Michael Henley

A few weeks ago I moved my blog over from being hosted with NearlyFreeSpeech to self-hosting on a Linode after Alex recommended them. NFS have been fantastic for the last few years but I decided I’d have a go with the flexibility that my own Ubuntu server hosted in London gives me. Bit of an experiment initially, although given the number of things I’ve put together to make it work I don’t know how easy it would be to migrate back. At first I set it up with nginx as the web server as it is nippy and light-weight, but it doesn’t support (somewhat obviously) Apache modules like mod_rewrite. Until this I hadn’t really appreciated how much stuff is written specifically with Apache as the assumed server (although as Alex pointed out, when you provide 60%+ of all web servers…) Now it’s running with nginx handling the static stuff, and Apache serving the dynamic content in a little bolted together set up. I will tweak this in the months ahead. I should say that Linode’s library has been invaluable in this process, and made much of the set up a breeze. The only thing I remotely needed to hack together was running Apache behind nginx, and that didn’t take all that long.

In the mean time I can’t recommend Linode as a server provider enough, and also hover as a domain name provider. Working with hover’s support, I got henley.co migrated from GoDaddy in under two hours. I’ll remind you that this is a process that’s meant to take 5-7 days. Absolutely can’t recommend their service and support enough on the basis of my experience so far. I’ve applied for an affiliate link so keep them in mind when you’re next looking for a domain host. Their service already beats GoDaddy hands down.

Finally I’ve added the WordPress plugin ‘Tweet Images‘ (apparently used by Stephen Fry, so I’m in good company) to try hosting my own tweeted images. Twitter and Twitterific on the iPad seem to support this API, but Tweetbot on the iPhone doesn’t annoyingly. This is all a little experimental, and with finals looming I’m probably not going to get it right in the immediate future. Apologies in advance to those that follow @michaelhenley, @mjdh, or subscribe to the blog. Hopefully I don’t balls anything up too badly!

I’m not sure what it is about Last.fm but I love what it allows me to do with music. So much so in fact that I am often out and about and I hear some music and think to myself ‘I wish I could scrobble this’

This afternoon has been one such day. I emailed Muller about it (he often has the misfortune of being on the receiving end of my random emails), but figured I would blog it anyway. Good excuse to blow the dust off the old gal. Below is the text of the email to Alex:

Just had a thought. So I am sat here doing some work and the playlist in this cafe fucking rocks. I want to scrobble it but I can’t. It’s on the speakers. But. What if they were scrobbling it and I could somehow say that I am here and so the same plays scrobble for me. Wouldnt that be awesome! Same premise if you’re at a party.

So dear reader – yes, all three of you – is this the kind of thing that would be remotely doable? I keep finding myself liking things like foursquare and gowalla but I want to see more geolocation integration with all my services. I am not tied to my desk but that introduces new situations that I want my social networks to be influenced by.

Right, back to the reading about tumour formation. Ta-Rah.

Those who pay attention to the UK and technology will know that the Digital Economy Act is now law with all the threats of disconnection and censorship therein. I am not going to write a long analysis of this; we all know it is a travesty and a terrible example of poorly thought-out legislation that is highly vulnerable to the law of unforeseen consequences, as well as a testament to the kinds of things that really can get fired through Government and into law provided the right people want it to be the case. That scares me, but is a discussion for another day.

My response to this is simple and (for the moment at least) legal. My traffic is encrypted and tunnelled out to a different part of the Internet before emerging. At the moment my computer is Swedish and shall remain that way for a little while. A few mouse-clicks later and my machine can be Swiss. A few more and it is Malaysian. The simple fact is that I can’t change my hard-line ISP very easily, but VPN providers are numerous and many of them cater to exactly my needs. I am now spending a little more each month than I was before for Internet access, but I know that this access is secure be it from corporations, special interest groups or the Government. Oh, and now I donate to the Open Rights Group. You should too.

