WordPress Again

I haven’t been updating this site very often. Upon reflection, I decided that this is in part because the Jekyll workflow that I switched to was… inconvenient.

It would be possible to hack around this. I could have written some sort of simple web-app which generated a new post, committed it to git, pushed it to github, built the site, and sync’d it onto my hosting. That’d keep the ridiculous performance / security benefits of a static site, while still letting me make quick updates from wherever I happen to be. It’d even be fairly easy, at least to get something basic working.

But. I don’t really want to do that. The point of using a system like Jekyll or (before it) WordPress is to offload that particular bit of work onto someone else, who can pay attention to all of those details for me.

So, here I am on WordPress again. Hopefully, after a bit more than four years, I won’t find myself getting hacked again. 😛

Why WordPress again? Well…

It’s really popular. This does count for something. Automattic likes to point out that it around a quarter of the public web runs on it. This means there’s a lot of resources available.

To keep some of what I liked from Jekyll, I’m using Automattic’s Jetpack plugin. This gets me a lot of the fancy features from WordPress.com, including letting me keep using Markdown to write these posts. I’m also using the WP-Super-Cache plugin, because it seems that even now running uncached WordPress is just asking for trouble.

I’ll write another post soon about how to migrate from Jekyll to WordPress. There were a few bumps along the way.

Hubot

My employer has long used Skype as a team communication tool. This has some drawbacks, as I found myself complaining about way back in 2011, mostly that Skype is very much not optimized for big long-running rooms, particularly on mobile devices.

Given this, why have we stuck with it?

  • If we switch, everyone in the company needs to change their workflow to use some new tool, and most people don’t want to do this very much.
  • As such, we want to be really sure that whatever we switch to is sufficiently better than Skype that we won’t have to switch again anytime soon, because it’ll be an even harder sell to do so.
  • …but Skype really is fantastic at the “call a bunch of people” and chat, without having to care about network settings use-case. So we either need something else that’s fantastic at it, or something which’ll make it easy to keep using Skype to call a group of people you’re chatting with.
  • We have existing tools set up around Skype. We wrote a bot that announces stuff we care about in our chats, which we’re all very used to having around.

That last point gives us some incentive to make a switch now, as Skype decided to discontinue important parts of its API back in late 2013. This means that our existing integration is slowly falling apart, as the old version of Skype it has to work with becomes unable to interact with newer clients. It recently reached the point now where it cannot send messages in rooms created by newer clients, which makes it effectively useless for new projects.

So. We’re kind of looking at Slack, and part of working out if we like it is getting our bot in there, so we can see how it feels with our normal workflow. However, our bot is just a thin wrapper about Skype4Py, and porting it to use the Slack API would effectively mean rewriting it in full… which seems to be potentially wasted effort.

Enter the Hubot

Hubot is a chat bot framework, with adaptors for approximately everything. It’s fairly popular amongst the hip tech-company crowd, which our company is entirely too long to consider itself a part of.

So I decided to port our custom stuff to hubot scripts. This turned out to be pretty easy, so long as I kept the CoffeeScript reference open in a browser tab.

I’ve written:

  • A subscribe-to-deviantart-events script, which lets users/rooms sign up to be notified of the events our existing skype-bot was already announcing.
  • A Zendesk script, which can be set up as a “target” on Zendesk so we can feed tickets into the aforementioned notifier. As a bonus, I gave our helpdesk a new system they’d been requesting for ages, which announces if we’ve receieved more than X tickets over the last Y hours, as a warning that there might be a serious issue.
  • A Phabricator integration to expand references to Phabricator objects (tickets, code-reviews, commits, etc). This one I’ve actually stuck up on github for general use, since I think it has nothing DA-specific in it.

Slack seems nice, so hopefully we’ll settle on it. But if we don’t, at least I’ve invested my time in something transferable.

Video Kiled the Tutorial Stars

I loathe having to watch a video or listen to audio to extract information, and would far prefer to read an article explaining the same information.

