New computer

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My parents are now the proud owners of a new Packard Bell desktop machine. It’s pretty good – AMD Athlon XP 3000+, 512MB RAM, 80GB HD, DVD rewriter, 64MB onboard graphics (since I doubt my parents will be playing Doom 3 any time soon), TV tuner card and multi-function card reader, plus the usual Ethernet, 56k modem, keyboard, mouse and related gubbins. There’s also a 17″ TFT monitor with built-in speakers that looks very nice and occupies much less space on the desktop. The whole setup is a rather fetching black and silver colour – much better than the beige boxes we used to have.

It comes with Norton Internet Security Suite 2004, but it’s only got 90 days of free updates, after which it’ll presumably demand payment of us, so I’m replacing that with the standard firewall in XP SP2 (which we had to install) and McAfee VirusScan Enterprise which is decidedly less annoying.

In fact about the only thing it doesn’t have is a floppy drive, which I suppose is a sign of the times.

My iPod Mini arrived!

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A photo of a green iPod Mini being held

At long last, my iPod Mini arrived this morning. It’s now on charge, connected to the bundled transformer that is almost as big as the device itself. Unfortunately I won’t be able to do all that much with it until my laptop is repaired because neither my dad’s laptop or my parents’ PC have USB2 ports, although once I have iTunes installed and have the device fully-charged I’ll try anyway. Experience tells me that if you charge the device fully on first use you can greatly extend the battery life of a device so I’ll wait a few hours.

Still, I’m excited at the fact that I can call myself an ‘iPod owner’ 🙂 .

Bollocks bollocks bollocks

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My hard drive has failed. I was using it normally, and then most apps froze and then I got a BSOD. I rebooted, but the computer wouldn’t boot, citing an IDE error 🙁

The most annoying thing is that the machine is only 10 months old, and that I went for a Toshiba machine because I expected it to be better than my previous laptop, a Samsung, which at least made it to nearly 18 months before dying one me. Toshiba supposedly make good laptops.

Thankfully, it’s still be under the 12-month manufacturer’s warranty, so the reseller that sold me the machine are going to get an earful once I dig out their number. Still, I’m downloading Knoppix in the hope that I can salvage the more important data as I imagine that the ‘repair’ will merely consist of a new hard drive. In the meantime, I’ve requested a quote from OnTrack data recovery should damage to the drive be severe.

Update: Knoppix can see that there’s an HD in the system but it can’t read anything off it. This isn’t looking good. On the plus side, I do have internet and an office program and I can FTP stuff if I need to save anything.

Photographic eye

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You may remember the beach party back in June, which I waxed lyrical about for a few days and then nothing. I took around 170 photos over the two days (a total of 130MB) and still haven’t really got around to sorting them.

Anyway, the student union were given copies of my photos (since I was effectively their photographer) and the good news is that three of them have already been used in union propaganda publicity material, in the form of a leaflet given out to prospective students introducing the union and what it does. Surprisingly enough, student unions are somewhat more than a cheap source of alcohol.

You can have a look at scaled-down versions of the originals. Incidentally those were taken quite late in the day when the sun finally came out.

Why I’m not switching to WordPress

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Now that I’ve announced the book, I’ve had a couple of emails on the lines of “So I’m guessing you’re not switching to WordPress now, huh?”, and indeed I’m not. The book, however, is not the only thing that’s keeping me with MT and I’d like to use this (rather long) entry as a list of reasons why I’m not likely to switch any time soon.

Firstly, MT is what I’m used to. As of the middle of next month, I’ll have been using it for 2 years – whereas I’ve been using WordPress for less than 3 months. It’s the same reason why I use Windows as opposed to Linux – sure, Linux may be more secure and less likely to crash, but I know how Windows works and I feel comfortable in that environment.

Secondly, there’s the templating system, which I’m afraid to say, sucks. Again, maybe I’m just used to how MT works, but altering the way comments display in WordPress requires a lot more time and knowledge than it does in MT. In MT, the templates are totally separate from the MT source code – in WordPress, that separation isn’t so finely defined. Indeed, when you edit wp-comments.php (in 1.2) you’re faced with a 20 lines of PHP that you can’t edit before being able to dig in. And even then, you get comments like “if you delete this the sky will fall on your head” – hardly reassuring for a newbie.

Want to alter how the RSS feeds display? Then you have to edit a page with lots of PHP code which can’t be removed for fear of the sky falling on your head, and with a warning about this being an integral part of WordPress. You also need to know what the file is called since it’s not linked in the WordPress interface. Adding new pages, especially new types of feeds, seems to require a good understanding of PHP – adding a new template in MT is far, far easier.

