Well I’m in the process of doing something similar with my IM accounts. In all honesty, I only really have a single account that’s active but it is attached to an email address I simply don’t use for anything any more.

As such, if you have me on MSN then please remove the existing account and replace it with robert@xset.co.uk which is a perfectly valid and working Passport account in its own right.

For those of you not big on the MSN route you can also add robert@xset.co.uk to your GoogleTalk lists and Jabber will be coming along shortly.

When J and I discussed it, Seam Carving was available as a GIMP plugin which meant installing GIMP.

Well now there’s a whole Seam Carving GUI available to make the job that much easier (not that it was that hard in GIMP) so get it out there and carve baby CARVE!

Whilst it’s still a short term fix it will do for basic browsing and email at home. I still need to find a solution to the bigger issue but I’m sure I can get that sorted.

Hopefully we’ll have the bridge connected on Thursday so we shall see what happens

Personally I’m fine with this… if only because, if I have anything to transmit over the internet that I want to keep away from MI5 / MI6 eyes I encrypt it … heavily.

On an unrelated note, coming up shortly – a guide to using GPG to encrypt your email and secure your privacy for no cost at all

(hat tip – This is Gloucestershire)

Truthfully, unless something is jumping up and down at me daily (e.g. this Blog is set as my homepage so I know when it’s been weeks since my last update) then it’s very likely to be forgotten about for weeks at a time. Such is the state with Twitter. Surely they could look at email alerting which would solve the problem in the short term.

What I really need is something similar to the Facebook app for the Blackberry which could keep me updated on Twitter activity via categorized email alerts…

I’ve been doing a load of work in PHP lately which errs on the advanced side of the language in certain areas. Specifically I’ve been working with the PHP Command Line Interpreter (CLI) to build a backend application on a par with a traditional Linux Daemon. Of course PHP presents a number of barriers to Daemon development and not least amongst them is a lack of support for threading. Certainly for highly blocking, spool intensive apps (like the one I’m trying to write) the facility to spawn multiple threads would be useful.

Yes I could use an alternative platform. Python, Perl, Java all have excellent threading support but my level of familiarity with PHP makes it the easiest choice even when I have to come up with some pretty round the houses solutions to issues.

For the most part I do not feel that threading is quite the panacea it once was. Traditionally, threading has been used to allow multiple threads of processing to run simultaneously on the same processor and to share data / communicate with each other. Forking on the other hand actually creates a new and independent process and has, historically, been considered too computationally expensive to use for intensive applications. With all of that said and understood I would reply that on modern systems, with massively powerful, multi core processors, RAM to spare and interpreted languages coming to the fore for enterprise level applications, forking (which is supported by PHP) becomes a very usable alternative to the preferred threading model.

The rest of the post references other site’s which provide information on Faux Threading techniques and how they can be used under PHP for asynchronous, multi path applications. Please read through and I hope you find them helpful.

Oh and it goes without saying that a large portion of these techniques are only supported on Linux stacks … not that I can think of a reason to run anything else

This initial example provides a good grounding in PHP forking along with introducing the functions used to do so. In this example, Mike uses Forking to parallelise a YouTube downloading script: Basic Forking Example

Of course in the LAMP development world a quick and dirty hack is often as good as a well rounded programmewd solution. Joseph Scott shows you how to use a Linux execution feature (namely forking a command into the background using and ampersand) to parallelise applications that don’t need to return anything. I’ve actually used this technique to build a one hit multiplexor for various applications: Quick and dirty fake fork for non returning scripts

A more polished method actually uses the non blocking stream parameter to permit multi threaded netowrk IO from a PHP script. This is another quick and dirty alternative to full threading: Part 1 and Part 2

In an example that is closer to true threading Brian W Bosh uses STD IO to facilitate basic communication between processes without all of that nasty mucking about in Shared Memory :Faux Threading

In the next post on this topic I’ll be looking at more detailed tutorials for using Forking in anger complete with advanced interprocess communication via Shared Memory and Semaphores and tying it all together with a multiplexor to over see a pool of processes.

