Rinsefirst

1 Month from now I will be married.

Just thought you would like to know.

5 servers related to me had some sort of major issue today… Here’s the quick list:

• Wario (adamantinearts.org) started the morning with a Ruby on Rails process gone mad
• Luigi (One of Jr’s primary webservers) decided to shutdown SSH, thereby making it impossible to do anything with. Was forced to reboot it about 2:30 today. Still not sure what killed SSH.
• Princess and Mario (JR’s DNS servers) BOTH decided to die at around 3:20ish today. Thus taking down EVERY SITE JR’s runs. Problem believes to have stemmed from a bad piece of data that was inserted into the primary DNS database.
• Basecamp (Not a JR server but a product JR uses for project management) decided to go down at 9:30 today for scheduled maintence.

So how do you deal with days like today?

A bowl of ice cream.

So this is actually more a photo post than it is something I got for Christmas… but thats ok, I’ll continue.

I had what I would call my first business Christmas party this year. It wasn’t a party put on by JR, but by one of my clients. All in all it was a lot of fun, food, and friendship. The evening began though with what would best be described as a “Roast”. Each one of us (there are like were called up to the front, and embarrassed to some degree. It was all in jest, and I enjoy it immensely.

To let you know how I was roasted, it basically went something like this: Because of my hard word, and my ability to take charge and make sure things get to the way they need to be (not to mention my strong German heritage), I was dubbed “Commander Gehring”. The picture above is me being a fully decorated soldier.

I’m not really sure what else to say about the event other than that… It was good fun, good food, and I hope to be able to do it again next year!

I’ve been working on my version of Sunfox for the year 2008 (aka, the version I will start from every time I create a new site in 2008). I may have talked about it already in another post just before I left for Nebraska… but if not, that’s ok, it’s not relevant.

This morning I searched for how to achieve a particular mod rewrite. The rewrite was to help me get sunfox working on dreamhost (something I’ve done before, but I needed something special this time around.) What I didn’t expect to find though was an article on caching.

Caching is the fine art of making your site even faster by taking the dynamically (most likely database driven) content and storing it to flat files (static html) on the server. This speed up, although time wise is rather small, can free up a significant amount of resources.

The problem with sunfox though is that there are handfuls of tools within it that just can’t be cached. In my initial look at caching for Sunfox way back in the day, I had decided not to run any caching software for Sunfox because the amount of time it would take to check to see if a “cache” had been made and if it was up to date would have taken longer than it would have been to generate the page.

That said, I stumbled on a rewrite that allows a very basic level of caching using PHP and Apache mod rewrite. What’s curious about it is how easy it would be to add to Sunfox, and how easy it would be to prevent it from causing problems with things like password protected pages.  The best part about the whole thing is that it requires nothing more than something we already do… Meaning it should take next to no additional processing time to check to see if the cache is full.

So here’s the link: http://www.hardcoder.com/server/caching.php

I’ll have to see about getting it added to sunfox here shortly.

This is a possible reason and solution for the problem where apt-get update stalls out while fetching headers, told in somewhat story-like form.

Everytime I leave town, I try to prep my laptop for travel. This normally includes the normal basic clean up routine (deleting files that aren’t needed, backing up the entire machine to my desktop, defragmenting, running scandisk, uninstalling all that demo software I try out on a weekly basis). I had considered going to the step of reformatting this time around, but alas, that would take more work and I needed my computer this morning for meeting.

In any case, I freeded up about 25Gb, which was more than enough room than I needed for something I always bring with me on trips like this one: My portable webserver.

I have a copy of Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 (available here for free) running Ubuntu 6.06 (available here for free). The drive image I have setup I have been using on and off for over a year now. It resides on my desktop when I am at home, and get’s moved to my laptop whenever I need it. It’s configured almost exactly the same as all my other web servers, which allows me to download a copy of whatever site I want to work on, and load it up into it and work on that site on the road. I then just have to resync the sites when I get in internet range.

All in all it works pretty well.

