Monthly Archives: June 2009

WordPress.com’s Job System – Cron for PHP in Distributed Environment

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Colleague Demitrious Kelly (meech, Apokalyptik) earlier this month open sourced the (Unix process) jobs system he (primarily) has been developing for WordPress.com. Not that I really understand it, but “jobs” is described as

A fast, distributed, horizontally scalable system built upon linux, php5.2, and mysql 5.1 wherein work can be stored in a database, and processed outside the flow of script execution. Examples of common things that are part of script execution but not necessary to the rendering of the response to the user might be spam scanning, statistical analysis, email notification sending, processing input data, etc. Also included is an equally distributed cron mechanism to remove single servers as a point of failure for scheduled jobs.

There are a lot of terms I like in there like fast, distributed, horizontally scalable, scheduled. It could probably benefit from robust and fault tolerant. Any others?

Anyway, this crontab-like system for PHP scripts is an essential part of our WordPress.com infrastructure, and I’m really excited to see it open sourced!

Check out code.trac.wordpress.org for other pieces of our puzzle that don’t have pretty project pages.

New Project to Find Movable Type Community’s Melody

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Interesting development today in the blog publishing space with the announcement of Melody and the Open Melody Software Group.

Melody is a new WordPress competitor — bring it! ;-)

Based on Movable Type Open Source (MTOS), Byrne Reese writes “[the project's] focus initially is consciously not about features, but rather upon laying the groundwork through a well-documented set of processes by which future features and contributions can be made.” to live up to it’s tag line “Community Powered Publishing”.

The tag line seems to directly take aim at Movable Type for not being community powered, though in interview Byrne suggests that may be part of the overhead of Movable Type being an enterprise product.

From my position looking over the fence, I’m sympathetic to how the Movable Type community has suffered since “in 2008 [when] the hyper dedicated Movable Type product manager, Byrne Reese, was laid off from Six Apart”. Sure, the MT community isn’t just that one person, but he sure was a catalyst and one of the only open channels to the inners of Six Apart. Since then there doesn’t seem to have been anyone there for the developer community, or for me, as a member of another project, to collaborate with. Even Byrne’s own recent email to the MTOS-dev list asking “Who is the lead engineer of MTOS?” went unanswered. Here is that email:

“I hate to ask such a seemingly odd question, but I have recently had questions I wanted to address to the lead engineer of MTOS — offlist, but am honestly not sure who that might be right now. Who is the best person to address questions about governance and process to? Is there one?”

Mark Carey writes today on mt-hacks.com:

“Over two years ago, Six Apart, the creator of Movable Type open sourced the code for the core Movable Type application. While its was an exciting and bold move, the announcement and product naming choices were confusing to many — the differences between Movable Type Open Source and the Movable Type Commercial product and closed source add-ons sold by Six Apart weren’t easy to grasp, and some even disputed the newly open source nature of core application.”

Although Six Apart promised that they would  continue “fighting for openness” when they announced “Open Source Movable Type ” at the end of 2007, Melody is now the hope for a Movable Type-based openly developed product. The Open Melody FAQs includes:

“The community created Melody out a shared passion for Movable Type and a shared desire to see it flourish as a platform. We felt that the best and quickest way to achieve that goal was to create a product in which the community was inherently entrusted with a greater degree of control over its direction, communication channels and roadmap, and rewarded with more transparency and a greater sense of belonging.”

Serdar Yegulalp writes “To see a new way for the same framework to be improved, and to allow for feedback and suggestions that stem from my own use, is deeply heartening”

I’m very interested to see how the source code flows. The greatest gift of open source isn’t the right to fork, but the ability to merge.

Wih founding members and leadership including the likes of Byrne, Tim Appnel, Jay Allen , and Jesse Gardner, Open Melody is off to an incredible start. ((By incorporating as a US non-profit there commitment is beyond doubt — if only in surviving the painful process that the WordPress Foundation has recently come out the other end of.)) The web site looks great, and they’ve chosen open and friendly development tools.

What is good for blogging and open source is good for WordPress, and Melody seems very good for both:

  • I’m eager to put my frustrations trying to collaborate with the often opaque Six Apart behind me, and collaborate through the Open Melody conduit.
  • I can’t wait to see a leaner, more modular open source MT based product emerges that is also more feature rich — further confirmation of WordPress’s own approaches, and more good open source products are great for open source.

If you love blogging or open source, then Melody needs our love, participate! (hence this post)

Another Year Until iPhone 3G S for Existing Canadian Customers

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Although a camera with auto focus and video would be nice, and I can imagine myself playing with the compass, the iPhone 3G S doesn’t seem particularly compelling — likely why the only name change is the addition of an S. The S is supposedly for speed, and although I do like things faster, better, stronger, I haven’t found the iPhone 3G that slow.

