The sTate of Things - Joseph's Musings

Red hots! Get Your Red Hots!

nospam@example.com (Joseph S. Tate) — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 18:07:08 +0000

When I was in high school, I sold drinks and hot dogs for the University of Utah home football games to earn a little extra money*. I walked around the stadium with a big tray of sodas or an insulated box of hot dogs. I'd call out "Coke, Diet Coke, Sprite" or "Red hots! Get your red hots!". Ten years later, I find out that Red Hots are a real product, and they are awesome. Red Hots are stubby, thick hot dogs, colored red, with a bit of spiciness. I sat down to have a couple for lunch today with 'kraut and brown mustard and reminisced about cold Utah Saturday mornings at (then) Rice Stadium walking up and down the aisles and circling the stadium. If only the hot dogs I sold as "red hots" 16 years ago had been real Red Hots, I would have been able to sell twice as many.

* I say a little, but as a vendor, you started out selling drinks. A hard working vendor could make between $50 and $100 in about 2.5 hours (they stopped refilling trays at the end of the 3rd quarter) and you could watch the end of the game anywhere you wanted to. If you had been there long enough and worked hard enough, you get promoted to hot dogs. A hot dog vendor could make $150 to $200 in the same time frame. As a high schooler in the early 90s, that beat working at Hires.

Web Site Hosting Advice

nospam@example.com (Joseph S. Tate) — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 04:52:34 +0000

Occasionally friends, relatives, and clients ask me what they should do about creating and hosting a web site. When this happens, I find myself repeating, well, myself; so I thought I would put my thoughts on virtual paper for future reference. I will post a notice on this entry if my recommendations change at some future date. If you would like to consult with me about your particular setup, please contact me for consulting rates and availability.

Ok, you want a web site, good. First, get an idea of what your website will contain, how big it will be, what kind of content you will serve, and how much traffic it will receive. Will it DO something or SHOW something. If you're just starting out, or have no idea, any of the recommended plans will let you scale size and traffic for additional monthly fees, so don't worry too much about it.

If your goal is an informational, mostly text, but low volume, web site, just get a BlogSpot.com or other blog hosting account. They are free, minimally annoying, and with free image galleries and video hosting sites, can link to or embed video and photo content too. My Ward (a congregation in the LDS church) has a few of these sites for various extra activities, for example the youth group is presenting a "Fancy Dance" and Dessert Auction on Saturday Feb 19, 2011 to raise money for camp and activities this year, and uses BlogSpot to advertise. By the way, everyone is invited to the dance, and babysitting is provided, see the site for more information.

If your goal is to sell something, sell through the Amazon marketplace or Etsy.com if the products are crafty. Piggyback on top of an existing marketplace to jump start sales. If you're too big for that, I don't really have any advice. I don't have any experience in that space. I think that I would look for a host that provided merchant services (credit card processing for example) as part of the package.

If your goal is to host a medium volume dynamic application, use WebFaction. WebFaction is probably the best Shared Hosting service there is. They're one of the very few hosting providers that embraces Python application hosting, and I've run Pylons, TurboGears and CherryPy applications there. The hosting is cheap, fast, and it stays out of your way if you want it to. I host this blog, my personal e-mail and my business website on the base level account. I also host demo sites for clients when needed. The email service isn't spectacular, but it's functional as long as you have client side spam filtering like what is provided by Thunderbird. I like it because there are no set CPU limitations, the memory allotment is generous (email, OS, and even Database memory usage doesn't count against your quota, though the disk usage does), and the base disk space/bandwidth allocation is substantial. It also helps that WebFaction takes care of all data backups and operating system and hardware maintenance for you. WebFaction has one click installers for a large number of applications, so you don't have to know very much about Linux to get started, but if you do know what you're doing, you have SSH access, and everything that comes standard with a Linux shell account.

If you are planning on building a new application, take a look at Google App Engine. It lets you get going and host up to a certain threshold for free. Scaling up can be done fairly reasonably. Applications developed for App Engine can be run independently of Google, so you are not necessarily locked to Google as your hosting vendor.

