Danny Angus

Using Apache2 as a reverse proxy

2008-05-14T16:57:00.000+01:00

It was years since I'd done this, and I'd forgotten everything about it but niq's article gets it all across nice and concise.

Microsoft iPod Carton

2008-04-30T15:20:00.003+01:00

Its old, but I only saw it the other day, and I laughed..
(If you can't see the video, perhaps you're reading this on a feed reader, click this link to you tube.)

OMG - java weenie goes LAMP!

2008-04-22T17:11:00.003+01:00

Well yes, I've spent the past week or so trying to apply a load of stuff that I want to do from the world of Java to the word of LAMP, or php to you and me.

I should also say that before I embarked on my career as a java-weenie I'd spent four years man-and-boy programming perl, so the php itself wasn't any kind of hurdle, my challenge has been to see if I could introduce all of the application architecture patterns which I know and love from Java world.

So what things have I uncovered?

1/ IDE - the Eclipse PDT, with zend debugger, is excellent. Not quite as robust as Eclipse java tools, there are still some flaky moments and the code completion can't always work out what class $this->thing actually is, but that is all made up for and more by subclipse and the zend debugger. Keep up the good work PDT guys. For others who want to investigate I followed these instructions.

2/ OOP Yes, PHP5's OOP is pretty decent, but (obviously) it is weakly typed which I find annoying coming from a strongly typed background. And surprisingly I had to write my own classloader, which was fun and instructive and it seems to work fine, but why? I haven't started using exceptions yet, hopefully they'll be familiar.

3/ ORM Oh yes, this is cruicial to my plans Mua hahaha, and it seems so far that the excellent Doctrine ORM is well up to the task, if not quite in the same league as Hibernate.
One thing thats puzzling me is where the transactionality has gone, but perhaps thats because I haven't read the manual fully yet.

4/ Logging, oh wow- log4php - in incubation at Apache this is the php sibling of log4j it works fine and smells very familiar.

5/ Unit testing, haven't tried it yet but while I was talking through my researches with the guys who will have to suffer the consequences of my decision making they said phpunit, which certainly sounds like the right thing!

6/ MVC I'm not keen to adopt a big framework wholesale, for reasons which I can't be bothered to explain now, but its been relatively painless to knock together an OO MVC framework using Doctrine, homespun controllers, and Views generated by the Smarty template engine which at least lets us bind, using simple {$my.attribute} syntax, display elements to objects from the model, not sure how far Smarty will suit at this early stage but its looking promising for now.

I have no stirring conclusions at this stage, but its looking good, stay tuned and I'll let you know how it all turns out.

Geek Heaven Award

2008-04-08T09:41:00.002+01:00

GSOC mentors have been introducing themselves to one another, and as always I've been avidly viewing the more esoteric web sites which this process introduces us to.

Today's winner (and its only 9:45 am) has to be Hironobu's HDD temperature graph here for its Zen like ability to ask us as many questions about the nature of life as it answers about the temparture of his drives.

Google App Engine

2008-04-08T09:14:00.002+01:00

Staking my place (I'm always well-behind-the-curve!) I just tried to sign up for the Google App Engine trial, after reading about it here, but its already full :-(.

However the docs make interesting reading, and at least I'll have time to figure out how to use it and what it might be used for as I wait for the program to expand.

@Work right now I'm thinking about things like code escrow, how to convince client's lawyers that they don't need to own the hardware, and business continuity. That all puts a different flavour on my view of stuff-like-this, I wonder what kinds of SLA's & other protections Google will offer commercial customers?

The Green Shoots of Common Sense?

2008-04-05T14:10:00.001+01:00

Digital Urban: US Census Drop's PDA, Adopts Pencil and Paper

New Studio

2008-04-03T13:42:00.001+01:00

Studio, originally uploaded by danny angus.

We've finally re-arranged the office, turning what was the programmers room into a photography studio. Now we have room for eight more people, they'll get a flat-pack desk and drawers as part of the induction pack ;-)

Dell PowerEdge R200 - Simulating hardware failure

2008-04-02T20:59:00.002+01:00

Warning, I'm not advocating that you *you* do this!
Determined to have a free (as in beer) operating system on the new servers I tried to put Ubuntu on them, but I couldn't get dell's open manage to work with the storage controller :-( so I've gone to CentOS 5.1 instead. Its more of a pain to get going with but probably a better bet in the long run.

Anyhow OpenManage installed fine, but being an untrusting guy I couldn't ship them off to the colo without knowing that I would spot a drive failure, so we simulated a failure by pulling out the cable. What do you know? It worked as advertised, and after pluging it back in again and rebooting (the R200's we've got don't have hot-plug drives) it rebuilt the drive quite happily.