So who loses out from this? I am slightly inconvenienced but life doesn’t really change, but the people who really have found the majority of traffic being unencrypted useful are the security services. Just from a signal-to-noise ratio point of view until now it was really people who especially wanted everything secret who encrypted and so drew attention to themselves. Now a large proportion of those who are tech-literate will employ encryption, IP-spoofing, use proxies and VPN tunnels. Anything to make ourselves feel less intruded upon. The Swedish example shows that this will be the case, and that it will lead only to a small, and short-lived, drop in downloads.

I finally should give a sincere thank you to people like the ORG, and Tom Watson & Evan Harris, who was until recently my local MP, for not only raising awareness about this issue, but for working to try to make it at least workable. If we had people like this on the Front Benches instead of the Back we might have a Government I had some confidence in.

I was talking with my Dad and brother this evening about the Times move to charging £1 per day. I don’t think moving from free to charged-for content will work for them because as far as we can see there is no new value added. It is simply charging where before it was free.

The analogy I came up with was, as usual, inspired by the glass next to me: “Imagine there are four glasses of wine here and at the moment you can pick up any and drink from them as you choose. Now think that one of them now costs you £1 to drink from, but the other three are still free. Which are you going to drink from?” He didn’t respond but then I decided to expand it because I realised my analogy was insufficient. The table in fact needs thousands of glasses, and whilst only a few of those wines will be ‘appellation contrôlée’, the choice and range that is available it almost boundless. Yes some will taste like vinegar, some won’t be to your taste, and some your parents wouldn’t approve of, but there will be some hidden gems in there from the New World that will fill the gap for insult, controversy and gossip that John Humprys seeks as well as doing what this little out-pouring fails to do in providing well written and considered ‘journalism’.

After all, what is journalism and why does it have to be something that is expensive to do well? The Internet might have choked how investigative journalism used to be done, but it has also opened up a wealth of information that used to cost large amounts to get hold of. Anyone can now easily be contacted, attribution found, and things investigated. In the UK, one of the biggest political scandals of the past decade has been that of MPs expenses. Amongst others, Heather Brooke was the main driving force behind this. She is a freelancer. This exemplified investigative journalism at its very best, and yet there was no backing behind it. Indeed, we see with initiatives such as the Bureau of Investigative Journalism that there are third parties stepping in to fill this gap that is forming as newspapers shrink. We are told that investigative journalism will go away if newspapers do and yet the BIJ is showing that that will not be the case. The newspapers and the old dogs of the news world tell us that the only way for our democracy to survive is to continue with the model we have. If humanity had agreed with that principle we would never have moved from foraging to agriculture, from horse to car, or from land to air.

So far I have heralded the end of dead tree as the inevitable, something to be embraced and to welcome despite the pain that will come with it in the short term. I have based this belief on the fact that what they provide – opinionated essays, investigative studies etc – are being, and will be, provided elsewhere in what is a natural evolution. There is however one traditional organisation whom I believe should stay for a while at least. That is the BBC. We are constantly bombarded with complaints from the aforementioned dead tree crowd that the BBC makes their lives difficult, that it does too much and exploits its position as a state-funded provider. I actually disagree with this but even if it were accepted there is one aspect of the BBC that I couldn’t live without; their news. It is, like Wikipedia, theoretically non-partisan and so presents nothing but the fact with minimum opinion. If there is one thing that I will agree with John Humprys is crucial to our democracy it is this. Easy, reliable access to the facts. Yes we have twitter opening up a vast wealth of raw information but this is also a weakness. It is raw, unfiltered, the noise can drown out the crucial point. When I hear of a development the first place I hit is news.bbc.co.uk and Wikipedia for an outline, followed by twitter to keep abreast as things happen. The first two will have basics but need sources on the ground etc so what they say is most likely reliable but, at t=2 hours, is limited. Over the next few years I expect Wikipedia will take over this space for me and others to be the non-partisan provider of information but I don’t feel that has matured yet. It is getting there, but isn’t quite my first port of call.