I do not recommend any kind of Virtual Private Server hosting that isn't bundled as a Cloud offering. I've used three different VPS services, and two have all been slow and had high network latency (the third, Slice Host was bought and extended into Rackspace's cloud services, which I recommend below). Higher volume sites may do OK, but if the CPU, IO or Memory usage is too high for too long, your VPS can be rebooted or shut off. What this translates to is that you would have to hit a very small sweet spot to get good performance out of a VPS without getting shut down. Better hosting options exist.

If you do need system level access to a server of your own for some reason -- if for example you have an email processing system as part of your application -- or if you have requirements that extend beyond a single host, like high availability, then using a Cloud based VPS is desirable. Cloud computing nodes are designed for high performance application hosting. The overhead of virtualization is minimized by the use of advanced virtualization techniques (paravirtualization, CPU instruction sets, etc.) and by dedicating virtual resources to physical hardware. The management tools are typically excellent and, in the case of my two favorite cloud providers, there is an inherent benefit of a content delivery network (CDN) and Storage Attached to Network (SAN) which can serve as a scalable long term application storage or system backups. These two tools are used by very large websites to deliver content faster and more efficiently, and they're available on the Cloud for even the lowest rate plans. The intro level computing node at Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) starts at 3¢/hour. Rackspace however has a node that start as low as $10.95/month (that's about 1.5¢/hour). There aren't as many third party software developers, and no external image providers (as far as I know) for Rackspace, but they have pretty good management tools, and a pretty good selection of base images to get you up and running pretty quickly.

EC2 was built for running short-lived computing (i.e., processor intensive) tasks, and it's pricing model and instance sizes reflect that. The instances and costs are very competitive to people looking at dedicated hosting. Rackspace's cloud is similarly designed, but has smaller instances, so it is cheap enough to use as a substitute for VPS or even shared hosting.

A former coworker of mine recently signed up for EC2 to host his blog using a promotional deal offered by Amazon's EC2. This deal lets you use the Micro instance for up to 750 hours per month for a whole year. Thereafter he's looking at a starting monthly rate of $21.60 plus storage and bandwidth charges. Of course using a Cloud node to host a blog is seriously overkill (as evidenced by his load average) unles he is doing much more with his site than visible at first glance. If he is uncomfortable with a free or even a paid blog hosting account, either WebFaction or Rackspace Cloud would be sufficient to host his site at about half the cost of EC2.

There is also dedicated hosting, but with the price point and performance of EC2 and Rackspace Cloud, you'd have to be very big indeed, or have special criteria not available for cloud nodes for the benefits to outweigh the costs.

Here's what I use for myself and my clients, and why I don't recommend VPS hosting:

As I mentioned above, I currently host my blog, email and business website on a WebFaction Shared Hosting plan. Shared Hosting starts at less than $10/month, with steep discounts for prepayment. I moved all the services off my VPS at Linode and shut it down since WebFaction was working so well. I found Linode to be sluggish and and network traffic to be high latency, but haven't felt that way about Webfaction.

With InMotionHosting's VPS offerings, performance was similar to or worse than Linode's. I had a client on the fully managed VPS plan costing $90/month. The VPS would bog down during traffic peaks and InMotion's system administrators would reboot the box (without any advance warning, without notice after the fact and without explanation of why). When things were peaceful, trying to log in to SSH could take 30-45 seconds, page loads for the main site or core application could take several seconds in spite of caching and being rather lightweight. InMotion always seemed to want to upsell to dedicated hosting when I mentioned the problems to their customer service representatives.

This site/application just passed through its busiest season on a Rackspace Cloud Server instance, and the it never even hiccuped. Final cost for hosting for the month? $24, and plenty of room to scale up if volume increases. I recommended the Rackspace Cloud Server because the application has an email processing system and the client has clients that could have been squeamish if their customers' names and email addresses were available on a shared host's shared database server (even though the database itself was not shared and was password protected).

As Promised to TriZPUG: EPDB

nospam@example.com (Joseph S. Tate) — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 06:36:37 +0000

So I did some digging around after giving my off-the-cuff lightning talk at TriZPUG tonight and it looks like some other ex-rpathers (Thanks Dugan and Gafton!) have forked epdb. There's also the the rPath tree synchronized from here but this tree is missing some of the latest changes. The dugan tree is "python setup.py installable" now, instead of using make, and some shortcut documentation has been created, so I don't have to make this post as long as I thought I was going to have to.

