AdvisorBits

Welcome Melody, we're watching you.

2009-06-24T12:36:48Z

It's fairly clear that one cannot code from the ground up in bazaar style. One can test, debug and improve in bazaar style, but it would be very hard to originate a project in bazaar mode. Linus didn't try it. I didn't either. Your nascent developer community needs to have something runnable and testable to play with.
- The Cathedral and the Bazaar by Eric Raymond

Congratulations!

Yesterday in Pittsburg Tim Appnel announced Melody, an open source fork of MovableType. I would like to congratulate everyone who has worked very hard to make this happen. I am uncharateristically excited about this project. The main reason for the excitement is that I have never witnessed a fork up close before. I know some of the players, and I am familiar in passing with most of the rest. I have wanted to see this happen since I first read about the evolution of fetchmail in The Cathedral and the Bazaar .

Byond the fanfare of Fork and hype of Community

At this time, the code of Melody is not stable and can only be obtained though GitHub. Information about obtaining the code is available on the download page. The web site states that they hope to have a consumer release in the "Fall of 09".

Melody is for those who find value in belonging to, supporting and contributing to a community of helpful, passionate and devoted users, but it is also for people who want a secure, proven and high quality publishing environment for their personal web site or their business.

Ah. "C-O-M-M-U-N-I-T-Y" Great. Yes, a community of users is required for open source projects to make sense. But the details of Melody's goals seem to be the same thing that MovableType.org promised .

What will make Melody different from Movable Type Open Source?

Well, to hear Ben Trott, the original author of Movable Type tell it, MT is stable and Melody is experimental. But Ben also acknowledges what I find to be an intriguing, if under-publicized, aspect of the project, "integration with the code of other open source projects".

In February of 2008, Tim Appnel argued eloquently on the MTOS mailing list, "...there are other more important reasons for migrating away from homebrew solutions and to module in CPAN that exist beyond MTOS." One of the specific open source modules that was being discussed in that post was CGI::Application . cgiapp is a framework for constructing CGI applications. (Movable Type is a CGI program.)

Tim's stated benefits included:

"effectively leveraging resources" He wants to use existing CPAN code instead of inventing every function and subroutine in-house.
"better embracing open source" He thinks that if we contribute parts of the system to CPAN, some new people will use the parts, and some of those will become part of our community.

And so it starts.

Although I knew in advance that Melody was being announced on Tuesday, the first time I was made aware that it had actually happened was on the CGI::Application mailing list. Mark Stosberg, advocate of simplicity (I think I like this guy, I hope I get to meet him sometime) and technology, and (one of ?) the lead CGI::Application developers has given Melody a positive write up. on his blog.

I can't wait to see what happens next.

Windows 7 is just around the corner!

2009-06-11T15:59:40Z

Windows 7 is the first release of a MS operating system I have actually been looking forward to. I have used the beta and the RC a little; and as soon as I can get my hands on a non-expiring version, I am going to switch my main desktop over to Windows 7 and move forward. Earlier this week Microsoft announced that will happen on October 22nd when Windows 7 will be available in stores . (I would do it now, but Murphy's Law states that the expiration date of the RC will be on a day when I do not possibly have time and the day before I cannot be without my main desktop PC.)

Here's a sneak peak at the desktop, Notice that the task bar and start menu can be positioned on any side of your monitor, not just the bottom? When I first noticed this, I thought about Xorg, or MacOSX that have this UI element configured differently. I wondered if the position of menu bars made any difference to usability, or adoption. (For historical purposes, you may be interested to know Start has been more or less stuck in the lower left since Windows 95 and NT 4.0) Gizmodo has an even more optimistic take on the Task Bar updates.

Microsoft has created a couple of gestures for dealing with windows. To Maximize a Window you can move the window off the top of the screen and drop it. To size a window to see it next to other windows (Side-by-Side view) drag it to the side of the screen and drop. (I am not sure if this works exactly as intended or even very well on multiple monitor configurations.)

It is my understanding that many of the early adopters to Vista suffered a lot of hardware issues. This has not been that case for me with Windows 7, but I run all my desktops under VMWare. I understand that Microsoft has learned their lesson from the problems that happened under Vista and modern hardware will be supported. (Your mileage may vary.)

And finally all those of you who don't want the your computer to tell you before you do things that might mess up the system, the UAC (User account control) settings are adjustable. All the way from "Bug me as much as Vista did or a little more" down to "Just let me break my computer now". In actuality there are 4 settings and the default allows users to change Windows settings without warning.

Over the next few weeks I hope to be able to explore the XP Mode virtualiztion is available for Windows 7. This is supposed to allow users to run Windows XP as a virtual machine in Windows 7. I'll let you know what I find out.

