Author Archives: Jerry

How This Blog Works

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Over the years, the technology behind this blog has gone from cave-dwelling stone-knives-and-bearskin static pages to cloud-city jet-packs-and-lightsaber dynamic yumminess. That transformation starts with WordPress but does not end there. Not by a long shot.

I started the Muddled Media Empire using a tool called iBlog, because it was free and worked with Apple’s hosting service, which I was already paying for. iBlog’s claim to fame was that it didn’t require a database – every time you made a change it went through and regenerated all pages that were affected. Toward the end, that was getting to be thousands of pages in some cases, each of which had to be uploaded individually. When iBlog’s support and development faltered, it was already past time for me to move on.

WordPress is an enormously popular Web-publishing platform. It comes in two flavors: you can host your blog on their super-duper servers and accept their terms of service and the slightly limited customization options, or you can install the code on your own server and go nuts. I chose the latter, mainly because I wanted to be able to touch the code. I’m a tinkerer.

So I signed up for a cheap Web host and set to work building what you see now. At first things were great, but after a while the host started having issues, and the once-great customer service withered up and vanished. So much for LiveRack. I think they just didn’t want to be in the hosting business anymore. I moved to iPage.

iPage was cheap, but I was crammed onto a server with a bunch of other people and sometimes my blog would take an agonizing time to load. Like, almost a minute. Then there was the time a very popular Geek site linked to my CSS border-radius table and iPage shut me down because the demand on the server was too much. Ouch! My moment in the sun became my moment at the bottom of a well.

I set out to find ways to make this blog more server-friendly and more user-friendly at the same time. Step 1: caching. WordPress doesn’t store Web pages, it stores data and the instructions on how to build a Web page. So, every time you ask to load a page here, WordPress fires up a program that reads from the database and assembles all the parts to the page. The thing is, that takes longer than just finding the requested file and sending it back, the way iBlog did. Caching is a way for the server to say, “hey, wait a minute – I just did this page and nothing’s changed. I’ll just send the same thing I did last time.” That can lead to big savings, both in time and server load.

I looked at a few WordPress cacheing programs and eventually chose W3 Total Cache, because it does far more than just cache data. For instance, it will minify scripts and css files (remove extra spaces and crunch them down) and combine the files together so the browser only has to make one request. It will zip the data, meaning fewer 1’s and 0’s moving down the pipe, and it does a few other things as well, one of which I will get to shortly.

I installed W3 Total Cache, and although some settings broke a couple of javascripts (for reasons I have yet to figure out – I’ll get to that someday), the features I could turn on definitely made a difference. Hooray!

But Muddled Ramblings and Half-Baked Ideas was still way too slow. I continued my search for ways to speed things up. I also began a search for a host that sucked less than iPage. (iPage was also starting to have outages that lasted a day or more. Not acceptable.) I decided I was willing to pay extra to be sure I wasn’t on an overwhelmed machine.

I’m not sure which came first – new server or Amazon Simple Storage Service. S3 is a pretty basic concept – you put your stuff on their super-duper servers, and when people need it they will get it really quickly. Things that don’t change, like images and even some scripts, can live there and your server doesn’t have to worry about them.

This is where W3 Total Cache earned my donation to their cause. You see, you can sign up for Amazon S3, and then put your account info into the proper W3TC panel and Bob’s Your Uncle. W3TC goes through your site, finds images and whatnot, puts them in your S3 bucket, and automatically changes all the links in your Web pages to point to your bucket instead of your own server. (Sometimes I find I have to copy the image to my S3 bucket manually, but that’s a small price to pay.)

Now a lot of the stuff on my blog, like the picture of me with the Utahraptors the other day, sits on a different, high-performance server out there somewhere, and no matter how overwhelmed my server happens to be at the moment those parts will arrive to you lickety-split. Amazon S3 is not free, however – each month I get an invoice for two or three cents. Should Muddled Ramblings suddenly become wildly popular, that number would increase.