It’s therefore unfortunate that most of the time when I want to find out how to do something nowadays, a google search will turn up almost-exclusively video results. Particularly as one gets into niche areas… “minecraft iron golem farm” for example, seems like an area where some detailed diagrams would be vastly better than watching 30 minute videos.

I’m apparently a minority in holding this opinion. Drat.

Hosting Switch

Recently I switched my personal hosting from Dreamhost to WebFaction. I’d been butting up against the resource limits on Dreamhost’s cheap plan for ages, and an annoying multi-day outage was the last straw.

The outage was actually pretty interesting, in its way. I discovered that all sites served from a particular user account were having their host processes instantly killed. Okay, I assumed that I was being hit by some crazy-aggressive spider, and I’d have to go throttle something. Then I tried to ssh in, and discovered that my login shell got insta-killed. Problem.

Eventually, via their web panel, I migrated all the sites on that user account to a different user account, and thus discovered that there was no unusual load at all. The process killer had just gone mad, and was killing any process owned by that user, without any reason. Dreamhost did eventually restore access to that account, but it took something like three days.

In that time I did a bit of research about alternatives! WebFaction came highly recommended from some of my coworkers and had a 60 day money back guarantee, so I felt they were worth a shot. They’ve turned out to work very well.

What I get out of this is:

  • Less resource constraints. For one thing… CPU and memory consumed by the server-wide Apache/MySQL/Postgres instances don’t count against your plan limits.
  • Less heavily-loaded servers. This article is accurate, from my own tests.
  • Focus on long-running apps. Dreamhost was very much a PHP host. You could run other stuff on it, but it clearly wasn’t what they intended.
  • Memcache installed on all servers. Thank $deity.

I’ve lost:

  • A bit of hand-holding. Dreamhost was pretty good at doing things for you with a checkbox, like redirecting www to the subdomainless domain if you wanted. With webfaction I had to write my own little www-remover app for it. (Which was simple, but still.)
  • Sites hosted under multiple user accounts. I always liked that as an extra little burst of security.
  • (Related to that last point…) a collection of cracker backdoor scripts that had been installed via some compromised WordPress themes and eventually been neutered by me.

All in all, I think I’d still recommend Dreamhost to relatively non-technical people. If all you want is to host a generic PHP package, WebFaction is going to be confusing.

One final note: it having been a long time since I last switched hosting plans (I’d been on Dreamhost since 2005), I was slightly amused to notice that it took me longer to bzip up a multi-gig database dump than it probably would have to just scp the uncompressed file across.

Startup Knowledge Ruined A Movie For Me

I was at the gym the other day, and a movie called The Darkest Hour came on. Now, this turns out to be a movie which has general consensus as being Not Good (12% on Rotten Tomatoes, etc). However, the thing which first threw me out of my suspension of disbelief was an early scene to do with startup economics.

I now have to recap the first 15 minutes of the film. Sorry. Our protagonists were set up as being some sort of web/mobile developers. They had developed a site/app that let travelers find fun nightlife in new cities, and meet up with one another. They were flying into Moscow, because they had developed said app up-front with the intent of selling it off to some Big Russian Business. When they land they mention looking at the site, and seeing 50 active users in Moscow that day. Showing up at their meeting, it turns out that their partner has sold them out, and is presenting their Big Idea to the Russians, with them cut out of the picture. Notably, he’s not stealing the actual app from them, just the idea. They are now incredibly discouraged, feel he has won, and make comments about how they guess their app has to shut down.

That’s the point where it lost me. These people have (a) an working application, which (b) has a noticeable number of active users despite their only having just launched it. Their ex-partner has an idea for a rip-off of a site with first-mover advantage. Assuming that they have any idea at all about how they want to monetize this service, they’re in a clearly good position. Either they perform said monetization themselves, or they find a new business partner to sell to. (If they don’t have any idea how to monetize, of course, there’s a problem. But if that’s the case I’m not sure how they hoped to sell to the Russians.)

So. 15 minutes in, and I’m forced to either break suspension of disbelief or conclude that our protagonists are idiots. I don’t think the writers wanted either of these outcomes.

