There is a slightly disturbing trend I’ve noticed where every interaction with our fellow man seems to be viewed as a business opportunity. Let’s face it: we can’t all make our livings selling our opinions to one another. I don’t view my readers as consumers or potential ad clicks. I seek to inspire and to be inspired by them. The payment I receive is in new thoughts and new ideas.

These and other wise words from brainwagon.

Every thing must have a beginning, to speak in Sanchean phrase; and that beginning must be linked to something that went before. The Hindoos give the world an elephant to support it, but they make the elephant stand upon a tortoise. Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos; the materials must, in the first place, be afforded: it can give form to dark, shapeless substances, but cannot bring into being the substance itself.

– Mary Shelly

They looked at it and Evan sort of nodded his head. Then he basically said that what I was talking about was interesting, but that he wouldn’t be doing it with Twitter.

I give him absolute full credit for that. Because here it is 4 years later doing phenomenally well. I sort of stopped using Facebook because I have 1200 FB friends, and there are 50 real friends in there and I don’t know anyone else. My news feed is covered with junk.

But I still use Twitter because it’s a very carefully curated list for me. I only follow people that I genuinely listen to and care about so it still is very high value for me. Thinking back, Twitter never “went viral” on me. Twitter never pressured me to signup, never spammed my account, never forced me to follow people, never made me add lots of friends. So I trust them for a highly curated experience.”

Great writeup on thenextweb.

The Facebook model has the fundamental problem that I don’t actually care what all these “friends” are doing all day. “Following” is so much more useful.

• New slice with Ubuntu Lucid
• WordPress 3 with Multi-site
• Varnish for that extra umph

The results:

• Slicehost, though not the most bang for you buck as others, still has great management tools and documentation.
• Varnish is awesome, easy to configure and lightweight. They even provide some guidance on using with wordpress.
• WordPress Multi-site, pain in the ass

It turns out Multi-site means a few different things. WordPress seems optimized do do multiple blogs on the same domain. Everything else is a hack. There seem to be two methods people use for getting full domain name support:

MU Domain Mapping

After configuring your site to be a ‘network’, you can use the MU Domain Mapping plugin to sort of handle full domain names. However, this is sort of half-way there. If you want a blog like ‘rhettg.com’, you have to create rhettg.nullhole.com and your blog, then use the mapping to make rhettg.com work. BUT, all your media and links still point to rhettg.nullhole.com. Meh.

True Multi-Site

I found some instructions here that involve actually doing MySQL queries to add a real site. Not an easy task, but seems to get much closer to what I wanted.

It seems that though under network mode you have ‘Sites’ configuration in admin, but these are actually just ‘blogs’. Internally, WordPress supports multiple ‘sites’ and multiple ‘blogs’ Where a blog is assigned to a single site. A site is essentially your domain name so if you want multiple domain names, the only proper way to to do is to add a real site.

The instructions above successfully got multi-sites working, but didn’t really get my 100% there because my second site was still a second class citizen. I couldn’t get plugins or themes working easily without doing more hacks in MySQL. The key, it seems is to understand conceptually what’s going on here and get the terminology right:

• A ‘network’ in front-end terminology is a ‘site’ behind the scenes. So we really created a whole new network by following the above directions.
• A ‘site’ then is actually a ‘blog’.
• Users can belong to both sites and blogs, but a ‘Super Admin’ is only super on their own network.

To really get things working properly, you have to make yourself (and other users if you want) Super Admin’s on the second network. I added myself as a Super Admin on the new site by creating a new row in wp_sitemeta. Something like this worked for me:

insert into wp_sitemeta (site_id, meta_key, meta_value) value (2, 'site_admins', 'a:1:{i:0;s:6:"rhettg";}')

I would copy and paste the ‘value’ out of the corresponding value for site #1. I assume this is some sort of PHP serialization format.

Now you can login to the second network and set things up. Kinda awkward, but seems to work now.

We have a crisis of leadership in America because our overwhelming power and wealth, earned under earlier generations of leaders, made us complacent, and for too long we have been training leaders who only know how to keep the routine going. Who can answer questions, but don’t know how to ask them. Who can fulfill goals, but don’t know how to set them. Who think about how to get things done, but not whether they’re worth doing in the first place. What we have now are the greatest technocrats the world has ever seen, people who have been trained to be incredibly good at one specific thing, but who have no interest in anything beyond their area of exper tise. What we don’t have are leaders.

This is one of the finest things I’ve read in weeks.

A while back, I signed up for redbubble.com to buy a t-shirt or something. Right away I got this really nice (automated) email that actually seemed personal because it was actually “from” someone. It felt like I was communicating with a person rather than a faceless company. Why thank-you Jason Michaels for welcoming me to this community. But then I realized the ‘from’ address is ‘noreply’ and I felt duped.

I suppose this happens because of the way companies are organized internally:

• Marketing is measured by how many people they can engage in the company. So they like to send out emails.
• Customer service is measured by how many people DON’T engage with them. Any additional customer contact is an expense.

So the compromise is to send out emails, but do everything you can to keep them one-sided. I wonder how these companies are coping with their twitter/blogs/getsatisfaction ?

On a related note, MySpace no longer has a human face.

My own issue involved having a python based daemon running that does HTTP requests (using httplib) to another service. This daemon is restarted gracefully by sending SIGTERM, which it catches with a signal handler, finishes up what it was doing and exits. The problem arises if it receives a signal while in a system call, for example while receiving the response from an HTTP request. To correct behavior is to attempt the system call again, however the actual system call is abstracted away, so the caller, or even httplib can’t re-try.