About that server – the next stop on my quest for a good host was a place called Green Geeks. I wanted to upgrade to a VPS, which means I get a dedicated slice of a server that acted just like it was my very own machine. There is a lot to like about those, but my blog just wouldn’t run in the base level of RAM they offered. I upgraded and reorganized so that different requests would not take up more ram than they needed. Still, I had outages. Sometimes the server would just stop freeing up memory and eventually choke and die. Since it was a virtual server in a standard configuration, logic says it was caused by something I was doing, but all my efforts to figure it out were fruitless, and Green Geeks ran out of patience trying to help me figure it out.

The server software itself is Apache. At this point I considered using nginx (rhymes with ‘bingin’ ex’) instead. It’s supposedly faster, lighter, and easier to configure. But, I already know Apache. I may move to nginx in the future, but it’s not urgent anymore.

During the GreenGeeks era I came across another service that improves the performance of Web sites while reducing the load on the servers. I recently wrote glowingly about CloudFlare, but I will repeat myself a bit here for completeness. CloudFlare is a service that has a network of servers all over the world, and they stand between you the viewer and my server. They stash bits of my site all around the world, and much of the time they will have a copy of what you need on hand, and won’t even need to trouble my server with a request. About half of all requests to muddledramblings.com are magically and speedily taken care of without troubling my server at all. They also block a couple thousand bogus requests to my server each day, so I don’t have to deal with them (or pay for the bandwidth). It’s sweet, and the base service is free.

Unfortunately, it was not enough to keep my GreenGeeks server from crashing. Once more I began a search for a new host. I found through word of mouth a place called macminicolo. Apple employees get a discount, but I wasn’t an Apple employee yet. It was still a bargain. For what turned out to be the same monthly cost of sharing part of a machine at GreenGeeks, I get an entire server, all to myself, with plenty of RAM. I’ve set up several servers on Mac using MacPorts, and I knew just how to get things up and running well. It costs less than half what a co-located server costs anywhere else I have found (Mac, Windows, or Linux). (Co-location has up-front costs, but in the long term saves money.) So I have that going for me.

The only thing missing is that at GreenGeeks I had a fancy control panel that made it much simpler to share the machine with my friends. I do miss that, but I’m ready now to host friend and family sites at a very reasonable cost.

So there you have it! This is just your typical Apache/WordPress/W3 Total Cache/Amazon S3/CloudFlare site run off a Mac mini located somewhere in Nevada. Load times are less than 5% of what they were a year ago. Five percent! Conservatively. Typically it’s more like 1/50th of the load time. Traffic is up. Life is good.

Now I have no incentive at all to learn more about optimization.

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A Question for the Chemistry Geeks and Auto Buffs Out There

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The plastic covers over my headlights are becoming opaque. Not the best situation. There are products out there that promise to restore that plastic to its virtually-invisible former self, but as far as I can tell all those products simply polish the surface of the plastic. It seems to me the damage is cause by ultraviolet radiation and likely goes more than skin deep.

Still, I’d like to believe the commercials that say they can restore my headlight covers to their former optic glory. I just don’t want to spend the precious cash dollars to find the claims to be bogus. Is there anyone out there who can either a) explain or b) attest to the worthiness of these products?

Thanks!

Wiener Dog Nationals!

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Saturday, a mere two days from now, the Wiener Dog Nationals will be run at Golden Gate Fields.

In the racing world, only the Kentucky Derby comes close to the majesty of this race.

Wiener dogs! Running! With dignity, of course.

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Things I Learned Today

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Green screen! Once you have lights and a background stand, the next step is inevitable.

  • No wrinkles in the green screen!
  • Light the green screen evenly, but don’t obsess over it.
  • Hair must be glued down
  • If Photoshop annoys you, you should try GIMP. Photoshop will seem a lot better after that.
  • As you can tell from the following image, you really should know what background you’re going to put your talent into before you shoot. Otherwise you get Utahraptors with hard light hitting from above, and a victim lit softly from the side.