My first Blackberry was the Pearl. A dinky little phone that happened to have some nice email features. I actually fell in love with the Blackberry approach to phone OS and the messaging, call quality and feature set were superb – by far the best phone I’d owned until that point (and this includes the Pebl, a Treo, a Nokia flip thingy and the Ericsson). The only problem with the Pearl … ok the only two problems with the Pearl,first the more I used the email side of things, the more frustrated I got with the multitap keyboard entry method. It was quick but not as quick as it needed to be in order to actually be useful. The second – the pearl on the Pearl stopped working. This meant I was able to take my Jersey Telecom annual upgrade and grab a:

Curve – full qwerty keyboard and all of the features I’d come to know and love. Packeged neatly in a unit that was of managable size. I was happy with the Curve – it did everything I needed from a phone and was generally the best possible compromise between form and function … except for 2 problems, one, it was GPRS, EDGE only – no Wifi out of the box and no GPS. Sure I bolted a bluetooth GPS recieved onto the package but that meant another (albeit small) box to carry around with me. Secondly, the memory card was buried in the depths of the phone requiring a reboot to get at it (and anyone who’s used a recent Blackberry will know, a full power cycle takes about 3 minutes) not ideal. Sure I could mount the card via the USB on the laptop but I have a card reader built in and want the speed as provided.

Another JT Upgrade was due in May and I Umm’d and Ahh’d about the newer Curves with GPS & Wifi. I considered dumping the Blackberry completely and grabbing a HTC or even another Treo and in the end I went into the store an took a look at the options.

Surprise the first – JT were prepared to pretty much give me any phone if I took out an 18 month contract. Well I’d been with them for 6 years already so another 18 months doesn’t seem too bad. Score!

Surprise the second – the Curve comes with either Wifi or built in GPS – not both! Bummer to the max as I wanted the Wifi for business type reasons and the GPS for dicking about with sattelites and maps.

Turns out the only unit JT offered with both was the 8820… which I now have. It cost me nothing aside from the 18 month contract and so far is working very well indeed. The Wifi ensures top speed at home and at work, the GPS works well.

Plus the 8820 is a business oriented machine, which means VPN out of the box for secure mail when away from my home network and a load of other dinky features (including full support for my SSH client – remote control my servers from my mobile – pretty damn cool!)

Anyway, the 8820 should keep me mostly happy for the next 18 months, at least until such time as the Thunder and next generation of blackberries are available… then, well who knows!

I’m not the first to write about the possibility of using Wordpress as a CMS, A quick Google will return a couple of hundred tutorials which will walk you through the finer points of customising this platform and creating your site.

Rather than look at specific implementations, let’s consider the features the Wordpress offers that make it suitable for managing an entire site:

Templates

The first key aspect of Wordpress is the highly flexible (and sometimes bewildering) templating system. The core features that make it worthy of consideration are the clear separation of header, footer and sidebar navigation (or any other included menus you might need), the ability to place and format your fields anywhere and anyway you may want, the ability to reference plugins (see below) for specific blobs of functionality, and, most importantly, the ability to apply specific templates to specific pages and categories.

This page specific functionality allows for small and medium sites to be built, out of the box, without any plugins required and allows for specific markup to be used for certain pages. Clearly, the flexibility this offers is immense, although at the cost of manageability for your template files.

Plugins

Wordpress is massively popular and as such is supported by an equally massive community. This community develops themes (templates) and plugins which extend your basic Wordpress install in pretty much any direction you care to contemplate.

Plugins allow you to customise navigation elements, page output, link content to dig or Paypal and mostly integrate seamlessly into the WP-Admin interface. Plus, if you have requirements that are above and beyond the scope of any plugin currently available, you can write your own.

Pages / Posts

The Wordpress interface makes a clear distinction between Posts (which are output as part of the blog time flow) and Pages which are static (chronologically speaking) content. Pages can take advantage of the Per Page template model described above and can be arranged into hierarchies of parent and child pages for structuring your content.

You can even specify a single page to use as the homepage for your website (something that in previous versions of Wordpress required a plugin or hack) from within the interface.

Finally the page structure can be output in a variety of ways using nothing more than standard Wordpress Tags and some CSS to produce treee menus, breadcrumbs and other navigational elements.

Custom Fields

Custom fields mean you can add pretty much any piece of meta data to a page without needing to use plugins or hacky HTML in your page content. They could be used for storing expiry dates for content or even for building an entire, mini database within your CMS. Custom Fields require some template hacking to get them outputting as expected but for the most part work as seamlessly as you’d expect.

Clean URLs

Clean URLs (or SEO urls) are a mechanism by which a standard URL:

http://somesite.com/index.php?postid=4334455&cat=category&view=comments

into something much more user friendly:

http://somesite.com/category/post_slug/comments

A load of CMSs provide this feature and Wordpress is no exception. It will actually let you build your own Permalink URL structure which allows you to be as brief (or as verbose) as you wish. Apache’s Mod.Rewrite powers the whole thing which makes for very fast, clean, memorable URLs.

User Management

Wordpress has built in user registration and management features (that can be massively extended via certain plugins) and allow you to build a small community of users. This can be enforced to ensure that valid users are allowed to comment on certain pages / posts (could be used for Reviews in an e-commerce context) only if logged in.

