlow that I’m a small blog and not Amazon). Also it ‘feels’ faster, which is totally subjective, but still a valid remark. The site feels fast, it doesn’t hang (yet) and it didn’t crash over Passover!

Former bbPress regular, _ck_, went and wrote a neat little Control Panel for Zend Optimizer+ which I snagged and tossed into my secret bin for poking at later.

Since I’m the Zend Rookie, anyone have any tips and tricks for configuring it to make it sing? Remember, I don’t just use WordPress on this box!
2 April, 2013
Goodbye Google Reader
Credit: Poorly Drawn Lines
You know, I get it. RSS is not a popular tool for people who like the ‘river’ flow of data. If you like everything to flow into your stream and back out, like Tumblr or Twitter or Facebook, then the loss of Google Reader is meaningless to them. “Why do I want another inbox?” they argue. That’s all fine and dandy for you, but we have to accept that different people process data differently. Some people like to watch news come in live, like reading a CNN ticker, and if they miss it that’s okay. Others of us like to say ‘These are the things I like, save a note when they happen and I’ll read them when I can.’ They’re two different workflows, and they appeal to different people.

Me? I’ve been using Tiny Tiny RSS for just under a year now, and I’ve actually figured out how to do everything I want, with key-commands. Since I use multiple devices for my news consumption (two laptops, an iPad, etc etc) having this web-based was a real killer. And while I could use a cloud device, I’ve never found one that worked across Windows and Macintosh, and wasn’t blocked by The Bank. That’s less of an issue now, but having it all on my own server beings me back to my oldest bugaboo ever: Owning my data.

If there’s anything you get from the whole Google Reader fiasco, it should be this: Google gave, and Google has taken away. Everyone who is mad that Google “Broke their trust.” just hasn’t been paying attention to the last year or two at Google. Google Apps for Email anyone? It’s not free anymore. But let’s not belabor the I-told-you-so part and get to the meat of the post.

Tiny Tiny RSS

So installing this is really easy for anyone who’s installed any PHP/SQL app before, I’m not going to get into that, you can read the Install Notes yourself. What I will point out are the plugins I find most useful, and the quirks to keep in mind.

First of all, ttrss is more like MediaWiki than WordPress. This means the upgrade is mostly manual for some of us, and you activate plugins by editing the config.php file. However. There is also a plugin interface in settings, so the define’d plugins are basically like Network Activated, which is great if you have multiple users. The other plugins are in the preferences.

Plugins work like this:
```
define('PLUGINS', 'auth_internal, digest, updater');
```
And I am fond of the following:
- auth_internal – Authenticates against internal tt-rss database
- digest – Digest mode for tt-rss (tablet friendly UI) Turn this on if you use your iPad
- updater – Updates tt-rss installation to latest version.
Interestingly, I cannot run the web-updater from my server, and it’s certainly to do with my PHP settings. That said, the manual upgrade is like WP: upload files, refresh DB, drink beer. I don’t mind it at all. There are the other available plugins under Preferences -> Plugins, and they make a lot of sense just by looking at them. Obviously they’re easy to see based on what you’d want to use. There’s no Twitter Plugin since Twitter’s new API made it a hassle to tweet and I don’t blame them on this front.(Tangental: Speaking of asinine moves, Twitter’s new API may require us to use it to embed tweets. The answer to the direct question was predictably vague.)

But if you’re here today, you probably want a more Google Reader type experience. I would enable ‘Combined Feed Display’ under preferences and disable ‘Automatically expand articles in combined mode’. This will bring the ability to expand posts. It doesn’t collapse them quite right or at all via mouse, HOWEVER everything you want can be done via key commands.
- s – Mark an article as starred.
- n (or down-arrow) – go to the next article
- p (or up-arrow) – go to the next article
- u – toggle read/unread
That’s pretty much all I needed, and once I read them, they were blindingly obvious. You can see them when you’re

You can style CSS to fiddle with the layout, but so far I’ve not figured out how to make it display the title of the feed.

