Tomorrow is the starting day at the Utah Open Source Conference (http://www.utosc.com/) , and while I’m down here attending, I have a ton of work I need to get done for my day job. Hopefully, however, I’ll be able to sneak into a presentation or two while conversion scripts run, moving 3 million internal user messages for Dating DNA to a new table structure that is much more efficient and scalable.

So I don’t have to keep going back and looking at the schedule, here is my list of things I want to do attend if I have time for Thursday. There are a lot of other great presentations going on, but I’m specifically looking for talks that deal with Web Development, and managing very large data sets (millions to billions of records).

• 10:00 am – Webhooks: Enable User Contributed Functionality
• 1:30 pm – Search to Infitinty… and Beyond
• 3:00 pm – How ioMemory & open source are creating a new storage tier

There are a lot of other great presentations too, so check the schedule. Some didn’t make my list because I’ve already seen them, or I just don’t have time to check them out.

Look forward to tomorrow, and say Hi if you see me.

Ten years ago, I remember my father introducing me to a band named Guster. They were opening for Barenaked Ladies (BNL) and he wanted to check them out. That CD, Lost and Gone Forever, became one of my favorite CDs. I remember driving on the highway to get to Media Play, searching through all of their records and buying it. It was then lost to a friend, and I had to go drive down again to a store and buy it. I owned maybe 20 CDs total my entire teenage years.

Now, ten years later, I find out on Facebook from my brother that their new CD just came out. Sixty seconds later, I’ve responded to his facebook post, tweeted about the new CD, went to iTunes, and spent $12 bucks on their deluxe edition for their new Album, and downloaded it. As I write these words, I’m currently listening to Track 4, “This Could All Be Yours, ” and loving it.

It is amazing what technology has now enabled me, as a fan of Guster, to quickly buy and participate in telling my friends about their new Album. When I look back at what has changed over the last 10 years, it blows my mind. It is absolutely crazy what all is going on. But I’m even more excited what the next 10 years hold for us, especially working in the technology world. I’ll most likely have an announcement about my career in the technology world to make, but we’ll wait until all the I’s are dotted and T’s crossed to talk about it.

Well, if you like good music, I recommend checking Guster out. Oh, and smart people listen to Guster, science says so.

For a long time I’ve been a fan of Andy Budd because of his book CSS Mastery. It basically was one of the core reasons I was able to switch to to 100% CSS standards and compliance. I talk a lot more about his book and CSS in general in a previous post. He is one of the key people over at the company Clearleft in London, and is a popular speaker any many conferences. He specializes in usability and persuasive web designs, helping companies making their websites and user experiences better.

Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to attend a conference where he is speaking at. However, thanks to the wonders of the internet, there are several videos and slides available from previous presentations. I highly recommend them for any web designer or developer, because we all deal with usability in one form or another. I’ve gone ahead and gathered a handful of these videos and slides into one article so I can easy reference them for others to watch. You’ll notice a lot of the themes and ideas in these videos will overlap, but each one has some very good content and advice.

Designing the User Experience Curve

This is the first video I watched of one of his presentations, and it has stuck with me for the last year or two. Warning, after watching this video you will no longer look at interacting with others the same, whether on the web or just day to day encounters. You’ll know what I mean after watching this video.

Slides

Video

Andy Budd – FOWD London 2008 from Future of Web Design on Vimeo.

Persuasive Design: Encouraging Your Users To Do What You Want Them To!

This is a more recent presentation, and while I couldn’t find a full start to finish video, I have pieced together a collection of videos that covers most of it. There are quite a few “aha!” moments that make you realize different things, and rather fun to listen to.

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One thing I haven’t mentioned much this year is the Utah Open Source Conference that is being held in two weeks. Larry Cafiero, a.k.a Larry the Fedora Guy, has written a nice summary of how he feels UTOSC “has been building up to a top-notch, not-to-be-missed show.”

During the course of the year, the FOSS traveling salvation show in North America wends its way around the nation to end up, finally, at the Utah Open Source Conference (UTOSC) in Salt Lake City in October before taking a hiatus for the holidays. Then of course the new year, FOSS-wise, starts with the Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE) in February.

