Mike Owens @ Filespanker / Blog

Amanda

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 00:29:37 -0400

Amanda

Mattdude of Tomorrow’s Sandwich

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 00:29:35 -0400

Mattdude of Tomorrow’s Sandwich

Ubuntu 8.04/Xorg

Thu, 17 Apr 2008 09:25:14 -0400

Ubuntu 8.04 is awesome. I’m running a pre-release, the final release is 7 days from now.

Of the changes, the best is Firefox 3, plus the Ubufox extension which is installed by default. Totally different experience than just downloading FF3 onto 7.10.

I really do wish they’d just disable Tracker by default, though. Every Ubuntu user’s first experience now is, “Wow, everything seems nice, except the hard disk has been grinding in the background for 30 minutes, making everything dog-slow”.

Also, it seems like the Xorg guys are trying their best to make dual head support with multiple video cards impossible. I keep seeing all the awesome dual-head randr stuff they show off, but all of that stuff is totally incompatible with “Zaphod” mode setups (vs. dual head via a single video card).

I hear this is gonna change with xrandr 1.3, but I just went ahead and moved over to a single card setup.

VirtualBox

Thu, 17 Apr 2008 08:59:00 -0400

As a web programmer who runs Linux day-to-day, I use VirtualBox nearly every day for IE/Safari testing.

Years ago, I used VMWare, and from what I hear, it’s really polished under Linux these days. I haven’t tried it in a few years, but VirtualBox is awesome right out of the box.

Additional Points:

It’s actually packaged nicely, I click on a .deb in Firefox, and gdebi installed it in a few seconds.
The version that has all the features I need is open source.

However, they should GUI-ize the process of creating writethrough disks, which allow you to boot a VM from a real disk partition, now it requires a command line out of the manual. For those Googling, on Ubuntu 8.04, it looks like:

sudo VBoxManage internalcommands createrawvmdk -filename /home/mike/.VirtualBox/winxp2.vmdk -rawdisk /dev/sda -partitions 1 -mbr MBR/winxp.mbr

Where:

The Windows partition in question is /dev/sda1
winxp.mbr was created with install-mbr —force winxp.mbr. It creates an virtual MBR that bypasses Grub, so I don’t do something stupid like start the WinXP VM then select “Ubuntu” at the grub menu. This is optional, but makes me feel better. install-mbr is in the package mbr.

Dreamhost

Sun, 30 Mar 2008 22:34:00 -0400

Dreamhost is an amazingly hit-or-miss experience. For portfolio-ware sites, I have clients that don’t want to spend a lot (or even a little) per-month for hosting. On paper, Dreamhost seems great from a price/feature perspective. For one thing, I thought it was awesome that you could deploy Rails on a $5.95/m hosting plan, (not that I’ve tried this).

Filespanker is at Dreamhost, because it’s simple and static. And it’s amazingly fast. I couldn’t really ask more from a shared host.

Which is why I recommended Dreamhost for my newest client.

Apparently, we ended up on the wrong machine. Servicing the initial request (Waiting for… in Firefox speak) regularly takes 4 or 5 seconds. Even for static files. This puts me in a tight spot, because I spoke pretty confidently that “a simple Dreamhost plan” would handle their modest site just fine. Now we’re trying to find another hosting plan and cash in on the 90-day money-back guarantee.

Yes, I know how shared hosting works, and I’m not gonna harp on “overselling”. Overselling is required to run a competitive shared hosting service. The thing is, if that’s your game, you actually need to be able to automatically and transparently do things like migrate accounts between machines as needed.

Also, as bad as Dreamhost has been to me, they’re still head and shoulders above the worst hosting experience I’ve ever had to deal with: C I Host.

What some people don't get about JSON

Wed, 12 Mar 2008 00:49:36 -0400

Javascript is just one language that can parse JSON with a quick eval(). Python is another. Using JSON doesn’t expose you to any Javascript (or Python) security problems unless you actually are parsing it with eval(). I don’t even do that in Javascript anymore.

I keep reading comments from people who think parsing JSON would somehow have more security problems than, e.g. parsing XML, simply because JSON was “extracted” from Javascript. Even outside of the context of JSON-in-Javascript. Are these people under the impression that you have to fire up an interpreter to parse JSON? We’re not talking about m4 here.

Divorce JSON from Javascript in your mind. Don’t think “JSON was taken out of Javascript”, think “Javascript is a language which happens to use JSON as its literal format”. It’s just a quirk that JSON isn’t called PythON.