This post was never meant to turn into the small essay that it inevitably has done, and indeed as the title reveals was probably meant to be a bit of a Murdoch-bashing despite this being the first time he has been mentioned. The writing is on the wall for newspapers. Some will move to media such as the iPad and other rich media tablets, some will move purely online and embrace the culture of free and open, and some, like the dinosaurs that survived the asteroid impact who lasted a few more years picking up the scraps of what used to support them plentifully, will eventually perish and in their place the small mammals of new media will flourish.

P.S. Dear Mr Humprys: This piece is opinion and it is provided to you for cheaper in real terms than any newspaper in history. It is admittedly probably not very rude, maybe not that offensive or disrespectful, but it is pretty bloody-minded. I actually do care who I upset, but that’s a personal thing and my name emblazoned beneath ‘The Sun’ wouldn’t change that. If you want gossip may I suggest you look no further than @eyespymp, for an iconoclast I point you to Guido Fawkes, and Heather Brooke seems to tick the troublemaker field. Those are just some political examples. So here is something that you would never see in a ‘posh’ newspaper – an opinion piece from a middle-class Oxbridge technophile. Please point me to the last piece of print from the Millwall terraces or saloon bar in a newspaper. Yours, Michael Henley

This is a problem which keeps springing to my mind, and is one of the main factors which for the time being will keep me from migrating any ‘mission-critical’ data into the cloud.

John C Dvorak, admittedly a cloud skeptic, just posted this on twitter:

Cloud Computing Report. Coming on 24-hours with zero Comcast Internet connection. It rained and blew up the “cloud.”

A few weeks back I was at the FoWA conference and it was plagued with WiFi issues. As understandable as these were considering the volume and number of users at an event like this, I couldn’t help noticing the irony of the lack of connectivity at a conference where there is a large emphasis on cloud computing. Lack of connection will always be the Achilles Heel of Cloud Computing. If I have an essay deadline and mine is stored cloud-wards I doubt my tutor would accept lack of internet as a valid excuse. Until we can make connection truly ubiquitous, with redundancy, so that in all but the most disastrous situations connection is available then I don’t see the cloud reaching its full potential. Again at FoWA we saw a presentation from a guy running an online invoicing and business finance service which looked fantastic, but I can’t see many small businesses migrating towards solutions like this until there is no risk of losing access to their information at inopportune moments.

Tangentially related to this is the problem of mobile data and of roaming rates. This is again something which needs to be addressed as we move ever forward towards the cloud and mobile devices becoming our first line in technology and data access. I was paying around £1 per MB while in Galway for the Oyster Festival. I have this amazing device in my pocket which could answer all the questions I have about this place I am visiting but I can’t access any of that without feeling like I am being mugged.

When initially setting up MovableType on my NearlyFreeSpeech-hosted site, I couldn’t find a way to get around the need for Authentication with Google Apps for email. Commenter Kevin Doyon informed me how to make this work, but as I had already finished the MT set up wizard I had to make the changes manually. I must begin by saying that I am no expert at this and am learning as I go. This is what has worked for me and might not work for you. You undertake this at your own risk, and as with any changes I advise you to make backups of everything before you start making changes.

Using your favourite FTP client (Transmit in my case), connect to the site for your MT installation. Navigate to /public/cgi-bin/mt, and find the mt-config.cgi file. Make a copy and rename it something like mt-config-old.cgi, and then open up mt-config.cgi in a text editor. At the bottom, add the following lines:

#========== EMAIL SETTINGS ===========

MailTransfer sendmail
SendMailPath /usr/bin/sendmail

Save the file back to the server, and then open up your web browser and navigate to http://domainname/cgi-bin/mt.cgi to access your installation’s control panel.

Select ‘System Overview’, and then settings:

From here you will immediately see the General Settings pane where we need to make changes. In the ‘System Email’ box, enter the email address you want to be displayed in the From: line of any emails sent by MovableType and click Save Changes.

Once it refreshes, enter an email address you have access to into the Send Email To: field and send the test. If all goes well then you will see a test email arrive in your account sent from MovableType, and the dashboard will report success:

That is it. Your MovableType installation will now be able to send emails as and when you have configured it to.

