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I'm Brendon Upson, jack-of-all-trades, master of one or two. I'm talking about life running a small ISV tackling business issues and leaping technology hurdles in a single bound.
webWise Network Consultants is based in Sydney, Australia and develops the groundbreaking Tornado Server technology. |
Hmm. The new "NetworkManager" stuff is just plain broke. Very friggin annoying. So I set a static IP and unchecked the network manager setting only to find each time I reboot the machine, the network interface eth0 did not start. Arrrrgh!!! Finally figured out what was going. By default the 'network' service does not start. So after enabling the service and restarting it, eth0 appears. Yay. Rebooted the machine as a test and all is (finally) good.
Hot on the heels of "Idea #21887 for Tornado server" is the new composite design element functionality.
The problem:
You like to store each of your javascript methods in seperate files so that like functionality is all grouped together. For example, maybe you put all your validation routines in one, you use prototype, mootools, ajax routines in another and so on. This make it easy from a development and maintenance perspective to keep up to date and find things. However, from a performance perspective the web app becomes sloooow. This is because for each included resource (css, javascript), the browser must ask the server if it has changed. Mostly the server replies with a "304 Not Modified", but the browser still has to ask, just in case, and there's a small overhead with each request.
The solution - Composite design elements:
We now have a new design element for example called "all.js". This design element is tagged as a composite and simply contains a list of other resources or filesystem based files to imclude into one larger file. Each page in the web app only links to "all.js" and Tornado takes care of assembling that file on the fly. Plus, you can use Tornado's built in ability to shrink the javascript AND it's dynamic gzip ability to compress that minified file. That's 3 perfromance optimizations layered on top of each other :-) The following is what it looks like in the webdesign app, 9 separate javascript files that get amalgamated and sent as one to the browser:
This will work for any text based resources!
In our project management app ProjectReator, there's a bunch of web 2.0 (gee I HATE that term!) whizzbangery. Like popup calendars, prototype, scriptaculous, shadowed boxes, flyout menus, ... Each of these typically uses its own .js and .css file(s). It works great, but the rub is performance.
In the land of http, when you request a page, your browser gets the page back, looks in the <head> for css and javascript includes and makes suibsequent requests for them. Wouldn't it be great if the browser pulled down only one .css file and one .js file? Hmm yes but as a developer what a nightmare to update one HUGE file instead of a few small ones.
So here's the idea.
On the Tornado server side, create a new design element which contains a list of all the files to concatenate in its response. For example, the page has 'all.css' listed in the <head> when the browser asks the server for 'all.css' it known to grab all the css files (resources) listed that resource and return them as a single reply.
The best of both worlds, from a programming and maintenance perspective things are easy to manage and from a performance perspective the site appears snappy. Now I just have to build it...
In the last 12 months we have been blindsided by a huge amount of consulting work, building apps on top of Tornado Server. While this has been a busy and interesting time, it has unfortunately removed resources from developing and improving our products. To that end, last week I decided that we really must dedicate time to make booster all that it can be. Looking at the feedback we've garnered from customers and partners over the last period, here's the short list:
- Better documentation of the configuration settings, particularly in puakma.config.
- A web UI to make managing, monitoring and setting up booster much easier
- A more flexible licensing model for very small customers (eg companies with <100 users). Booster is now affordable for one person companies!
- A reseller branded version so that users know to contact the reseller for on site help, upgrades etc
Do you have customers that need web single sign on?
It's really easy to become a reseller! Just sign an agreement and you're away. Resellers get a percentage of each product sold and ongoing maintenance, as well as access to fantastic technical support and beta versions. To increase your product portfolio, contact us today.
I've been running the company email system on Notes for a long time. Since I was a Notes admin it seemed like the easy choice, but unfortunately over time Notes became less and less effective at stopping the web nasties from pouring in, eventually getting to the point where I was clearing out (manually) over 50 mails a day, and that's after the thunderbird spam filter cleared out another few hundred on top of that. This was all brought to a head with the purchase of the iPhone. The iPhone connects directly to the IMAP mail server so if Thunderbird is not running on my laptop, no junk gets cleaned. The iPhone became instantly useless for mail.