My current Rails annoyance

Thu, 21 Feb 2008 02:59:33 -0500

My current Rails annoyance

Outsourcing discussion

Tue, 19 Feb 2008 02:55:00 -0500

I’m working on a site that needs to have a discussion area on each page. The project isn’t about comments, so I don’t feel bad farming it out. Sorta how I don’t write log-analyzing code anymore.

Creating yet-another “comments” table would drive me crazy. Moderation. RSS. Nested sets. OpenID. All things I don’t want to have to deal with.

I think I saw Jef Poskanzer’s implementation first, a few years ago. Now there’s a half-dozen serious options.

All of these involve pasting a Javascript snippet into your page. When evaluated, it expands into a normal comment display list and a form. I don’t like the idea of the comments not being available to visitors without Javascript, but I’ll get to that in a minute.

After trying each and every one of these, here are my impressions:

Disqus

Pros

These guys seem the most open.
They have a REST API you can use to fetch all your comments.
On their developer boards, you’ll see a random guy saying “I need to do $this”, and a few hours later, a Disqus guy will pop up and say “I’ve added the $whatever configuration option, tell me if it works for you.”
All of the comments on your site are actually integrated into a proper forum. If you take the time to visit it, you’ll see a thread for each page which is disqus-enabled.
RSS support.

Cons

Actually submitting a comment in Safari 3 just spins forever.
No OpenID support. Not amazingly important yet, but it’d be nice.
The imported comment “weblet” is heavy. They even pull in Google Analytics. While developing my site, I have a fast page-refresh rate, and I got fed up watching the Analytics script spin around for 3 seconds in Firebug.
Speaking of Firebug, I was turned off by having to sift through all the random CSS and Javascript errors Disqus threw up to my console when included. I’m a developer, I need to use that space for my errors.
Email required for all posters. Not a deal-breaker, but I’d like to be able to turn it off.
On submit, it redirects back to your page with some variables filled in the query string. It looks weird having all that crap in one of My beautiful, REST-ish URLs. It also interfered with parameters my application was using. All the other services submit out-of-band, AJAX-style.
I got around this by wrapping the form in an iframe. This opened another can of worms, which I spent 4 hours testing in every browser.

I think with the attitude they have, they’ll be successful. Disqus will probably be the best option after a few months of technical refinement.

Intense Debate

Pros

RSS
OpenID support (seems a bit beta)
Out-of-band AJAX-style submission
Smaller “weblet” footprint, loads pretty fast.
No errors cluttering up my Firebug console.
~~“Export Comments to XML”~~

Cons

“Export Comments to XML” is broken, returns empty document.
None of that cool auto-forum stuff, or even a plain HTML page I can point to that contain all the comments.
Occasionally just doesn’t work: undefined reference to showReply, etc. Fixed with a reload.

I also tried the JSKit comment widget. JSKit makes you confirm that you own a site by creating a file under the domain, or inserting a special tag in the source of the main page. My site is sitting on my local network, and not available to the internet at large yet, so that was a no-go.

Right now I’m developing with Intense Debate, on the assumption that they’ll improve in the next month or so. The Safari bug was a deal-breaker for Disqus, but if they were to start marking off the cons in my list above, it’d be a no-contest decision.

gumuz devlog » But yesterday it worked fine! -- A JavaScript gotcha

Mon, 11 Feb 2008 13:51:00 -0500

gumuz devlog » But yesterday it worked fine! -- A JavaScript gotcha: Check out my comment about the “+ conversion operator”. I totally use it all the time.

Toilet Ducks: Some disgusting toilet ducks I found

Fri, 11 Jan 2008 03:55:41 -0500

Toilet Ducks: Some disgusting toilet ducks I found

Vices: Some vices lined up nicely.

Wed, 02 Jan 2008 05:13:30 -0500

Vices: Some vices lined up nicely.

Photography

Wed, 02 Jan 2008 05:13:11 -0500

As you can probably see, I’ve been playing with my new Digital Rebel XT since Christmas.

I used to be interested in video and cinematography, but got burnt out because of how much work it is involved. With video, you can’t just think of something awesome, shoot it, and have a finished product of worth publishing. There’s got to be a story involved or people get bored. There’s not a large audience for 15 second clips of random things.

Now that I’ve got the requisite boring dog photos out of the way, I’m setting myself some photography guidelines. From here on out, each photo I publish will try to fulfill at least one of the following:

Make a statement
Ask a question
Be visually interesting and uncommon

#3 is sort of a cop-out, but at least I threw in “uncommon”. Basically, these rules just exist to keep my work free of sunsets, pets, and flower macro-photography.

Doesn’t seem to bother her: Classy.

Sun, 30 Dec 2007 07:23:41 -0500

Doesn’t seem to bother her: Classy.

