Musings & Meanderings

Matt posts Best Open Source Social Networking awarded to WordPress by Packt Publishing. Wtg!

Check out the numbers in A Hollow Victory Microsoft which says “the fact is that open source has won this battle”. There’s a lot of spin in this post, which refers only to web hosting software, rather than the OS upon which Microsoft’s empire is built, but the basis is real. Unix and Apache are increasingly adopted by enterprise developers because they work, and new development growth continues to be increasingly based on open source vs Windows.

Open source isn’t about free. It’s about self sufficiency and community. It is about building things for ourselves instead of serving a master.

The anonymous WordPress blog to which I linked above, called There Is No Government Like No Government, claims to be about anarchy, yet is rich with the political cant of the extreme left, with an occasional right wing position thrown in. Does anyone other than me find this ironically amusing?

There’s a hidden chasm in many a segment of open source communities which is tied to political agendas (qu’elle surprise). Many community members bristle at big business, and many corporations deserve it, exhibiting intent to capitalize on free software, as they do on the free content millions of individuals create on the web every day. Open source community members are far more likely to be on the political left than the right. Nevertheless there is a core of practitioners of true free enterprise, which is apolitical. Here new economic models are needed, and here casting aside canned political agendas can make a great difference for all of us.

Open source developers who are apolitical shouldn’t worry about capitalistic opportunism, other than in the aspect in which it gains baseless dominance through big government support, regardless of which party is in power. The fact that open source has the momentum it does, is based on achievement and performance, not politics. Keep that thought.

Just over a week ago, I received a letter from my GP that he is shutting down his practice. Add me to the list of millions of Canadians without basic medical care. I actually haven’t had that for a long time here, but that’s in the lap of cynical and burnt out doctors, which is another post altogether.

No, you can’t simply find another GP here. Their practices are all closed. Patients are told to contact the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons. The College maintains a list that is always out of date by at least 6 months. Patients get the list, which has hundreds of physicians names on it, only to be told by every office they call that the practice has been closed for many months now. The College, by the way, advocates for their peers …the physicians and surgeons. No one advocates for the patients. Supposedly one can write to the Minister of Health.

As recently as 10 years ago, if you went to specialists, any one of them could direct you to a good GP. Today they all shake their heads and say, “Not any more”.

After receiving and trying to digest that news, I next faced this blog going into meltdown. It was shut down for several days, due supposedly to a server migration that made the mess worse. Some hosts should not be offering Linux on Apache combined with open source packages that they don’t know a great deal about.

The upshot is that I have a new host and re-installed yesterday. Some data, such as categories, didn’t survive the import, so it will take a few days to get through the archives.

If you get pinged from one of my old posts …again… please say that you forgive me!

Now I’ve also lost my voice, although I can whisper. The best thing I can say about this is thank goodness it went after I made my new hosting arrangements, and now I have a ‘voice’ again for musing and meandering on things that matter much to me.

WordPress …je t’adore. It is better the second time around.

BlueHost makes a big difference too. Installing and setting up the second time around has been so much easier I feel like I’ve moved to another planet. I even got everything validating within hours yesterday. I’m sure there’ll be new twists and quirks to deal with, especially as I add plugins, but the past month has also proven to be a great learning experience.

If you’re a returning reader, thank you for your faith.
If you’re in Toronto, do you happen to know a GP with good hearing?

From my install process, which had to be hacked, to my WordPress feeds, which are still acting up regularly, rather like brief blackouts, I was repeatedly told that there was something wrong with my code or file configuration. This caused me to spend all my usual blogging hours, and a few nights, digging through every single file. There are a couple of hundred of these, only a dozen of which I had initially worked with for the set up and theme.

All that time spent wasn’t necessarily a bad thing (although I’m suffering from withdrawal in missing many of my favorite reads) since it afforded me an even deeper appreciation of what has been created by the WordPress community.

Why didn’t my index files work? Nobody knew, so we just kept making new ones.

What were those way too long strings that doubled back in error messages? Must be a non-tech newbie code mistake I made somewhere.

What was that —>  thing that kept appearing before certain pages loaded? Tech people just shrugged.

That thing represents the hidden encoding characters preceding a UTF-8 file that has been saved with a BOM, or byte order mark, and I’ve also now read somewhere that PHP doesn’t care much for BOM.

Although I found many entries in help forums by webmasters waylaid by BOM, the only formal faq I’ve found on it is by Sun and Unicode. The Wikipedia entry refers to this being a problem with Unix and not Windows servers, and I’ve read that including the BOM in UTF-8 by default was one of those unilateral Microsoft decisions. Here also is a post by WordPress blogger Pierre, and a related issue post on translating character sets and collation in WordPress.

I first found evidence by downloading one of the suspected problem files and opening it in WebTide, which showed me unicode hard break characters before the file content. They didn’t appear on the page, but rather in the code schema window.

Getting rid of the BOM is fairly simple, although time consuming. You have to open a file that can be saved in plain text with no encoding and then paste the file contents into it. After saving it, you then copy the contents again, and paste them into a new file in an editor that will save with no BOM. Not all editors will do that, even the fanciest professional ones might require you to know how to script in that function. I’m using Notepad++, one of the top downloads on sourceforge.net, and really liking it so far.

There’s a possibility that db files can become corrupted as well. There is a WordPress plugin called UTF-8 DB converter which I think was developed for upgrading from versions earlier than 2.0 (which I think is when WordPress switched from Latin-1 encoding to UTF-8) but I don’t know whether it would help with this issue.

It’ll still be a while before I can get to setting up all my blogrolls and links here, and to joining in as many conversations as usual, but in the meantime, I hope that this post on the BOM issue might make it a bit easier for someone else to learn about than it was for me. I do wonder how much buggy behavior remains a mystery for the moment because of BOM.

Hello WordPress.

It’s been a sharp learning curve so far, but even when I’m banging my head against the wall , I still have Louis singing Hello Dolly in the background.

Who knew that I’d enjoy poring over code files in the middle of the night until I figured out what they did or until I found my mistake? (If I’d only known that I should have been reading PHP instead of MySQL manuals first it might have gone a bit faster.) No, this isn’t a gig, just a hobby.

I’d originally thought of waiting to move in concert with other plans, but decided that learning WordPress and joining this community was a wonderful complement to any future development at all, and a perfect place for my personal weblog.

So here I shall muse and meander from now on.