Drupal: Session, Cache and other Mysteries

By genox | Published: 2009/10/11

Drupal is a nice and massive tool for deploying websites, but not everything is perfect, as we all know:

  • Session Management: Drupal’s session management is somehow inconsistent. But as I found out later on, it is due to the fact that IE sucks. However, this should be a known problem and the workaround is to have the webserver send specific instructions for the use of the clientside-cache and to use the Boost cachemodule to have a better cache management on the server side. IE for some reason doesn’t listen carefully to Drupal’s default cache-instructions and decides to rather keep certain pages and not check for updated versions. So it might happen that a logged-in user gets the feeling he is not logged in on pages someone else created earlier, thus not being able to edit the content: The page appears to be the public page, no edit buttons. Don’t ask me about the technical details, I had to rely on trial and error to get this working.
  • Module Hell: One huge advantage of Drupal is the ability to deploy a solution for almost and really everything a client might be wanting to put on a website. One huge disadvantage of that is that you need a huge number of modules in your arsenal. I’m currently at around 70 modules for my base-setup.
  • Drupal.org: A huge ressource for information on everything Drupal related, but honestly, it’s quite a pain in the behind to find what you are looking for. There’s just way too much content stored on this website to be effectively able to find what you’re looking for in a short amount of time. If you’re new to the system, it will take you a little while to get used to navigate the site and find out what you can actually do and how. But luckily, you get used to that. :)
  • Drupal Politics: I get the feeling that the community surrounding this project is currently on the edge of an “evolution-step”. There is currently a little bit of tension between different groups. Hopefully that will not cause damage to the ongoing development of the project itself.


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Welcome PS3

By genox | Published: 2009/10/10

Okay this is not really news, just giving a little heads up what was cooking in the past couple of weeks. I was actually offering myself a little luxury good: A PlayStation 3. I sold my Wii with all the stuff I got for it and was able to finance a PS3 this way. So far I’m quite excited.

The best parts are a) the small Indie-Games I came across in the PSN Store and b) using it to playback video content. Honestly, the PS3 is quite a nice solution if you want to playback content stored on the network. Accessing content via uPnP works flawless (and MKV works, you just have to use the fantabulous PS3 Media Server which is OpenSource and available for Windows, Linux and OSX).

My first try using MediaLink worked nicely too, the only problem was the lack for MKV transcoding. After browsing the web for 4 hours, I stumbled across the software mentioned above and I’m happy ever since. No use for modded appleTVs anymore. Honestly, for the money, you get quite a lot more with a PS3 than you get with an AppleTV. Renting movies is nice tho, but this will soon arrive on the PS3 aswell.

Games I’m planning to give a try sooner or later include “Demon’s Souls”, “Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising”, “Little Big Planet” and I am already waiting for the next “Ratchet&Clank” adventure.

Posted in games, hardware, movies | Tagged , , , , , | 3 Comments

Erratic Calibration Results

By genox | Published: 2009/09/24

Thank god, my eyes aren’t messed up: It was just a bad calibration device. I tried to match both of my screens yesterday and I couldn’t figure out why the heck a calibration target of D65 has a huge tonal difference on my iMac monitor and on my Eizo CG242W2 – apparently, my eyes didn’t fool me. :P


Today I calibrated both monitors using my old-fashioned Spyder2Pro calibration device. Compared to yesterday’s calibration runs with the X-rite i1 display pro, the colors suddenly matched – on the first try and without tweaking whitepoints or anything. I should have tought of that earlier.


I suspect that the i1 is either damaged or just not able to determine colors correctly. If you encounter erratic calibration results or you have a “feeling” that the result is off the desired target color temperature, make sure to rerun the whole procedure using a different device. It might explain a couple of things.


I’m not sure about that, but I guess for some reason, the i1 – or “EyeOne” – doesn’t “see” as much red as it should. That’s why the color shifted to an ugly blue/green after calibration. I’m not sure wether this is a hardware problem or software related. Maybe the thing just died the classic consumer-electronics-death: Silent, erratic and causing hours of banging your head on the desk and making yourself.


So, just for the record: If you think your calibration results are way off the desired results, double check with another measuring device. It will save you hours of figuring and frustration. For the future: I’ll probably stick to the “Spyder”.. :P


Also, if you’re already trying to calibrate stuff: Give “ColorEyes Display Pro” a try. Nice tool for OSX/Win with a lot of options and producing very nice results. 175$ – but it’s worth it. Never had a good feeling with the bundled programs.