This is based heavily on Daniel Sirz’s useful piece for using Analytics with MT which can be found here. I found that it was missing one or two little bits which had me scratching my head for a while and so have rewritten it for the most current version of MT. This will include the Analytics code into the header template, so that it is included in every page of the blog.

Ensure that you are managing the blog, and not the global MT install. From the Dashboard, navigate to the Templates section:

Scroll down to the Template Modules section, and select Create Template Module:

Copy your Analytics tracking code from their website, and then create a new module called ‘Google Analytics’:

Save your changes, and then navigate back to the templates by clicking ‘List all templates’

Click the HTML Head Template to edit it:

Click the line below the last one currently present, and enter:

<$mt:Include module="Google Analytics"$>

Once you save, you should see this:

Head back to the main screen by again clicking ‘List all templates’. The final step is to rebuild your blog to include the new code. To do this, click the ‘Publish Blog’ button in the cross bar:

Tell it to Publish all files, and then wait while it rebuilds. When it is done you will see a box telling you that it is complete and how long it has taken. If you now go to any page on your blog and check its source, you will see that the analytics code is being included in the header and so will report back the stats.

This guide continues from a previous post which can be found here, which details the steps required to download, arrange, and set the permissions required to install MovableType onto a NFS-hosted site. The same disclaimers as posted there apply to this post.

In a web browser navigate to http://domainname/cgi-bin/mt/mt.cgi , where domainname is the domain name of your blog.

Here you will be presented with a box where you will configure the static path of the MT installation:

As with the page URL, replace domainname with the domain name of your blog, then click ‘Begin’.

If everything is as it should be you should see the following screen:

Continue to the Database config page.

Here, select MySQL Database:

Once you have selected the Database type, the window will expand to give you more options. At this point we must set a few things up on the NearlyFreeSpeech end. Don’t navigate away from the MT set up page, but in a new tab log into your NFS member area, and then click the ‘mysql’ tab. If you already have a MySQL process set up then we can just use that. If you do not, then click ‘Create a new MySQL Process’ and follow the on screen instructions.

Once created, click ‘open phpMyAdmin’ and log in with the details emailed to you by NFS when you created the process.

I like to create a new user for each database I create. This helps to keep it more secure. From the main page, click the Priviledges tab:

Then click ‘Create a New User’, and you will be presented with the new user window:

I am going to give my MT installation the username ‘moveabletype’ and have generated a secure password for it. Take note of the username and password you create as you will need to enter these into MovableType later. Select the ‘Create Database with same name’ radio button below the user credentials, and then click ‘Go’ at the bottom right. The page should refresh showing you a colourful box at the top informing you that the new user has been created. If you were to go into the databases tab of  phpMyAdmin you should also see that a new database has been created called, in my case, ‘moveabletype’. You can now log out of phpMyAdmin and head back to the MovableType installation page.

Once you clicked MySQL Database some new options will have appeared. You must fill them in as follows:

For Database Server, you must enter the process name you created at NFS. If you did not take note of this, it can be found on your NFS mysql page, and is listed as DSN. Fill in the other fields with the info you entered in phpMyAdmin when you created the new user and database. The click ‘Test Connection’. If everything goes as planned you should see the following window:

After clicking Continue, you are presented with the Mail configuration page. At this time I have not figured out how to make this work with Google Apps where I host my email on michaelhenley.co.uk, and so have chosen to skip this step simply by clicking continue. My issue is that Google Apps requires me to authenticate before they will pass on email, but the MT installation does not present me with a way to enter user details. I will update with a plugin later if I find one to make it work.

Simply clicking Continue allows you to skip this step.

[Update]: Thanks to commenter Kevin Doyon for informing me on how to make this work. Select the option to send email via sendmail, and set the path to

/usr/bin/sendmail

The test email will now send correctly even from a GoogleApps Address. If, like me, you had already skipped over this step then follow the instructions here to configure sendmail from outside the wizard.

If you have done everything correctly your MovableType installation should now be set up and you will be presented with the following window:

Once you click Continue you must set up a user for yourself:

Click Continue, and then enter your blog title, and change the paths so they point to the ‘blog’ directory:

Once you click ‘Finish install’ you will see the system initialise the database, and then you will see the Installation Complete! Screen:

Congratulations! You have now successfully installed MovableType onto your NFS-hosted site. I hope these two guides have been useful.

