cftopper.com

Myself and Cormac had nothing better to do in Dublin city yesterday so we looked up some old friends at Digerati.

We were well received. In fact, we went for coffee, followed by a trip to check-out the X-Box live gaming centre, followed by a few pints. Cheers guys. When your in Cork next, I'll try to be as good a host.

It's great to see these absolutely sound guys making a name for themselves and I wish them every success.

I'm at Dublin airport and I'm just after paying Eircom's extravagant fee of €5 for 1 hour of wireless Internet access - the thieving bastards. I'm on my way to Boston for 4 weeks. The flight leaves in 2 hours time.

One of the highlights of my trip to Boston will no doubt be attending the Boston CFUG meet tomorrow night. I've been in touch with Brian Rinaldi and he says I welcome. He might even be able to arrange 5 minutes for me to show off the multiple file upload component I recently developed.

Aside from all that, I'm wrecked after Ireland's biggest festival, Oxegen, at the weekend. The Red Hot Chilly Peppers rocked. I was also impressed by Feeder.

Saturday was a mud-ridden wash-out but Sunday was great. We were camping and it was hilarious to intermittently see tents take-off in the strong gale with 2 screaming girls jogging after them.

Update

Dan I KNOW you'll get a kick out of this. Some goth style Linux nerds just came up and said "here ya go" and gave me an Ubuntu Linux installation disk. Looks like there are walking through the airport giving them out to anybody with a laptop. I got a strange look from the cute girls across the way when I took the CD. Reminds me of the sandals - you'll know what I mean.

This morning, Dan and I were planning, scheming and arguing about the forthcoming application we are planning to develop when Cormac marched into my office with a priority mail package from Fog Creek.

It had arrived! The long awaited package contained Aardvark'd - a documentary of the development of Co-Pilot by a group of interns at Fog Creek software last Summer.

We did a bit of rescheduling so that we could have our Geek Night in and thoroughly enjoy this movie at Dan's house later. We were looking forward to watching the code-monkeys plan, structure, project manage, make decisions, argue, debate and code their way to success.

Interlude

Well, I'm just back from Dan's house after watching the DVD and I have to say that I'm a little disappointed.

Certainly there were a few interesting bits and it was good to see inside the organisation, their environment and so on. But I had wanted to see software development at it's finest. I didn't. Instead I got 90 minutes of utter tedium.

Seriously! - I don't care about the ledge, your tomato plant, your birthday hat, your misfired party, your apartments, your bike or even the fucking cockroach (I could go on).

I had wanted to see the team work together, choosing the correct platform, the decision to go with VNC, the frustrations, the long hours, the code, the mistakes, the tools, the database design, the server setup... everything.

But alas, it seems that this wasn't aimed at developers. If not, then who was this aimed at? Certainly nobody other than developers would give a shit about something subtitled "12 weeks with Geeks". It could be that they were sick of discussing the development process they went through forums and such online and wanted to show the lighter side of software development. Or it could be that the production company behind the video just don't get it.

For me, it's a misfire, a wasted opportunity.

After catching up on Joel's blog; I just ordered Aardvark'd, Fogcreek's documentary about their last summers interns and the software they developed.  My plan is to get a group of players (read:Geeks) together and have a Geek-Night-In watching this.

Interns get free housing, free lunch, Aeron chairs, dual-Xeon workstations with 30" LCD monitors, and weekly cultural events like Broadway shows, a Yankees game, and tours around New York City.

Shit. Dual-Xeon workstations with 30" LCD monitors and Aeron chairs - fuck, almost makes me want to apply. I decided I want an Aeron chair for my office but can't find anybody who supplies them in Ireland.

Aside 1: You spent months making a state of the art Intranet and content management system for your client, only to find that 2 months later they've used their new-found WYSIWYG and ease-of-publishing power to envelop the whole thing in Clip-Art. And shitty Clip Art at that:

I was shaving a while ago and got to thinking about that famous book title; it makes sense; Men are from a somewhat practical and usable planet with abundant resources and Women are from a resourceless, bloated, high-pressure, extremely hot planet.

I will definitely get in trouble for this analysis. Only messing.

Recently due to lazyiness, candlewax and lack of coordination I had an accident with my laptop resulting in a messed up LCD display. Moving swiftly along...

I'm delighted to report that I managed to fix the screen on my laptop. I painstakingly took apart the LCD monitor (some 20 screws) and poked around, checking that the connections weren't loose (I suspected it was a loose connection since the LCD seemed ok apart from the complete lack of the colour red)...

Some blind poking and prodding (I'm not a hardware guru) and I booted her (she's called Natasha) up to find it works perfectly again.

Amazing when I put the whole thing back togther I didn't have a single screw left over - very proud of that - i usually have loads of itty-bitty screws left all over after a reassembly.

Damn, I'm some hardware guru!

ps. forgive my spelling, IESpell doesn't seem to like IE7 Beta 2.

pss. Holiday to Thailand in T-5 days. Looking forward to going diving in tropical waters and lazing in a hammock. Switching off from programming for 2 weeks. Oh yes, roll on Friday. Life is good. Hope your seething with jealously whomever you are.

