Louisa and I went on a little Holiday to Staithes in North Yorkshire at the end of January. We stayed in a tiny cottage 20 steps from the sea with no Internet and no mobile phone reception. It was the most relaxing holiday I’ve had in years. Usually we’re storming all over whichever city we’re staying in to make sure we see everything.
Media Lens Alert: Iran – The media fall into line
The “liberal” “left-wing” media are, once again, falling into line to support another war to enforce the status-quo (along with all the “right-wing” media too, but that’s rather a given). Iran is 10 years away from creating even one nuclear weapon (assuming that’s what it’s trying to do) yet the mainstream media are telling us they are a major threat.
This is how it always works. When the powers that be announce a new threat (Iran) the mainstream media fall over themselves to support it without question.
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“We are extremely concerned at the ongoing culture of secrecy endemic in the planning of the identity cards proposals. The Home Office has conducted most of its work in a covert fashion, refusing to disclose information that would inform debate, and conducting negotiations in a closed environment. This process is inimical to the creation of trust. This situation also makes further research on the proposals impossible.”
The London School of Economics has published their latest Identity Project Status Report concerning the governments Identity Cards Bill 2005.
The last report was immediately damned by the Government at every turn in what can only be described as behaviour of the intensely insecure. Why are the Government so insecure about the details of their Bill?
My earlier post about Turck-mmcache is now deprecated. Turck-mmcache has not been actively developed in quite a while. eAccelerator is a fork of Turck-mmcache and has been actively developed by a new team.
eAccelerator fixes all the PHP crashing errors I had, and adds support for newer version PHP too (including PHP 5.1 in their latest dev snapshot, which I’ve had working perfectly btw)
Benjamin Mako Hill has written a great post over on his blog titled “Principles, Software and Freedom”. It’s something I’ve been trying to put into words for a while and he does it very well.
“Sure, everyone uses Firefox. Sure, everyone uses Apache and GNU/Linux for their web servers. Sure, everyone uses Drupal, Mambo, Plone, or another free CMS. But one can’t help but notice that Firefox, Apache, and free CMSs are higher quality, more featureful, and easier to use than the proprietary alternatives.”
“People arguing for free software from a principled position need to remember that principled positions are sometimes inconvenient. Free software is no exception. It’s frequently different, sometimes incompatible and a bit more work. In some situations (dare I say it?), it’s not as good as the proprietary alternatives.”
Free software isn’t always easy and isn’t always the best solution. Personally I believe freedom is important enough to weigh in heavily in the face of this.
UPDATE: The info in this post is deprecated. See the new post about eAccelerator instead.
I installed Turck MMCache PHP accelerator and I got a big improvement.
ApacheBench reported 4.52 pages per second before and 12.47 pages after installation (a WordPress 1.5.2 page on a 1.2Ghz PIII). That a 275% increase in performance, with currently no observed problems. I tested this with both Apache2 and lighttpd, and got a similar boost with both.
There is only a package for Debian unstable at the moment, so I downloaded the package source and backported it to Debian sarge. I put the package in my apt repository (along with a backported openswan package I’m using). Add to your sources.list:
and apt-get update ; apt-get install turck-mmcache
See PHP fly (comparatively)
UPDATE: I’m running into a few problems now actually. WordPress runs fine, but an application of my own is having some serious problems. MMTurck is kicking out the following log message:
I’ve disabled the extension for now until I investigate further.
UPDATE: S
And they’re OFF!
And remember folks, it’s not the winning that’s important, it’s that they all die as soon as possible (ensuring they never face war crime trials)
I took this back in June.
Of all the photos I took in 2005, these are some of my favourites.
I’ve built Ubuntu Dapper Epiphany 1.9 and Firefox 1.4.99 packages for Ubuntu Breezy. I’ve also enabled the Epiphany Adblock extension which seems to work fine. You can’t specify your own advert signatures with a GUI yet (afaikt) but the built-in database seems to cover most bases.
I’ve only built for i386 as that’s all I need it for right now. Tbh, it’s really not that difficult to build you own, but here they are anyway:
UPDATE: I’ve setup an apt repository for all this nonsense.
deb http://johnleach.co.uk/downloads/ubuntu breezy backports
I don’t really have plans to keep this up to date, but I might expand it to a few other packages I want to play with, so feel free to use.
I met Stuart Langridge and Jono Bacon from LUG Radio last night as they came to Leeds where Jono talked at my local LUG. Wookey also gave a talk about the latest stuff going on in the Emdebian world.
And of course I also met up with some of the WYLUG regulars (Robert Speed, Jim Jackson, James Holden, et al) and some perhaps not so regular (which would include me btw).
We enjoyed the talks, went to a local Italian place for dinner then to a local pub. Was a great night.
I played with Hula a few weeks ago. I really didn’t spend very long with it, but managed to get it working on Ubuntu Breezy and connected to it with Evolution IMAP client. A big fat tip if you’re planning on having a go with it: don’t use the official Ubuntu packages. The ones I used were old and really sucked; I got nowhere with them. There are packages for Debian on the Hula site that worked well for me.
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