Thankfully, all this really seems to have grown up in the last year – mod_wsgi is now the recommended way of deploying Django in production, and following the mod_wsgi django instructions, I was in business in 20 minutes. No fuss, no mess, no drama, and best of all, using daemon mode, no noticeable performance hit when serving static files and PHP off the same Apache installation. The ability to run the django project as its own unprivileged user when using daemon mode is also real handy.

Footnote: those of you reaching for the comments button to sarcastically remark that this website appears to not be available over IPv6 will be pleased to hear that I intend to fix this in the immediate future.

One day, I should probably move to using the Dovecot LDA and its sieve implementation, which supports the “imap4flags” extension, thus allowing marking messages as read, making them turn purple in Thunderbird, and all sorts of other cool stuff. Sadly, life (or this afternoon) is too short.

In the meantime, I’ve solved the problem in the usual way I deal with life’s imperfections: gratuitious Python – http://pastebin.org/77199 run from a crojob every five minutes.

(Disclaimer: letting scratty little bits of Python anywhere near something as important as your e-mail is probably a Very Bad Idea.)

It’s been doing sterling service for me at news.dnorth.net ever since. Today, I’ve sorted out a 0.2 release with the following improvements:

• Now caches etags/Last-Modified headers to avoid fetching a feed if it hasn’t changed since last time (thank you, Mark Pilgrim, for chapter 14 of Dive Into Python 3, which reminded me to be a good citizen in this regard). I was pleased to discover that the Universal Feed Parser it’s built on top of already supports gzip and deflate compression to save bandwidth.
• Now supports just one category per feed, because having articles appear in several categories just seems wrong to me
• Each category now really does contain the most recent X articles from the relevant feeds, because I’ve fixed the severely broken sort-by-date logic

A fair bit of refactoring has gone on under the hood, and the code now looks a bit more like an app and less like a ten-minute bodge. The next round will involve getting some proper unit tests in place, and possibly AJAX magic to load the articles lazily on the page.

You can download the 0.2 zip, or get the latest version from subversion if you like to live dangerously. The cool kids all seem to be using Git or Mercurial these days, but I haven’t found the need (or overcome the inertia) yet.

Enjoy. Feedback welcome to the usual address.

It’s hard to say what I’ll remember 2009 most for, because it’s been such a packed year for me. Perhaps I’ll remeber it as the last of my three happy years at Magdalen, the year I finished my degree, the year I set up a hosting co-operative with six friends, the year I moved away from home, the year I got a job or the year I took over as joint church treasurer.

It wasn’t a perfect year, of course – my personal TODO list is still 39 lines long – but never mind, I’m fairly sure there’s another year just around the corner. One item a week. What could possibly go wrong?

Happy New Year to all 3.5 of my readers (and all those following along via Facebook; do come and read the website this is all automatically imported from), and I look forward to seeing as many of you as possible in 2010.

The problem

A friend of mine has a laptop. It’s about five years old, and it runs Windows XP. This means, inevitably, that it’s a mess. My personal metric of measuring how rodgered a machine is by the number of icons in its system tray gave it a ten, and that’s pretty nasty. Nevertheless, until last Friday, there was nothing wrong with it that an uninstall fest followed by a defrag wouldn’t have fixed.

Enter the Internet Man

Last Friday, a chap called round to set up some broadband for my friend, who’d previously been on dial-up. I’m not going to name the ISP concerned, since it gives me more freedom to say nasty things about them, but suffice to say that they’re big enough that they really should have done better.

Their engineer fixed the simple(ish) problem with wiring which was stopping the broadband from working, and what he should have done at that point was connect the laptop to the router (less than six inches away on the same desk) using the supplied ethernet cable, and left. What he actually did was shove the supplied CD in the drive, which helpfully installed a few hundred megabytes of crapware onto the machine, then hooked it up to the broadband via wireless. Then he left.

Despite the above totally unnecessary shoving of stuff onto it, the laptop struggled manfully on (system tray count now up to 12) and seemed superficially fine.

Enter Dragon Naturally Speaking

My friend makes extensive use of Dragon NaturallySpeaking, a voice-recognition product which seems to knock the socks off everything else on the market when it comes to actually coping with different accents. And it was here that the problem first manifested itself: trying to use Dragon to voice-control Internet Explorer caused it to crash with an error message along the lines of the one described in this Microsoft knowledgebase article.

Enter the sucker, stage left

At this point, I fetched up, and agreed to see if I could fix the problem. Although the above KB article looked ideal, being the first hit on Google when I exercised the too-useful-to-be-documented Windows feature of “Ctrl-C copies the text of the active dialog box to the clipboard”, the hotfix it supplies claimed to be already present in service pack 3 of Windows XP. Just about the only virtue of this laptop was that it was fully up to date on patches and service packs, so what now?

