The Live Blogging plugin offers lots of functionality for WordPress bloggers, especially those who blog following live events. Using Live Blogging, you can create many small, microblogs within a single post, with each update automatically appearing on your readers screens.

For a demonstration on how to use the plugin, and how it works, I’ve created a 4 minute screencast demonstrating it.

For users of version 1, version 2 is an almost complete rewrite, adding many new features – the most important of which is the removal of the requirement of Meteor for automatic updating (although using Meteor offers improvements over the standard polling situation), so the effect demonstrated in the screencast is available to everyone. More customisability is available too, for those who have used Live Blogging v1.

I’d also like to thank the beta testers for helping me debug the release before I released it. Also, thanks to all the users who are using the live blogging plugin.

Please spread the word!

One reviewer of the plugin did point out that:

I get the impression that it is a plugin that was built for a specific use and released, rather than a plugin that was intended to be released.

which is a very fair, and accurate, assessment. It’s no secret that I developed this plugin in a few days for Nouse‘s coverage of Roses 2009.

Version 2, however, changes all that. It’s been rewritten from the ground up for WordPress 3.0, with no constraints on time for a release date, so it’s coded a lot better than version 1 was. It also addresses a lot of niggles people had with version 1 of the plugin. It no longer relies on Meteor (it can use an AJAX polling method which is suitable for low traffic blogs), the backend user experience is better and the plugin as a whole is a lot more flexible.

When the final version of the plugin launches, I’ll be writing a full blog post detailing the changes and new features – but rest assured, this is not the same plugin as version 1, but contains the same principle – microblogging without your readers having to refresh the page.

As for now, I’m looking for beta testers. Particularly people who have used version 1 of the plugin, as the migration functionality is one part in particular I’m keen to test. If you are interested in testing and blogging using Live Blogging v2, please comment on the post, drop me a tweet, or e-mail me. I’m hoping to have a beta ready within the next week, which I can distribute and elicit feedback on, and hopefully squash a few more bugs before 2.0 hits the WordPress plugins directory.

I think this plugin could be something big, especially for professional bloggers, and making the barrier for entry considerably lower than what version 1 could provide is something, I hope, can achieve this.

The second beta is now out, and can be downloaded here. Any feedback will be gratefully received.

Desktop PC

This runs Windows 7, however only the “Professional” version, so no Bitlocker technology (shame). I’m using TrueCrypt’s volumes for my non-SSD drive which stores the bulk of my personal files. My profile (AppData folder) and programs run off my SSD, and sensitive data (AppData, MSN logs, Desktop and local code checkouts) is encrypted using Windows 7′s EFS (my user profile).

However, my personal data (Documents, Music, Photos, etc) is shared with my laptop for file syncing, and would TrueCrypt volumes being mounted at log in time, this means the shares aren’t automatically recreated every log in. A Windows batch file is used to automate this:

"C:\Program Files (x86)\TrueCrypt\TrueCrypt.exe" /auto favorites /quit
net share Archive=Z:\Archive /GRANT:Chris,READ /CACHE:Documents
net share Documents=Z:\Documents /GRANT:Chris,FULL /CACHE:Documents
net share Music=Z:\Music /GRANT:Chris,FULL /CACHE:Documents
net share Pictures=Z:\Pictures /GRANT:Chris,FULL /CACHE:Documents

Obviously the share names, locations, permissions, etc, will all need changing, but invoking TrueCrypt this way (rather than its automount favourites on startup option) guarantees the availability of the share (as long as you don’t cancel the mount). However, this script needs to be run as Administrator, and with no UAC allowed at login, a scheduled task had to be created to get this working.

This machine is backed up with Mozy, which is supposedly encrypted, but the private key isn’t mine – so I’ve now changed to using my own custom AES key for Mozy. This key as well as the EFS ones is itself backed up (in a TrueCrypt volume) in the event they ever need to be restored.

Laptop PC

Again, with Windows 7 Professional, so no Bitlocker, but Windows’ EFS is used on sensitive data (my user profile), which makes encryption pretty simple to use. My personal files are shared on my desktop (requiring appropriate credentials, obviously), and these shares are mounted on my laptop, using the ‘Offline Files’ feature. This has a built in option to use EFS to encrypt the Offline Files cache, which is used to encrypt those personal files.

Netbook

This machine is Fedora based, and so supports encryption out-of-the-box. However, there appears to be no easy migration path to an encrypted volume if it’s not already encrypted, so I’m putting off implementing this until I need to rebuild my netbook. I don’t store my personal or business files on it (it’s literally just a web browsing machine), so exposure here is limited to basically my browser history.