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GUI shame: Touchpanels

By genox | Published: 2009/08/11

I’m currently doing a lot of design-work for high-end touchpanels. One should expect that a touchpanel in the price range of around 3’000$ to 5’000$ each should be able to render truetype fonts smoothly. Bad luck: AMX doesn’t even support OpenType fonts to date and looks as bas as Crestron-rendered fonts. This is really disappointing. Especially since they are all heavily based on Windows OS implementation mostly, it shouldn’t be that hard to implement something like ClearType or anything. Those results make the whole design process utterly frustrating sometimes.

<cynicism> That explains why most of the preloaded GUIs look like the panels used in beta “hacker”-movies from 1992. Or, wait, maybe it’s because coders do the first-level design on graphical user interfaces: “Cool, we can generate beveled buttons!” – Unfortunately, nobody uses it because it just looks like Windows 3.1 … argh. Where’s the perfectionism, ladies and gentlemen? :) </cynicism>

But that’s not everything by far. Most “high-end” panels I’m doing design for (especially the Crestron ones) only run on 16bit color, which means that you’re gonna have to deal with banding at some point sooner or later if you’re into smooth design. Now try to simulate banding if you don’t have access to the real hardware :P (well, it works with Photoshop’s “Save for Web”, to an extent, but it’s not a 100% predictable).

The touchpanel-concept is pretty cool and I like creating interfaces, but hey, this is sooo 1998 compared to an iPhone which costs roughly a fifth (without a contract) of a “regular” touch panel and has a compass built-in. I mean, come on. The hardware is out there. What’s the matter? If they don’t catch up technology wise, they are doomed. Really. There’s already competition coming up with really sweet hardware.

Posted in design, hardware, my five cents | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

Mass Effect

By genox | Published: 2009/08/10

I like RPGs, and I like Science Fiction. And some time ago, I was thinking “Hmm, something which mixes the two would be greatly appreciated.” But I didn’t find anything in the massive ammount of games which is listed on IGN for example.

Turns out I just didn’t look around good enough: Thomas (gamester.tv) told me about Mass Effect some minutes ago and after watching the trailer, I think I really have to give this a try. Like, next week, after the BNZ and recovering from the demoparty-hangover. Now, I dunno how much further the development of the Stargate RPG is (last time I checked there wasn’t even a beta around…), but this sure is a way to waste time meanwhile. :P

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Welcome: Mac Mini

By genox | Published: 2009/08/09

After much of back and fourth and sleepless nights, I ordered a Mac Mini and a Lacie 4big Quadra RAID (4TB, 3TB/RAID5) this week. I’ve gone through countless options, even a low budget Hackintosh-setup with a PCI-Express RAID interface/Hotswap-cage and a FreeNAS setup. The thing which made me end up with a Mac Mini was the fact that I wouldn’t have saved *a lot* of money with a self-made setup, but it would have been definitely 10 times more work for the initial setup.

The temptation of an easy to setup (AND easy to maintain) solution was too big. I guess I’m getting old. 3-4 years ago, I would have chosen the solution which involves the largest DIY-factor. But nowadays, I just want an easy solution which doesn’t make much noise and I’m even willing to pay a little bit more for that. However, not as much as for a Netgear NAS… I have to admit that the Mac Mini setup is quite at the top of my budget, tho. If all I’d want are some TB of space in a corner of my flat, I’d certainly wouldn’t have chosen this: I came to the conclusion that I don’t want a single purpose (“dumb”) data-storage solution, but something which blends nicely into my current infrastructure and allows for custom expansion with services in the future on an environment I’m rather familiar with: OS X.


Posted in hardware, mac | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Buenzli 18

By genox | Published: 2009/08/08

Well well, one week to go until Buenzli will shake the swiss scene (or what’s left of it ;) ) for the 18th time. As always, preparations are currently at the peak level for most of the staff members. Unlock is as always doing an immense job and everyone else of course, too. If you don’t know yet what you’re up to on the weekend of 14/15/16 of August, drop by in Winterthur and have a beer and some nerdy discussions. ;)

As for potential releases from my surroundings, well, certainly nothing huge to take note of so far. My “musical disability” is not yet over, so don’t expect anything.. Would be cool to have some action from YOUR side, tho. Fellow swiss sceners, GO FOR IT!

For more information, check out the BNZ website (*cough cough* as always designed by yours truly *cough cough*).

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1Password

By genox | Published: 2009/08/07

After using this little App for a while now, I can’t imagine living without it. 1Password saves your passwords in a keychain, much like the OS X keychain already does, but with the ability to add other confidential information (secure notes, credit card information, etc), an auto-fill plugin for *every* OSX browser and an iPhone app to synch the whole keychain with your iPhone.

