Monthly Archive for January, 2007

Life Hacker’s assinine Vista poll…

Published
by
Chris Meller
on January 22, 2007
in Commentary, Links, Microsoft, Public Opinion, Rants, Windows and Windows Vista
. 4 Comments

I checked out the headline Reader Poll: Will Windows Vista send you when I saw it on my Google homepage, mainly because I wanted to see what the rest of the sentence was.

Clicking on it popped up the full-text of Reader Poll: Will Windows Vista send you running to a new OS? and the no-javascript message got me interested, so I decided to load up the article and check out the poll.

Am I the only one that realizes that this poll is totally, obviously, and painfully anti-Vista and anti-Microsoft in general? I mean, every single option may as well have “if I absolutely have to…” tacked on to the end. There’s not a single positive remark made about Vista on the entire poll, despite its increased security measures and the amazing Aero glass effects.

What kind of statistical results can you honestly expect from a poll that could easily be summed up with a single “No way will I upgrade to Vista” option? We may as well have called the post “Why won’t you upgrade to Vista in the new year?”

Thank you for objective and fact-filled reporting, Life Hacker… *unsubscribed*

Adventures with Prototype and Scriptaculous

Published
by
Chris Meller
on January 21, 2007
in Daily Grind, Incoherent Code and Links
. 6 Comments

I spent a few hours playing around with Scriptaculous and Prototype this afternoon, working on a navigation accordion-like feature for someone in the #wordpress support channel. It proved to be quite a learning experience (particularly when we realized the example was totally broken in IE7), so I thought I’d share my example with the rest of the world.

I was provided the CSS for the example and made a few changes to the HTML I was originally handed and asked to make it accordion-like, allowing multiple or no sections to be displayed at the same time. I could have easily accomplished this with MochiKit, but we also wanted a nice smooth roll-up and roll-down effect when each section was toggled on or off. Since MochiKit doesn’t do transition effects (yet), I decided to drop back to Script.aculo.us and punt.

Using Script.aculo.us and Prototype, I was able to create this example. It took quite a bit longer than I’d planned, but that was mostly spent reading through both sets of documentation and figuring out which functions were the best to use in each situation.

Script.aculo.us and Prototype Navigation Example

Ignore the junk at the end, that’s just debugging data. All the javascript is totally dynamic, hooking each element generated on the page. Since the navigation was intended to be used on a Wordpress-powered blog, there was no telling how many “panes” there actually could end up being. All-in-all, it was a fun experiment, and it got me some real experience with two new massively popular javascript libraries.

Overall, I still prefer the amazingly flexible simplicity of MochiKit, but the visual effects of Script.aculo.us can’t be denied…

From (mt) to Fuzzy Hosting - A Tale of Hairy Joy

Published
by
Chris Meller
on January 21, 2007
in Commentary, Follow Up, Hosting, Internet, Media Temple and Techno-Babble
. 2 Comments

I just wanted to follow up to Thursday’s post about moving off of the (mt) grid to Fuzzy Hosting with a few more details about the move.

Migrating was as painless as you can ever hope for a change in hosting to be. Neither (mt) nor Fuzzy use any funky PHP or Apache configurations, so there wasn’t really anything “different” between the two accounts from the perspective of running Wordpress on them. While migrating, I also took the time to upgrade each blog I moved to Wordpress 2.0.7 - still no problems.

There were two minor inconveniences I ran into during the process, although to call them “problems” would be vast overkill since they were very easily worked around.

  1. No SSH Access
    Now to be fair, the average user probably wouldn’t call this a “problem”. Still, once you’ve gotten used to using the command line for migrations such as this (thanks to the scp command), it’s a pain in the butt to go back to regular old FTP. Still, not a big deal. In fact, I took the opportunity (while downloading my old content) to download the new version of Wordpress and uploaded it back up to Fuzzy before sending my content up.
  2. phpMyAdmin Importing
    The other issue I had was when re-importing my main blog. With all the statistics information, posts, and comments (none of which I was willing to part with) the database was rather large. The default PHP maxfilesize for an upload is 2MB. Unfortunately, the phpMyAdmin install found in Plesk inherits this setting. My database was too large to download and then upload all in one fell swoop. Instead, I had to do it in pieces, a few tables at a time. Fortunately, none of my tables were single-handedly larger than 2MB (at least when gzip’d) so it wasn’t a real issue.

Like I said, no real issues, but those were the two things that I did notice during the process that could have been slightly more seamless.

Overall I’m thrilled with the service I’ve received from Fuzzy, even if they did complain about one of my WP-Cron scripts (the reminder one, which tests cron by sending emails every 15 to 60 minutes I believe). They went in and deactivated this script, claiming it was sending out a crap-ton of blank emails to no one and that it was overloading their email server. Seems a tad over-exaggerated to me, but it wasn’t a big deal since it didn’t do anything useful anyway. I don’t much care for other people snooping around in my database and deactivating plugins I’m using on my blog, but I suppose it’s one of those things that hosting companies do from time to time (although in the dozen or so I’ve used in the past, no one has ever done such a thing).

Just as a side note to the whole process, at first I was going to dump a few of my more critical sites onto my Dreamhost account, just to get them up and running. Over the past several months, my Dreamhost account has been rock-solid, while (mt) has experienced massive amounts of downtime on their grid product1. Unfortunately, the Dreamhost panel was so unresponsive during the two days in which I was considering the move that I was forced to abandon that plan. I wasn’t really planning on getting yet a 3rd hosting account, but I’m glad that Fuzzy was there to help me get my sites back up and running.

UPDATE: Correction. Fuzzy Hosting doesn’t have an upload limit of 2MB on their phpMyAdmin installs. Apparently I mis-read the display (which I believe usually shows 2,048 KB):

Fuzzy Hosting Upload Limit
  1. According to monitoring by Site 24×7. [back]

Screw Media Temple!

Published
by
Chris Meller
on January 18, 2007
in Announcements, Daily Grind, Internet and Media Temple
. 2 Comments

That’s right, we’re finally off that god-forsaken host…

Welcome to Fuzzy Hosting everybody! Isn’t it nice and fuzzy and warm?

Here’s to better service in the new year… We never should have left our 1and1 dedicated server….

A New File Server Begins…

Published
by
Chris Meller
on January 8, 2007
in Advice, Hardware, Networking and Techno-Babble
. 3 Comments

Bought a new LSI MegaRaid 6-port SATA adapter last night, now I just need to build a machine around it1.

The only slight downside is that the SATA adapter requires a 64-bit bus, which is going to make the rest of the box slightly more pricey than I’d have liked. Oh well, I guess it’s about time I bit the bullet and made a decent box anyway…

Hell, if I go far enough, I may be able to consolidate the domain controller, SQL 2005 (which would, eventually move into a VM), and the Virtual Server 2005 R2 boxes. If they were able to run on some (probably dual-Xeon) box together, I’d have quite a bit of extra hardware laying around to play with.

This is really the part I hate. Now I’ve got to piece together parts from all across the ‘net, looking for the best performance yet the best deal, while trying to balance the desire to get everything from one retailer.

If you’ve got any particular recommendations on where I should head with this project, feel free to chime in. I’m always open to the opinions of greater nerds who watch hardware performance tests like the true geeks they are…

  1. Sure, some would say I’m building in the wrong direction, but nerts to them! [back]