versus

On the other hand, I know the favicons of most of these sites so with a little CSS jiggering I was able to make it look a little better for myself. Here’s my CSS:
```
div.postReply div.postContent, body#ttrssMain, body#ttrssPrefs, body#ttrssLogin, body,blockquote,#content-insert blockquote, #headlines-frame blockquote, .dijitContentPane blockquote  { font-size:14px;}
div.postReply div.postHeader { font-weight:bold;font-size:14px;}
.hlScorePic {display:none;}
img.tinyFeedIcon {float:left;}
.Unread span.titleWrap  { font-weight:bold; }
```
From there on out, you can play with design as you like it. It’s clean, it’s simple, and best of all, it’s Open Source so if you like most of it, you can fork the rest!
14 March, 2013
Genericons: Plugin’d

The thing about all this is that I really like Font Awesome. The licensing drives me to drink. The WordPress Repository has an extra rule, saying everything there has to be GPLV2 or later, for reasons that aren’t the point. What is the point is that the moment Genericons came out, I knew that it should be a plugin, because a totally GPL-compatible version of a font like this was what people wanted.

Since I also knew Rachel Baker had made a killer Font Awesome Plugin (and yes, that’s the one I use), I quickly stripmined its code and made Genericon’d.(At this point it’s pretty much a re-write, but I always credit where I started!)

The name is not Genericons because it’s not official, and they may want that name later. With that in mind, I thought “Well I totally Genericon’d them all!” because sometimes I talk like Zaboo from “The Guild.” I think of him as the Patron Avatar of this Plugin (though he’d probably ask why there wasn’t a Genericon for his staff, or Codex’s).

So what are these ‘font icons’ things anyway and how do they work?

Normally if you want to insert a Twitter image, let’s say, you would have to go find the image, download it, edit it to the right size, upload, embed. On the other hand, with a font you can do this: That will look like this: Isn’t that cool? All you have to do is include the font and the CSS in your site and you’re good to go. All those files are smaller than most images, load faster, and best of all, they scale better.

[genericon icon=twitter size=4x] Same font, bigger size. Isn’t that cool? Since they’re pure CSS, you can do whatever you want, from changing colors and size to inserting into menus, like I did on another site. When you add in their relatively small file size and scalability, you gain and added level of awesome because your little icons always look amazing on retina displays too! After all, they’re just fonts.

The alternative to something like this would be to use sprites, which is actually what WordPress uses today on your dashboard, and they look like this:

If you go look at your WordPress dashboard, you’ll notice that hovering over these images makes them change between the dull grey and the cool colorized version. In order to do that, you have two images. Not so with Genericons! .genericon-twitter:hover {background-color:pink;color:purple;} would do the same thing (in pretty garish colors…). Just as an example of how it works, here’s a link with a Genericon in it: [genericon icon=twitter] @ipstenu. It’s actually kind of nice how it automatically adapts to the CSS I have in place for hovering over links.

Basically the reasons to use icon fonts instead of images are that you can style them with CSS, they look good on all displays at any resolution, they easily adapt to fit your site when you change themes and colors, there’s only one HTTP call for the icons, and they’re open source.

Here are some features in Genericon’d (as of version 1.2) that I think are kinda awesome:

On the fly color changing.

You can make a Twitter Blue icon: [genericon icon=twitter color=#4099FF] makes [genericon icon=twitter color=#4099FF]

On the fly resize.

You can make a Facebook icon bigger: [genericon icon=facebook size=4x] makes [genericon icon=facebook size=4x]

And it all pretty much works the way I want it to. I did tweak the CSS a little to use em instead of px, which isn’t perfect. Genericons works best when your font is a derivative of 16, and for some reason, people still default to 12px. Protip: Ask someone with imperfect vision to look at your site. If they squint, your font is too small.

Genericons, and any font-icon add-on, aren’t perfect for everyone or every site, but they’re here if you need ’em.

7 March, 2013
Stolen GPL

I made a polarizing comment on Twitter back in November, which was perfectly plain to me, but apparently not everyone else.

“GPL means that you can fork, but it doesn’t mean you can steal, and you know damn well what theft is.”