Time to do the other R200 and the PE2950III, the 2950 has 8 hot plug 2.5 inch bays, we've only got 3 drives in there right now in Raid-5. How the hell can raid 5 possibly work?

Unless the third drive is like schrodinger's cat, in which case it would be a complete copy of whichever drive happened to be missing, my power of imagination is defeated by the idea that any 1/3rd of my data can be created from the other 1/3 and some meta-data bout the missing stuff. If thats the case why do I need the missing drive at all? It all makes no sense to me, but I'm happy to trust it!

Black Perspex

2008-03-21T20:56:00.002Z

Black Perspex, originally uploaded by danny angus.

The office was a frenzy of excitement yesterday because the black perspex was delivered for the photography.
So I took this picture of a baby's Converse Allstars on it with my phone.
Nice? I think so. Imagine what we can do with an actual camera.

Is the message getting through?

2008-03-20T16:08:00.003Z

One of the first things I did when I started here in November was to introduce Jira, prior to that we lacked a certain amount of structure.

This appeared on the divider between the (recently relocated) programmers and the photography area this lunchtime.

I think I'm winning hearts and minds! ;-)

Google Summer of Code 2008 - Apache James email Projects

2008-03-19T11:52:00.002Z

The Apache James team have submitted two proposed student projects for Google Summer of Code 2008, you can read them here.

In brief they are:

1) Develop a VERP Mailet to allow James to write VERP modified return addresses on outbound messages, and an inbound mailet/matcher to identify VERP bounces and invoke configurable "do something" code.

And 2) James' provided mailing list manager is fine for small closed groups, but lacks the functionality of a more robust MLM, the project is to add some all or more of the following features subscriber and message moderation, double opt-in and bounce handling.

Spread the word, James needs Students!

City 17 -Life imitates Art

2008-02-29T12:59:00.005Z

When I was in Manchester the other day I was struck by the resemblance between it and Half-lif2's City 17, largely as a result of the Beetham Tower. The top images is Manchester, the lower image is City 17

(Manchester Image credit http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:DSC01639.jpg)
(City 17 image credit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:HalfLife2_City17_Street.jpg)

Iomart responded

2008-02-29T12:06:00.003Z

I received an email from Iomart in response to this posting about problems I'd had which, amongst the expected said this:

Customer Service is extremely important to us and as you can imagine the extended maintenance was disappointing from our own internal viewpoint, however it was at the same time unavoidable and we did everything in our power to restore services as quickly as possible.

Which is fine as it goes, but if they actually read the post they will see that my anger is directed at three things:

1/ We were not expecting to be affected, this wasn't "extended maintenance" for us it was unplanned downtime. Iomart advertise 100% uptime, how can they do that if they don't even know when things aren't working.
2/ Even if we had been expecting this we were not given enough time to come up with contingency arrangements.
3/ We couldn't contact anyone for several hours after we discovered the problem, and neither did they contact us to tell us that there even was a problem, therefore clearly not doing everything in their power, and it took several more hours to finally restore our services.

My correspondent also said:

is there anything we can do to perhaps help you find alternative solutions or ease the frustration you have clearly experienced with the maintenance on Sunday 27th January.

Which is nonsense because the two things which might have made a difference are clearly not going to be on Iomarts agenda,
a) compensate our clients who lost tens of £000's of revenue
or b) turn the clock back and warn us at least 10 working days before this happened.

Now don't get me wrong, I know that things can and do go wrong at times, I'm not complaining that things went wrong, I'm complaining that we weren't in the loop.
Customer service is about making your customers priorities and concerns your priorities and concerns. In this case Iomart's priorities and concerns were clearly their own.

Oh and if anyone from Iomart should choose to respond to this post, please use comments, and if anyone does choose to email me, don't try to be clever and use an address you discover, use the one advertised, find it using the "contact me" link, that's what its there for.

serendipity

2008-02-28T20:07:00.002Z

Went to collect my teenage daughter from her guitar lesson today for the 1st time, so I got Nikki to show me where it was on google maps. I took a good look at the satellite view so's I'd know exactly which house to go to, and how to get to the right street. Neither of us knew what the address was, and even if we did we're satNav luddites. Imagine my surprise when I got there to find the same maroon car parked in the same place in the drive as was in the satellite photo.

The Gratuitous Shoe

2008-02-19T15:51:00.004Z

I couldn't resist posting this picture, as you may guess we've got more shoe photography going on in the office today... but this time its going straight into the asset library, from where I plucked this beauty.