How Fondue Resturants Work

Mon, 10 Dec 2007 22:13:00 -0500

It costs half a grand to cook your own food, two bites at a time. It lasts 3 hours. Truly (hopefully) a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Down with The Melting Pot.

Cheating Link's Crossbow Training

Fri, 07 Dec 2007 11:58:00 -0500

To get a gold medal in a level of Link’s Crossbow Training, you have to get a combined score of 80,000 across three stages. Most of my gold medal points are distributed like so:

Target Practice: 85,000
Defender: 9,000
Ranger: 5,000

So I just get awesome at the target levels, then cruise through the others, not caring about my score. It works, but it seems like cheating.

Really, I think they should’ve just left out the Ranger and Defender levels, they’re nowhere near as fun.

Our new Boxer mix, “Sundae”.

Sat, 24 Nov 2007 04:01:31 -0500

Our new Boxer mix, “Sundae”.

Link's Crossbow Training

Sat, 24 Nov 2007 03:57:40 -0500

The Wii has been idle recently while we’ve been playing Guitar Hero and Orange Box on the 360. But seriously, bang-for-buck, Link’s Crossbow Training is the best entertainment purchase I’ve made in years.

For $20, you get the game and the Zapper, a gun-style housing for the Wii remote+nunchuck. And the game is awesome. It’s the type of game you can throw in at parties and people who don’t play video games will be into. Basically a version of Duck Hunt or Barker Bill’s Trick Shooting for 2007.

I’ve read some negative things about the Zapper, mostly that it’s slower to move than the Wii Remote. I’ve played through RE4:Wii Edition 8 times with the remote, and look forward to trying it with the Zapper (even though it fires with A). Yes, the Zapper is slightly slower than the remote alone, but you gain massive stability, the type emulated by the stock add-ons in RE4.

If you’re more of a headshot-type person, try the Zapper.

Nintendo DS development

Wed, 14 Nov 2007 20:31:00 -0500

Occasionally I play with devkitPRO to get code running on the Nintendo DS. This homebrew SDK is really low-level. When the developer-friendly abstraction includes symbols like VRAM_A_MAIN_BG_0x06000000, you know you’re working at a pretty tedious level.

I’ve done embedded development before, but the impression I get is that NDS development is hard. I sometimes wonder what the official Nintendo SDK looks like. I’m sure it’s a bit more abstract than remembering which processor to ask for which button inputs. I’m not sure if it’s this low-level because of the weird hardware peculiarities of the DS, or just a missing layer above libnds.

When you come across a good homebrew Nintendo DS application, be impressed: It’s like writing a dekstop application in assembly.

Know your Regular Expression anchors

Wed, 03 Oct 2007 00:44:46 -0400

Know your Regular Expression anchors: Yeah, seriously watch out for that, especially with simple boolean tests validating data.

The Death of SvnRecord?

Wed, 03 Oct 2007 00:01:14 -0400

Of course, SvnRecord was too good to be true. After a week of implementation, using Subversion as a backing store for a web app seems infeasible for anything non-trivial. Problems I ran into:

The Svn::Ra protocol layer is gimped. As far as I can tell, you can’t ask across the network: “List all the (versioned) properties of this file at revision n.” It seems everything useful requires the Svn::Client layer, which works with a local working copy on disk to do most useful things.

Because of this, to get decent performance for operations like that, you’d have to setup a ramdisk. This makes deployment a pain, and adds truckloads of platform dependencies.
The documentation sucks. I had to spend my time flipping through the comments in the bindings, the underlying .h, the svn client itself, 2 books, and all the unit tests to get anything done.
The Ruby bindings suck. There’s a dozen alias functions that do the same thing, all the underlying “do_something” and “do_something{2,3}” replacements are still there. It’s easy to segfault the bindings. The user has to deal with most of the underlying implementation of library, using classes like Svn::Ra::Callbacks to mirror what the C library is doing. Ruby shouldn’t be passing around auth_batons and such.
Memory. Just opening an Ra session adds 20M to RSS. Fetching a few files bring the processes to 130MB. This is probably a bad interaction between Ruby’s GC and Subversion’s APR pool memory management. I could find no way to flush the pools, and as there’s no docs, I’m done looking. Having 4 mongrels on one server doing this would be insane.

I’m mostly disappointed because SVN isn’t the old legacy project it feels like. It’s a pretty young project (in Unix terms), and I expected it to have less gotchas and problems.

Of course, I could look into other version control systems, but the whole point was that Subversion is well-understood and has been installed by thousands of people. I guess I’m back to timetravel tables in PostgreSQL.