Now I know my way around Linux and had briefly set up and run a postfix server but it's a world of pain.I wanted something that just worked with the minimum of fuss: POP, IMAP, SMTP, webmail, with virus scanning and anti-spam server side.
Then I stumbled across qmail.
I downloaded a premade virtual machine from http://www.qmtiso.com/ and gave it a run. Seemed to fit the bill, but trying to load it into my ESXi server was a world of pain as it was built with IDE drivers and ESXi runs SCSI. Back to the site, I purchased a copy of their latest ISO (20 bucks!) and installed it straight into ESXi. Setting up the domains and accounts was a snap, then following the setup guide the rest was running perfectly. Took maybe an hour all up which is pretty amazing, since I've burned many hours in the past trying to set up opensource servers using unintelligible config files.
If you're looking for a new mail system, I recommend qmail. Oh and my level of spam has dropped to around 3 a day. :-)
2009 has certainly got off to an odd start. On the one hand, the "experts" are telling us what a massive pile of poo we've got ourselves into financially, and on the other I've never been busier! Strange indeed. January and early February are usually the quieter months of the year, time to do some reflection and planning for the coming year. Not so this year - Maybe March...?
On the music side of things, all my new guitar amp gear has arrived (Mesa boogie Triaxis and 20/20 power amp) and it sounds FANTASTIC. Well worth the pain, cost and effort to get the pieces here from the US. To go with the new gear, I built a pair of speaker boxes to go with the new stereo guitar amp :-) To buy new here they're stupidly expensive and very hard to get. They're only single 12" boxes but sound HUGE with great bass response, based on a Thiele design for Electrovoice (TL806). The only downside is the full kit is now more difficult to transport and takes a bit longer to set up, but did I mention it sounds FANTASTIC??
Rock on!
After continually getting poor mobile reception in my office I ditched my old provider (3) and moved to a new iPhone and Optus. Here's my week so far with the iPhone.
As with all Apple products its industrial design is fantastic. The finish is slick, it has enough weight to let you know it's solid but light enough to easily cart about. Again like most Apple products it has a limited number of external buttons and it quite intuitive to use. In fact the manual in the box is almost non-existant!
What I like:
- The finish, form and styling
- The screen is amazing as is the OS
- The gesture based UI is very intuitive
- You can switch between 3G and GSM networks (yeeha!)
- Wireless performance is good, easily locates and connects to access points
- The app store and apps are a great way to extend the phone, weather, times, conversions, ...
- The virtual keyboard guesses well when you make a typo and magically fixes it
- Having a decent web browser so I can look stuff up while I'm on the go
- GPS finds your location quickly
What I don't like:
- Every time I plug it in to the laptop iPhoto starts up. Annoying
- Synching is via a cable rather than bluetooth
- Uses a non-standard charger. Would have been nice if it accepted Nokia style power.
- Google maps for navigation is rubbish. No voice navigation, useless in the car, plus the screen powers off after the timeout. No map cache so you have to be connected to the internet all the time, which would be fine if the 3g network was better :-(
- You can't easily use it without looking at the screen (Don't use your mobile while driving!) because there are no raised buttons to feel for
- There are some UI quirks where it occasionally (rarely) becomes temporarily unresponsive
- Bluetooth is incredibly limited, no way to send photos, contacts etc between phones - this was great on the nokia
- No MMS. Not a train smash but really, would it kill Apple to include it??
- There's a ton of cr@p in the app store
- No easy way to access the phones 3g internet from my laptop
- No external memory cards - again would it kill Apple to include one? 8 or 16gig is limiting if you have a pile of videos
- the 'buttons' on the virtual keyboard are quite small, if you have big fingers it would be more difficult to use
Despite the negatives I really liking it. I assume that software upgrades will solve most iof the niggles. Email is my world so having easy access is great - and a drain - 'hey, I'll just check my email again while we're waiting for the entrees to come out'. The lines are now getting very blurred between mobile phone and computer. Over time as processing power and battery technology improves we'll see the phone become more of a computer and less of a phone.
Sadly the quality of the 3g network is its weakness. As soon as your 3g connection drops out (and you don't have a wireless network) the phone is partially lobotomized.
As we prepare for the onslaught of visitors, this is a quick note to say Merry Christmas dear reader(s). Here's to a happy, healthy and prosperous 2009.
May all your endings be happy :-)
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