Jerry with Utahraptors

Are they about to kill me, or are they just admiring my shirt?

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Ubiquity Solutions: Evil or merely Overwhelmed?

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Note: Wow. This got long, and somewhat technical. For today, some of you might want to look at cute pictures of cats instead. I won’t mind.

I noticed the other day a huge rush of spam comments from ip addresses starting 108.62. I did a lookup and found that the whole block is owned by an outfit called Nobis Technology Group. Most of the addresses also mentioned Ubiquity Server Solutions. They are a massive hosting and colocation service. Basically, they supply the hardware and infrastructure, and their customers set up Web servers and whatnot.

Some of those customers (or the customers of the customers) send out a lot of spam. A truckload. In some cases the customer of a customer of a customer might have been lax and his server got hacked and turned into an unwitting spambot. In other cases the people using Ubiquity’s servers are likely institutional spammers.

Brief aside: Why does comment spam even exist in the first place? Google plays a big role there, with a number called Page Rank. Part of Page Rank (at least historically) was that more links pointing to a page make it land higher in Google searches. So, the spam comment isn’t to get readers of a blog to buy Doc Marten shoes, it’s to get that particular site to land higher in Google’s results when someone searches for them.

The thing is, Google doesn’t publish page rank numbers anymore, and they steadfastly maintain that the comment spamming actually hurts your results in a search. That hasn’t stopped many companies from promising higher sales and taking people’s money in return for smearing their name all over the Internet.

Google could go a long way toward eliminating this sort of spam by publishing page rank again, only now include the amount the rank was hurt by spamming activities. My shoe salesman above is not going to keep paying when Google shows the opposite of the desired result.

So anyway, using CloudFlare’s threat control, I blocked an entire range of ip addresses allocated to Ubiquity’s servers. Then another. I didn’t like this solution; I had no idea how many legitimate potential blog visitors I was blocking. After reading more, the answer surprised me.

The folks at Ubiquity point out that they have terms of service that prohibit using their infrastructure to spam people. When I sent them a complaint, they were professional and courteous. They asked for more specifics, then said they’d sent a complaint to the culprit. Only after they’d asked what my domain name was.

Question: Did they send a message to the culprit saying ‘stop spamming people’ or did it say ‘stop spamming that guy?’

On other blogs where people have ranted about Ubiquity, representatives of the company have responded with measured, rational responses, explaining what a huge uphill battle it is for them, and asking the community to keep sending reports when spam comes from their range. Those reports make it possible for them to put sanctions on clients who are in violation of their terms of service. It is a huge problem and not easily solved.

And yet. Other hosting companies don’t seem as bad, from where I’m sitting.

One of those responses from a Ubiquity representative threw out the argument (I’m paraphrasing from this) “While it’s theoretically possible to monitor all data to weed out the 500MB/s of spam from the 2GB/s of legitimate traffic, that would be really expensive and we wouldn’t be able to compete in this market.” My first takeaway: they think 20% of the traffic from their servers is unethical. Wow. Now, that’s reading a lot into a statement like that, so take it with a grain of salt. Also, it was in a comment to a blog post and may well have been a typo in the first place.

But still, it makes me wonder. And a request coming in to a server for data (legitimate traffic like a request to load a Web page) is fundamentally different than robots on a server sending unrequested data OUT (a high percentage of which will be spam), and sending emails (almost all of which will be spam). A small random sampling of GET and PUT messages outbound from their data centers would probably smoke out the most egregious violators pretty quickly, and not require a lot of hardware to implement. (Not sure how I feel about this from a privacy standpoint.)

Once I got the message that Ubiquity had sent their complaint to the spammer involved, I unblocked that range. Sure enough, in a few minutes more spam came through. I sent the report and back up went the blockade. In my casting around the Internet I read assertions that were not contradicted (so must be true!) that said that NO legitimate traffic would come from those IP’s anyway; they were the addresses of big servers and not IP’s that would appear when Joe User is surfing. So there’s no downside to blocking them. (I’ll put the blocked ranges in a comment below, if you want to follow suit.)