If you’ve got plenty of website-passwords, this is really cool. For example, I save the 1Password-database on my DropBox account (soon to be replaced by my private fileserver :D), this way I can sync it easily to every machine I work on, at home and on some office machines. You can also configure a session time on “critical” machines, so for example, you have to enter your master password after not using the app for 15 minutes.

The database is saved using strong encryption, so your data is pretty much safe. A strong password generator is included aswell and you will never have to use your “standard” password on every website you want to create an account for. ;)

What I miss right now is that 1Password doesn’t save system passwords, for example WiFi keys, logins for shares et al. But on the other hand, you can just create a secure note for this purpose.

Note: Apparently, 1Password + Snow Leopard Dev..A421 + Safari 4 = FAIL. Works with Firefox 3.5 tho.

Some screenies: The app’s user-interface and the integration into safari using a plugin (“1P”).

Posted in mac, software | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Dupin

By genox | Published: 2009/08/06

Dupin is a small utility which helps you getting rid of duplicate tracks in iTunes. You can filter dupes by selecting which bitrates to keep, length, date added, and so on. The free version can take care of 40 tracks per session, for unlimited access,  you have to buy the 15$ full version. I didn’t hesitate to buy this little program, especially because Doug Adams already did a heck of a job by maintaining the iTunes-script library on his website. Btw. if you’re already checking for dupes, think about checking for files residing in your media folders which are not part of your itunes library and removing dead tracks.

Doug’s Scripts, Dupin: iTunes Dupe Finder

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The joy of having a clean media library

By genox | Published: 2009/08/05

I listen to a lot of different music and thus there have been quite a number of tracks accumulated over the past 15 years. A wacky 22’146 tracks to date. Keeping this enjoyable on a file-system level is almost impossible. One of the first things I did when I switched to Mac 5 years ago was to start importing tracks into iTunes. It took me quite a while, but it was well spent and I’d never again use winamp or anything like it.


The following procedure has been the most satisfying for me. But you’ll need a Mac to use it. :P

1. Get the tools: iTunes (free), Amazon Album Art widget (free), Shtaggle (free), TuneUp (limited free, 30$ lifetime) and install.

2. Setup your iTunes to “manage tracks” on your harddrive or network share (iTunes -> Preferences -> Advanced). If enabled, iTunes will always save tracks in the selected directory if you import new albums in this fashion: /Artistname/Albumname/03 Trackname.suffix

3. Launch iTunes, Shtaggle and TuneUp. Make sure to read through all the preferences of these tools, because they allow you to set a lot of personal options.

4. Create an empty playlist which you will use to import and edit albums to keep ‘em separated to avoid a chaos due to missing ID3 tags.

5. Move one of the albums you’d like to import to the playlist and wait until all objects have been imported.

6. Check for missing tags: Track names, Album names, Artist names, etc. If the album you’ve imported is an original record: Use TuneUp and have it run it’s detection mechanism on your import. Netlabel music: Sorry, this is going to take your time. Cmd+i on the full album and edit the album tags. Single tracks: Cmd+i, track by track ..

7. After tagging the album, check for missing cover art. Use the dashboard widget to run a search on Amazon if TuneUp failed to find album art. For netlabel records: Sorry, again this will need your time. Cmd+i on the full album and drag an image to the album art area.

8. Play each tag and set some tags (to your liking) with Shtaggle.


Some tasks (for example cleaning up tracknames: 04-trackname -> Trackname or moving ID3 info from one field to another) are easily done by using scripts provided on Doug’s AppleScripts for iTunes. Very powerful ressource btw.

For example, you can now create intelligent playlists inside iTunes which include tracks haveing the <happy> tag and genre != techno to exactly get what you want. Apple’s “Genius” does something similar but is limited to the music which is available on the iTunes store. Genius is nice, but only works 50:50 for me. If you use an iPod and an AppleTV, this is going to make things a little easier. And at some point, it will be possible to use the same method to keep your movie library clean and in synch with other devices.

Of course you are kinda limited to Apple hardware at this point. If you don’t feel ok with that, this is no option for you.  I am not a friend of this myself, but I am willing to give up a little bit of my freedom of choice for a well working solution. So far, it’s working pretty well.

Posted in music, software | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

The IE7-js project

By genox | Published: 2009/08/04

“…make MSIE behave like a standards-compliant browser.”

I’ve come across this little script which can be loaded in a conditional statement in your website’s header, to enable old IE versions (<=7) to display certain CSS properties correctly. This will help you to reduce the amount of CSS you have to rewrite for classic IE browsers:  The IE7-js project.