The crux of the issue is the function readline() provided by a fileobject socket wrapper in socket.py

                self._rbuf = StringIO()  # reset _rbuf.  we consume it via buf.
                data = None
                recv = self._sock.recv
                while data != "\n":
                    data = recv(1)
                    if not data:
                        break
                    buffers.append(data)
                return "".join(buffers)

I’m not the first to find this, as this issue even has a patch. But, due to the “test needed” status, it’s been siting there getting no attention for quite a while. Well I want it fixed, so let’s try to write a regression test!

The first step was to apply this patch to an appropriate development branch:

  svn co http://svn.python.org/projects/python/branches/release26-maint python26
  cd python26/Lib
  patch -p0 < ~/socket.py.diff

Now it turned out, this didn’t apply cleanly, as the patch was from an earlier version. But it was easy enough to fix.

Secondly, I need to a test case to Lib/test/test_socket.py
There is already a test case for normal behavior of fileobject, however causing a real socket to generate a EINTR isn’t exactly easy. But I just need to test the error handling, this is unit test. Perfect case for using a mock object. Now there arn’t any handy mock object libraries in the standard python distribution, so i’ll just keep it simple:

        class MockSocket(object):
            def __init__(self):
                # Build a generator that returns functions that we'll call and return for each
                # call to recv()
                def raise_error():
                    raise socket.error(errno.EINTR)
                self._step = iter([
                    lambda : "This is the first line\nAnd the sec",
                    raise_error,
                    lambda : "ond line is here\n",
                    lambda : None,
                ])

            def recv(self, size):
                return self._step.next()()

Now when I create my test case, I’ll just pass this mock socket in and call readline on it.

class FileObjectInterruptedTestCase(unittest.TestCase):
    """Test that the file object correctly handles being interrupted by a signal."""
    def setUp(self):
      ... create my mock socket ...

    def test(self):
        fo = socket._fileobject(self._mock_sock)
        self.assertEquals(fo.readline(), "This is the first line\n")
        self.assertEquals(fo.readline(), "And the second line is here\n")

Now to find out if this test case will allow this fix to be included……

So I was particularly excited to have these two events transpire today:

The iPhone Upgrade

ATT finally got their act together and enabled their premier site to allow online upgrades to the 3GS. Fantastic, thank you AT&T, you were only a couple of days late. Anyway, I placed the order, goes great, no problems. But then 2 minutes later I get an email:

Thank you for your recent purchase on the AT&T Premier Online Store. We’re pleased that you chose AT&T as your wireless service provider.

Unfortunately, we cannot validate your credit card number. Please call us at your earliest convenience with a different credit or debit card number so we can complete your order: 1-866-499-8008, Monday through Friday, 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. Eastern Time.

Oh great, 3 cheers for online ordering. Well I still want my phone so 2 minutes later I’m on hold listening to the same 8 bars of crappy jazz music playing over and over, interspersed with messages about how much they appreciate my business. Finally, after a full 10 minutes of hold I get to talk to a real person. Of course I have to tell them my phone number, again, I’ll never understand what the automated system does with the phone number I gave them earlier. She starts looking for orders and can’t find me.

“Sorry, it says you’re still elegible for an upgrade, so the order must have come through yet. Can you call back again in about an hour?”

Somehow I feel better sending this email reply the no doubt automated email address:

I just called, but they couldn’t find the order.
This is really poor customer service. I order stuff online all the
time, why don’t other companies have this hard of time. I’m trying to give you money!!

The Amp Assembly

My JBL Amp Assembly blew up a few weeks ago. Thankfully, I can buy a replacement part for only $120. So I called up the parts department today, part number in hand, excited to watch Jurrasic Park again and rattle the windows.

“Let me place that order for you…….Oh, sorry sir, my computer just crashed”

“Hmm ok, that sucks.

60 seconds later

“Sorry sir, I don’t think this coming back anytime soon. Can I call you back ?”

Why is this commerce stuff so hard!?!

It’s very impressive how quickly after the 1 year warranty on the electronics of my JBL Venue SUB12 decided to melt down. Not sure when it happened exactly, but one day I thought to myself, “self, there isn’t much bass going on here anymore, is the subwoofer still on ?”

RIP Subwoofer, Sept 2007-Sometime in the spring of 2009

The memory that will stick with me the best on this trip though is the hour or so Britt and I spent trying to track down a decent sweatshirt. I always assumed that Disneyland was designed for you to spend a whole lot of money once you got into the park. They have this nifty Fastpass system where you can get a pass to come back to a ride, so instead of waiting in line you can go shop.

HOWEVER, it was really difficult to spend money here. Nothing was quite right. Honestly, with so many shops open, all over the park, outside every ride, there was a real shortage of choice. Even though all the shops have a sort of theme, usually related to where in the park they are, 80% of the merchandise was the same in every one of them. 

I found two kinda cool unique t-shirts:

I really dig these retro graphics. However, I’m not going to wear them on a t-shirt. I want a print or poster with these images. But of course, even looking through the Disney Art Galleries, they don’t have these ones available.

Disney has a ridiculous amount of IP to draw upon to create merchandise. The rides and unique parts of the parks alone should provide for no shortage of cool ideas for unique gifts you could get only at Disneyland. Somebody is REALLY dropping the ball here. 

I do have to applaud Disney for there forward thinking embracing of online retailing. They have licensed lots of their Disney characters and images to Zazzle so you can create your own custom merchandise. But seriously, it should be EASY to spend A LOT of money at Disneyland. But it isn’t.