There’s only one word for those who might want to skip the last-of-the-year Linux expo: “Don’t!”

Quietly and with little fanfare, UTOSC has been building up to a top-notch, not-to-be-missed show that is beginning to draw deserved attention — and people — from outside immediate Utah area. In fact, in the last four years it has grown to become the best community computer conference in the Mountain West.

UTOSC will be held from Oct. 7-9 at the Miller Campus of Salt Lake Community College in Salt Lake City. Attendees who register before Saturday can save 30 percent on the price of admission to the three-day event. Regular admission to UTOSC is $70 for a full-access pass, $25 for an expo pass with entrance to try-it lab workshops and $15 for an expo pass.

I’ll give you a little hint: You can get %50 off if you register with the Discount Code UPHPU. So I highly recommend if you would like to learn about some very cool software that is free, to check it out. Unfortunately, this year I won’t be presenting, since I kind of got busy and forgot to get my abstract in before the deadline. Probably next year then.

So lately I have been given some thought to how we use Subversion (SVN) in our web development, and features we don’t use nearly as often.

In web development, one big area where I don’t see us using a lot is branching, tagging, and merging. However, with our iPhone Apps, we use tagging and branching a lot. As I started to think why, one of the biggest things was the environment. Client development, especially with the iPhone, is double clicking on a project file for Xcode, and I’m ready to go. There is almost no hassle running trunk versus running a tag or branch. It is all the same.

Building against a website, however, is different. Your environment requires a lot more information and pieces. For me, I need to make changes to my host file (for custom domains), Apache/Nginx configuration, MySQL Connection information, etc. There is no file i “double click” and go. It is a pain anytime I need to change my local (or staging or even production) paths and settings.

This is where the svn switch command comes in handy, and is extremely important. It allows you to change your checked out working copy’s source (or url), while maintaining any local changes you may have made. You can tell the actual path, regardless of file or directory names, by doing an svn info command. The best way to understand is through examples.

Arg, should have made this a branch.

You’re working on a big change, such as completely rewriting your internal message system. Suddenly, your boss walks in saying “There is a bug we need you to fix and push live now!” It is a simple bug, but your trunk is only half way through a major change. What do you do?

1. New Branch on Server – You need to make a new branch on the server based off the server’s version of trunk. It’s a simple copy function, while having it execute on the server:

   svn copy -m “Branching for new email system” http://svn.example.com/trunk/ http://svn.example.com/branches/new_email_system/

2. Switch your trunk working copy to new branch – This allows you to keep all of your current changes locally, but switches you to the branch version:

   cd /path/to/trunk/
   svn switch http://svn.example.com/branches/new_email_system/

3. Commit changes to branch – Commit your changes to the repository which will be applied to the branch:

   svn commit -m “changes to new message system.”

4. Switch back to trunk. – Make sure you are still at your trunk. If you did an svn info, it would show the URL location at the branch. Execute the switch again:

   svn switch http://svn.example.com/trunk/

5. Switch between trunk & branch as needed – When you need to work on the trunk, switch to the trunk. When you need to work on the branch, switch to the branch. The great thing is you won’t need to change any URLs in your configs in apache and such, it will just work.
6. When your branch is ready, merge into trunk – Perform a merge since the starting of the branch to the last revision in the branch, applying it to the trunk:

   svn merge -r 100:125 path/to/branches/new_email_system path/to/trunk

7. Test changes made by merge, then commit. – Test the changes locally, and when you are satisfied things went well, commit the merged changes to trunk: svn commit -m “new message”
8. Continue Development – you are safe to proceed as usual.

Over the new few weeks I plan on posting more little tutorials and tricks of some more advanved SVN commands, and hopefully it can help some of my fellow team members. Let me know if you have any questions, or want to know how to do other things. But the bottom line is if you haven’t used the svn switch command, especially in web development, you are sorely missing out.