Phone

The Nokia E71 supports full encryption out of the box, and this was very simple to set up.

iPod

My iPod Classic doesn’t support any type of native encryption (nor is it possible to install full device encryption), however my iPod Classic doesn’t contain any data I consider dangerous if unencrypted (just my music collection), so this isn’t an issue. The iPod Touch is more of an annoyance, as it has things like E-mail, Calendars, Contacts, etc, as well as the myriad apps that seem to stay logged in. Coming to review it at first, I realised how much of an issue it would be if I did lose it or my iPod Touch got stolen. I removed all the auto-sign in password things (however, I will have to remember to manually log out every time I use an app on it), set up a passcode and got rid of the link to my e-mail/contacts/calendar, etc.

iOS 4 did correct this obvious shortcoming with it’s new data encryption features, so I’m back to using my iPod Touch as it’s meant to be used.

Memory Stick

This is a fairly simple case of TrueCrypt encryption again, however, instead of full drive encryption, I am only going to create a TrueCrypt volume – this allows for easy transfer of unencrypted data between any machine that does not have Truecrypt on, if need be (although obviously I must be careful to not put any sensitive documents in there).

And that’s it! With the exception of trivial storage (such as the SD card in my camera with recent photos), my digital storage now has some sort of protection. I realise it’s not perfect – binaries aren’t encrypted (full disk encryption on an SSD is heavily advised against from multiple sources I’ve read), backing up encryption keys in a TrueCrypt volume is possibly a weak link in my system, as are things like hibernation files/leading my laptop in sleep mode, and of course the human link (I know the passphrases) – but hopefully it’s better than nothing, and if my phone or laptop or desktop does get stolen, me (and my customers) can be confident that my records, and my own financial records, are safe.

In other news, I might as well blog a few links as to what I’ve been up to lately:

• I’ve redesigned the website for my parent’s holiday home;
• I moved my web hosting company from Poundhost to Linode sooner than planned, due to a hardware failure on the old server;
• I launched a new site for my web hosting company – the old one was incredibly dated;
• I attended WordCamp UK and took part in WordHack – building a website to show information about how government aid is spent: http://www.openaid.org.uk/.

I’ve set my privacy settings for my connections to friends only, and have no uncategorised ‘Likes’ (due to the bizarre Facebook decision to not be able to set privacy settings for ‘Other’ likes):

I’ve also set the privacy settings to those who can see my friends list to be friends only.

As one would expect, the profile preview doesn’t show these things, but my profile is set to be visible to search engines, and despite my privacy settings (‘Likes’ and ‘Friends’ to be ‘friends only’) and that the profile preview correctly does not show my likes, my search engine preview does. Bizarre, and almost certainly a bug.

Now, actually viewing my profile when not logged in doesn’t show that information, but with yet another bug in Facebook’s privacy settings and the inability to set privacy settings on some aspects of your profile, I’m beginning to trust Facebook less and less.

Since I last blogged, you voted for the Councillor/Link merger to go ahead and I stood forward and was subsequently elected to sit on the select committee to make sure the merger goes smoothly. The select committee has a good mix of sceptics and supporters and we’re all dedicated to getting the best out of the merger, so hopefully my cynicism will be unneeded if we can pull off a successful merger.

Another issue we discussed was that of the elections. As Forge Press reported in issue 20, there was some accusations of foul play against Josh Forstenzer’s victory at the Union Officer elections, and we were asked to overturn the decision. I was one of the few that voted in favour of overturning the decision, but I would not have supported the plans to ban Josh from standing again, but rather to re-run the elections to ensure it was done fairly. In particular, I was dismayed to hear about the decision of the returning officers to dock votes from Josh – a move that literally disenfranchises some voters from the elections, especially as the decision of how many votes to remove was based on thin grounds.

Unfortunately, I missed Council two weeks ago due to being away from Sheffield (I also missed the early Merger select committee meetings for the same reason), so I don’t have anything to report from that meeting.

The papers for today’s meeting were interesting – particularly the reports from NUS conference of our delegates, and a number of policies were proposed – one on spying on campus and one on twinning with the University of Gaza. These will be discussed further next meeting, before going to referendum. I plan on tabling an amendment to the Gaza motion to instead twin with University of Gaza’s students’ union, as I believe that we would be more effective to twin with and support a body of the same type as us, and generally be more effective than twinning with the University would be.

Along with the usual conference updates, minutes from Exec Committee and officers questions, we also set in place the elections timeline for next year’s councillors elections. Following discussions from the merger select committee, I proposed an amendment that we should instead run the Council elections as e-voting over, saving money, paper and counting time for the election. Concerns were raised over accessibility, but Union staff assured Council that these could be managed.