A few credits:

I have put this guide together based on information found at the following sites:

1. http://blog.nearlyfreespeech.net/2007/01/28/writing-files-in-php/
2. http://wiki.movabletype.org/Main_Page
3. http://www.movabletype.org/documentation/installation/quick-start.html

I host this blog and the rest of the michaelhenley.co.uk domain on NearlyFreeSpeech and have yet to have a problem with them. However, while in California @alexmuller and @zethraeus were trying to set up the back end for MiscellanousGeekery, the tech blog which they are running, and at first decided to try to use MovableType instead of WordPress. After they spent a day getting nowhere at it they decided to go with WordPress instead and that was that. I had attempted to offer a helping hand while there, but being completely unfamiliar with MovableType and no sort of expert at configuring these things anyway I was about as much use as a chocolate teapot. This afternoon however, resolving not to be beaten by a piece of CMS Software, I decided to have a bash at it myself and see if I could make it work. After a few hours poking, proding, shouting and screaming, I finally managed to make it work.

Below is a step-by-step guide to how I made it install and run. I must preface this with saying that I am no sort of expert, nor do I claim to be. This is simply how it has worked for me and how it will hopefully work for you. Some things to note:

1. I use a Mac and as such my main tools for interfacing with NFS are terminal SSH and Transmit. I will keep Transmit to a minimum to try to make this as universal as possible.
2. The only configuring I will do is to install the blog.
3. I found things a lot harder to approach than WordPress. While this is not surprising as WordPress is a little more dumbed down, this guide is the product of much Googling and I owe pretty much all of this to various guides, manuals, wikis and blogs. I will try to give credit where I can
4. I am trying to make this as comprehensive as possible. Skip over any explanation you don’t need.
5. Only enter commands in black. I am including the prompt in grey for clarity. The idea is that before you hit return to execute the command you should see exactly what is written on each line of the guide.
6. This shouldn’t break anything, but if it does, please don’t sue me You are undertaking this at your own risk.

In your NearlyFreeSpeech control panel, create the site where you are going to install MovableType, and take note of the credentials you will require to connect to this site over SSH. If you are simply adding to an existing site then ignore this step.

Head over to movabletype.org and copy the URL to the latest distribution of MT (4.31 at time of writing). Open up the terminal and SSH into your site, and enter your NFS password when prompted:

ssh nfsusername_sitename@ssh.phx.nearlyfreespeech.net

You should then be presented with a prompt similar to this:

[sitename /home/public]$

From here you can download MT directly to the site using wget. Replace the URL with that obtained from the MT website for the latest release:

[sitename /home/public]$ wget http://www.movabletype.org/downloads/stable/MTOS-4.31-en.zip

You can follow the progress of the download on screen, and after a short while it will have downloaded. Next unzip it:

[sitename /home/public]$ unzip MTOS-4.31-en.zip

Once this is completed, if you enter the ls command at the prompt you should see that the public folder contains one file and one folder. The file is MTOS-4.31.en.zip, and the folder is simply MTOS-4.31-en. The folder contains the unzipped contents of file downloaded from MovableType.

Create a folder in public called cgi-bin, and then a folder called mt inside of it:

[sitename /home/public]$ mkdir cgi-bin

[sitename /home/public]$ cd cgi-bin

[sitename /home/public/cgi-bin]$ mkdir mt

[sitename /home/public/cgi-bin]$ cd ..

The contents of the MT download have to be split between the cgi-bin/mt folder and the public folder. At the prompt enter the following:

[sitename /home/public]$ cd MTOS-4.31-en

[sitename /home/public/MTOS-4.31-en]$ cp -rf mt-static ../

[sitename /home/public/MTOS-4.31-en]$ rm -r mt-static

[sitename /home/public/MTOS-4.31-en]$ cd ..