I’m currently testing it on a couple of sites and so far, I didn’t encounter any conflicts with other JS-libs. You can even hot-link the file, but I suggest you copy it to a central place in your environment for the sake of .. well .. organisation. :-) For example, fixing min-/max-/width/height by hand for IE6 becomes obsolete, even tho the script fixes the display only after the whole page has been loaded. This will make it look a little bit “jumpy”. But, heck, my empathy towards IE6 users is shrinking by the day. Check the project website for a complete list of affected properties and CSS-selectors.

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Drupal: WYSIWY(should)G

By genox | Published: 2009/08/03

A rather annoying problem with Drupal is the lack of a *really* standard WYSIWYG interface. WordPress made the example and included TinyMCE as a default which is expandable with a couple of plugins (“TinyMCE Advanced”). Putting together a solution which also allows users to easily upload and include pictures into article texts with Drupal took me quite a long time. And every possible way I tried out had it’s own little problems – be it usability, be it incompatibilities with other plugins, you name it.

The combination which posed the smallest problems to me AND the users so far was this one:


WYSIWYG/TinyMCE + ImageAssist


The WYSIWYG-Plugin is trying to become the standard gateway for a number of editors and ImageAssist already supports it (on TinyMCE). Everything is rather Beta for now, but it works and it’s more promising in terms of future development than other solutions. However, I still hope that Drupal 7 will include a streamlined solution (like WordPress 2.8) for editing and importing images into posts. That’s really a keyfeature for a web CMS and if this is buggy or hard to use for the editor, you can only lose the game, because the main focus for most users is usability these days. Compensating the lack of usability with feature richness isn’t doing the trick for me.

One downside of this combination is that if you use ImageAPI aswell, you can not yet share images between the two media libraries. For instance, you cannot select images from a gallery created with ImageAPI/ImageCache/Views in ImageAssist’s “select image to include”-dialogs.

That’s why I really would like to see a little bit more standardisation for media integration in Drupal. It’s nice to have a huge number of options, but media integration is something really standard nowadays. And from my point of view, I prefer one stable solution over 20 half-baked solutions in alpha/beta stage, even if they all have different advantages over a restricted option.

I know a lot of people prefer different editors. But you can’t make it right for everyone and hope that the result still has the same quality compared to a little bit more restrictive and therefore more stable way of integrating features, especially the most basic ones. In a way, it’s like offering your client 10 different Web CMS to choose from: It’s cool to have a choice, but it’s a pain in the ass to maintain and the opposite of efficiency. And well, I’m a huge fan of K.I.S.S. by the way. :P

Posted in my five cents, software, web | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments

Xenocode Browser Sandbox

By genox | Published: 2009/08/02

On this website, you can run a browser based “virtual machine” which loads IE 6/7/8, Firefox 2/3, Opera and Safari (all for Windows). Only problem: Requires Windows and IE to run. But still: quite handy if you don’t want to mess around with your installation of win/IE (in my case, the VM running on OSX :P) but still want to be able to view your websites in different browsers and be actually able to browse them.


Xenocode Browser Sandbox

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Röyksopp – Happy Up Here

By genox | Published: 2009/08/01

Great video, great track. And space invaders. :-) It’s available on youtube in hi-def.


Posted in music | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Fileserver: NAS or not, that’s …

By genox | Published: 2009/08/01

…the question.

The amount of data I have around here isn’t the problem. I’ve plenty of space left. The thing which makes me worry is the reliability of my space. I’m currently running 2 LaCie Harddrives with a total of 1.5TB space on my iMac’s FW800 port. 500GB for my iMac’s TimeMachine, 1TB for the “Archive” (well, all the stuff which is rarely used but you still want to keep it). If my “Archive” disk dies, everything is gone for good. I can’t afford this to happen.

So, what I need is not really space, but I’d like to have all my data *a lot* more secure than it is currently. All the data I’ve produced in the past 10 years is basically the biggest asset of my little company. And it should be network attached. And it should be cheap. And I want to use it for other services than just serving files (VPN,SSH tunneling etc). And the power consumption is also relevant. A NAS is what I was looking for at first. But there are a couple of  downsides to them. I was setting up the network environment at PGM using a Synology DS509. It works nice and since we just replaced an outdated CS407e with the new DS509, we have a backup server “for free” which relaxes the whole data security situation quite a lot. The only thing this box is doing is serving files to a small number of office users. For that, it’s quite right. And most important, the data is secured, daily backups, etc.