Although, as I put the blockade back up, I had a thought: If I complain about every violation, and cc Google, then the cost of NOT clamping down more effectively on the host’s clients goes up. At some point, if enough people complain enough times, the cost of fixing the problem at the source becomes less than the cost of continuing to do business they way they are now.

That goes not just for Ubiquity, but for all hosts, and for Google and the other search engines. There is no incentive for them to play nice unless we create one.

Yep, I’m proposing fighting spam with a deluge of emails, and I’m probably too lazy to do it effectively.

Of course, this blog is hosted at a data center that almost inevitably will have spammers. Do I want to pay more for my own hosting because my data center has to install a bunch of spam detectors? In my case, I’d be willing to pay a bit more to know my host is doing the right thing, but I think I’d be in the minority. That makes it really difficult for one host to unilaterally decide to take the high road. And you’d be alienating about 20% of your customers, if Ubiquity’s off-the-cuff numbers are an indication.

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CloudFlare = Awesome

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So by now you’ve probably heard of “the cloud”, but you might be vague on what the cloud actually is. That’s OK, the cloud is by nature vague. In short, it’s just a name that applies to what the Internet has been trying to do for a long time: information without location. You put a photo up in the cloud, and it’s just “out there”, not on any particular server, not in any particular data center, not in any given country. Could be there are copies of it all over the place, and when someone wants to look at the picture, The Cloud serves up the copy closest (in Internet miles) to the person who wants to see it.

This requires a lot of expensive equipment. Google and Amazon are the biggies in the cloud, but there are others as well, who, for a price, will host your data in a ‘cloudy’ way. In return, people around the world can load your stuff faster.

This humble blog is in the cloud. When you load a page here, roughly half the time the request doesn’t even reach my server (protected in a bunker somewhere in Nevada), but is instead served up from one of CloudFlare’s data centers around the globe. It’s pretty sweet, and has reduced the strain on my server (not that it’s working that hard anyway) while improving the Muddled Experience. The cost for this service? Nothing. It’s free.

I totally win.

CloudFlare also blocks a few hundred spammers each week, before my server has to go to the trouble of blocking them. They compile usage stats and provide other interesting information, and cut the load time for the blog about in half.

They’re a friendly bunch, too; when I suggested upgrades to their interface they wrote back with specific questions as well as thanks. A site they hosted was attacked from China a while back, and it brought down part of their network. They were right up front about the issue and what they were doing about it, and advised people on how to ‘de-cloud’ until the crisis was over. Not everyone was happy, but I was impressed. Soon after reading those communications I signed up.

How can they offer something like this for free? It’s the upsell, of course; they offer premium services. In addition they create a platform for other companies to sell stuff to me. Some of those services are pretty cool, too, though I haven’t dipped my toe in those waters yet (for instance, there’s a free service that checks your site now and then to see if it’s been hacked).

Overall, I can’t think of any reason NOT to use CloudFlare. Check ’em out and tell them Jerry sent you!

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Here’s an Area where I can Improve my Writing

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My buddy over at middlerage tipped me off to this article, about a book my sweetie and I agreed we’d want to read before seeing the movie: Kathryn Stockett’s ‘The Help’ Turned Down 60 Times Before Becoming a Best Seller.

Whatever comes to her now she has earned and then some. Me, I’ve been rejected exactly once this year. That’s not how you succeed as a writer.

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Kafka’s Playing Quarterback!

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Suddenly I’m an Eagles fan, just for letting me type the above.

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Ahh, Football

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I’m in a bar and apparently the preseason starts today. I’d say that this mattered not at all, but I do have this observation: On what I think was the Raiders’ first play of the first game of the preseason, there was a fight.

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OK, This is a Little Spooky

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I guess I knew this intellectually already, but reading this article really brought it home. We all know that info we post on Facebook and other social media sites is more or less public, no matter what security settings you use. The stuff just leaks out. Your birthday, gender, and zip code is enough to uniquely identify most of us in this country. Once someone has that, they can start to gather more information about you and share it with their friends.