I still can't work out how to make Adobe Version Cue work with a linux samba fileserver, VC seems to use java and mysql, but for some reason even running the server on windows I can't select the network shares as the data location. :-(

I think I'll just admire the shoes and wait for inspiration ...

Another day another dollar

2008-02-18T23:04:00.003Z

Today we had a visit from an extremely prominent Scottish Politician with a local (to us) background, which was weird but fun. At Quango X we were sheltered from the politicians by several layers of civil (and sexy, and grumpy, and anal-retentive, but not all at once) servants, so it was odd to meet One So Exalted on equal terms, he was pretty normal, but my cynicism nags me that perhaps he was being professionally normal. Anyhow I liked the guy.

Is this starting to sound like a Douglas Coupland novel? Perhaps. I'm currently enjoying JPod, read it you geeks...

We've also taken delivery of the subversion/asset library server, I set up samba and svn on friday, and any hints on how to make Adobe Version Cue use a linux/samba fileserver would be *much* appreciated, or how to integrate Bridge with svn. Comments *please*!!

I also set up our "pool" laptop for tethered photography directly into the library, we're starting to get perilously close to professionalism :-)

All in all another step closer to the dream, just gotta buy a rack full of servers now....

Busy Busy ...

2008-02-12T16:13:00.001Z

Well, things are settling down here at the not-so-new-anymore-New-Job.
The changes we've made in production seem to have had a beneficial effect in de-stressing the boys and girls (pictured above) and, touch wood, we're making progress.

This week sees the introduction of new release management procedures and the start of a two week push to get all of the code into subversion, and all of the tasks into JIRA.

All of which is slightly hampered, I have to say, by the fact that the server its all supposed to go onto isn't due here 'till the 27th. But I'm an adaptable guy, we're using a pc that used to be someone's prized gaming rig to tide us over. It was either that or put it on the windows sbs domain server, but if I break IIS, Exchange or Active Directory I'd have to hire someone to fix it, and I wouldn't be happy with that prospect.

A week or so ago we managed to make four releases in three days for four different clients, and there was no hint of panic about them. Hooray!

The only stress we had to contend with was the self imposed stress of no one in the whole office being happy with our own new site! What's there now is a complete re-write from what was originally requested.

But hey, if we've got scope creep and change-of-mind syndrome sorted out for the paying work we can live with our own deficiencies for now.

The releases were:
Duchamp Spring Summer 08 collection
Qube Shoes brand refresh
The Hunter Leadership Programme, site launched to coincide with the press launch,

And last but by no means least a long awaited update to our own Drive Business site, which as of today is still waiting for most of the case-studies to be completed, but at least it has a news section. I have to say I like the magazine style of the case-study that is there but I'm not sure that one big image of the PDF is quite such a smart move.

Oh, and we're still growing. More boxes from dell and ikea cluttering up the space, and more effort is being expended on building furniture and editing the organisational chart than is being exerted on the project plans. But such is the Way of the Small Business Employee.

Right, better get back to work now, whip-cracking to be done.

Put the Internet Down...

2008-02-03T00:15:00.000Z

... and walk away with your hands in view...

I just read this.

Storing MIME email in JCR with James and Jackrabbit

2008-02-02T16:03:00.001Z

I read a post on the James dev list that mentioned this blog posting which goes into some detail of the method Jukka Zitting used to create a JCR message repository (using Apache Jackrabbit) for Apache James in the James sandbox. I thought this would be a good excuse to mention that work here.

I find it an exciting idea because it takes the inherently richly structured MIME messages and stores them in a way that can cope with the full richness of the structure including the mixture of content types, the recursion of nesting, and the mixture of encodings and character sets supported very well by the totally fan-bloody-tastic MIME spec. In fact JCR is much more aptly suited to storing MIME structures than a traditional RDBMS or the filesystem because it is flexible in the right ways and can also manage the metadata.

The expensive act of parsing the MIME message is only carried out once, when the message is exploded into the store, and thereafter the whole message, or just specific parts of it, can be passed around as a serialisable reference to a location rather than as unserialisable streams, or big byte[]'s.

What's more any system that can manipulate the JCR repository can become involved in the life of the messages, for example web mail stops being a web interface for traditional mail protocols and becomes a first class citizen, web applications built straight ontop of the repository.

Add Web Services and the repository can participate in CRM systems which use WS to integrate channels and systems into a single Agent Desktop and a Single Customer View.

The fact that Jukka made the James JCR repository (with an html viewer as well) in a few hours at Apachecon EU is testament to the suitability of JCR, the extensibility of JAMES and the value of the Hackathon as a tool for innovation.