The Merger select committee also provided an update to council, where various uncontroversial recommendations were agreed. A more controversial motion, that of splitting up some ‘schools’ into ‘departments’, as there were more links than councillors was also agreed.

We also had an interesting presentation from the head of Accommodation and Campus Services, who showed us the amount of feedback gathered by people staying in Uni accommodation, some disappointing trends, and what was being done to correct it. I brought up the issue of postgrads staying in Cratcliffe over the summer (as I was asked to, and had done before), as movement on it seemed to have stalled, and I was reassured that there would be more communication on this soon.

The final select committee to report back was that of the alcohol working group. Several recommendations were made, and some more added (such as reinforcing staff training) to improve the Union’s alcohol responsible retailing policy. These were generally sensible and progressive, but not particularly revolutionary, but small wins are good. I personally proposed an amendment which was that bar staff should not attempt to “up-sell” spirits (i.e., offering a double for £1 more). The offers will still be there, but staff will no longer directly offer it to you – you will have to specifically ask for a double if you want one from now on. Most staff weren’t “upselling” (it’s not Union policy to offer it), but some were, so this should sort it out. Council agreed with me on this amendment, so this should be coming in soon.

And finally, as Rob (Union Chair) pointed out at the end of today’s meeting, much to my embarrassment, I was awarded the title of ‘Outstanding Union Councillor of the Year’ at last week’s Union Awards – so thanks to those who nominated me, and the judges

Next meeting, I plan to bring a motion to Council about expanding the Media Hub to include space for Forge TV (who only have 1 Mac for video editing, compared to Forge Press’s many PCs and Forge Radio’s 2 studios), which could also be used by Film Making Soc, etc. And as always, if you want to get in touch with me, drop me a line at computersciencecouncillor@sheffield.ac.uk.

The departmental councillors exist to provide political representation to the highest level of the Union structures, and covers a lot more issues than just academic. There is some overlap as the Students’ Union also covers academic issue, but the roles are otherwise separate and clearly defined, if poorly communicated. One Link described the Union Links as the civil service of the Union, and the councillors as the MPs.

An ongoing issue with the Union is that representation structures are often called confusing, and the Union Officers have put together a proposal (ongoing for the past 2 years, at least) to eliminate some of the representation structures, moving their roles into the departmental councillor role (where there is some overlap already). I think that this type of merging is far too drastic, and there are perhaps smaller, less risky steps that could be taken (clearer communication of the difference of the Union Link – academic representation – vs. the Departmental Councillor – political representation). In particular, the risks of merging I see:

• loss of representation structure – having two points of call, especially in the larger departments, is possibly more effective than just having one;
• damage to one of the representation roles – some of the Union Links in a feedback forum expressed that they have a lot of work to do, I think that it would be very difficult for a new councillor to be able to adequately provide academic representation and political representation at the same time, one of these things will have to give (this is the core argument against an Equality Officer too);
• increased depoliticalisation of Union Council – quite often people interested in becoming course reps and links do so because they’re interested in improving their course or academic representation, not so much in Union politics which leads to an increasingly weak overall Council and a less progressive Union;
• the role of a councillor is to set the direction of the Union, the role of a link is to ensure that the academic direction of the Union is being properly implemented and communicated to departments. I see a large incompatibility here between setting this direction, and towing the party line wrt academic policy.

As I see it, there are two solutions to the problem of confusion over representation structures: changing the structures as the Officers want to push through, or changing the way these representation structures are communicated to the members of the Union. I favour the second, as the first method seems to be throwing the baby out with the bath water.

One clear change I consider very likely to have positive results would be changing the name of Union Links, perhaps to Academic Links, to make it clear the representation role of the Link is for academic, rather than general Union matters.

The other problem with the proposal is the issue of payment to councillors. Put simply, this is Council getting financial reward for their role. A role that has previously been filled by volunteers doing it out of the good of their own heart (and the experience should go over well with employers), changing it to a paid position will attract people less interested in the position and more interested in getting paid, doing the minimum amount of work required to get there.

I urge anyone voting on the referendum in March to very carefully consider the potential consequences of this change, and whether or not they think the perceived benefits are worth the risk of this wholesale change, or whether a series of smaller changes is at least worth trying first – this issue’s been around for a few years, one more to make sure we get it right won’t hurt.

• Using Suexec (or some variant thereof)
• Using the ITK or peruser MPM

However, using suexec isn’t feasible for me – my virtual hosts are dotted all over the file system, not served from /var/www as Suexec demands, and I don’t want to start moving my customers files around in case they have hard coded file system paths, and I don’t want to roll my own Apache – I want to stick with the official Fedora RPMs. There’s a third method too – suPHP, which runs a script as the user which owns it, but this also seems a bad idea imo (just like PHP’s “Safe Mode”).