For those who didn't see my little demo, epdb is like pdb (the standard Python debugger), but it adds multi-line text input, history and tab completion, nested debugging from the debug prompt, shortcuts to introspecting code, and a very nice post mortem debugger. Last, but not least, it also contains a server and client for remote debugging. The docs are still pretty sparse, but hopefully more attention can help fix that. I'd also be happy to answer questions about it.

An Exercise in Python planet link recursion

nospam@example.com (Joseph S. Tate) — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 19:16:43 +0000

Thanks to Chris Calloway, TriZPUG has a planet now. I don't know why it's taken me so long to connect with this group of people (I've been working with Python for 5 years now), but it's a pretty cool group from what I've seen so far. Thanks for making me (a TurboGears guy) feel welcome among all you Zope/Plone/Django developers.

Better E-mail validation

nospam@example.com (Joseph S. Tate) — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 21:05:30 +0000

Due to several shortcomings of the stock formencode email validator, I forked it and extended the test suite. This fixes the two most glaring issues I know of, namely the inability to handle unicode strings (international domains), and several problems with input checking (e.g., allowing commas) where invalid e-mail addresses make it through.

I did not write most of the code, I just refined it and added tests to exercise it. Let me know if it's useful to you, and if you find problems with it.

New Biofuel System

nospam@example.com (Joseph S. Tate) — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 14:01:49 +0000

This technology is probably the only biofuel technology I'm really excited about. Unlike E85, it doesn't use food crops, and although algae based programs don't compete directly with food crops, they still require fermentation of cellulose, or refining of algae produced oil to create fuel. More links here and here. Joule Biotechnologies website here. I've been thinking for a while that we should be able to extract CO2 from the atmosphere and produce fuel. Now Joule has gone and built something that might be able to do that.

Usability and "Linuxification"

nospam@example.com (Joseph S. Tate) — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 05:23:00 +0000

This week, Neil McAllister at InfoWorld wrote about User Interface (UI) design in applications (whether for in house or general use). He argues that the UI should be left to professionals, that the professional UI designers should be given final say in UI design, and that software suffers because developers are building the UI or the usability expert's concerns are dismissed or overruled by developer interests. I certainly have seen the "damage" that software developers can do when left in charge of user interaction; terse messages, techno-babble, pointless configuration options, arcane defaults, etcetera. I'm guilty of such damage myself, but I make no claims to expert status, though I'm a bit more motivated to acquire that status to improve my consulting business.

Continue reading "Usability and "Linuxification""

Working around KDE bug 162485

nospam@example.com (Joseph S. Tate) — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 14:39:25 +0000

If you want to add support for third party certificates in your KDE 4 desktop, you'll have to work around this languishing bug. KDE for some arrogant reason includes its own certificate authority bundle located in /usr/share/kde*/apps/kssl/ca-bundle.crt, but doesn't provide the tools needed to modify the collection as a normal user. Therefore, as root, move this file out of the way, and link to your distribution's certificate bundle (typically in /etc/ssl/certs). This will let you use your distribution's SSL tools for managing SSL, rather than waiting for KDE to implement these important features. Changes to the distro's CA bundle will require restarting the applications using SSL/TLS before they can see the new root certificate authorities, but that's better than having to click through nag screens for certificates that should be trusted. We still have the security problem of not being able to verify certificates in any app but Konqueror, but the above fix removes the need to do that if you have a Root CA.

Why is it so hard...

nospam@example.com (Joseph S. Tate) — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 21:45:07 +0000

to put on a decent festival? Is it the economy? Is it greed by the organizers, by civic leaders? Is it the need to "show a profit?"

Today I took my family to Hog Days for the fourth time. We like to go for the BBQ, the carnival rides, the artsy vendors, the car show, and the booths by the civic organizations. We also like to hang out by the Project Racing Home tent and scratch the ears of Gus's old kennel-mates.

This year however, the entrance fee -- which was free the first time we went -- was $5/adult, up from $3 the last two years. The number of artistic vendors was down about 30% from the last year, and about 70% since the first year. The carnival rides were few in number, the first year there were tons. The civic org booths were pathetic, the car show, while it had a nice '65 Shelby Mustang, a '45 Ford Custom and a few other nice classic cars, also "featured" a 1997 Ford Crown Victoria with a cracked plastic panel near the hood and cheesy 19" wheels, and had about half the number of cars as last year's show. There was no motorcycle show this year, though there had been the last three. At least the BBQ was top notch; the sandwiches were much larger than last year too. I think I even know the guys who won 5th place.