For some reason, this was turning out to be kind of hard to accomplish, and everyone on the internet wanted to do it with JavaScript hacks. My issue was if the JavaScript hack didn’t execute fast enough, causing the title to flash for just a second, so I’d much rather do it with CSS. Unfortunately, there are no built in ways to hide it in jQuery. However, there is an option you can pass in the .dialog() method: dialogClass. This places a custom class in the main div element, allowing you to do something like this:

function selectLocation()
{
	$('#modalSelectLocation').dialog({
			modal: true,
			dialogClass: 'modalSelectLocation'
			,buttons: {
				Cancel: function(){
					$(this).dialog('close');
				}
				,Continue: function() {
					alert('goto-buy');
				}
				
			}
		});
}

with the css of:

.modalSelectLocation .ui-dialog-titlebar { display:none; }

Tada! No more Title Bar. However, make sure to have some form of cancel button.

These last few days have been full of quickly implementing things I’ve only read about, but hadn’t done for myself.

One situation was looking at splitting web traffic across multiple servers. In our case, we had only 2% of our website that would spike and increase our load by %1000 percent (I’m not joking) for a short period of time. So instead of doing traditional load balancing, we opted for routing specific functions to a custom subdomain that would run on another server. That way if the thousands of crazy video game players (you know who you are), slam the servers trying to get a cool skin for their online avatar, it would only take down that one section.

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There is a method for ignoring files in an svn via their svn:ingore tool. For those who use windows w/ TortoiseSVN, it has a really slick interface for handling it all. However, for those of us (like me) who are on a Mac and just use the command line, I always forget the commands. So here is my note to myself on how to do it:

First, navigate to the folder I want to edit it’s ignore settings.

Second, execute the command: svn propedit svn:ignore .

(don’t forget the period)

It will then open up a text editor. You put one match pater (or filename) per line. Save and exit, and your svn properties will have been changed. You then need to commit your change, and you’re good.

Now, I won’t forget. If you follow my blog, you might have noticed a trend of myself putting simple things I don’t do frequently here. It seems I have a terrible memory, and it makes is easy for me to find things on my blog again. Hopefully, just maybe, it will help someone else out there too.

I always forget how to do this, so I have to look it up each time. This will make it easier the next time. It is so simple, just I always forget.

First, I need to generate my ssh pub and private keys on the host server: ssh-keygen

Second, I need to copy the pub key to the remote server: ssh-copy-id -i id_rsa.pub user@server.local

Then, that it! Now that I wrote it down, I won’t forget it… I hope.

I think it’s important for technology folk, especially programmers and system administrators, to take breaks and such that allow for us to be completely disconnected from our work. Its a very hard thing to do, especially if you work with very small companies. With Dating DNA, when I go on vacation, I’m the only Sys Admin and all of our web development stops for the time I’m gone. So if there are Web Service APIs that need to be updated for our iPhone Developer, he has to wait as well. Also, if something goes down, I’m not around to fix it. Not a very fun situation to be in.

So for Dating DNA & Clipish I put together the “Basic Server Administration Document” which detailed everything a person would need to know to perform basic sys admin tasks. It was nicked named the “Oh Crap” document. Fortunately, while I was gone, there were no problems, and the document was not needed.

For my other main project, CEVO, that was not the case. CEVO has 4 times the servers that Dating DNA has, and is a bit more complex. But there are two other programmers who also monitor the servers, so I wasn’t worried. Then, while I was gone, half the physical servers for a Virtual Server “Grid” went down, which was my pet project. The CTO for CEVO, Eric, had to try to figure out what was wrong and co-ordinate with the Data Center to figure what happened and how to fix everything. Since we host our Databases on this “Grid”, if it goes down, everything practically goes down. At the time, I was in Glacier Bay, watching Glaciers crumble and fall into the ocean, with zero internet connectivity.

So thank you Eric for putting up with everything while I was gone. It was all fixed by the time I came back.

But if there is anyone wondering if an Alaskan Cruise is worth it, it definitely is. My father-in-law took us, which was very nice of him. I’ll probably post some pictures in the near future of the trip.