The Technician

Sushi restaurants hold a special place in my heart as possibly the worst place to go for a meal. Granted, I have not been to many, but the ones I have been to all share the same horrible characteristics.

The service is always has a certain briskness to it. To many, this is great, you order, get your food, eat, and have your plates taken away almost as the last piece of sashimi leaves your chopsticks. Rice notwithstanding, once most of your food is gone, so is your plate, replaced almost as quickly with the check. While many consider speed to be a feature, I’m not sure I agree when it comes to my dinner. While the staff at every sushi joint I’ve ever been to has been efficient, they’ve also been less than accommodating when it comes to simple things, like recommendations.

Ambiance and fellow patrons normally leave something to be desired as well. Somehow, sushi has come to be the meal of choice for the screaming hordes of clubgoers, Jersey Shore wannabes, and that certain type douchebag that only comes at night. Thusly, the soundtrack of most of these places closely resembles being inside a speaker cabinet while DJ Pauly D spins whatever the fuck it is that he spins. Again, nothing wrong with that, but not while consuming raw fish.

Then, there’s sushi itself. Don’t get me wrong, I like sushi, particularly a real nice piece of toro when it’s nice and cold. And I’ve been adventurous enough to have tried some more exotic options, like uni, which is without a doubt, a taste you need to acquire. I also understand that it’s considered an art form. But what bothers me most about going out for sushi is the vast majority of places do not regard it that way.

Creative Index

The now defunct Creative Index was a search engine aimed at indexing portfolio sites. The Creative Index was perhaps the most open-ended project I have ever taken on. The goal was to allow people to list their various portfolio sites, have the Creative Index scrape their sites, index all the textual content, and make it searchable via a Google-like interface. Of course, the project was doomed from the beginning, as results would be measured against Google, and we all know how that goes. I had never taken on a project that required taking such unstructured data, also another reason it was doomed. Most portfolio sites contain very little text, which makes matching and ranking difficult.

And that’s when I discovered the Mars Volta. While writing the engine to handle the retrieval of web pages, I learned just how chaotic the underbelly of Internet is. Circular redirects, 404s, bad links, authenticated pages made my code check hundreds of variables in the most paranoid, chaotic way possible. The Mars Volta’s drug-induced, hallucination-inspired free-form rock-jazz-samba was a great soundtrack to the chaos I was trying to make sense of.

Creative Portfolio Display

In July of 2010, I had the distinct honor of developing one of the few InApps for Linkedin. LinkedIn’s InApp platform runs on Google OpenSocial. OpenSocial is a great way to plug in 3rd party apps in a secure way. However, the normal development workflow changes quite a bit, as OpenSocial acts as a caching proxy. So in order to get changes in your app down to the user/tester/you, you need to set an additional variable that will re-retrieve the specification for your app. In order to get to that, you need to find the URL to the iframe that contains your app, which is only available in a javascript block, add the cache busting variable, drop the URL in your browser, and hard refresh. That only worked sometimes. And when it did work, it was pretty much guaranteed that the change you made didn’t.

Needless to say, the workflow was painful, even on the best days. Add to that, some weird firewall issues, and you had a situation that would make St Francis of Assisi murder kittens. That’s where Passion Pit came in. Their music is just so…damn…happy. In most cases Passion Pit saved me from putting my fist through my monitor.

RightScale, Rackspace Cloud configuration

In attempt to save ourselves some money, and automate a lot of the SysAdmin work I’d been doing by hand over the past couple years, I undertook a partnership with RightScale. Since in every case, the servers I was deploying didn’t have php, or any other language I knew by default, I had to resort to bash, which I didn’t know. This project took me very out of my comfort zone, had a Mt Everest of a learning curve, and was so essential to our growth that it couldn’t fail. There were also tons of moving parts that were out of my control. RightScale’s integration with the Rackspace cloud is in Beta, which meant that in addition to struggling through a language I didn’t know, I had to differentiate my own errors from things that were problems with the sever images. Tons ‘o fun.

In stepped The Bronx (III), probably one of the most solid rock bands I’ve heard in a long time. Their tracks had a real sense of purpose, and the lyrics echoed a lot of my desperation. In particular, the line in Pleasure Seekers where desperation is cited as inspiration totally got me through.

Having your own domain and server is a really fun thing. You can keep a blog, store files, post photos. All good ole down-home interwebz fun you can dream up. With the advent of micro-blogging, everyone now has an audience they need to communicate with in the briefest fashion.

Short links have become the norm for sharing, but with a huge price. Short links break the interconnectedness of the Internet. Search results that depend on the count of links become incorrect. Some services try to reconnect links between domains by using some DNS trickery. But the issue remains that there is a middleman that can’t help make the connection.

Unless, of course, that middleman is the search engine. Google’s recently announced URL shortener could solve many of the problems inherent with URL shorteners. By being the middleman, Google would have all the necessary information to put the pieces back together. It’s easy enough to set up, provided you have a Google Apps account. It does not currently have an API, but here’s hoping.

I am pleased to announce that this site is now hosted on the Rackspace Cloud. It was a simple migration from MediaTemple, and has given me the level of control I want. I got to choose my OS (CentOS), versions of php and MySQL, and setup apache how I like it. I’m free of Plesk and those and the limitations therein.

The one thing I would really like to see from the Rackspace Cloud is DNS Support. My goal when migrating http://chr.ishenry.com was to move entirely off of MediaTemple. The one thing I really did like about hosting with them was that DNS was integrated directly into the service. With the Rackspace Cloud, there was no such convenience. However, a quick signup with DynDNS and a tweak to my domain registrar solved that.

Big thanks to Ryan Kearney’s video tutorial for the yum command that brought everything together.

xq94dwsy2u

A Zombie Project is any project that has been completed for a while but needs to be changed or updated in some way. After laying dormant for a while, the team that developed it may have left, or evolved into a different team, or changed their methodology entirely.

While the project was dormant, it is extremely likely, if not definite that knee-jerk reactions to bugs have caused changes that no one remembers, much less committed. So when development starts on the project sandbox, if it still exists, it is more likely than not that everything is out of date. In this case, bite the bullet. FTP the whole codebase down, and check it against the repo. Your life will probably be miserable for a bit, but at least there won’t be any horrible surprises later. Also, if there’s a sandbox, triple check it. If not, be glad there’s nothing you’ll miss in an old one.

If this project is only being opened for a short period, resist the urge to make small changes in methodology or framework. For every small change you make, you’ll want to make another, and update this, and modify that. Be extremely careful of the budget, and cost of each change, or you’re done for.

Lastly, be very, very afraid of the build to production. Even with fastidious notes, a sys admin with OCD, and Gillian the QA girl telling you how awesome you are, assume you missed something. An open tail of the error log is your best visibility into whatever has reared it’s ugly head. Your next best bet is your trusty Crisis MO.

When making changes to a large site, it’s really helpful to have tools to measure how those changes affect performance. One of my favorite tools is cacti. This is a graph of the load average of one our database servers

Database Load Average

We done good…