OwlManAtt’s Blog

Since I like to avoid the Sun, I’ve started migrating my stuff away from MySQL and into Postgres this weekend. So far, I have a functional PostgreSQL ActiveTable driver and most of my ActiveTable demo app working with it.

Postgres isn’t bad. It’s a little confusing initially, when you can’t figure out how connecting works (it can auth based on whoami if you just want to connect via a UNIX domain socket, and it supports hashed passwords for connecting over TCP/IP, etc), but once you’re in, it’s easy. I really like phpPgAdmin - I wish phpMyAdmin was this nice.

The major differences I’ve seen between Pg and MySQL are

• No auto_increment. Instead, there’s a SERIAL type you can use that creates a sequence for you automagically.
• Timestamp doesn’t accept 0000-00-00 00:00:00 as a valid value.
• Postgres doesn’t let you specify an empty string in an integer column.
• Instead of enum, we have a CHECK() that takes in any expression. Enums are CHECK(column IN (’A',’B')).

It has some pretty ridiculous features, like arrays and polygon datatypes, too.

The only problem I’ve had thusfar is that my sequences got all fucked up when I imported my data. I specified the value for my PK columns, but the sequences stayed at 1. Easy enough to fix, though. I wrote a little script to clean things up in no time.

As I’ve been anticipating since Sun announced its acquisition of MySQL AB, Sun is ruining MySQL.

I was expecting them to start adding horribly slow Java bullshit first, but it looks like they’ll be using a different caliber round to shoot themselves in the foot: MySQL features only available in Enterprise Edition with no code available to review/optimize/submit patches for/have tested by thousands of people.

Thanks, you douchebags. Way to not get it.

I guess I’ll be switching to Postgres now. Oh, hello there, 2006…

Continuing on yesterday’s work, I’ve gotten iTorrent to be functionally complete. The one thing that remains to be done is putting together the iPhone UI that it draws it’s name against. That just involves putting some templates in the iphone/ directory and (probably) writing a ton of Javascript to make the experience pleasant. Since I hate designing things, I left that till the end…

I did find a number of things worthy of being shared, though. First and foremost is how awesome rTorrent’s XMLRPC interface truly is. The system.multicall method is incredibly, incredibly, incredibly powerful:


$results = $this->rpc->multicall(array(
array('methodName' => 'get_max_uploads_global', 'params' => array(''),
. . .
));


With that, I am able to get/set all of my rTorrent client settings in one HTTP request. Tiny amounts of overhead FTW.

However, PEAR::XML_RPC2 or Curl or something don’t do the multicall so well with Lighttpd. It sends some kind of Expect header to Lighty and it freaks out and replies with an HTTP 417 code. I only noticed this when doing system.multicall.

According to InfinityB, this is going to be fixed in Lighttd 1.5.x, but in the mean time, here’s a patch you can apply to force it to send the expect header as blank:


/usr/share/php/XML/RPC2/Util/HTTPRequest.php
197c197
< curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, array('Content-type: text/xml; charset='.$this->_encoding, ‘User-Agent: PEAR_XML_RCP2/0.0.x’)) &&
—
> curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, array(’Content-type: text/xml; charset=’.$this->_encoding, ‘User-Agent: PEAR_XML_RCP2/0.0.x’, ‘Expect: ‘)) &&


The functionality I added to iTorrent today was:

• Adding torrents by URL
• Setting client-wide settings (max up/down rate, download/upload/seed slots, etc)
• Viewing RSS feeds and adding these torrents with one click (and having the damn nyaatorrent URLs rewritten to be direct links to the torrent instead of their fucking info page)
• RSS highlights

I also learned that PHP can’t handle strings worth shit. The TT RSS feed has very unicode-y things (funny characters in things that could be ASCII, mooninite glyphs, etc), and comparing these to titles that rTorrent reports does not work well at all. What I finally did was strip the zero-width space characters out of titles in the RSS feed, which makes it fairly reliable for any torrent/RSS item titles that do not have moon glyphs in them.

My model classes for hiding all of the nasty details of XMLRPC are all kinda like some sort of ActiveRPC implementation. They’re pretty slick. Even if somebody doesn’t want to use my UI, the classes would go a long way towards helping them write some PHP scripts to automate torrenting for them.

I’ll have a source release when I finish my iPhone UI. I’ll probably have some thoughts on web design for the iPhone in a few days.

For the past six months or so, I’ve been using Azureus’ command-line interface for my torrenting needs. Using it can be likened to running a cheese grinder over your thighs for hours on end; it’s a horrible, horrible afterthought that some developed put in. It didn’t handle backspace properly, the help menu was dismal, setting file priorities would make you cry, and configuring Azureus itself through that UI was next to impossible. Even the wiki says just fire up X and the GUI to do the initial configuration because the CLI interface is so bad. All that said, Azureus supported DHT, and that was useful enough to justify using it.

rTorrent finally added DHT support. It’s not in the stable release yet, but today I build the libtorrent/rtorrent trunk and the XMLRPC-C trunk. The amount of power and flexibility this combination brings to the table is breathtaking.

First and foremost, rTorrent is the frontend for libtorrent. It’s an *incredibly* fast ncurses client with a ton of features packed in. The UI is much, much, much easier to use. It has screens and progress bars and all manner of useful pieces of data and controls I can navigate to.

But, the real kicker is the XMLRPC interface. Everything you can do in the rTorrent UI, you can do over XMLRPC. When I got this working, I nearly had an integrationgasm by thinking about all of the possibilities. I can write a web app to pull in RSS feeds of torrents (say, from Tokyo Toshokan) and put a ‘Download’ link right there. It can add the episode to a queue of things to watch and file it in the right folder when the download completes. Then I can mark it as watched afterwards and report out on how much of my life has been wasted.

Of course, I can’t just make any old web UI. My UI will be a multi-user rTorrent manager with ACLs and all that sort of fun. It will have a rule engine that rTorrent uses when a file completes to sort files out. And, it’ll detect if you’re using it from my iPhone and give you a special, iPhone-y interface with big happy buttons that say ‘Download’.

One tap to download, baby!

I’ve got the authentication and ACL stuff done (I just gutted Kitto) and a nice Torrent class for getting data over XMLRPC.

I did run in to some problems with XMLRPC-C and PEAR::XML_RPC2, though. Since rTorrent insists on expressive everything in bytes over the API, unsigned int32s are too small to hold the size of most files. The XMLRPC spec doesn’t account for anything larger than an int32, but the Apache guys have an ‘extension’. They added for unsigned int64. XML_RPC2 didn’t support this, but I hacked support in.

It’s a very kludgy solution. On a 32-bit OS, PHP’s int datatype is only an int32. Float, however, is as large as you want it to be. It’s probably Bad For Performance, but I just casted s to floats to make it work.

Digg is over.

09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63
09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63
09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63

In case anybody did not realize, Web2.0 is the metamorphosis from the regular, boring internets into a new ZOMG SOCIAL internets. When you are attempting to build a company around this Web2.0 phenomena and specifically targeting geeks, this is how to not turn a profit:

1. Censor HD-DVD decryption keys that have already been posted all over the web right after finishing up filming a new episode of Diggnation with the HD-DVD group as a (paid) sponsor.
2. ???
3. ProFAIL