i promise i won’t say “i told you so”.

or, check out ecoIron, with their textual analysis of how a Black Google Would Save 750 Megawatt-hours a Year:

As noted, an all white web page uses about 74 watts to display, while an all black page uses only 59 watts. I thought I would do a little math and see what could be saved by moving a high volume site to the black format.

Take at look at Google, who gets about 200 million queries a day. Let’s assume each query is displayed for about 10 seconds; that means Google is running for about 550,000 hours every day on some desktop. Assuming that users run Google in full screen mode, the shift to a black background [on a CRT monitor! mjo] will save a total of 15 (74-59) watts. That turns into a global savings of 8.3 Megawatt-hours per day, or about 3000 Megawatt-hours a year. Now take into account that about 25 percent of the monitors in the world are CRTs, and at 10 cents a kilowatt-hour, that’s $75,000, a goodly amount of energy and dollars for changing a few color codes.

but, the problem with keeping the window open is that, at least on my fedora boxes, a system cron script comes along once a week and cleans out the /tmp directory — including the temp files that vim is using to keep state in my editing session. this makes me have to save/close/reopen vim, usually when i try to launch some external command like sort.

the solution i found was to touch vim’s temp file daily, making it look like a “new” file to the system cleanup script. vim makes temp file directories in a format like this:

/tmp/v\d??????

so, in my personal crontabs, i use this to ferret these out and touch them up-to-date:

find /tmp -follow -type d -name v?????? -exec touch {} \; 2>/dev/null

works like a charm.


macro index S "<bounce-message>spambox@mijit.com\nyd" "Learn as spam"
macro pager S "<bounce-message>spambox@mijit.com\nyd" "Learn as spam"
macro index H "<bounce-message>hambox@mijit.com\nyj" "Learn as ham"
macro pager H "<bounce-message>hambox@mijit.com\nyj" "Learn as ham"


these allow you to highlight a message in the index or pager, hit “S” for spam (or “H” for ham,) and the message bounces away to the appropriate zimbra mailbox for automated spamassassin learning. (additionally, the “S” for spam macro marks the message for deletion; the “H” for ham macro simply moves to the next message.) the tricky bit for me was understanding that mutt allows the “\n” newline character to simulate <return> at the end of the <bounce-message> command.

note that you must change “spambox” and “hambox” to the appropriately named mailboxes for your domain. to see what your current spam mailboxes are, issue the following command as the zimbra user:


zmprov gacf | grep SpamAccount


to change these values to something more appropriate to your domain, use zmprov again:


zmprov mcf zimbraSpamIsNotSpamAccount <your ham account>@example.com
zmprov mcf zimbraSpamIsSpamAccount <your spam account>@example.com


I’ve been wanting to implement some simple tests for my home network to make sure everything is running the way I expect it to on an ad-hoc basis. I’ve got a Nagios setup monitoring my Apache, MySQL, and Zimbra services, but I wanted a bit more granularity to my tests, a command-line interface, and the ability to separate out the “business logic” a la MVC.

Since I had documented my server installation routine in chronological order (eg, “first, unpack the box,”) I immediately noticed I had roughly determined a five-step overview of the process. Since most tests I’ve seen run numerically, I decided on:

• 00prereqs.t – do I have everything I need to run the other tests?
• 01dns.t – can I resolve host names, so I can find hosts and services?
• 02time.t – is my clock correct (so later time dependencies would work?)
• 03hosts.t – can I find all hosts I expect to find?
• 04services.t – can I contact all services (SMTP, HTTP, etc) I expect to find?

UPDATE: I forgot that I moved the DNS test earlier in the sequence – my NTP test relies on DNS to find external time masters to get the current time.

Note: I discovered via 02time.t that Net::Time doesn’t work for me; Net::NTP does. I don’t know what the difference is, but “working” is always a plus in my book. Basically, using it, I test whether localtime is the same as NTP time (see Net::NTP time for details.)

I am not sure whether 04services.t will grow into multiple files for various services, but this works well enough for now. I won’t go into each individual test in each file for this post, but suffice it to say this is how I now test for sanity from my SVN tree:

~/src/mijit
[204]meatbag$ prove -l t/
t/00prereqs.....ok
t/01time........ok
t/02dns.........ok
t/03hosts.......ok
t/04services....ok
All tests successful.
Files=5, Tests=11,  2 wallclock secs ( 0.97 cusr +  0.26 csys =  1.23 CPU)

VIM discoveries

• When using the gq command, the autoindent option can be your friend! This allows indented text to be left-aligned correctly (a necessity for my notes.txt file.)
• some matchparen plugin that is installed on some of my machines and not others adds annoying cyan brace-matching highlighting. This drags my eye away completely away from the cursor – bad plugin! The quick fix: :NoMatchParen disables the plugin, and :DoMatchParen enables it again. Do as you like to your plugin/ directory.