Have a look at the code here or subscribe to the server-dev@james.apache.org list to discuss it.

iomart, what shower of bastards

2008-01-27T16:15:00.000Z

Iomart have screwed us up royally today. The Glasgow based hosting provider who's website boasts "100% uptime guaranteed" Have screwed up.

On thursday we got an email from subsidiary easyspace saying:

As part of our ongoing improvement to our Network and Infrastructure, we are in the process of moving services between datacentres. This migration is a simple physical move between two facilities and while no action is required by you, some customers may experience website and/or email downtime. In order to minimize customer impact, the move will be carried out over a 6 hour period from midnight on Saturday 26th January 2008 until 6.00 am Sunday 27th January 2008.

6 hours, complete by 6am you note.

It went on to say:

Mail & web services with the following IP Ranges will not respond during the outage:
84.22.184.XXX
84.22.161.XXX
84.22.162.XXX

Imagine my surpise when a machine with an address in the 84.22.180.xxx range wasn't responding at noon today, 6 hours after this downtime was supposed to have ended.

(In the past two months we've also been aware that they've wiped complete DNS zones for two of our clients, claiming unpaid bills or something when nothing of the kind was true.)

Whats worse is that I've spent all day trying to get in touch with them and they aren't answering the phone, or responding to emails, or support tickets. Our account manager is out of the country and not answering his mobile. I drove the 30 miles to their head office, it was empty and shut up for the weekend.

Iomart, you bastards.

1/ I wasn't expecting this machine to be affected
2/ Two days isn't enough time to do anything about contingency even if we had expected it
3/ What the fuck is going on? I can't even get in touch with you. Our clients are loosing money.

So in summary, you useless shower of twats, forget any more business coming your way from this direction.

Anyone else reading this, I suggest you look for a reputable company, I know I will be come monday morning.

Update: Its now 8 days since the "event", and although Iomart are reading this blog, we still haven't had a satisfactory explanation.
Actually we haven't had any explanation at all. Way to do customer service guys.

Innovate or die

2008-01-18T13:22:00.000Z

Told one of my guys that I needed him to be an innovator, then I looked it up in the thesarus, now I'm not so sure!

agitator, anarchist, antagonist, apostate, demagogue, deserter, dissenter, experientialist, experimenter, frondeur, guerrilla, heretic, iconoclast, independent, individualist, innovator, insurgent, insurrectionary, malcontent, mutineer, nihilist, nonconformist, opponent, overthrower, recreant, renegade, resistance, revolter, revolutionary, revolutionist, rioter, schismatic, secessionist, seditionist, separatist, subverter, traitor, turncoat, underground

Roget's New Millennium™ Thesaurus, First Edition (v 1.3.1) via http://thesaurus.reference.com/browse/innovator

My Celebrity Look-alikes

2008-01-06T14:42:00.000Z

Scary Snowman

2008-01-04T19:22:00.001Z

Scary Snowman, originally uploaded by Emma. x.

My kids made this scary snow man while the snow lasted. It never lasts long round here.

New Chair for Apache James PMC

2008-01-02T20:58:00.000Z

Its been a long holiday, and I meant to blog this much sooner, but I've been too busy hanging out with the family.
On December 19th the ASF board passed a motion to recognise the change of the Apache James PMC chair from Serge Knystautas to myself.
This is a big honour for me, and I intend to work hard in 2008 to live up to the example Serge has set.
I haven't much to say about James right now, but I'm sure I will be saying more as the months progress.

Google Language-ism ... WTF

2007-12-20T09:09:00.000Z

Well, I never. You'll never guess what...
I've been disgruntled at the fact that I hadn't got the new version of GMail, nor the IMAP option. In fact I set up a gmail account for handling bounces that used to come into our office, and I was dissapointed to see that this account gets the new look + IMAP while my long serving account still didn't have it.

Guess what?
This morning I installed firefox 3 beta and it made me think that I should have a go at finding out why my gmail account isn't upgraded.

Guess what?
I read this on the help forums...

I'm in the UK and simply had to set my account to US English, which is mildly annoying, but it works.

Three questions spring to mind, Why Google? Why? and Why didn't you tell us?

I hope the answer to the first two aren't that you're language nazis, I'm going to spell licence and colour and analyse and optimise the way I always have no matter what functionality you withhold from me. Actually I'm going to use IMAP and perform daring feats of spelling without the aid of a safety net.

Sadly Firefox 3 beta2 doesn't have an "English UK" spellchecker either, its only a beta after all, so if I lapse into american-ism its because the fiendish plot is succeeding.