Then there was the issue of parking.

When you go to an event as large as Hog Days, you expect a hassle when parking. The last three times we went to Hog Days, we enjoyed just parking on the street and walking a few blocks. It was a little crazy, but not overly so, but we never stayed much past noon because of the heat and the need to get the kids home to take naps. I imagine in the evenings it would get bad as the crowds built up towards evening. Still, for the "largest festival in Orange County" with attendance of up to 35,000 people, not that big of a deal.

This year, however, as we went to pull onto our customary parking street, a police officer waved us on, then explained that they weren't allowing street parking on that road (apparently there were a couple of accidents the previous year on that street). He said that we could park in one of the public decks (at $3.00 a car), at the old Walmart (and pay to take their shuttle), or on any other side street. So we picked a side street that fed into the rear entrance. It was actually a shorter walk than we typically have had. However, when we left the festival, we started seeing tell-tale pink slips on every car on the street. Hillsborough's finest had written a $10 ticket with the reason "obstructing the lane of traffic," to everyone who had parked alongside the street. Now, I admit that our car was sticking out onto the pavement about 12 inches, but two cars could have still passed on that narrow street, and traffic was still getting through. Of course there were no signs about warning about the arbitrary parking rules, though I doubt a town as large as Hillsborough doesn't have a few dozen barriers at their disposal to advertise them. A passing motorcycle cop explained that they had "made an announcement over the PA" for people to move their cars -- of course we never heard it -- and that they were ticketing "everyone parked on the street" when I asked if it was because I was still on the pavement about a foot. As we drove away, he had started writing more tickets on a different street. At least it was only a $10 ticket. They could have really filled their coffers if they had arbitrarily set the fine higher.

Well, that $10 parking "fee", and $5 admission makes a $4.00 BBQ sandwich an up to $19.00 BBQ sandwich, and the BBQ just isn't THAT good.

I can understand why they would not want thousands of cars parked along residential streets; crime invitations, potential property damage since almost no one in NC has proper streets, gutters, and sidewalks, neighbor complaints, traffic congestion, blocking driveways. But it's one lousy day a year. They already have all the police officers out and about to handle the potential problems. Now, Hillsborough has a potential revenue bonus in hundreds of $10 tickets, but they've lost four years of built up goodwill and lots of word of mouth advertising. I'll have to apologize to several people for having recommended that they should have gone this year, especially if they happened to make the same parking "mistake" we did. I'll also try to discourage anyone I hear talking about it from going next year.

Since attendance seemed down significantly this year over last, and it's been declining since our first year, I don't imagine that Hog Days has much time left unless serious changes are made. I certainly won't be going back again until those changes happen.

Are there other local festivals that haven't imploded on themselves? We're running out of options.

Web Browser Posers

nospam@example.com (Joseph S. Tate) — Sun, 10 May 2009 03:27:46 +0000

Ok, I'm not a novice when it comes to developing websites: I've been building web pages for close on 15 years. But within the last week, I've come across two browser behaviors (or perhaps they're browser addon behaviors) that make me scratch my head.

First, a request coming from something sending the User-Agent "Mozilla/4.0"-- yes, that's all, no clarifiers or parentheticals-- is lopping off the GET parameters when a popup is launched through a button click via an onclick handler. This site states that this is a Yahoo! search something, but the links are not something that a Bot would come across. On the other hand, there is no referrer sent, whick makes me think it could be some kind of link preloader or some other browser add on. Also, I saw a very similar error today coming from Firefox 3.0, though I'm not sure it's related.

Second, and this is really baffling: Sometimes I'm getting requests from a browser identifying itself as IE 6.x that has the entire URL made lowercase. I'm use nice REST-ful URLs for my application, so when a identifier comes across as lowercase, it throws off the lookup. Of course my own copy of IE 6 doesn't exhibit the behavior. For this particular case, I'm using JavaScript to build a URL, and then sticking it as the src attribute of an embedded iframe that is also being created by JavaScript. I'm seeing other errors in my logs though of IE6 and IE7 browsers going to different links (links that would typically be clicked or pasted from an e-mail) that are all lower case as well. Again, not sure if that's related, or if people are just typing them in (lazily) or if it's a browser bug. The only thing I can seem to find about this is this forum (news?) post from 2005 with no replies.

