S H Mohanjith

jango vs. last.fm

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last.fm

jangoI had been using last.fm for a while and recently tried out jango. Though jango lacks the bells and whistles of last.fm like desktop client, feeds, etc it does it’s job; play music.

I like jango for it’s discovery algorithm. It plays music I’d like. With time it has been improving. In contrast last.fm would get worst with time, playing songs I’d not like at all. Either from genres  I wouldn’t like or from artist I have marked as I dislike.

jango seems to have better collection of tracks (more about quality than quantity) compared to last.fm. I really get annoyed when last.fm plays mix tapes, which doesn’t happen on jango 🙂

Biggest minus point of jango is lack of a desktop client, but it doesn’t bother me because I can browse around jango site without the track stopping (I believe they use iframes). Next is a lack of an API/feed. At least a feed of items I recently listened would have been nice, so I could add to the blog 🙂

IMHO, jango is good if you would like to listen to good quality tracs from artist you like and last.fm is awesome for discovering new music, new artist, and even new genres. last.fm has an API for the inner geek as well. last.fm is truely a radio while jango is more of a juke box.

Either way both are awesome services that help you avoid boredom and know about artist you listen to. I would say I like both jango and last.fm, each with it’s plus and minus.

Google Analytics for WordPress plugin is incompatible with AddThis plugin

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Google Analytics for WordPress plugin adds an onclick attribute to links when “Track outbound clicks & downloads” is enabled irrespective of whether there is already an onclick attribute. AddThis plugin adds a link with onclick attribute to the post when enabled. This combination causes WordPress to generate invalid mark up. Same would happen if the post contains any links with onclick attribute (very unlikely scenario).

I have created a patch (with Git) that adds the content of $coolBit to the existing onclick attribute (without onclick=””) else a new onclick attribute is added with the $coolBit. You can download the patch. I have also reported the issue to Joost (plugin developer).

Hope this will be useful for someone in a similar situation until the fix makes it into the plugin.

WordPress plugin Smart Throttle 1.0.0 released

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WordPress plugin Smart Throttle 1.0.0 released. With this release Smart Throttle is hosted on WordPress plugin repository allowing users to easily install and upgrade.

In this release I have added the ability to configure throttling parameters. You can download the latest release from either here, here or from your WordPress blog under Plugins -> Add New in wp-admin.

Please do not forget to rate the Smart Throttle plugin and give your ideas to improve it. 🙂

My fight against comment spam on WordPress blogs – Smart Throttle

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My blog was hit with a comment spam flood which almost brought down the server under load. There were aproximately 30 bots continuously posting spam comments, geez don’t they realize that none of the comments get published. With all the writes to the database, my servers came to a crawling stop. I disabled comments for a while, until I figure out a means to prevent the spam messages from being posted. First option was CAPTCHA, I installed re-CAPTCHA WordPress plugin. This did reduce the spam but in an ugly way. I was thinking of a means to stop the nuisance spam without even writing to the database. Then I came accross this, and gave me the idea for Smart Throttle WordPress plugin. It’s very simple, depending on the rate of comments in the last hour by the user the comment flood time out will be automatically adjusted. Check out the plugin home page for details how it’s done. The plugin is released under GPLv3. I have now disabled re-CAPTCHA plugin and so far things are looking good, most of the spam bots are lost in the you are posting too fast message 😉 . Give your blog a break with Smart Throttle.

Subversion to Git

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My new year resolution was to ditch Subversion and move to Git. I switched to Git as my SCM for all my development work on new year day it self. I did hit some issues because my ignorance about how things are done with Git, however everything was fixed within the day. Now, 20 days later; I’m really happy that I did make the switch. Git has reduced development time greatly. No longer do I think about whether I should commit, wait for commit to finish for many minutes, or worry about overwriting someone’s work. Now I spend more time doing actual development than thinking about planning merges and commits.

I’ll blog about the few gotchas that I faced when I have time, hopefully soon. Development is fun again, thanks to Git. 🙂

Use KernelCheck to build the latest kernel for debian/ubuntu

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I recently found this awesome project called KernelCheck that allows you to build the latest Linux Kernel for your distribution. It requires very little interaction from the user and automatically optimizes the kernel to user’s needs. Currently it only supports Debian based distributions but support for RPM and Slackware based distributions is planned. KernelCheck is build around the AutoKernel idea by PinguinZ.

Building the Linux Kernel was never easier on Debian (and derivatives) before. I just compiled the 2.6.28.1, it wasn’t a pain at all.

v4l supports Avermedia PCI pure analog (M135A)

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I bought a Avermedia PCI pure analog (M135A) recently (26th December) and to much to my delight it was just plug and play on my home media center running Debian testing with custom built Linux kernel 2.6.28 (Released on 24th December). TV tuner was working with no issues. All local TV channels we accessible :).  Even the remote was working (not all but the most critical ones like volume control and channel selection are working). Since my sound card didn’t have a mixer I had to use sox to redirect the sound from the TV tuner to the sound card. Running the following at start up did the job.

sox -r 32000 -w -t alsa hw:1,0 -t alsa hw:0,0

Just in case not all required modules are loaded in your case, the required modules to use this radio tuner are:

  • saa7134
  • saa7134_alsa
  • tda827x
  • tda8290

I’m really happy that now most of the hardware I can find in local shop is just plug and play on GNU/Linux. My kudos to v4l (video4linux) and the Linux kernel developers 🙂 .

CUPS spool in devices with limited space

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I was trying to print a large document, and it would never print. A small print job had no issues. To add to that I was printing a stupid PDF form that will only open with Acrobat Reader. The print job was passing through many places, VMWare guest, my notebook, and finally print server. I spent hours looking for what’s wrong.

Finally after many hours lost the issue was found to be lack of storage space in the print server; specifically print job spool was filling the disk.

I was unable to find a work around or a fix other than printing in smaller batches. I believe not many people come across this issue, IMHO this is not even worth fixing. I just blogged it for my own reference.

Lanka Bell broadband charges for services not requested

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Last 14th I got my self a LankaBell broadband connection, there were no addons available either. Today I got the bill and they have charged me for web space and web mail that I was not even aware of they had. I complained to their billing department and they said they will get back to be on Monday. Just to clarify things I rang up their sales department acting as a new customer and queried about web mail and web space, and according to them web mail is free and they have never provided web space.

Be aware if you are getting a new LankaBell broadband connection. They charge you for products/addons they do not even provide. I’ll post and update after the billing department gets back to me. Let’s hope it was a mistake on their part. For everyones reference see the bill bellow.

Update 10/12/2008: Lanka Bell informed me that web space and web mail was billed erroneously.

Going multi uplink

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Last Friday I got a 2nd connection for my home-office. Now I have 1Mbit/s WiMAX uplink from Dialog Broadband and 512Kbit/s (Soon will be upgraded to 1Mbit/s) WiMAX uplink from Lanka Bell.

I have setup one of my old PCs as the router. I couldn’t find a single router with multi-uplink here in Sri Lanka, but PC router is more flexible, IMO. I’m running Debian on the router and using Shoreline Firewall aka Shorewall for firewalling and traffic shaping/control. It took a good few hours to setup mainly because I mixed up the ethernet interfaces 😀 . Shorewall documentation on multiple internet connections and traffic shaping/control by Tom Eastep helped me a lot in setting up my router.