But there’s another piece of information that most of us have shared all over the Internet, which when combined with the above, gives unscrupulous (or are they?) enterprises the ability to gather vast amounts of information about what you do even when you’re not using a computer.

What nugget of information is that? Your face. If you’ve used modern photo software, you may already have noticed that it’s getting pretty good at recognizing not just where faces are in your pictures, but whose faces they are.

Let’s say I own a big store, something like Target. I already have security cameras scattered liberally around the place. Imagine that now I can buy a list of faces in the zip codes close to my store. Suddenly I’m able to keep a record of which departments in my store each customer visits. The next time they come back, I can put a tease on a video screen as they walk in, tailored to their purchasing habits, or I can alert security if the person is a suspected shoplifter.

Of course, your friendly neighborhood government can use technology like that, too, and they already have your picture on file.

What to do about it? Realistically, nothing. The train has left the station, and there’s no calling it back. We could try to pass laws about this stuff, but they’d be pretty much impossible to enforce. You could try to scour the Internet and remove every picture in which you’re identified, but good luck with that.

The only counter-strategy I can think of off the top of my head is misinformation — tagging a whole bunch of different faces with your id, to create uncertainty over who the “real” you is. That only goes so far, however; once your face and credit card are linked at a retailer you’re done. It’s probably time to coach our children to not make the same mistake we did, instead to take a page out of Harlean’s book. She is a fiction. The Internet is no place for real people.

Coda:
The front panel of the article linked to above is about breaking the security on iPhones. It’s worth noting that while the article is correct, the same advice applies to anything protected with a password. The obvious thing missed in the article is that most people don’t put any password on their phone, rendering the rest of the warning moot. I use an Android, and my screen lock thingie has even fewer permutations than a 4-digit number. I’m not out to stop the pros; I put the lock on the phone when I read that California has ruled that searching a phone doesn’t require a warrant, even though searching a briefcase does. My lock is to stop prying during routine traffic stops. I don’t have anything to hide, but it’s important that everyone protects privacy, not just people with something to hide.

A closing note about passwords:

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I’m a Lucky Guy

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We were sitting around tonight when my sweetie said, “I want to make cookies.” And she did. And they were good.

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Mmm… Honey

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I just installed a honey pot on this site. The idea of a honey pot (or honey trap) is to create a tempting target that attracts wrongdoers, but once they put their hand in the honey pot they leave sticky fingerprints everywhere they go.

In Internet terms, the honey is a seemingly-innocent email address placed on a Web site, invisible to humans but easy for robots to find. When the spam harvesters scrape the email address off the site and use it, both the harvester and the spammer are caught and blacklisted, which reduces their ability to run robots and get their mail through.

The more people who participate, the more trouble spammers have spotting the honey pots. How can you help? Even if you don’t have control of your site or run a blog through one of the major services, you can pitch in. Go to Project Honey Pot and sign up. You can provide invisible-to-humans links to honey pots on other sites, if nothing else, and it doesn’t cost you diddley-doo.

If you click on the “swag” link in the header, you will see that they could also use a graphic designer. I imagine a spam-bear with his head stuck in a honey pot. How you communicate that it’s a spam-bear and not an ordinary bear I leave as an exercise for the visually talented.

Once Project Honey Pot compiles its list of villains and ne’er-do-wells, what happens next? Many major services use the list, and I also use a program called Bad Behavior which blocks blacklisted bots and spammers from reaching my site. Recently I added another layer called CloudFlare which is awesome enough for me to devote a separate episode to it. So, you have that to look forward to.

In the meantime, I encourage you to join the crusade to make life more difficult for those who want to use the Internet for evil.

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Impressions of Lion

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So just to be clear, even though I work for Apple I have no special access to the plans of the hardware and OS guys. If I did have access, I wouldn’t be able to post speculations like these. All this is the same guesswork you can do if you stop and look at your operating system as it evolves.