FuseFS musings:

Much seems to have been made of FuseFS lately, which I think is a really neat (but not necessarily great,) idea – and I mean that in a it works in theory, but not reality. At least, that’s been my limited experience. Given the state of these tools and the tech know-how needed to deploy them, I find myself asking why not just set an expectation that WebDAV can do it for you (yes, I know it has its own problems with various clients requiring certain server headers. Maybe that means we should pressure people more to follow open standards.) That said, I have been finding the following quite useful to mount a remote directory to a local directory over SSH:

sshfs -p $REMOTE_PORT $REMOTE_HOST:$REMOTE_DIR $LOCAL_DIR

On behalf of the entire WordPress team, I’m proud and excited to announce the immediate availability of version 2.2 “Getz” for download. This version includes a number of new features, most notably Widgets integration, and over two hundred bug fixes. It’s named in honor of tenor saxophonist Stan Getz.
–Matt, from WordPress

Here’s my “short list” of observations:

• Widgets (ie, AJAX-y sidebar thingies)
• Full Atom support (plus new XML-RPC APIs)
• Blogger.com integration
• jQuery used for internal functions on admin page
• Optionally set “home” and “siteurl” options in wp-config.php instead of the database (useful when supporting a dev/prod setup)
• Tenor players (eg, Getz) rule

if you followed my previous post regarding subversion access to WP code, I can attest that the upgrade is now as easy as:

svn switch http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/trunk/

…and hitting the database upgrade link. I needed to svn switch since, as you may have noticed, I had checked out the 2.1.3 tag, not the trunk. Switching to trunk should mean that all future upgrades are as easy as svn upgrade. Whee, etc!

The irony of adding to a lengthy discussion on the topic is hopefully not lost on us, but I feel compelled to add that this is precisely the problem Zen addresses. That is, there is a way to directly experience the truth of our situation without expending excess energy on processes that do not serve us. During walking meditation yesterday, it occurred to me that Yeats said this very thing to me in The Coming of Wisdom with Time:

THOUGH leaves are many, the root is one;
Through all the lying days of my youth
I swayed my leaves and flowers in the sun;
Now I may wither into the truth.
–Yeats, William Butler

So, the solution? Read. Read more. Read even yet still more.

Then, go ask a tree.

Catalyst is a powerful and versatile web development framework that aims to be Perl’s counterpart to Ruby on Rails, fusing a Model-View-Controller (MVC) environment with the depth, breadth, and power of CPAN. If you build web sites with Perl, you should check it out.

The problem: you want to use TT’s WRAPPER directive to supply a site-wide wrapper template, but you also want to be able to selectively turn the wrapper off so that you can serve some pages as partial HTML. At first glance, Catalyst’s config() method might suggest that one could reconfigure your view in your action’s end(), but that proves fruitless and it clucks in the following manner:

[warn] Setting config after setup has been run is not a good idea.

My solution: create an end() in your controller that emits “partial” HTML fragments by creating a new Template Toolkit object with a locally-defined configuration. (Note that since we override the root controller’s end(), we must call forward/detach to it if we do not specify the “partial” parameter.)

sub end : Private {
my ($self, $c, $file) = @_;
my $params = $c->request->parameters;
if (exists $params->{'partial'}) {
my $html;
my $tt = Template->new({
%{ $c->config->{'View::TT'} },
INCLUDE_PATH => $c->path_to('root'),
WRAPPER => undef,
});
$tt->process($file, $c->stash, \$html) or $c->log->warn($tt->error);
$c->response->content_type('text/html');
$c->response->body($html);
}
else {
$c->detach(qw/CE::Controller::Root end/);
}
}


A more robust solution better-suited for larger projects might be a new view with an alternate configuration (eg, a custom View::TTpartial,) but I wanted to show the logic directly in my controller, allowing full control of the configuration and direct access to the $html.

Coming soon: the “data island” solution I ultimately opted for to obviate AHAH for serving map marker data to a Google map.

here’s how i did it. see the upgrade documentation for details.

mkdir mijit.com-new
( cd mijit.com-new && svn co http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.1.3 . )
cp -pr mijit.com/{.htaccess,wp-config.php,wp-content} mijit.com-new
mv mijit.com mijit.com-old && mv mijit.com-new/ mijit.com


note: on my production server, i ran into a problem where the upgrade page didn’t work – it simply showed a white page, no matter how many times i reloaded it. i peppered the php code with die('x') to see what was failing, but it seemed to just crap out at some point in the script execution. then, i discovered the following in my apache error_log:

Allowed memory size of 8388608 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 0 bytes)

aha – so sucktastic php is crapping out and barely giving any indication that it is to blame! (i don’t blame the wordpress people for not slavishly checking every memory allocation, but you’d think php itself could put something cunning like “php” in its log lines so i know the error is neither with wordpress nor apache.)

googling that line brings the solution, to increase the memory available to php. not that that stopped me from wondering why the hell an upgrade script (which presumably just updates a version string, based on a cursory examination of the code,) needs a ton of memory anyway:

in /etc/php.ini, bump from 8M to 16M:

memory_limit = 16M

installation proceeded flawlessly.