I decided to come back to a WordPress based blog – hosted at Joyent. The reasons were pretty simple. I wasn’t overly happy with the way that Typepad‘s pricing model worked. It’s ok for people wanting a pretty basic blog, but if you actually used it and want to customise it, I think WordPress is better.
I could have done the whole free hosting on WordPress.com thing – but I prefer hosting myself.
Hope the few readers I do have like the theme!
We get mice up in our flat a reasonable amount. A block of 50 or so flats tends to mean there'll always be some. Plus, this is London – so you're never too far from them I guess. Being on the 5th floor helps a bit, as they have quite a way to come to get here.
No more commercial breaks! Makes it all worth watching. So this is where the money they saved from giving Neighbours to Channel 5 has gone?
“The BBC has secured the television rights to Formula One from the 2009 season. The five-year deal marks the return of the sport to BBC screens 12 years after ITV began broadcasting Grands Prix. Hopefully they leave James Allen with ITV”
read more | digg story
This is clearly the new, safer, caffeine – for those late night coding/gaming sessions.
“Eerie blue LEDs in truck cabs and truck stops could be the key to reducing accidents caused by drowsy drivers, say US researchers. They say bathing night drivers in the right light can increase their alertness by resetting their body clocks.”
read more | digg story
Leopard’s Finder has a glaring bug in its directory-moving code, leading to horrendous data loss if a destination volume disappears while a move operation is in action.
read more | digg story
I still get agencies trying to ‘sell’ me jobs. I wouldn’t mind so much – but my CV hasn’t been “out there” for a very long time.
I always thought that CV’s, like all personally identifiable data, had to be destroyed when it was no longer useful. So what are these job agencies doing!?
Oh well, suppose I’ll just keep treating them like spam.
Sorry Mac fan boys. Safari 3 in Leopard was obviously not ready for release. This afternoon – it has crashed on me a total of 7 times.
I can’t seem to narrow down the problem but only occurs after I access a site protected by HTTP Basic Authentication. After that, I have about 30 minutes (depends on whether I continue browsing said protected site) before it crashes.
*sigh* – That and the Expose bug… quite annoying really. I wouldn’t mind – but Firefox has more memory leaks than Vanguard.
UPDATE: Safari appears to be bugged for me when using Privoxy – When I have no Proxy settings set, everything works fine.
This I didn’t even bother to notice – So bit of a noob error.
If you check the WhatsNewInLeopard page over at macosforge – you can see they already built in the patch from the Joyent guys.
I should really have looked before embarking on doing the patch myself.
However – gave me a good insight into how to do it 
I also did a quick check and noticed that Python also has it all compiled in too – shame the entry/exit names aren’t the same as the one on Python on Solaris though. They also haven’t included the PHP module that exists (and I have made work on OSX) so you can still grab that on this site.
Well it’s been a very busy couple of months since I posted on here. We’ll skip through why I haven’t posted in a blink of an eye though.
I got promoted (yay), Wedding prep is going well and is on track, Work is extremely busy – leaving not much time for other pursuits.
Anyway… I’ve been playing with DTrace recently. For those that don’t know what DTrace is I sincerely suggest you check out the video of the Google Tech Talk by Bryan Cantrill on Google Video.
My favourite bit of the video is where he recounts his early weeks at Sun and talking that software is different.
“Software is different, software is unique. And we try and draw analogies between software and other things we build; those analogies always come apart”
And at 4:26: “This isn’t a thing! This doesn’t exist! We’re not seeing a manifestation! We’re seeing a representation of an abstraction. This doesn’t exist anymore than your name exists. Your name doesn’t exist. We made it up! Doesn’t this bother you?”
Now although Bryan then uses this as a starting point of the whole DTrace debugging method – he has another distinct point. A point which has come true at nearly every point in my career. You can’t design the design before the design.
So, back to DTrace.
I love it. No really, I do. The real power of it for me comes from monitoring the three main scripted languages: Python, PHP and Ruby (on and off Rails).
On my Solaris 10 box (yes, no fancy Developer Express on this testing). I now have Ruby 1.8.6 (with p111), Python 2.5.1 and PHP 5.2.0 working 100% with DTrace. That is – I can actually trace through what a running PHP script in Apache is doing.
That is immensely powerful.
Here’s the thing though. The PHP addon for DTrace doesn’t work. I have fixed it and sent the information on how to fix it back to it’s maintainer (hopefully an official fix will come out in a few days from him). Ruby 1.8.6, although there is a patch, doesn’t have the latest security fixes. Not overly useful? I have patched that locally (if anyone reads this and wants the patch – let me know).
Python 2.5.1? That doesn’t appear to exist at Sun. Although someone made a rough patch for it. It doesn’t compile, work or anything. Why release it if you haven’t even compiled it…? No matter. It took a couple of hours – but I got that working too in the end. That one however is a ‘new’ patch. Again – if anyone wants this patch, let me know.