I should have said ‘doesn’t mean you should steal, and you know damn well what that is’ but the point is close enough. Forking in GPL is not only okay, it’s encouraged. Many of us get our starts forking and improving plugins. But there’s a difference between that and stealing someone’s work and presenting it as our own. That’s stealing, plain and simple. If you fork, you attribute. I have a plugin that started as a fork and ended up 100% re-written in a totally different way, but I still credit my original inspiration.

Why?

Because of the community.

Look, per GPL, taking someone’s plugin is not stealing it, in so far as taking the code goes. You have the right to distribute someone else’s code. And I don’t even think that taking someone’s copyright protected work is actually theft. What I do think is that is taking someone else’s work with questionable motives, and rebranding it as your own, is stealing.

Here’s the GNU’s take on Copyright ‘Theft’:

Copyright apologists often use words like “stolen” and “theft” to refer to copyright infringement. This is spin, but they would like you to take it for objective truth.
Under the US legal system, copyright infringement is not theft. Laws about theft are not applicable to copyright infringement. The copyright apologists are making an appeal to authority—and misrepresenting what authority says.
Unauthorized copying is forbidden by copyright law in many circumstances (not all!), but being forbidden doesn’t make it wrong. In general, laws don’t define right and wrong. Laws, at their best, attempt to implement justice. If the laws (the implementation) don’t fit our ideas of right and wrong (the spec), the laws are what should change.

I agree with their explanation, and think it’s valid, in so far as it goes.

Where it breaks down is the motive, as I mentioned before. If I buy a plugin or theme to use, I’ve bought it for the intended purpose. If I buy it to fork, I’ve bought it for another intended purses. If I buy it to sell as my own, now I’ve walked into asshole territory. Per the GPL, this isn’t theft and it isn’t stealing (again, forking is okay). But when you look at it dead on, you’ve taken someone else’s work, with the intent to profit from their work, without any attribution or credit or compensation.

In any other situation, that would be, clearly, stealing.

Theft is taking someone else’s property without permissions and with the intent to deprive the rightful owner of it. Obviously we’re not depriving the owner of the product when it comes to software, but we are intended to deprive them of the profits of their software, by circumventing their established ‘sales’ procedure. This works the other way, too. If I take someone’s free theme/plugin and sell it, I’m stealing from them as well. However. In both cases, if I’m not selling the product, but selling my support of it, I’m not stealing anything.

Stealing is presenting someone else’s works as your own, among other definitions, and taking without right or permission. When it comes to GPL, you have both right and permission to take, that is unquestioned. But again, once you start presenting this as your own, you’ve walked into asshole territory. You didn’t do the work, you didn’t write the code, and you didn’t do anything except copy/paste. That’s not coding. You’re being dishonest, and I feel you’re stealing.

It’s morally ambiguous and sticky for me to just say ‘this is stealing’ which is why I have to come back to the intent and motive. Am I doing this for altruistic reasons? Did the developer take a walk and abandon their work, and I’m simply keeping it alive? Did the developer reject my patch so I forked it? Or am I doing this because I resent them charging $85 for a plugin when WordPress is free? If it’s that last one, then I’m a thief, because my motive is to stick it to the other guy.

Separating ‘stealing’ and ‘theft’ is like undoing a Gordian knot. You can do it, but it starts bumping into all sorts of crazy semantics. That’s why, most of the time, we don’t bother. I have a very strong opinion on the subject of code-theft, and always have. I feel that the only way to keep the GPL going is to not only do what’s right, but mean it, and being a good steward of the community, be it WP or Drupal or even Expression Engine, means you have to do what’s right.

The right thing is to thank the guy who came first. Even an ‘Inspired by a snide comment by Ipstenu’ is being a good steward. You’ve encouraged me to do more by taking the time to recognize my effort. With that encouragement, I’ll go on to do more. It’s positive reinforcement at it’s best.

13 December, 2012

Tag: open source

Your Photos, Your Way

Chrome Dumps Webkit

Trading APC for Zend

Installing Zend

Cleanup

Results

Goodbye Google Reader

Genericons: Plugin’d

Stolen GPL