I’m used to losing immersion due to computer-related mistakes. But I think this is the first time it’s happened because of a more general tech-industry issue.

My operating theory is that this is a case of screenwriters assuming that every industry is like screenwriting. Presumably if you’ve written a script on spec, and you show up at a studio to try to sell it, and it turns out that your backstabbing partner is already there selling a script based on the same idea… you’re kind of screwed.

Switching from Android to iPhone

Back in March-ish of 2011 I got an Android phone. It was an Optimus V, which means it was cheap (about $150, no carrier subsidy) and limited, but was available with an actual reasonably-priced no-contract plan ($25/month). Since I can’t bring myself to pay the crazy rates you Americans seem to pay your phone carriers, this was a good deal.

In July of this year I got myself an iPhone 4S. Virgin started offering them, but I wound up going with Straight Talk instead, since Virgin only offered the lowest storage capacity and wouldn’t let you activate a phone you didn’t buy from them. I’m paying a little more for the service, but it’s still reasonable ($45/month, unlimited everything).

I feel like talking about the experience of switching. What I liked about Android, what I like about the iPhone. I know some people who are really invested in their phone OS, but I am not one of those. I think I can be relatively unbiased here.

Still, this is all utterly subjective. It’s what I like and didn’t like, and what matters to me.

Hardware, with an asterisk

A big caveat: I had a cheap Android. It had poor performance, low memory, almost no onboard storage space, a so-so screen, a not-overly-large battery, and all in a flimsy plastic case. I’ve not used any of the higher-end Android devices. By all reviews it was fantastic for the price, but still… I’m not going to dwell greatly on the hardware differences.

I do think it’s fair to note that you can’t get that sort of experience with an iPhone. The worst iPhone out there is, at least, that way because it’s 5 years old.

So, up-front, the device quality of the iPhone is a lot higher. Better performance, lots of storage, good battery life, ridiculously good screen, vastly better camera. Also, as a personal-taste matter, I think the iPhone has much nicer industrial design, but your mileage may vary.

Mind you, I sort of liked knowing that my phone was cheap. It might have been flimsy plastic, but I didn’t have to worry about dropping it the same way I do this $800 lump of crackable-glass.

Now, the stuff which I think is fairer to compare: software differences!

I rooted my Android and ran a custom ROM. I like that I could do that. I don’t like that it was the only way I had of getting a sort of up to date version of the OS. At the time I switched, Gingerbread was still the most-recent Android version available for the Optimus V, even with custom ROMs. So I like knowing that, for the next few years, I’m guaranteed to get updates promptly and without having to fiddle around with warranty-voiding matters.

iOS and Android feel about equally flexible to me. Technically this is false, since Android has a lot more flexibility, but for my purposes they’re equivalent. Rooting your android and running a custom ROM feels about the same as jailbreaking your iPhone. It’s true that I can’t easily switch to a different keyboard layout without jailbreaking… but I stuck with the default keyboard on Android anyway, and I like the iOS keyboard.

I liked the account manager on Android. Setting up my iPhone involved entering passwords repeatedly, whereas on Android I just had to enter them up-front and apps would ask permission. This is improving a little with Twitter and Facebook integration, but my Google credentials were the real killer.

I miss the Google integration. GMail and Google Voice are so much better on Android. Google Maps on Android was a vast improvement over the Google Maps app on iPhone. The new Apple Maps app looks promising, and finally picks up parity on the turn-by-turn navigation, but may also have some teething issues to work out.

I like knowing that if an app is mentioned, it’ll be available for me to use. On Android, a lot of apps were restricted and not flagged as available for my device. This is sort of a “cheap Android” issue, but it came up enough that I want to call it out separately.

I like that installing apps on the iPhone reliably works. Fuck “package file invalid” errors. I got those all the time on Android, and as far as I can tell they happened because there was insufficient room on a partition to uncompress a downloaded package file. I would call this another “cheap Android” issue, but Google’s utter failure to write a Market app that could notice the problem and provide a helpful error message or workaround just leaves me bitter. This error, on its own, was a major driver in getting me to upgrade my phone… and in persuading me that moving away from the OS that had this as a persistent issue was worth a shot.

