I mentioned that I hadn’t been updating this blog, and that wasn’t just a matter of there being nothing to talk about.

Back in July I got laid off by DeviantArt. Since that was their second layoffs round of 2015, I think it’s fair to say that they’re having some problems.

This was non-ideal for me. In retrospect, I should probably have started looking around for a new job after the first layoffs round, but I’ll count that as a learning experience.

Fortunately, I then spent a month on downtime and relaxing, because I’d been terrible at taking vacation time at DeviantArt and they thus had to pay out a lot of vacation hours to lay me off.

Now I’m part of the Visual Editor team at the Wikimedia Foundation. I help people edit Wikipedia, essentially.

Funnily enough, there aren’t all that many resources for people who’re moving from Jekyll to WordPress. I took some advice from a post by Fabrizio Regini, but had to modify it a bit, so here’s what I figured out…

My starting point was a Jekyll-based site stored on github. Comments were stored using Disqus.

As a first step, I installed WordPress on my hosting. This was, as they like to boast, very easy.

Next I had to get all my existing content into that WordPress install. I decided the easiest way to do this was to use the RSS import plugin that WordPress recommends. So I added an RSS export file to my Jekyll site and ran Jekyll to have it build a complete dump of all my posts which I could use.

Here I ran into a problem. I’d set up my new WordPress site on PHP 7… and the RSS importer wasn’t able to run because it was calling a removed function. It was just a magic-quotes-disabling function, so I tried editing the plugin to remove it. However, after doing this I found that running the importer on my completely-valid (I checked) RSS file resulted in every single post having the title and contents of the final post in the file. So, plugin debugging time!

While doing this I discovered that the RSS importer was written using regular expressions to parse the XML file. Although, yes, this is about as maximally compatible as possible, I decided that it was better not to go down the rabbit hole of debugging that, and just rewrote the entire feed-parsing side of it to use PHP’s built-in-since-PHP-5 SimpleXML parser. This fixed my title/contents problem.

My version of the plugin is available on github. I can’t say that I tested it on anything besides the specific RSS file that I generated, but it should be maintaining the behavior of the previous plugin.

With all my posts imported, I went through and did a little maintenance:

• The import gave me post slugs which were all auto-generated from the title, while some of mine in Jekyll had been customized a bit, so I updated those to keep existing URLs working.
• All images in posts needed to be updated. I went through and fixed these up by uploading them through WordPress.
• Some markup in posts needed to be fixed. Mostly involving tags.

Next came importing comments from Disqus. I tried just installing the Disqus plugin and letting it sync, but it seems that relies on you having WordPress post IDs associated with your comments… which I naturally didn’t. So I went out and found a Disqus comment importer plugin… which, much like the RSS importer, was broken. It expects a version of the Disqus export file which was current around 5 years ago, when it was last updated.

Thus we have my version of the Disqus comment importer plugin. It tries to work out the ID of your posts by looking at the URL. This works pretty well, but I did have to edit a few of the URLs in the export file to make sure they matched my current permalink structure. If you’ve never changed your permalinks, you should be good without that step.

Migration: complete.

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. :-P

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.

Last year Apple introduced child accounts, so that children under the age of 13 could have Apple IDs without having to lie about their age. This was a sensible move! However, it left those of us who had already made an account for a child (by lying about their age) a bit in the lurch, since there was no official migration support. In fact, there’s even a bunch of advice out there saying that there’s no way to do it without making a new ID for the child.

I don’t know if this has changed, or if it’s been possible all along, but today I worked out the hoops to jump through to turn an existing “adult” Apple ID into a “child” Apple ID associated with your family.

1. Invite your child’s Apple ID to your family. They’ll join as an adult, with full “buying stuff” powers, but this is very temporary.
2. Sign in to your child’s Apple ID.
3. Go to “Password and Security”.
4. Update the birthday to your child’s real birthday.
5. Apple will send an email to you, as the family-organizer, asking you to approve turning this account into a child-account which cannot leave your family until it’s 13.
   • If you only have a debit card on your account, you may have to add a credit card while you approve the child-account.
6. Enjoy your child’s newfound ability to make popups appear on your phone asking if they can buy an app.

This may have been driven by my getting an iPhone 6s, and the chain of device hand-me-downs resulting in my six year old daughter now having a device which can actually use family sharing…

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.

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.

I once claimed that I have a daughter.

I now claim that she has just started in kindergarten. She’ll be going to a language immersion school, where she’ll learn Chinese.

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.

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.

jQuery 1.9 was released recently, and removed some things that have long been labeled as deprecated. This broke maphilight slightly, since it was still doing a few checks on $.browser.

I’ve just fixed that. As always, the latest version is available on github.