It also allows you to produce a list of valid visitors which could be piped into your Email Marketing tool or used to notify users of new content.

Search

Using MySQL as the search technology means that pages can quickly be located. Of course the search is only as good as your content but a search box can be restricted to certain categories and provides a user with a navigation option that they will find familiar and useful, should your site ever grow big enough to warrant its use.

The downsides

Wordpress is good, but it’s far from perfect. The following are some of the issues that this platform is well known for and may be reasons to look elsewhere:

Templating looks (and is) a lot like PHP

PHP is the scripting technology behind Wordpress and whilst the day to day admin of content is handled through a lovely web interface, the actual process of building the templates can be rather daunting for some. Plus the actual Template syntax is, in places, pure PHP so newcomers to the ubiquitous web programming language may find it difficult to pick up.

Needs caching for bigger sites

An often aired complaint is that Wordpress does not scale well. This is actually not true – Wordpress scales amazingly well, but does require that you reduce the load on your database by using one of the many caching plugins available. Of course if you’re feeling really swish you could implement a dedicated reverse proxy and really keep the install cool.

Some designs can be difficult to realise in dynamic navigation

This is from personal experience, designers who are not used to the restrictions placed upon them by dynamic content often run into difficult realising their designs within the CMS as the template simply can’t be created that does what they require.

For the most part these issues are solvable but please consider the dynamic nature of the output when you sit down to design your site. You will not have total control over every aspect of the page as your are perhaps accustomed to in straight HTML design.

Security Concerns of XML RPC and User Management

I haven’t seen any recently but previous versions of Wordpress were prone to security bugs in the RPC system and the User Management system that could lead to an attacker compromising your website. When using any dynamic CMS you must be aware (and prepared for) the possibility that a previously unknown loop hole could be discovered and will need patching.

Careful management of your Wordpress install is therefore a must to keep ahead of any potential hack attempts.

Summary

Wordpress is a great tool to develop a simple site but many designers and web masters will quickly run into the limitations of the system. After all Wordpress was designed as a blog platform and the CMS functionality has been added after the event.

Next up? Expression Engine

View the rest of this series:
Part 1 – Intro
Part 2 – Requirements
Part 3 – Wordpress

30+ Free Security, Encryption Firewall and Antivirus Apps for Windows

My recomendations?

Antivirus – AVG 8 (but disable the link scanner)

Firewall – Zone Alarm

Encryption – Truecrypt

Digital Signing and Encryption – GnuPG

Although you know what my ultimate recomendation would be right?

Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda3              28G  6.9G   22G  25% /
varrun                2.0G  204K  2.0G   1% /var/run
varlock               2.0G     0  2.0G   0% /var/lock
udev                  2.0G  120K  2.0G   1% /dev
devshm                2.0G  624K  2.0G   1% /dev/shm
lrm                   2.0G   44M  1.9G   3% /lib/modules/2.6.24-19-generic/volatile
/dev/sda1              95M   69M   26M  73% /boot
/dev/sdb2              87G   11G   77G  12% /media/disk
/dev/sdb1             146G   89G   50G  64% /media/passport_
/dev/sdc1              75G   52G   23G  70% /media/ROB'S IPOD
/dev/sdd1              21T  5.1M   21T   1% /media/iscsitest

And for those who like there bytes to be bytes:

Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda3             29285564   7232512  22053052  25% /
varrun                 2028576       204   2028372   1% /var/run
varlock                2028576         0   2028576   0% /var/lock
udev                   2028576       120   2028456   1% /dev
devshm                 2028576       624   2027952   1% /dev/shm
lrm                    2028576     45040   1983536   3% /lib/modules/2.6.24-19-generic/volatile
/dev/sda1                96312     69704     26608  73% /boot
/dev/sdb2             90554320  10791040  79763280  12% /media/disk
/dev/sdb1            152387268  92597084  52110316  64% /media/passport_
/dev/sdc1             77915440  54512064  23403376  70% /media/ROB'S IPOD
/dev/sdd1            21484243840      5152 21484238688   1% /media/iscsitest

This amazing large number comes from one of our new SAN boxes. To put it in context, 21TB (Terrabytes) is enough to store the entire human memory of 14 people, the contents of 3,072 DVD quality movies or 4,404,019 MP3 files.

Oh and Greg? Just in case you think you might be able to come close bear in mind the following:

• This is one of 2 units we have available providing a total of 42TB
• Each unit has only been partitioned to 60%
• Each unit has 30% drive capacity still available

All in all, that’s a lot of pron