Phine Solutions web work notes

Last week Amazon A3 was down for 4 hours and made a lot of webmasters unhappy. It further proves that it is quite risky to design your site solely relying on A3 to provide the essential functionalities, at least for now.

One way to reduce the risk is to have a copy of the files, for example images, saved in your server and design a flag in your code to pull the file from your own server if A3 downtime was detected. The flag can be controlled by some parameter in a configuration file so it can be easily switched.

One might argu this defeats the purpose of using AWS storage since the load copies take up the space. But I believe the storage cost will worth it in the event of the A3 hiccups. By using A3 service when it’s up and running, you will still save the bandwidth when serving those files, which is a lot more expensive than the storage cost.

Good documentation can save a lot of time to look for the information that you have once obtained. I had been looking for some documentation system that can help me to write down notes and finally decided to use a wiki.

Using a wiki can provide some great benefits:

• It is web based can I can access anywhere.
• My documents can be organized by sites and category so I have a central place to look for things that I have done but not necessarily memorized.
• Easy collaboration with others.

There are several free wiki softwares and I chose DocuWiki after some research and test run. Since I only need a simple interface to create structured content DocuWiki was a good choice for me. This is a nice comparison on some popular wiki software that I also used to help me make my decision.

There are a lot of talks around Yahoo’s move recently. Y’s decisions to reject the Microsoft deal and partner with Google on search advertising market don’t sit well with a lot of people. Some think Yahoo is making stupid decisions.

I beg to differ.

Being bought by Microsoft will make a lot of shareholders happy today. But if bought by Microsoft, 3 years from now, will Yahoo still be relevant at all? Choosing to remain independent will give Yahoo a chance. But what about the shareholders? Well shareholders don’t RUN the company. They can make their influence by choosing the board, or cast their vote by selling the stock. I don’t own YHOO so this might sound insensitive. But company shareholders having disagreement with management team is not new and opinions from shareholders who want to sell the stock and cash in should not be used to judge the company’s direction.

Will Yahoo+Google deal hurt Yahoo in the long run? It might hurt Yahoo’s advertising network. But Google is already so dominant in search market and Yahoo may never be able to catch on with its technology today. The key is for Yahoo to innovate and find new ways to establish a stronger brand, not necessary all in the search market though.

Some also have concerns that Yahoo is helping to create a monopolistic Google which will turn evil in no time. Google has 60% search market share because so far its search technology is the best. And it is not so dominant in other areas and Yahoo’s deal will not make it be. I think the key is to believe that technology is alway moving forward, today’s big players will be replaced if they stay still, and there will always be newer and better things coming out. Technology is simply not a business that can be established upon monopoly.

Having said that, the challenges ahead of Yahoo are obvious and I wish them the best of the luck.

Recently I started looking into both JQuery and ProtoType to simplify the Javascript works on my site and first decision to make was to which one to choose. Besides these popular options, MooTool also caught my attention since it appears there are some very loyal followers on the web.

I found this article best explains the differences between JQuery and Prototype from the level of the framework itself.

In short, Prototype does what a “framwork” is supposed to do. It is a layer between the HTML dom objects the developer and functionality is done through a set of classes.

JQuery is, for lack of better word, a straight DOM manipulator. It also provides a layer between the JavaScript and HTML, but it is more direct and simpler so it is rather provided as a “library” than a “framework”.

I guess which one to pick largely depends on the developer because neither could really go wrong. It is really about how you look at HTML frontend coding, or whether you are more comfortable with treating the HTML dom as an individual entity and Javascript as UI helper; or JavaScript as a UI driver and HTML is a product of it.

I personally enjoyed using JQuery and I like it a lot. And I believe JavaScript should stay small in the whole HTML UI design and not to be too complicated.

Dr. Graham’s new article made the reddit.com’s front page. It talks about the programmers’ natural unfitness to work for a corporate environment. Being a programmer myself I can totally relate to what he had to say. I have a day job, its bring me the money to support my family; but my true passion is in my own “moonlight startup”. Comparing two kind of work styles can be interesting and Dr. Graham said it perfectly.

“Programmers learn by doing, and most of the things he wanted to do, he couldn’t—sometimes because the company wouldn’t let him, but often because the company’s code wouldn’t let him. Between the drag of legacy code, the overhead of doing development in such a large organization, and the restrictions imposed by interfaces owned by other groups, he could only try a fraction of the things he would have liked to.”

This is so true. Working in a big corporation environment really frustrates me sometime because knowing how NOT to do things is such an important skill and you have to master it. I guess the extreme goes to the government job.

As a programmer, what attracts me starting up my own project is the freedom of thinking. My idea may succeed, or it may fail; but I learn and grow from it. The freedom of implementation also makes working such a fun thing.

I guess people are different. Some enjoy working a corporate, but not for the good programmers.

If you run a website or websites, you understand how spam is such a pain in the butt. I guess this is one of the things a webmaster has to deal with. With the technology today, it is a lot easier to create content on the web, including spam. So separate yourself from spam becomes an inevitable task for a web builder.

Blog

If you use wordpress, Akismet is THE plugin that you need to activate.

Forums

I have forums using both vBulletin and Simple Machine, and Akismet can be used to handle the spam filtering too. For vBulletin, there is readily made plugin that you can download and install from vbulletin.org. And I wrote a simple Akismet API for my Simple Machine board and it worked fantastic.

POW (Plain Old Website)

If you code your (or someone else’s) site all by yourself, there is no readily made “plugins” for you to use. But on the other hand you will have more power to customize since you know the code throughout. There are a few things you can implement to reduce or block spam.