Hard working Old Dog

2009-04-02T13:38:01Z

You may wish to review RFC 5513 which was submitted yesterday. It identifies a serious problem facing the Internet community. (No not the virus thing, far more serious than that.)

This has real security implications for all of us, and we need to do something about it now. Congress should hold hearings.

Furthermore, it should be noted that we are rapidly approaching World Acronym Depletion (WAD). It has been estimated that, at the current rate of TLA allocation, we will run out by the end of September this year. This timescale could be worsened if there is the expected growth in demand for mobile acronyms, IP-TLAs, and TLA-on-demand.

And if that wasn't bad enough this issue may effect those of us in the business of securing systems even worse:

Many security algorithms are identified by TLAs. It is a clear requirement that someone implementing, for example, MD5 should be understood to have encoded the well-known Maybe-Decrypted-Deciphered-Decoded-Disambiguated-and-Degraded algorithm, and not any other security algorithm with the same acronym.

Make sure to write your US Senator or Representative today about this pressing problem. Congress is going to fix everything else, why not this thorny problem?

(Thanks to Susan for pointing this out and Adrian Farrel for writing this much needed RFC)

All Warm and Fuzzy about Vista

2009-02-16T16:41:12Z

I recently purchased a new workstation, and finally took the plunge with Windows Vista.

I don't get what all the fuss has been about. From the comments I have heard, and the impressions I read about, I expected many problems and got none.

Hardware Issues?

Not here. The workstation came with the Downgrade Rights Installed, or something like that, which means it had XP on it. When I installed Vista, I obtained a 64 bit version in order to use more RAM. I was able to obtain 64 bit drivers for all the components of my system, and I can still use the network printer. I don't think I need much more than that.

So, no Vista hardware issues (ok, its new) and no 64 bit issues.

But, the interface changed!

Bah. I hate change. But progress is change. Or maybe I have that backwards, I'm not sure. I look at some individual elements of the interface and I think Vista is progress. We should get used to it.

I happen to like some of the eye candy, but I am sure that's subjective.

A specific example of progress in usability that comes to mind is the control panel. In XP they hid it behind a nice interface. Unfortunately for me, as a power user, I could never find the individual control panel applet I knew I wanted to use, so I always switched to classic (old style) view. In the Vista control panel there are sub headings which make it easy for me to navigate, and presumably should be useful to end users since it also has the "main bullet points" complete with very pretty icons. (The people remind me of Fischer Price toys.)

I'll be sure to let you know if my opinion changes.

I haven't got all my apps running under Vista yet. The version of QuickBooks that I have licensed is so old that its not fair to even try. Right now, everything has gone smoother than expected, and as the title of the post states, I am pleased.

Distractions cause Brain Thrashing, sap productivity

2009-01-08T14:09:39Z

I've mentioned it before, and I'm not alone. (STOP! Ask yourself this: Are you on company time right now? Is reading AdvisorBits really a part of your job description? ... This post? Why?) While it is arguably a powerful business tool, the Internet presents a whole new series of challenges for managing the modern workforce. When a computer's memory gets too full it may try to use space on a disk. Sometimes there's just too much moving in and out of memory and it causes disk thrashing. I agree with Kathy Sierra that there is a similar phenomena, called Brain Thrashing.

The Internet is filled with distractions that have nothing to do with getting work done, and in fact even some things that seem on the surface to be productivity boosters can in fact cause the opposite effect. I enjoyed reading more about this issue in a larger context than my own experience over at Internet News in an article by Mike Elgan.

I think he is probably right on about his primary assertion, and I only wish I could get 6 hours per day with total focus on a productive task.

SBS 2008 Migration - What DVD Drive?

2008-11-21T00:46:11Z

As I mentioned in my last post I'm working on my first SBS 2008 install, it is a migration from a 5 year old SBS 2003 install I have maintained. I thought I had maintained it fairly well, but it turns out I missed a few major updates. I'm not really sure how but some service packs were not installed on components.

The Best Practices Analyzer is a tool that is used in the migration to determine the overall health of the "source" Small Business Server prior to migration. You can run it any time, and it will produce useful results, with instructions to fix the discovered issues.

The migration guide, which showed me where all these problems are is quite comprehensive. It provides for a variety of scenarios and alternative approaches to many instructions which might be dicey for one reason or another.

Once thing they didn't mention, is what to do if you can't insert DVD #1 into the source server because the source server has no DVD drive! Which is funny, because 5 years ago when I installed Small Business Server 2003, they knew this might be the case, and included both CDs and a DVD.

Anyway I copied the tools directory from the DVD onto a CD. A search of Google reveals it may be possible to mount the DVD via a network share and copy the files needed to update the AD to the server to run.

