Thoughtless Banter – John Bellone

Technology

Jul

Installing Lion

Posted by JB at 11:08 pm

At some point near the end of last week I decided to try out this new fangled operating system that Apple has been toting for the better part of the year. I used their Mac App Store but within the first few minutes I ran into some issues that should have been a forewarning to spending the time to be an early adopter of Lion.

Earlier in the year I installed a developer preview of Lion which did not seem to include too many features. In fact, I did not even remember that I installed this, and when it came to the Mac App Store at first it believed that I already had Lion installed. After some searching through Google and forum posts I was able to figure out how to reset the Mac App Store and get Lion downloaded. The installer kicked off without any problems. This is when the proverbial shit hit the fan.

I was greeted with a failure message that basically told me jack squat. My disk was corrupt and unable to be repaired by the Lion installation image (or the bundled Disk Utility program). This was a real problem. After some quick searching some fellow patrons suggested trying a repair installation with the original Snow Leopard installation disk. I tried this and was met with a little success – I was now greeted with a seemingly updated installer that included Safari and an updated version of Disk Utility. But to no avail was I able to actually get Lion installed on the disk. My laptop was effectively a brick.

Since I was actually busy this weekend (riding the Monster around New Jersey) I decided that I would make an appointment to see the “Genius” bar at the heralded 5th Avenue Apple Store in New York City. This was a big mistake. Despite making the appointment an hour and a half ahead, arriving fifteen minutes before my appointment, it took them a full hour to actually see me. Not the best service thus far. The “Genius” that I met with was baffled at the problem claiming to never have seen the installation do this to a laptop. Great.

What really complicated the matter was that I was using FileVault to encrypt my home directory just in case my laptop got stolen. If it wasn’t for this fact I would have merely copied all of my music, photos, and documents over from the directory to an intermediate storage device. After completing the re-installation of Lion I could copy it over and all is good. But, rightfully so, this was not the way to actually complete the measure.

Now I am writing this without actually attempting to open up the encrypted sparsebundle that my data is stored in. I have a copy on an external drive that I mounted in the Lion installer, and copied over the files from the Terminal application. The actual Lion installation (after using Disk Utility to erase my main disk) went smoothly without a hitch. All of my applications were installed and ready to go after about an hour and a half.

The only thing that remains right now is getting the sparsebundle mounted unencrypted so I can extract the data, and figuring out why my instructions for using a third party device to backup with Time Machine don’t work. It is looking like that Apple is requiring the use of AFP protocol for Time Machine backups. This won’t be too much of a problem as the open source netatalk solves this for all of you Linux users, but for people using an integrated device that runs a stripped down version of Linux it may be a little bit of a pain to get this on the device. Nevertheless, I am on the problem.

Mar

Model Scopes in Rails 3

Posted by JB at 2:53 pm

I am going through the Type Aloud code trying to improve queries, implement some fragment caching, and generally clean anything up that I can before flipping the proverbial switch on this bad boy. I came across something a few weeks ago that, combined with the awesomeness that is Arel, makes my life a hell of a lot easier writing queries.

These named scopes have been around in Rails for awhile now, but as always I am coming late to the party. Because Type Aloud contains “draft mode” where stories and chapters can both be in an unpublished state I need to be able to call only the chapters and here is a quick, simple way to do that on the model.

scope :published, lambda {
   joins(:story).where(:disabled => false, :stories => {:disabled => false}).includes(:story, :user)
}

The named scope will filter out any chapters that are not published or any chapters in stories that are not published. This is very important when displaying, let’s say, a random chapter for reading that may not have yet been published in an existing story. The last statement at the end there will eager load the story (and user) because there really is never an instance where I don’t want the story (user) records associated with this. Here are the queries that are executed.
And here and the queries that are executed from this little snippet.

SELECT `chapters`.* FROM `chapters` INNER JOIN `stories` ON `stories`.`id` = `chapters`.`story_id` WHERE (`chapters`.`disabled` = 0) AND (`stories`.`disabled` = 0)
SELECT `stories`.* FROM `stories` WHERE (`stories`.`id` = 1)
SELECT `users`.* FROM `users` WHERE (`users`.`id` = 2)

And of course, this is what the signature looks like from the controller.

@chapter = Chapter.published.limit(1).first

For this particular operation it resulted in a 0.5ms improvement in time spent during the Active Record phase. That may not sound like a lot, but it actually is a 19 percent time optimization. Good stuff!