Well… As I prepped my virtual machine to bring with the sites I wanted, I realized that a few things weren’t installed. Namely: Samba and Tidy. Both of which are fairly easy to install. So I went to run apt-get update and ran into all sorts of problems. Some of which had more to do with the fact that I hadn’t updated the sources list in awhile.

In any case: I ran into a very weird problem where the following symptoms occurred:

• The Internet Worked
• Apt-get update stalled at “fetching headers”
• Pinging the apt-get servers worked
• Changing sources.list had no effect
• apt-get upgrade had no effect

It was really rather frustrating, and I gave up trying to get it to work after 15 minutes.

A little later, I ran into a problem where wget failed at the “awaiting response” while trying to download a sourceforge. It was then that I figured out the two problems might be related. The only thing they had in common was that they shared the same network connection (that and it’s possible that apt-get was using wget to get the files it wanted). In any case, this lead me to look into internet connection sharing which was how I was connecting to the internet through my laptops internet connection.

As it turns out: If you have the firewall turned on, not all traffic will make it back in (even if it was requested by the laptop). This is a problem in my mind of the windows firewall, but one I can live with. Simply shutting off the windows firewall all together seems to have solved the problem for me… This isn’t a permanent fix, but it will at least let me get the files I need before I leave.

It’s late… I felt like sharing… It’s boring I know. That said, I’m going to bed…

Oh and I’m excited. Sunfox 2.0 is shaping up nice for the year 2008 (I’ve decided that I’m going to spend time yearly just going through the code and making adjustments to it based on the year before). So far the list of things that have been cleaned up/added is as follows:

• Base table structure has gone from 14 tables to 10 (sunfox_groups, sunfox_group_membership, sunfox_app_blog, sunfox_app_events, and sunfox_advanced performance have been removed, a new table, sunfox_error_log has been added)
• A custom error handler has been added that features:
  • More secure error messages
  • More useful error logging
  • Pretty errors
  • The ability to capture errors and do something with them
• Cleaned up a dozen or so bugs in the admin panel
• Cleaned up a bug or 2 in virtual addresses
• Cleaned up the mysql authentication system (made it much simpler by removing the never used groups)
• Updated FCKEditor
• Removed the localization crap that was never used.
• Updated FCKEditor
• Updated mysql_tabula_library

And that’s just the start… My goals are as always to make it simpler, faster, and more useful for the stuff I do everyday. The higher level error reporting is going to save hours of debugging, and help me to write cleaner code (when set at the highest level, the software is harsh). I’ll post here with anymore updates, and probably upload the latest version to sunfox.net when the time comes.

Ok, sleep time for Justin… he has met his goals for the night.

I am constantly thinking about what I love and what I hate when it comes to business.

Like any sane person, I try to limit the things I hate, and try to increase the things I like. For example, in the last year, I have:

• Started removing hosting services from our business model (and will continue to do so in 2008)
• I have started to reduce the number of clients while increase the number or recurring clients (mostly designers)
• I have shoved off more of the design work to other people, and taken on more of the coding (while still doing some design work)
• I begun turning down off-site clients (house calls) to reduce the number of times I have to leave the office.

Now to me, that sounds a lot in the negative column… Which is good because on a whole, most of growing pains JR was feeling came from trying to do to much at once.

However, like any good business, I am now looking to see what our next project is. The truth is: we haven’t started a project of our own in a LONG time (Mostly because of what I said above). It’s funny, because to some degree this used to be all we did. We would simply start a new idea because we had nothing else to do.  Well, we still have plenty to do, but its starting to look like perhaps we will have some time to develop something or another.  It won’t be overnight, but perhaps we can come up with something in the next 6 months.

The question is what.

I have a lot of great ideas. Some, I would like to think, are probably million dollar ideas with the right marketing and the right attention to usability. Others, are without a doubt for-fun ideas. Some, are just improvements on things that we aren’t all that good at doing now. The only question is which one to put time and money into.

Whatever the case, I’m up to something. Whatever the case, it’s coming. It’s always coming…