I’ve also been investigating the feasibility of moving to Lighttpd (but decided against it), and stumbled across a tutorial on how to accomplish this with Lighttpd and FastCGI and thought I could take the same tack with Apache. So, I implemented the first part of the tutorial (using spawn-fcgi to start up the PHP FastCGI clients), but it was configuring Apache to use it that flummoxed me. First off, you can not use external FastCGI servers with Apache’s built-in mod_fcgid, you have to use the mod_fastcgi module, so I compiled, configured and installed that. Then I played around with the Apache config to get it to do what I want to do, and the following in my www.pling.org.uk VirtualHost seems to accomplish the job:

FastCGIExternalServer /srv/pling.org.uk/fcgi-bin -socket /var/lib/fastcgi/chris.sock
ScriptAlias /fcgi-bin /srv/pling.org.uk/fcgi-bin
AddHandler php5-fastcgi .php
Action php5-fastcgi /fcgi-bin virtual

The first path in FastCGIExternalServer is a “virtual” path, and anything that gets mapped to there gets sent to the PHP FastCGI server. The ScriptAlias simply maps that virtual directory to be inside of the root (for some reason putting the virtual directory directly in my document root confused my .htaccess rules sending it into an infinite rewrite loop). The final 2 lines simply tell Apache to deal with .php files as “php5-fastcgi” and to map this “php5-fastcgi” type to our fcgi-bin script alias, so all .php files get sent to FastCGI.

Not a bad start to 2010.

You can read my piece, along with the other student journalists, on the MediaGuardian website.

For those not on council, or attending the meeting, I thought I’d lay out my reasoning for introducing the motion in the first place.

The driving reason behind me introducing the motion was that it strikes me as odd that the Union would only provide such a service for half of their student body – men (particularly those travelling alone) are also at risk of assault, although assaults on women are disproportionately of the sexual nature as opposed to men, which I hoped my proposal of giving women priority aimed to account for.

There were a number of arguments against – a compelling one is that the minibus is currently perceived as a women only safe-zone, that the introduction of men to this space would eliminate this and put some of the most vulnerable women off using the minibus, however I still believed that this will be minimal, and outweighed by the significant increase in welfare to vulnerable men who choose the use the service (and who currently have no equivalent service).

Another argument related to the viability of the idea – anecdotal evidence was presented that men would somehow result in the minibus need cleaning more, or are more likely to vomit than women. To me, this argument was less compelling – and is exactly the kind of negative stereotype the Union should be battling against, rather than reinforcing.

Union democracy worked and it was decided that the status quo should be maintained, and although this motion itself has failed, it has brought attention to the issue of a disparity between male and female welfare provision travelling home from the Union at night – hopefully constructive discussions and ideas will arise from this.

As student, we’re a progressive bunch, and obviously a way to do this is to question the status quo, and I have absolutely no regrets about bringing this issue up.

As always, if you want to contact me and discuss with me my role as Union councillor, or you want me to bring something up to council, drop me a line to my Union e-mail address: computersciencecouncillor@sheffield.ac.uk.

We also tackled a number of issues regarding trans representation – updating the definition of women to include self-defining women (there are no reference to men in the constitution, so no corresponding definition for men have been added), to formally include transphobia in the ethical policy and a change to election regulations so students can use preferred names (subject to officer scrutiny to avoid people taking advantage), which also benefits international students who use adopt a western name, etc.

Another issue we discussed was that of splitting the modern languages councillor into 2, which we will be recommending council reject (the rationale behind the split seems fairly weak, and last year’s proposal to introduce more councillors for larger departments failed, and modern languages isn’t a particular large school anyway.

The final issue brought up was for reducing the majority required for constitutional reform from 2/3rds to simple majority which we are also recommending to reject for a number of reasons – it’s out of line with standard student union practice, and an event where over one third of the student body reject a constitutional change, it would be hard to claim that the union is representative of the entire student body considering such a high level of controversy with such a fundamental document.

Thursday sees the next Council meeting, which I have submitted a number of proposals – one asked of me by people I’m living with regarding summer accomodation in Endcliffe for postgraduates, and one I’ve raised regarding opening up the women’s minibus to be a safety minibus for all students (priority being given to women students) to better utilise the resources available, which looks like it might be a controversial debate.

As usual, I’ll blog after that meeting to let you all know the outcome, and as always, you can contact me at computersciencecouncillor@sheffield.ac.uk to let me know your (dis)satisfaction with how I’m representing you.