Archive for June, 2006

WordPress has a wonderful feature: instead of providing a timezone where you live, you tell it how much hours your local time differs from GMT. Which just fails when dealing with daylight saving.

And I just noticed that my setting was still 1 hour, instead of 2. I remembered to change time on my wallclocks, mobile phone, but I forgot my blog... But changing that will change it only for future posts and comments.

So, for people who forgot like me, here are two SQL queries to fix the database:

update wp_posts set post_date = convert_tz(post_date_gmt, 'GMT', 'Europe/Paris'), post_modified = convert_tz(post_modified_gmt, 'GMT', 'Europe/Paris');
update wp_comments set comment_date = convert_tz(comment_date_gmt, 'GMT', 'Europe/Paris');

Don't forget to replace Europe/Paris with whatever your timezone is ;) . Note that this will require you to run, if you've never done it before, something like
mysql_tzinfo_to_sql /usr/share/zoneinfo | mysql -p -u root mysql

Until recently, I wasn't really bothered by the poor OpenGL performance of my laptop. Though it has a Radeon Mobility 9200, the OpenGL "experience" was really bad. But since I was not using GL enabled applications, that was not an issue.

Then, I tried Google Earth and thought "well, it's slow, but it's huge, I don't know, maybe it's normal". A few days later I heard about neverball and gave it a try. It was even slower than Google Earth, and that seemed pretty hard to believe this time.

Thanks to clues from people on #d-d, I figured out I didn't have the libgl1-mesa-dri package installed. Quite simple to know if you are in the same case : first, grep "Direct rendering" in your X.org log file to be sure DRI is enabled on the server side. Then check for "direct rendering" in glxinfo's output to know if it's enabled on the client side. If not, try to apt-get install libgl1-mesa-dri.

Trying neverball again was delightful: the game was playable.

I thought I was done with my OpenGL settings until yesterday, when, for some reason, I read the X.org log and noticed AGP mode was 1x. I didn't know exactly about nowadays, but I was pretty sure 4x was reached at some point, and that the chip in my laptop might support it.

My friend google helped me finding something about "xorg.conf radeon 9200 mobility agp", and gave me hints about three parameters to add to the xorg.conf file that might improve GL performance:

Option "AGPMode" "8"
Option "AGPFastWrite" "on"
Option "EnablePageFlip" "true"


Glxgears is not a benchmark, but still, it helps to make self comparisons. Before: ~260fps. After: ~1350fps. WAW ! Now Google Earth is really fast.

Though I have a strange bug which appears whenever an X window (popup, balloon help, etc.) gets on top of the 3D frame: only the rightmost part appears... on the left. It appears on neverball, on glxgears, on Google Earth, but NOT on foobillard... moving or resizing the window usually fixes the display.

Update: When switching to console and back to X, the glxgear performance gets back to ~260fps...

Update 2: It seems my "before" score is not as bad as claimed. It's actually ~950fps. Still a good improvement, though. The reason why i got ~260fps is that i almost never reboot my laptop nor restart X, and hibernate instead of shutting down the system. Which means I'm in the switched back from console case most of the time.

Update 3: Thanks to Robert Hart for pointing to bug #363995. The patch from there works perfectly \o/. (If you can't wait and want a patched .deb, send me a mail)

In the past months, I was getting more and more comment spam. Even though the configuration was set to moderate comments containing a link. It was a good filtering measure at the beginning, but became less and less handleable. When I decided to act, I was getting more than a hundred comment spams in my "Awaiting moderation" list. Per day. Maybe even more, I can't remember. And about the same amount were actually able to go past the moderation filtering, by not putting links in the comment itself, but in the homepage field of the comment form.

While wordpress' comment moderation interface is pretty efficient at deleting a lot of spam, the comment management interface just sucks, even in the "massive editing" mode. So, after having spent quite some time in this sucky interface, I decided I didn't want to resort to it any more.

First I had to remove all these comment spams. I had to use use the SQL delete command myself, since WordPress is useless. I basically deleted all comments posted after the last real one I saw. Sorry if someone posted one I didn't see. The tricky part was that the comment count for articles is kept in a field of the wp_posts table. Which means there was a difference between the actual comment count and the count displayed. For those who'd want to do the same at home, here is the magical SQL query to refresh the comment count:
update wp_posts set comment_count = (select count(*) from wp_comments where comment_post_ID = id and comment_approved = '1');

Next step was to avoid getting more spam. I didn't want to use captchas or any turing tests, because they basically all fail to be accessible in some way. So, I took a balanced decision. While I appreciate to get comments, I can't stand any more the spam that get in posts as old as the blog. The best thing to do then, I think, was to allow comments on recent posts only. Sorry for those who'd like to comment on old stuff, but being able to comment on the newer posts is still better than nothing. I also kept the link moderation policy, which seemed to be helpful at the beginning.

For the little story, again, WordPress was not very helpful, so I had to resort to an SQL query to close comments on all the posts.

It's been 3 weeks or so, now, since I switched to this new policy. I got only 1 spam to moderate and none directly in the comments. Let's hope it will last.

This morning, I got one of these standard cialis/viagra/xanax/valium/whatever spam you get numerous times in a day, but with a "test xul" subject. Well, that's targetted.