I should be asleep - I've been bed-browsing for hours now. The Internet is just full of interesting shit! I just did some interesting tutorials over at Mozilla and was investigating XUL (pronounced ZOOL). XUL looks promising; the source code puts me in mind of Flex.

Anyway, with everybody trying hard to capture the imagination of the world by churning out Web2.0 apps, I been doing some thinking about a project I'd like to put out there that might impress the shit out of everybody. The problem at the moment is coming up with a good name. Look at all the new Web2.0 (I hate using that blasted term) applications out there; every name is strange and unrelated... Flickr,del.icio.us, Netvibes, Digg, Flickr, Openomy etc. ... with the exception of Writely which is somewhat related to what it does.

Aside: Earlier I watched a movie The Constant Gardener - it's now up there on my top 100 films of all times list. Go see it.

Right I'm off to sleep but bet I'll spend at least half the night thinking and then fade into an intoxicating dream of XUL and Web2.0.

Update

Myself and Dan have plotted and schemed and have registered a great domain for our secret project. So far I've only done the database design, stay tuned.

Hi John,
 
I just logged in. As a professional Internet application developer I
have to say that Group Worker is one of the worst web based programs
I have even seen.
 
Its smells of incompetence - for example the page titles are
"Untitled Document" and there is no style sheet. I would guess that
whomever wrote this doesn't have much HTML or JSP experience.
 
It seems apparent that O2 has completely useless developers working for them
and that their managers are blind enough to not see that. Is it not plain to see
how bad the "Group Worker" program is? I can't understand how this could pass
any quality control tests. Ye probably spent more on the Group Worker brochures
that the application development.
 
Complete Incompetence.
O2 should be ashamed. Somebody should be fired.
 
Regards,
Peter

(I'm an arrogant ass - but they deserve it)

Just found out what the shitty wireless router we have at our house has become absolutely useless. It seems there is a mixed-network issue - i.e. the more physical lines we plug in, the more the wireless performance degrades.

Just shows, I want against my own rule of using CNet reviews when buying new technology when I ran out to get that piece of s**t.

Just bored here in AREA51 doing my usual Friday night stint, browsing the web, considering doing some work. Was just filling out a form...

On just about every HTML sign-up form, when you make a mistake or something like your desired username is taken, you have to re-enter your desired password and password confirmation because writing out the users password in the HTML is a breech of security.

There is a better way.

Developers should ask the user if they want to use the password they already provided or supply another one i.e. the server should remember that the user put in the first time.

Grant it most of us just are too busy for that added effort. Guess I'm just a lazy idealist.

 

This is bullshit - there is an angle-grinder wailing outside my office here at Digital Crew  (DCHQ) at the moment making it very hard to concentrate on anything.

For the last 4 years the City of Cork has been undergoing a transformation resulting in an endless barrage of noise from angle-grinders, pneumatic drills, trucks, diggers and dump trucks. I guess it'll be worth it in the end - time to crank up the music!

I had a slight pain in my stomach yesterday afternoon and thought nothing of it. That escalated into what felt like my stomach was digesting itself with all sort of funny sounds emanating from by body - don't ask. I'm told that I probably have a 24 hours bug. Feeling a little better today but still not 100% better - using this as a great excuse to work from home (ie. stay in bed).

There I am lying in bed drifting off to sleep... my mind wanders... I start thinking about servers and bandwidth (yes I know I am extremely weird) and it occurs to me that it would be relatively easy to share a load across multiple web servers by having one the master server send a redirect header to another server to share the load.

Effectively we could have a number of different servers running distinct web sites. Then when one server is not busy it could help out another server by hoarding and serving the most-used simple (images, CSS etc.) content from a local cache.

A rough gist of how it might work:

1. All servers in the cluster stay in touch informing each other when they are not too busy.
2. A server that is busy will ask the other servers to help it share the load, the other servers will respond by saying OK, and then downloading and caching some simple content - CSS, images etc.
3. The busy server can now send simple redirects headers back the web browser informing the browser to fetch the content from one of the other servers. Tada! -  -  the non-busy servers will help serve the content - simple load balancing.

OK, somebody's going to get back to me a say that there will be a slight delay caused by the redirect header but come on we're talking milliseconds and the end would certainly justify the means.

Is it feasable?... well it could be implemented by developing a simple ISAPI filter. I don't think the actual programming would be nearly as easy as the principle, there'd be loads of factors to take into consideration, cache management, cache size, most effective load-balancing algorithm (round robin etc), inter-server communication... but it'd be a pleasure to solve those problems.

The end result is that a company who own 10 servers serving completely different websites can force those servers to help each other out greatly reducing the strain on any one server... sure they can't all be busy at once!

You thoughts would be appreciated. I may be crazy... I'll go away and program the comment part of this site now so you can have your say (check back if its not done).