Country Ban

Not trying to discriminate but there are certain countries where a lot of spams are originated from. If your site’s visitors are mainly from US, you can pretty much block all the foreign users from accessing certain pages such as registration, contact, etc.

To identify the user’s country, you can use the IP to country mapping database from maxmind.com and ip2location.com. Both companies provide trial versions of databases and APIs to use. If you like the result, you can purchase a basic version for only $50 from maxmind.
Ip Ban

I don’t normally use the IP ban since a spammer usually has multiple IPs to use and it is not that hard to hide the real IP.

Akismet web service

I love Akismet!

Is Facebook worth really this much?

Personally I don’t think so. Unless there is some secret revenue making channel that I can’t see.

Is this a good move for Microsoft? The key is not how small the percentage of the FB stake that MS gets, it’s the stake of the FB ad netowrk. And the victory of blocking out Google in the deal.  Comparing with the other ad network deals happened earlier this year, it is possibly good move from MS side.

I have a few computers (desktop, laptops) at home and each one of them accumulate data and media files over the years. I used to copy them to CDs for backup purpose but this method has become too tedious. I do have a portal hard drive but carry it to each computer and copy the files is just too much work for lazy me. Lately I started to explore the options like a network drive and after some research this Bufflo Link Station network drive seems to be the best one on the market.

I made the purchase from buy.com and setup was very easy. Here are some points I want to share:

I plugged the drive into the network and power it up, and almost immediately I found it from my router’s admin console. So this is pretty much all the initial setup needed.

I went to the Link Station’s web admin console using the ip address that my router assigned to it. I went to the network menu and change the DHCP to static IP address, and changed the gateway and DNS server to the ip of my router. In this way, the LinkStation drive has a static ip.

From each computer, I mapped the network drive to the ip of the LinkStation. And there I had it, the network backup that I have been longing for.

I didn’t install the Memeo backup software that comes with the LinkStation since I use this one for my backups.

• The speed is good enough for the backup.
• The user management and trashbox feature is awesome.
• The drive only makes a little harddrive spinning noise when there is active file copying going on. I placed it on my book shelf in the living room and it is very quiet.
• There are some other nice features such as emailing and FTP access for advanced usages.

Overall this is a great drive.

I have an old Dell Inspiron 1000 laptop. It is slow (with XP), noisy, but it has the best keyboards in all my current or previous 4 laptops. I installed Ubuntu on it this weekend.

Actually it was Xubuntu, Ubuntu’s  little brother. Since it uses Xfce desktop, it uses less resource and is more suitable for machines with less horse power.

Installation is quick and simple. Just boot the computer from CD (burned with Xubuntu image) and you will have a Linux desktop. Run the installation and it was quickly done.

Ubuntu claims “just works”.

This is largely true. I have a Logitech wireless mouse, and it was recognized immediately started working immediately. The network card worked fine too.

The problem was with the wireless. I have a Dell wireless adaptor card and it just wouldn’t work. There are quite a few disussions and intructions on the internet about how to setup or configure this type of card but none of them worked for me. It appears this kind of card was made by “Broadcom” and it is notoriously lack of Linux driver support.

Frustrated I took my Belkin USB wirelsee adaptor and plugged it in the Ubuntu machine, and Woohoo my wireless is ON. Not knowing how many hours I have to spend to get the other adaptor to work I decided to put my personal ego down for now and stick with the USB wireless.

Besides the issue with wireless I really like the Xubuntu user interface. It is clean, simple and elegant. I have been using Linux for years and I like this distro immediately.

I just purchased a Dell Vostro 200 desktop. Since I have been used to have dual monitor (laptop + extended monitor) I decided to have the same setting. But it didn’t turn out to be easy. Since I had to spend a lot of hours learning and researching, I want to write this post so you can save some time if you are in the same boat.

First of all, getting dual monitors for your desktop is easy in most cases. There are several ways that you can do it, and the most common ways are:

1. Get ONE video card with multiple ports (VGA, DVI). For those of you who don’t know the term, VGA is blue and DVI is white. You can connect an analog monitor to a VGA port, and digital monitor to DVI port. An adaptor is needed if you decide to connect an analog monitor to DVI.

2. Install 2 video cards.

However, in some cases (like mine), it is harder. Since I ordered a slim tower desktop, it is not easy to find a video card to fit my computer case. As a matter of fact, the video cards sold in the computer stores are not likely to fit. I tried both MicroCenter and Fry’s store and they don’t even carry this type of video cards. And I had a hard time to even explain my case.

Let’s ask my friend Google. One thing about searching these days is that you really need to know your keyword to search Google. For example, I tried searching “small video card”, or “video card for slim tower case”, and only got endless pages or generic online store results. After some research, I finally found their official name: “half height video card”.

However the search on “half height video card” didn’t yield much result. Apparently they are just rare.

Because the size restriction (half height, go figure), a half height card can only have one DVI/VGA port, and one s-video port at most, so the previous option No. 1 is out of the picture. But there is an alternative: use a video card that has DMS-59 port. With the DMS-59 port, you can use a Y-cable to split the signal with dual monitors. Here is an example of the Y-cable: http://www.amazon.com/Molex-DVI-cable-DMS-59-DVI-I/dp/B000BFGXOQ

Besides the option above you can always add a new video card to the system. But just make sure it is”half height” and “low profile” so it can fit the case.

One additional point is that choosing the correct card for your PCI slot. There may be different kind of PCI slots on your motherboard, for example mine has 2 regular PCIs, 1 PCI x1, 1 PIC x16. So getting the right card to fit the right unoccupied slot is another thing to watch for.

A couple of pictures.

I really should get an Apple some day.