But for my home office, I don’t want just some file-serving box. I want something I can play around with. And it should be somehow expandable with other peripheries than just an USB printer or an USB disk. My Epson R2880 won’t work with a NAS for example, because it’s not a PostScript printer and needs special RIP drivers to work.

Other than a NAS, there’s basically only the LaCie 4big Quadra which I’d consider for the job. It’s not very cheap, but offers a *lot* of speed on FW400/800/eSata, HW/hotswappable RAID5 and whatnot, but no Network connection. After comparing dozens of NAS-Boxes and reading about possible pitfalls and comparing speeds (which vary really a lot), I had the following idea:

Why not use a MacMini as a server?

Sure, it’s not the ultra-cheap solution I was looking for. But it has quite a lot of advantages over the (not so cheap) NAS when I think about it: It’s a full featured box with plenty of speed (core2duo@2GHz), video output and – using remote desktop – pretty much a third workstation for my home office and expandable to become a *real* server, not just some downsized linux.

So I did a little price comparison:


1xMacMini 1GB RAM + 2xLaCie 4big Quadra RAID 2TB
Storage Security: 2xHW RAID5, software mirroring via FW800
System Backup: Monthly disk clone to old 1TB disk (scheduled)
Total cost (CHF): 2'165.–


1 x Synology DS409 2TB + 1xLaCie Quadra 2TB
Storage Security: 1xSoft RAID5 + 1xRAID0, via USB2.0/daily backup
System Backup: N/A (AFAIK)
Total cost (CHF): 1'346.-


So, for 800.– more, I will get a full workstation and the security of a mirrored 2TB (well, 1.5TB, actually) RAID5. I could even run OSX Leopard server on this box, use it as file-, media-, VPN-, etc. server. Additionally, I would be able to handle data storage and server independently. The whole thing would be running on HFS+ formatted disks and it would be quite easy to upgrade the MacMini to a newer version or expand the storage. Of course, the whole power-consumption aspect will become quite useless with this configuration. :P

But, let’s say cpu performance would be an issue. There’s a box made by Netgear which has an Intel Atom processor and is currently reviewed as one of the fastest NAS servers. Let’s add this to the list:


1xNetgear ReadyNAS Pro 6x1TB
Storage Security: 2 Volumes: 2xRAID5 over 3 1TB disks, daily backup from Vol 1 to Vol 2
System Backup: N/A (AFAIK)
Total cost (CHF): 2'999.–


So, this setup actually costs more than haveing a MacMini + 2 FW800 disks and doesn’t nearly offer the same possibilites in terms of being able to expand the system with additional hardware. If something goes wrong, I can detach the FW drive and continue to work on another box without having to worry about unmountable file systems etc. I could attach 4 USB devices to the MacMini + a display and even the processor is faster. Theoretically, I could even run the AppleTV OS on this box on a small bootable USB HD :P. With all the free and 10-20$ apps for OSX and Leopard’s built-in server abilities… I can attach my scanner, the 2 printers, DVD-writer and other stuff and control everything either by sharing over the network or using remote desktop control. “Real” iTunes servers, UPnP/Media, SMB, AFP, NFS, VPN and pretty much everything else which is possible on Leopard. Best of all: all on a nice GUI, no need for any  terminal (well, maybe for the initial MacPorts setup :P) Thinking about it now, this would be totally and absolutely awesome. :D

PS: No! Backup to CD/DVD is *not* an option and backup to tape is far too expensive for my financial situation. And I want a solution which is easy to handle: That’s the whole point. I realise that this is not the most secure setup but it’s the best price/performance situation I can think of right now. However, if you think you have a better idea, let me know. :)


Update: After thinking about it again, I think the following config’s sustainability factor is bigger. At least in my case, since I’ve got plenty of external HDs already which can easily serve as a backup disk for another couple of years. I’ll have already enough RAID space to reduce the need for upgrading for at least 3-4 years from now. And until I reach an archive size over 1TB, there’s going to be enough inexpensive 2TB disks around.


1xMacMini 4GB RAM + 1xLaCie 4big Quadra RAID 4TB
Storage Security: FW800 HW RAID5 / Vol1 2.5TB, Vol2 1TB: TimeMachine-Volume for all macs

Vol1 will be mirrored to old 1TB LaCie-disk (daily rsync) as long as there's space left :P.

System Backup: TimeMachine -> Vol2

Total cost (CHF): 1'917.–

The things which will be moved onto the networked storage: All project data, media library, archive data. Total space needed: around 700GB. Might be that I will wire my iMac up again with Gigabit Ethernet. Should be more than enough performance for 90% of times.



Posted in hardware, mac, my five cents | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

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