Much of the rest of bang of the 3G S will be available to current iPhone customers as part of the OS 3 upgrade.

Oh, the promise of better battery life is really tempting, but the original promise of the iPhone 3G’s battery life was completely bogus, so why would I believe the 3G S’s numbers. I’m still considering buying a battery sled or external battery.

Besides, because iPhone owners were required to sign a 3 year contract when it came to Canada, it will be another year before existing Canadian customers can get reasonable “subsidized” pricing. “Rogers/Fido Social Media Guy” Keith McArthur confirms here.

The good news is Kieth says “tethering included free in data plans of 1GB or more until at least the end of the year.”

Kieth does through down the gauntlet “@dasnutz Canada is a very different market than US.” in response to Jason Wilkes “@keithmcarthur why is it that Rogers wants us to sign up for a 3 year contract, yet in the US it is 2 years? Greed…”.

The problem I have with Keith’s claim is Canada stands part from many countries in allowing three year phone contracts. Challenge accepted fellow Canadians? Time to take it to our legislators?

I know Micheal Geist continues to rise to the challenge by appearing two weeks ago before the Standing Committee on Transport and Communications to discuss the state of telecommunications in Canada:

“Remove consumer barriers – Restrictive long-term contracts and the possibility of copyright legislation that could prohibit consumers from unlocking their cell phones make it harder for consumers to move between providers. Other countries place caps on long-term contracts, caps on overpriced roaming charges, and reject legislation that stops consumers from unlocking their phones.”

WordPress.com Still Blocked in China

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I’ve seen some reports lately that “WordPress is blocked in China”, including some Mashable articles. To clarify, it’s WordPress.com that is blocked, not all sites that run self-hosted WordPress.

Mashable’s “China Blocks Twitter (And Almost Everything Else)” seems to suggest that the block relates to the 20th anniversary of Tiananmen massacre on June 4th. That may be the case for the other major web publishing and social networking sites, but WordPress.com has spent much of the time since the beginning of 2006 blocked by the Chinese government.

It’s an incredibly frustrating, sad situation.

In “Blogging guru chips away at Great Firewall of China” my boss Matt Mullenweg shares:

After some discussions, Mullenweg realised the site would be allowed back online if he agreed to block certain words or topics and give up information to the Chinese communist government about users.

“I started thinking about the DNA of the company,” he said. “That sort of company is not one I would wake up every day and feel passionate about working in.”

The site remains blocked, although Mullenweg, unable to suppress a giggle, points out that the official Chinese line insists it is freely available.

There was a break in the blocking around the time of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games, but that ended with the games. That was the longest time I know of when people could consistently access WordPress.com from across China.

Part of the Chinese government’s approach seems to be to sometimes allow western hotels access and other specific points — likely to deceive Westerners and cause confusion.

There does not seem to be a reliable way to automate detection of WordPress.com being blocked, regardless of what tools might promise. I’m not surprised that http://greatfirewallofchina.org/ gave up. This is the message on the site’s homepage:

“Because of the ever stricter measures of censorship China imposes on the Internet, the team of www.greatfirewallofchina.org at present can no longer vouch for the reliability of its test tool. We have therefore decided to take the test tool offline.”

Herdict <http://www.herdict.org/>, a project of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, seems to be a novel, survey based approach to find out which locations are blocking or censoring web sites.

The tool of choice to let people dodge surveillance is Tor <http://www.torproject.org/>. Please consider your own safety and technology expertise before using any such tools. Reporters without borders <http://www.rsf.org/-Anglais-.html> seems like an excellent resource if you are considering reporting from a dangerous place.

Monday, June 8th Update

A reliable source in China shares that Twitter is back. The same source also shares:

Specific blockages do appear to coincide with major events, like those in Tibet last year and the recent anniversary, but are also part of general and ever-changing blanket censorship.

The Twitter blockage is really the only new story of the last week (apart from 5 second delay foreign television news blackouts) but the news media wanted to turn it into a larger story, including the WordPress angle.

WordPress has been blocked for years now. Youtube has been blocked for the last 3 months. Twitter went done last week.

While the dates for the last two occurred at the same time as sensitive periods or events, I think both are more about controlling new forms of communication and networking than the particular events. Censorship in China is generally a one-way street with periods of activity ramping up around specific times. I think of it in the same way tax auditors get busy around tax season and government ministries around budget time. The difference being once a site is blocked by thePublic Security Bureau (PSB) here in China, it is very difficult to get it unblocked; given the public security connection in an already opaque closed-door administrative system. A good analogy is trying to get someone off a no-fly list in a bureaucratic security system that lacks transparency.

Domestic blogging sites are heavily controlled and censored (though in an ad hoc way). Chinese video sharing sites are coming under increasing regulation and many believe it was only a matter of time before Twitter, as the newest uncontrolled networking site, was shut down.