WordPress isn’t all bad though, and it’s a whole load easier to install than MT is. In fact, a newbie to blogging* would be better off installing WordPress than MT, and includes nice blog-centric features like a links manager. But if you want to control how your site displays and don’t know much PHP then MT is the way to go, in my opinion.

(* = a newbie to blogging would really be better off on a service like Blogger or Typepad, but if they wanted something they could run themselves, WP would be easier than MT)

WordPress also wins on the comments front, despite what I said above, since it has much better comment management features built-in (although in 1.2 they are rather hidden away). That said, MT is brilliant once you have MT-Blacklist installed, since it deals with all the duplicate comments and spam perfectly, but that isn’t included out of the box (though it will be available with MT 3.1).

Rebuilds seem to be a bone of contention with some – if your web server isn’t so fast, they can take forever. I’ve never really had that problem as my host’s servers seem to run well (and I have optimised MT a bit to make it faster) but some people do find that rebuilds take forever for them. With that in mind, I suggest you wait for MT3.1 which adds support for dynamic pages. This will give you the best of both worlds – pages that get requested often like your indexes and feeds can be static, whereas other pages can be generated on the fly as needed. Sure, you can install a caching plug-in for WordPress but it’s not something that’s there out of the box (in 1.2, at least). The result is that rebuilds will be much quicker since only 2 or 3 files are being regenerated each time, plus, unlike in WordPress, you won’t have the PHP preprocessor kicking in and doing an SQL query every single time someone requests your RSS feed.

Rebuilds are also quicker in MT3.x due to its more efficient use of SQL queries and background tasks. Since upgrading to MT3, this site has been a whole lot faster, though I am working a new search script to replace mt-search which is a little slow.

Both packages have plug-ins and while WordPress kicks MT2.x’s arse in that respect, MT3.x does have much better plug-in support and many more hooks to allow developers to integrate their plug-ins with the MT interface without needing to modify the MT source code (detect a theme here?). For example, with MT-Blacklist installed, the comments mass editor has a ‘despam’ link added for running comments through the blacklist and removing the bad ones. As more plug-ins designed for MT3.x are released I’m sure we’ll see some truly great plug-ins that integrate tightly with MT.

MT’s help is better. There are some very extensive help documents provided with MT, whereas WP has a few links back to its rather sparse documentation pages on its web site. There’s also the wiki but like many wikis it suffers from a lack of structure, and some areas are quite patchy, in my opinion. Trying to have information only display on an individual entry page meant having to use a seemingly undocumented PHP function, for example. Apparently the #wordpress chat room is a good source of help but I’m not comfortable with asking for help in chat rooms and it assumes that you have an IRC client and that you’re on a connection that doesn’t block IRC like my university does.

This is getting quite long but as you can see, I have my reasons for not switching. What this isn’t is a “WordPress sucks and I can’t believe you all use it” rant, it is merely pointing out that WP is not for me. I’m sure that when WP reaches maturity it’ll be much better and I may give it another look when it hits 2.1 or something, but I’ve yet to be totally impressed. MT is at 3.01 now and feels much more mature than WordPress does. That said, my test install isn’t about to disappear any time soon, though a test install is what what it will remain.

I’ll leave comments open on here – I know this may seem controversial to some of you so please play nice.

Going into print

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The cover of the book 'Hacking Movable Type'

If you read Ben Hammersley and Jay Allen, you may have seen references to “the book” recently. This is Hacking Movable Type (sponsored link), a 500+ page guide to getting deep down and dirty with MT and customising it to the extreme. And now I think it’s time to let you know that I’m writing a couple of chapters for it.

It’s very much a group effort – as well as myself, Jay and Ben, there are contributions from Matt Haughey, Brad Choate and David Raynes amongst others, and the foreword to the book is being written by Ben and Mena Trott themselves. As arguably the least known of any of those, I’m naturally flattered to be involved in such a project.

The book is still very much a work in progress but will be out later this year. I’ll keep you posted. In the meantime, if you want to pre-order it, the ISBN is 076457499X and the publisher is John Wiley & Sons.

Beach for the stars

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I’m only able to post a few photos today. I have taken rather more (around 70 to be precise) but they’re not on this computer yet – I’ll probably upload a few at the weekend.