Last night I installed the latest Mac operating system (‘Lion’) on my work machine. We’ll see how that goes before I put it on anything more important. A couple of things struck me immediately, however, that I think may be indicators of where Apple is heading.

1) No scroll bars. Well, barely. There’s something scrollbar-like that appears when you move stuff around, but there’s a fundamental shift in the UI going on here. In the past you worked the thumb on the scrollbar to move the content in its window. When you worked the scroll wheel on your mouse, you were in your mind moving the scrollbar thumb. Now, in your head you grab the content of the window and move it around – which goes in the opposite direction as the scroller thumb. So the wheel on your mouse works ‘backwards’ in Lion; before you were moving the scroll thumb down, now you’re moving the content down, which moves the thumb up.

Opinion: I’m ok with this overall, but there are times when there is no indication that you can scroll. There are also cases where there’s no indication that the corner of a window can be dragged to resize the window. I’m not comfortable with designs that presuppose you know stuff.

2) Bold prediction: the magic mouse is Apple’s last major mouse. It’s a mouse/touchpad hybrid, bringing people closer to the touchpad replacement. The company that brought the mouse to the consumer will also be the first to take it away. Interestingly, the company that only put one button on its mouse will be hanging its hat on a very complicated set of finger gestures and combinations. They can do a hell of a lot, and they’re intuitive, if you already know them. (I just accidentally discovered the gesture for switching tabs in my browser — only, shit! It’s not switching tabs, it’s like using the back arrow. And there’s a bug! I almost lost this entire episode!)

Opinion: with the iPad and whatnot, multiple-finger user interfaces are here. I should have applied for a patent fifteen-plus years ago when I thought about making touch screen interfaces with actual knobs to turn and stuff like that. If I’d had this blog back then it would have shown up in the Get-Poor-Quick pages. But I didn’t, and now that invention belongs to other people. Because they built it, and I only talked about it.

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I’m Sure it’s a Coincidence

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As an employee of your favorite fruit-flavored gadget company, I find myself noticing some interesting things about the way my employer promotes itself. For instance, there are the buildings of Infinite Loop. There are signs at the entrances to the campus, but on the buildings there are no logos.

No logos on any of the other buildings Apple occupies. No logos on the big gray busses that glide up and down the freeways, taking workers to and from Cupertino. (The busses have WiFi, of course.) No logos on the shuttles to the railway stations or on the bikes you can check out to travel between buildings.

You’d never know, driving on I-280, that you were passing through a company that has more cash on hand than the Unites States.

So why wouldn’t a company as intent on spreading its brand take advantage of putting their logo on stuff they already own? I think because it would almost become a joke in iCupertino. There would be an apple on every damn thing in the city. HP used to have a big presence here, but now Apple’s new mother ship will be built on their old campus. (Business note: few places in the world will have greater demand for sandwiches and beer than the one-block radius around the new Apple campus.) Seagate’s here, and plenty of other companies, and they put up the signs. Apple just is.

But none of that is why I sat down to write this little episode. I’m watching baseball right now, and an ad for the iPad 2 came on. It’s a nice, friendly ad, and one of the little vignettes it plays is of a very small child writing his first words with his finger.

The camera moves over the iPad (2!) as the child completes the ‘n’ in ‘lion’. His penmanship is pretty good. (I know it’s a ‘he’ because he’s wearing blue.)

Of course, Lion is also the name of the operating system Apple released last week. Coincidence, I’m sure.

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An End? Really?

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Just a quick note to those who might have been waiting to start reading Allison to make sure there would be an end. I understand completely; I rail consistently about stories with no clear scope yet they expect me to join in and follow every word. And when you throw in my irregular update schedule, all the more reason to not get caught up.

I’m happy to announce that Allison in Anime: White Shadow is wrapped up in a neat little (anime-style-inscrutable) package. It reads like a not-bad first draft; there are plenty of opportunities I see looking back, but overall I feel pretty good about it.

I hope you enjoy.

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