Don’t press that button

Being rather short on ideas at this point, I decided to fire up the nearest thing broken Win32 boxes have to a magic bullet, namely System Restore. The machine refused to roll back to any of the restore points at first, but restarting into safe mode fixed that, and it was soon rolled back to the Friday, at a time before the problem occured.

Unfortunately, Dragon now seemed completely broken, giving the error message described in this support article. And no, of course there were no backups, I hadn’t taken one before I started, and my friend is no different to most of the non-geeky people I know in not backing up, except for dragging his holiday snaps onto CD once every six months.

To their credit (and they’re about the only players in this story to be awarded any), Nuance’s suggestion in the article of how to manually restore the user files for Dragon did work, after I rolled back the fatal system restore [or rather, didn't, because it didn't seem to have made a pre-restore restore point. Fortunately picking one from the Saturday seemed to work].

So, after two hours feeling my friend’s anxiety at the thought of having to retrain the speech recog from scratch – not a pleasant accompinement to the sick, swoopy feeling we get when we know we’ve just permanently erased some irreplaceable data – we were back at square one with the original problem. One last shot in  the dark, disabling the ISP’s nasty extensions to IE, seemed to fix the issue.

So who do we blame here? Laptop vendors, for selling machines so laden with rubbish before they even leave the factory that DLL hell seems assured the minute they meet with real life usage? Or, we could blame the idiots who seem to write the nasty unsigned drivers for most hardware on the market. We can definitely blame the ISP’s engineer for installing the crapware, but perhaps he’d been trained to, and anyway, why do ISPs think we need a CD full of crap to supplement the TCP/IP standard that’s been around for several decades? Is it really asking too much of Johnny User to plug in a cable or enter some Wifi passwords in to the applet that’s sodding well supplied with Windows, thus making the poorly writtten replacements from laptop manufacturers and ISPs alike completely superfluous? We could also blame Microsoft for making system restore not clever enough to cope with software like Dragon. Or possibly blame Nuance for not fixing or documenting what has apparently been a known incompatability for several versions of Dragon*.

Certainly, we can blame me. I clearly need to have “I will not agree to even slightly ‘fix’ someone else’s computer without taking a full disk-image of it first” tattooed across my forehead. I also clearly need to reimmerse myself in the happy world of properly written software which I’m lucky enough to earn a living in and try to forget the horrors of the last 48 hours.

* The most useful reference I could find on Google was this page. The Nuance KB doesn’t mention system restore. Then again, perhaps their customers simply don’t know this is the cause of the issue, or don’t get round to reporting it. It’s not like I have.

If you’re reaching for your e-mail client at this point to tell me I’m being unduly harsh, look me in the eye and tell me you think the way Firefox cheerfully caches DNS lookups and ignores such things as TTLs is a good idea. Or, even harder, give me one good reason why Thunderbird doesn’t check all IMAP folders for new messages by default. You can’t; in both cases it’s a disgrace.

All this being the case, I wasn’t what you’d call hopeful when, last Sunday, I had to write some e-mails on a train. And to do so, I needed to refer to some other e-mails in my Inbox. Since said train lacked anything as useful as a wireless internet service*, I’d need some sort of offline IMAP facility**.

As I bashed Thunderbird offline IMAP into Google, I was expecting a half-baked plugin at best, and “can’t be done” at worst. What I was actually very pleasantly surprised to find is that this functionality is built into Thunderbird.

What astonished me even more is that it actually worked. Faultlessly. So perhaps democracy can be salvaged after all.

* And, let’s be honest, because I still haven’t got organised and bought a phone with internet capabilities.

** Nobody uses POP3 in the twenty-first century, right?

Various posts on the Ubuntu forums suggested firewall issues, but nothing had changed, and Spotify continue to work on Windows on both machines.

In the end, I applied the nuclear fix of

$ mv ~/.wine ~/.wine-with-broken-spotify

and reinstalling Spotify from scratch, which worked. Might not be so handy for anyone with other apps under Wine, though.

It’s called the Tuff ‘n’ Tiny, apparently, and if you live in the UK, Ryman are selling the 2GB version online for £5.99 and two for a tenner on the high street.

I can also confirm that mine has partitioned quite happily into two FAT32 partitions, and, with prodding, boots Linux off one of them [the second. I had to use usb-creator, followed by install-mbr to get the bootloader to work]. I don’t think I’ll be following John’s suggestion of RAIDing two together just yet, but who knows…