[sitename /home/public]$ cp -rf MTOS-4.31-en/* cgi-bin/mt

[sitename /home/public]$ rm -r MTO*

To summarise, these commands have copied the mt-static folder into the public directory of this site, and have copied the rest of the contents into the mt directory we created inside of cgi-bin. The final command is simply housekeeping to remove the downloaded zip file and the folder to which its contents were extracted.

One of the differences between MT and WordPress is that it requires the server to have the ability to write to certain folders. NearlyFreeSpeech limits how this can happen and so the permissions for the folders and files to be written must show the group as ‘web’ and allow the group to write. It also requires the blog to have its own subdirectory within the domain. I am going to assume that this directory will be ‘blog’, but if it is not then simply substitute ‘blog’ for your chosen name in any commands. Finally the world must also be able to execute files within cgi-bin/mt.

[sitename /home/public]$ mkdir blog

[sitename /home/public]$ chmod -R 775 blog

[sitename /home/public]$ chgrp -R web blog

[sitename /home/public]$ cd mt-static

[sitename /home/public/mt-static]$ chmod -R 775 support

[sitename /home/public/mt-static]$ chgrp -R web support

[sitename /home/public/mt-static]$ cd ..

[sitename /home/public]$ cd cgi-bin

[sitename /home/public/cgi-bin]$ chmod -R 775 mt

[sitename /home/public/cgi-bin]$ chgrp -R web mt

[sitename /home/public/cgi-bin]$ cd ..

At this point we should have completed pretty much everything which needs to be done in the terminal and via SSH. To disconnect from the server simply enter

[sitename /home/public]$ exit

This completes part 1. In the next part I will walk through how to configure your MovableType installation and set up MySQL database which it will use through phpMyAdmin. This can be found here.

I am sat in Caffè Nero on the High St in Oxford. Having paid in a cheque and been fitted for a ball suit I have popped in for a spot of brunch. While eating my meatball and mozzarella panini and drinking my latté I am keeping up to date with the news on my iPod touch. The guy at the next table is from college and is doing much the same but he is reading the dead tree Times. Over the past few days I have been fairly heavily revising for my prelim exams in a week and a half’s time and so I have been spending large portions of time in the Radliffe Science library. V easy place to work with the advantage of being undergroud and so there is no mobile reception. I periodically check Twitter on my iPod using their Wifi or access the online book database to find the Dewey reference of a text book to supplement my notes. It works perfectly.

Were I carrying around my laptop I would probably be crippled by the weight by now, but I can’t justify buying a netbook yet because my laptop is (kinda) portable and does more than I need despite being 2 years old. Looking at the new Asus Seashell I find myself very tempted but I keep thinking ‘it would be nice if it ran OS X’ (though I’m not sure how much that would change). This isn’t fanboyism, but more that I have a routine established there. I know how to make drive imaging work perfectly and jungledisk backs up my homefolder hourly to S3. Despite how beautiful Windows 7 is, and it really is. You know it’s good when @alexmuller with all his MS hating bile says it is the best netbook OS.

So what am I trying to say in all this. Something, and nothing. Partly I just really wanted to write something that wasn’t related to Biochemistry or Organic chemistry, but I also realized just how little I need something netbook- or even tablet-esque. The iPod is doing everything. It isn’t powerful enough and the frequentish keyboard hangs are getting a bit frustrating but if this had more power and a much bigger battery of would be the perfect computer in my pocket. If I am spending the day writing an essay then I will bring out the MacBook Pro if for no other reason than staring at this for prolonged amounts of time strains my eyes and 15″ screen is easier.

Would an OS X tablet/netbook be nice? Hell yes. Would I buy one? Honestly? probably not… I am not sure I am happy with the middle ground at the moment. My MBP may be heavy, but I bought it for some good reasons which still hold true and so if I am using a laptop I want that. A netbook or tablet won’t fit in my pocket for me to pull out, look up a reference, and then slip it away to dash off to the shelves. Make this iPod/ iPhone better or indeed bring out a competitor that has a similar app infrastructure and availability and then maybe we can talk. Until then the money is staying in NatWest, even if the eye candy is tempting.