Mar

iPad Update Time

Posted by JB at 11:06 pm

Well, tomorrow is officially the day that Apple is going to update the iPad. Many of these tech blogging sites are wondering if we’re going to possibly see a Thunderbolt (Light Peak) port on the iPad, or will we be seeing a SD card reader, perhaps dual cameras or how about that brand spanking new Retina display that the iPhone has been sporting for over a year? All of this shit would be absolutely great, but as someone that doesn’t own an iPad (and doesn’t plan on buying one in the near future, sans possibly developing applications) I am looking forward to one thing, and one thing only: the possibility that tomorrow we may finally see an iTunes cloud streaming service.

It is a widely known fact that Apple has been purchasing some real estate in North Carolina to house a massive data center to what they’ve told investors is for their expanding cloud services division. For the past couple of years Apple has been trying to get people to pay $100 per year for MobileMe when you can get the same services, with nearly the same Mac integration, for absolutely free from Google. Apple told its investors that this new data center is going to be strictly for MobileMe and iTunes; pray tell what exactly does iTunes need a billion dollar data center for on the east coast? MobileMe sure as hell doesn’t need it; the service is crap, and most people only pay for it because they forget to take it off their credit card after the first three months they’ve owned a new Mac.

Another point of interest is that Apple purchased Lala, a music streaming startup, and has done absolutely nothing with the service to date. Steve Jobs sure as hell does not buy companies unless he plans on using their technologies, because otherwise they would just roll their own. You can bet your dollars that tomorrow we’re going to see three things: a brand new iPad, without a Retina display, with two cameras, a bumped up processor and memory; a new take on the MobileMe offering, most likely free and including some kind of premium services ala Dropbox storage; and a cloud streaming service powered buy the Lala purchase.

If we’re lucky iTunes catalog streaming from the cloud. That would absolutely make my year. And I am about to launch a a website myself!

Feb

RDBMS Specific Migrations With Rails

Posted by JB at 10:55 pm

I have been running into a problem recently with my development over at Type Aloud; some of my column data types differ from MySQL (my development database) and PostgreSQL (my production database). I store two copies of the story in the database: the first is the “human readable” version that uses the Markdown syntax and the second is the HTML version of that syntax so it is easier to fragment cache and display when someone is viewing the chapter. This problem is particularly irritating because when it first happened in MySQL the text was merely truncated, but in PostgreSQL it correctly does not allow the insertion into the table if the text is too long.

For the past couple of days I have been doing some light searching trying to figure out a way to have a RDBMS specific database migration, and I once I did some pecking in the ActiveRecord::Migration class I was able to figure this out pretty easily. I figured that I would share it below since it took me a little while to find it. Now normally I do not believe in migrations being platform specific, but in this case because I wanted to actually have the application work on two types of platforms (in this case, two RDBMS).

class AddLongtextToPostgresql < ActiveRecord::Migration
  def self.up
    case ActiveRecord::Base.connection.adapter_name
    when 'PostgreSQL'
      execute "CREATE DOMAIN longtext as text"
      execute "ALTER TABLE chapters ALTER COLUMN html TYPE longtext"
      execute "ALTER TABLE chapters ALTER COLUMN body TYPE longtext"
    else
      puts "This migration is not supported on this platform."
    end
  end
 
  def self.down
  end
end

Feb

Service Architecture Inside The Cloud

Posted by JB at 9:10 pm

When I started doing some serious programming about ten years ago this new buzzword started to get passed around. When I was browsing the isles at Barnes and Noble every other new-age programming book would pop up describing how a service oriented architecture would be the future of software development. How it would bridge the gaps between platform dependent code and allow us to use cheap hardware when necessary to serve enterprise clients (and other services). It promised a more modular approach to programming, encapsulating functionality in a bundled executable called a “service” which had a schema that it responded to, but it via XML, SOAP or some other protocol.

Whenever I dream up a project I tend to use it as a driver for learning a new software library or language. When reading first about the service oriented architecture paradigm the Java programming stack was usually the king of the hill when it came to discussions. Even today, after Oracle purchased Sun and basically started to put nails in the proverbial Java coffin, it still reminds a leader in enterprise service oriented design. I am a C/C++ programming, self taught and currently by trade, but I would be a fool to ignore the advantages that this platform offered. So as any good project manager I read up a lot on Java (at the time) and learned as much as I could about SOA practices.