Today we had some schoolchildren and the university nursery use the beach, along with Bradford’s bactive campaign, who roped myself and other union members into “combat aerobics”. After that and then having to rake the sand my body is aching all over. Going out and then only having 6 hours sleep last night didn’t exactly help either…

On the plus side, I got to meet Bradford’s Lord Mayor, who’s actually a really nice guy. And despite all the pain, I did have a thoroughly enjoyable day – roll on Friday!

I’m 20 today!

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Today is my first day as a non-teenager in several years 🙂

It’s not been particularly eventful, mainly because we’re all in the middle of exams and can’t afford the time to either go out or recover from having been out, but it’s been somewhat enjoyable nonetheless.

Presents were the camera that I’ve been talking about, a t-shirt with velcro letters (so you can change the message on the front as often as you like), some socks with my name on, £33 cash (in total), and O’Reilly quick reference books on PHP and Regular Expressions (thanks to Jeff Wright and regular commenter Chris Berkhadt for those 🙂 ).

The cash is going towards a Sega Mega Drive for the house next year – we’ll have a PlayStation 2 as well but you can’t play Sonic on it.

Incidentally, today is also Towel Day.

Apple Lossless Encoder

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One new iTunes feature that slipped by me was the new ‘Apple Lossless Encoder’. Unlike music formats like MP3, AAC and Ogg Vorbis, lossless encoding results in no loss of quality – the music file sounds exactly like the original. The downside to this is that files compressed using lossless compression are typically quite a bit larger than their lossy counterparts.

With the largest iPod topping 40GB it’s hardly surprising that Apple have adopted this – I’m sure the majority of people will never fill that much (even I have only 6-7GB) so the extra space can be set aside for higher quality files. What is surprising is that Apple chose to adopt their own format, and not one of the (many) other lossless encoding formats.

If you thought there was a format war amongst lossy encoders then you’ll be knocked back by how many lossless ones are out there. There’s at least 14, although not all of them are as good as each other. Thankfully, lossless formats are easier to compare since output quality isn’t a factor, but a good format will have quick encoding, a small output file size, many features, and would preferably be open source too.

The most popular is FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec), which is now being steered by the Xiphophorus Foundation who are also steering the Ogg Vorbis format. It’s arguably not the best format out there but it’s good enough and it’s entirely open source. It’s well represented on almost all platforms and is even in some hardware players. Monkey’s Audio is a little faster but isn’t so well supported, being restricted to Windows and a command line encoder in Linux. Although it is open source, development has been a little slow of late, and it lacks some features compared to FLAC. Shorten is another popular format.

Apple Lossless Encoder (or ALE for short – nice acronym), is, sadly, based on none of these. It’s a new format which is closed source and currently only works in iTunes (Mac and Windows) and through QuickTime, although a dBpowerAMP codec is apparently in the works. It is quite well featured, offering streaming and seeking support (which a surprising number of other formats lack), and is obviously supported on the iPod with the addition of the latest firmware update, so on paper it has a similar number of features to FLAC. It is, however, slower at encoding and decoding, and files are typically a megabyte or so larger, according to this comparison provided by the FLAC project, however this HydrogenAudio topic suggests it is faster. I’m guessing Apple may have optimised it for the PowerPC processor, in which case compile times on Mac OS X would be better than in Windows.

It’s just a pity that Apple took the decision to re-invent the wheel when good alternatives already exist, although this Macworld column reckons this is because Apple may want to add DRM to it in future so that punters can buy higher quality files from the iTunes Music Store. AAC was an open(-ish) format and look how quickly that was cracked. On the other hand, I doubt the record labels would be interested in giving away their songs on the internet at full quality, based on their previous boneheaded decisions.

There may also be reasons, such as patents or problems with embedding FLAC in the iPod firmware, but seeing as other hardware manufacturers have managed it this seems strange.

In any case, it’s an interesting development. Any support for lossless audio in iTunes is a good thing, I just wish that Apple had gone with the herd rather than go on a tangent and then confuse people. What I would like to know is whether the WMA import function of iTunes allows you to convert them to ALE, since then you wouldn’t lose any quality – I couldn’t find anything that suggested this in my research for this article.

Boing

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Hope you enjoy that extra day we have to stick in every 4 years so that the seasons remain in order!

No special plans, although I’ve spent almost half of it asleep now since I only just got up. And then when messing around with Real Alternative I realised I’d missed out on this week’s Radio 4 comedy shows, so that was another hour wasted.

Thanks for the comments about the re-design, I’m glad to hear that all of you who have commented like it.