Of course my Google searching is revealing nothing to help me keep my hair, so I turn to the Lazy Web. Any ideas?

Proud Papa Times Three

nospam@example.com (Joseph S. Tate) — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 04:55:54 +0000

Friday at 7:53 PM, a little girl was born to us. She's adorable, and will most definitely be a Daddy's girl. So we named her Abigail Sue; Abigail means "Father's Delight". Here's a link to Nichol's blog post, which has a couple of pictures.

In search of good [flash] help

nospam@example.com (Joseph S. Tate) — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 17:47:24 +0000

I'm working on some freelance work to rebuild a website that has a whole bunch of flash v4 movies that need to be moved forward to flash v9 or higher. I received a reference of a guy who does good work on the flash programming side of things, but finding a flash animator who isn't afraid of a little action scripting has proven extremely challenging. Anyone know of someone who is free for a project immediately?

Sort Tabular Data

nospam@example.com (Joseph S. Tate) — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 21:25:42 +0000

I hate the way that tabular sorting is typically done in web apps (make links on every column with sort_order="columnname" or similar). It is tedious to code, and requires a lot of bandwidth and round trips from the server, not to mention additional load on the database.

Well, today I Googled a bit, and found SortTable.js. Add the script, and add a "sortable" class to the table you wish to sort, and you're done. It automatically detects string, numeric and date columns and sorts them using a very quick (though non-stable) sort.

I only had a very small problem (some of the CSS styles in FF3 stopped working) with the mechanism used to set the table up to be sortable (window.onload replacement), so I switched it to use jquery(document).ready, which happens later in the page loading process. Works nicely.

Check out the documentation for additional features.

KDE in Foresight

nospam@example.com (Joseph S. Tate) — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 01:48:28 +0000

I get asked a couple of times a week what's going on with the Foresight KDE edition, what is the status of KDE 4.x, and when is the KDE edition going to be released. I thought I'd blog so that something exists in Internet-firma that can be referred to and even "Googled".

First the status of KDE 4.1: I have no plans to build KDE 4.1 into Foresight. While a giant leap forward from what KDE 4.0 was, KDE 4.1 is still disappointing. Part of what happens when you rewrite rather than make incremental improvements is that functionality gets left behind, and some core functionality that I feel is essential to making a decent desktop experience for the end user is missing or buggy. Also, two of KDE 4.x's killer apps are less usable in 4.1 than they are in KDE 3.5.9: Amarok 2.0 lacks basic wholesale tag editing, dynamic playlists, and is a very buggy Alpha; and Kmail 4.2, part of Kontact is significantly slower than it's 3.5.x counterpart. Kontact itself doesn't yet feel cohesive when it comes to user interface interactions. There are a few KDE 4 apps that I would prefer over kde 3 though: kopete, konversation, potatoguy and many others show marked improvement.

Even though we won't be shipping KDE 4.1 in Foresight's KDE edition, it will be available to install side by side with 3.5.x in kde.rpath.org@fl:2-kde4.1-devel so long as someone is willing to maintain it.

For the KDE edition, there remain a few cosmetic issues with the theme, but mostly what we're missing is new ISOs on the release label and testing. If you'd like to help, jump in #foresight-kde on Freenode. I'm hoping that I'll be able to free up some time in the next few weeks to get us over the final hump.

Icon View Style Grid Layout?

nospam@example.com (Joseph S. Tate) — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 18:28:16 +0000

For a couple of projects now, I've wanted a grid layout engine that is similar to how desktops display lists of icons: nearly fixed width items, but varying slightly in height, displayed on a variable width page, so your layout could end up with 1 column or 8 depending on the width of the browser window. Tables are no good because they're always a fixed number of columns. Div elements using float works, so long as you make all the elements a fixed width, but they also have to be the same height, or you'll end up with gaps. I'm thinking it's going to have to be javascript driven including redrawing when the page size changes, and to manually size all items to the tallest item in the row, but I can't seem to find an example on the web anywhere (or my Google foo is weak).

Dear lazy web, can you point me in the right direction?