Category: Computing

Categories
Computing McAleely.com

Worried about WordPress security upgrades

The technical among you may have noticed I use the ‘WordPress‘ package to host this blog. As I noted a long time ago, this was largely because the folk behind it seemed to be respectful of the fact that URLs are part of the human interface to the web.

I’ve been a happy user of WordPress for a few years now, and I enjoy the new features they’ve added in that time.

However their basic position is that the only way to get security patches is to stay on their latest release. This is problematic. I’ve invested considerable effort in integrating this blog into the rest of mcaleely.com, by creating a custom theme. Sadly, the WordPress team don’t appear to claim to maintain the APIs that themes talk to in a stable fashion. Every time I upgrade, I’m expected to review (At least – at worst, I must re-do) the technical work of creating a theme. This is non trivial effort, but apparently this time of mine is not important enough to the WordPress team. If it were, I think they’d nominate stable API releases, and provide security patches for them. Otherwise I find the claim that I can upgrade with a ‘known amount of work‘ niave and mildly insulting.

I’m finding the fact that I’m required to do this work for a time critical security patch on a Sunday evening just plain annoying.

Unless this attitude changes, I’ll have to shop for a new blog provider. Any suggestions?

Categories
Computing Miscellanea Video

Sabbatical Progress

I’m now about half way through my sabbatical year, so I thought a progress update would be in order. You may recall that I wanted to see if I could do two things:

  • Integrate more cycling into my habits.
  • Find out if I have the capacity to start my own software company.

Taking the cycling first, I haven’t much. Indeed, I cycle as infrequently as when I had a full time job. An early start has fizzled out, and my main activity has been to watch this year’s Tour de France. However, I got a nice new cycle computer for my birthday last week, so perhaps the trick of ‘new equipment’ will get me going (it has worked in the past).

On the software company front, I have made more progress, although I don’t claim to have a going concern yet! I have formed Transmission Begins, and developed its first product, My Own TV Channel. This is now just starting to be used by people other than me. It’s well received whenever I discuss it, so my current plan is to improve it somewhat and then focus on building a service business around it. The software itself is available for download with an open-source licence.

Categories
Computing Video

Beta testers wanted

Inspired by my encounter with the Miro team, and mindful of a need to broaden my skillset beyond client software, I’ve been busy the last few weeks. One comment that was made at the Miro presentation was that most of the channels are hosted over plain http, and make no use of the bittorrent client in Miro. In the pub discussion afterward, we seemed to conclude that bittorrent server software was still too hard to use.

Curious, I started looking around. Most of the bittorrent software I could find was limited in some awkward way – perhaps implemented in a less popular language, or designed to handle the needs of the high traffic pirate content servers rather than small providers of their own content. Two services stood out: Amazon’s S3 service lets you turn any hosted file into a torrent by adding the ‘.torrent’ extension to its URL, and the Miro Team’s Broadcast Machine did all the torrent generation server side, on your own server.

However, Broadcast Machine is no longer supported, and S3 leaves you needing to create an RSS feed. I’ve therefore been busy implementing a bittorrent server that can be hosted at any domain that supports PHP and MySQL. If you can install WordPress, I intend this software to work too. It can create a .torrent for any file already on your server, and then include it in an RSS based channel feed, ideal for clients like Miro.

I’m looking for a few beta testers to see if this software works outside of my own test set up. If you want to host some video content (perhaps you already post them to youtube) on your own domain, and you are familiar with installing software like WordPress there, you would be an ideal candidate. It would also be useful to see how multiple downloads work, so if you already use a torrent aware RSS reader (Miro is one), or would like to, please get in touch.

Feel free to email me (john@mcaleely.com), or post a response to this blog entry.

Incidentally, selling this software is not my business idea. This is BSD licensed open source.