I kind of miss Intents. Being able to set default apps was useful; the iPhone locks you into things like Mail, Maps, Photos, and Safari. They’re perfectly servicable apps, mind you, I’d just like knowing that if I discovered something vastly better I could seamlessly switch.

I like Siri. I find I mostly use her for the “remind me to do X when I get home”, or “add Y to my shopping list” features, rather than the search-related stuff. I could probably get an app to do the same on Android, of course.

My shopping list being shared with my wife over iCloud as a built-in feature is awesome. I had an app for that on Android, but it’s something I had to buy. That said, my having to visit the iCloud website to set up this sharing is ridiculous, and I bet almost no non-technical users have ever noticed it.

I’m a fan of the iPhone’s lock-screen camera mode. You can start taking pictures without having to unlock the device, which I never saw an equivalent of on Android. My 3 year old daughter uses it to take pictures of me sleeping if I didn’t put my phone away the night before. 😛

My wife switched as well, and asked her if there was anything she had to add. She says she likes “knowing that things will just work”. I’d say it’s a bit of a cliched point, but then I remember what she went through while trying to make a bluetooth keyboard work reliably on Android. Another example would be plugging into car stereos: the iPhone works easily, since almost everything has support for it, while the Android functioned as an external USB hard drive of MP3s… which is rather more awkward. Syncing music with your iPhone is also far, far easier than syncing music with an Android device, if only because there’s a clear default “this is how you do it” state.

No, there is too much. Let me sum up.

Android:

  • good: accounts, Google apps, changing default apps, “freedom”
  • bad: experience depends vastly on the exact handset you own, long-standing Market bugs, upgrade schedule is atrocious

iPhone:

  • good: app availability, Siri, retina screen, iCloud, no bad devices, reliable upgrades, “it just works”
  • bad: Maps not up to Google’s standards yet

I’d say that I’m happy with my iPhone. Next time I want to get a new device I’ll still consider an Android. I gather that a Nexus is the way to get iPhone-equivalent upgrade support, so I’ll certainly look at that. Still, unless something on Android looks like more than just a quantum leap ahead, I’d imagine I’ll be sticking with the iPhone.

I am not this hotel’s customer

I’m on vacation at the moment, in Chicago, and my experience of staying in a hotel here has caused a fairly predictable reaction in me. It has made me realize: I am not the customer here. Or, to be more precise, I do not represent the primary demographic this hotel considers its customers to come from.

First, a few observations:

  1. In-room wifi is not free. (This is really the big one.)
  2. The hotel maintains a few restaurants/bars which sell really over-priced and under-alcoholed drinks.
  3. The hotel maintains a convention space. It’s been hosting things most nights I’ve been here.

From this I conclude that the hotel has geared its offerings to appeal to people who aren’t paying for their own room. People with an expense account. If my employer was covering my travel costs here, I’d be fine with charging wifi to my room, and adding on meals/drinks regardless of whether they’re reasonably priced.

The customer is a business that can afford to send employees out to travel for some reason. Thus the purchasing decision will be made based on factors that I don’t care about, like whether there’s meeting spaces, or how close it is to some convention. In particular, the customer isn’t the person who’ll be staying at the hotel, or even who’ll be directly paying for anything involved with the hotel.

Interestingly, if I go to an objectively worse hotel, say a Motel 6, I am the customer. I’m a probably cost-conscious consumer who is picking between similar options, and since I’m also the person who’ll be using the service they have an incentive to directly appeal to my own irritations. Free wifi, free breakfasts, etc.

Note: it’s not really the money that matters to me, it’s the sensation of being nickel-and-dimed. I bought a room, and you’re not giving me an amenity that the cheapest motel will throw in for free? Really? That’s why I don’t think the explanation is that the hotel expects its visitors to be people well off enough to not care about the extra fees. Even if the money’s no object, the attitude is a pain.