A few years ago I started attending college for the computer science discipline and Java was the primary language that was being taught everywhere. Although, until some of my later entrepreneurial projects, I heard not a word about SOA practices in any of my programming or software engineering courses. A few years ago the topic of the “Cloud” became all the rage; people were making money off writing books, companies such as Microsoft (and even Sun) were working on Cloud projects to help developers and Amazon started selling specialized hosting geared towards metered bandwidth, CPU and memory usage. I began asking myself: what is different about software in the Cloud?

Well, the truth is, software that is written to be able to take advantage of all the regularly toted features of the Cloud such as being able to elastically adjust your application’s presence on demand, is just the service oriented architecture approach of designing software taken to the limit. The actual truth of the matter is that any piece of software that is designed to be fully “cloud compliant” is most likely some kind of service, be it a web application using the HTTP protocol or a Glassfish Java application stack using XML or SOAP as communication protocol. When designed properly a service oriented platform stack should be able to scale horizontally much more efficiently than it does vertically.

What the is the difference between scaling out vertically and horizontally? When an application scales out vertically this means adding more memory, CPU power, hard-drive space, etc, to an existing system that is servicing clients. Scaling out vertically is merely adding additional computing nodes. This means everything to a distributed architecture; as soon as the node touches the grid it should be servicing clients. But as I said earlier in this essay the idea of SOA practices have existed long before the marketing engine of Salesforce and Amazon have trademarked the word cloud.

The principle of the cloud is the ability to scale out vertically on demand. If your application is about to get hit by a swarm of geeks from Slashdot any normal application running on cheap Linux metal in a data center would likely cripple under the additional CPU, bandwidth and memory requirements put in place by this surge of new clients. An application that is able to be scaled out can elastically grow and shrink on demand, servicing the needs of its client base at any single point in time.

But what does that mean for business? You only pay a metered rate for bandwidth and CPU cycles on the amount that you’re using at any given point in time. Your traffic at 2AM in the morning on a Thursday likely is not anywhere near the traffic that you have at peak Internet browsing hours. Why should you be paying those massive hosting fees when you’re really only using your hardware to the limit about three to four hours a day?

This is the principle behind “the cloud,” and if you couple this with a logical service oriented application design (see: distributed) your business will much more agile and cost effective in both the peak and downtime hours.

Feb

Publishing Stories on Type Aloud

Posted by JB at 8:40 pm

One of the features that was omitted from the Type Aloud beta launch earlier this year was the ability to work on unpublished stories and chapters. My testing period in early December showed that the workflow of most of the users was to develop their story in some offline editor such as Word or Pages first, and then pasting in the finished product into the text area making slight modifications when needed for markup.

A few friends brought this to my attention and this afternoon I started cooking up some changes to make it possible to “publish” and “depublish” stories and chapters from the website. Any story that is created first begins in an unpublished state (draft mode) which needs to be explicitly toggled by the owner before it goes live on the site. At any point in time the user has the option to take their story offline making it unpublished again. It should then immediately become unavailable across the site. I am working on making sure that comments and subscriptions correctly disappear when a story becomes unpublished as well.

One good thing is that I do not plan on deleting subscriptions and comments on stories (chapters) when someone decides to depublish a story. This is assuming that the story will eventually come back because it was not deleted. When a story is deleted, the chapters, comments and subscriptions will follow.

Jan

Type Aloud Beta Live!

Posted by JB at 11:25 pm

I have been waiting a very long time to be able to say these words. For the past couple of months I have had a bottle of champagne sitting around, waiting, for me to finish the site enough to launch it to the public as a beta. I am glad, honored and relieved that the day is finally here that I can crack open that bottle and drink it (actually, finishing up the last bit of it now). My close group of friends have been pounding away at the site already reporting bugs that I promise I will get on top of as soon as I can.

Type Aloud has been a dream of mine for at least four years now. I envisioned a writing and reading community where people will not only be able to share their stories (and poems) but also get collaborative feedback for both editing, and hopefully, print publishing. Some of the most intriguing writing I have read came from people that were not published professionally. I look forward to being able to read (and write!) much more than I have in the past with this service. My primary goal is not to be profitable: Type Aloud is a service that I want to use myself. I am a lucky man if I am able to break even.

If you have a couple of minutes, or even better some writings that you want published, please take the time and head on over to the open beta page and sign up for a free account. Remember that all work posted to Type Aloud you retain ownership to. In the coming days I will have a proper copyright agreement up on there which will basically amount to you giving us the permission to publish it on the website.

There is much, much, more to be done, but I feel as if the first hurdle has already been past.

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