And by the way, don't tell Microsoft, but I was able to normally install CentOS 5 running in a Hyper-V VM on a legacy network adapter.

Now to figure out this pesky no USB for the migration answer file thing.

SBS 2008 is here!

2008-11-13T17:28:02Z

I try not to get too geeky and excited about new software releases, but I have to confess to a certain amount of joyous anticipation this week as I look forward to deploying Windows Small Business Server 2008. The main features I think will make this release an improvement for small businesses are

Built in support for virtualization. These days many small businesses have more than one server for a variety of reasons. Even by consolidating only two servers onto one physical server, I estimate the savings in hardware cost can be as much as 20%.
Lower administrative overhead, and associated cost savings. For instance: the issue of SBS storage locations has been a problem for me. I have used these instructions on every Windows SBS 2003 installation I manage, and that adds up to a bit of time. Wayne McIntyre at SBS Blog posted a great introduction to the Server Storage Manage tool that greatly simplifies those things in SBS 2008.
Updated and improved Small Business Server functions such as RWW, sharepoint server, and Exchange with Outlook Web Access.

On the downside, you will need 64 bit hardware for this, and you cannot upgrade an existing SBS domain in place, you have to install SBS 2003 in migration mode and then demote your old SBS server. But then again, upgrades are usually at least a little painful.

And depending on how you look at things, prices have increased. Its hard to compare apples to oranges 5 years later.

Resources

Neccessity is the mother of ...

2008-11-12T16:22:58Z

... getting the TODO list done. For a couple of weeks now, my Windows Small Business Server 2003 has been telling me the weekly backups failed. I think the tape drive in this 10 year old server hardware finally died, leaving me feeling a bit vulnerable to fires, floods, or more likely in my neck of the woods, an extended power outage.

I've also been meaning to do a test deployment of iSCSI target. (In iSCSI parlance, the target is the storage server and the initiator is the storage client. So, last night I finally got around to building and installing the IET on a CentOS 5 server I had installed for just such purpose. You must install GCC, the kernel-devel, and openssl-devel packages and any dependancies in order to build the IET kernel module and install it. (I was previously under the mistaken impression that you had to patch the kernel to use this tool. That is not the case.).

You can get the tar ball from sourceforge, via the IET website. I ignored the advice for RedHat users to get the rpm, because it is fairly old. The most recent version as of this writing was 0.4.16. As I mentioned, after installing the dependencies mentioned in the previous paragraph, the install went just as described int he README that is included in the tarball.

I edited the configuration file to make a single target from a whole RAID device, and restarted the daemon, everything worked more or less fine. (There's a single error in my message log that I haven't figured out yet, but everything seems to be working.)

Then, I had to setup the initiator on my Windows 2003 Server. This is built into Windows 2008 (and Vista), but for Windows 2003 (and XP) you need to download the initiator from Microsoft.

Once I installed the initiator, I told it what IP address to look for the iSCSI target at. Once it found the target, it new about the volume I published and let me connect to it. When connecting I checked the box to reconnect when rebooting. The final step was to click the "Bind All" button shown in the illustration.

Once the iSCSI initiator connected to the target, your network (iSCSI) volume looks just like a local drive to the disk manager. I thought this was really slick for about an hour's worth of hacking about and installing software.

If you are thinking about doing this, you should be aware of what happened to my 100 MB home network when I did this. What happened was: It croaked. The interface on the server got pegged at 100% saturation while formatting the drive I setup to use for backups. Its OK for me becuase of two reasons: 1) I'll only backup during hours when I am asleep and not using the network much anyway. 2) Its a proof of concept. I can always turn it off it it becomes a problem.

If I do this in the real world, I will probably do it on a separate storage network fabric, and it will be over gigabit Ethernet. I even know what sexy new little Cisco switch I would use, but that can be a topic for a future post.

extraordinary Microsoft Security announcement

2008-10-25T19:31:52Z

Over the past few days, all the news I read seems to be about the Microsoft patch on Thursday. A handful of you are subscribed to AdvisorBits and maybe a few of you aren't reading the same things as I read. In a very unusual event, Microsoft released a patch on Thursday that is rated Critical. Critical means ... you should have it. All versions of Windows are affected. Links to other coverage are below the video.

Official Microsoft Announcement : MS08-067

Most users should only take away one thing from reading the announcement at Microsoft. If you are responsible for a computer that runs Windows, run Windows Update or Microsoft Update and follow the instructions. (If you are one of my customers, your servers were patched Thursday night.) I have applied the patch to my own XPSP3 workstation and nothing broke.

Can't get it out of my head

There's been such dire predictions in coverage of this that I can't get this song from my adolescence out of my head. The title pretty much says it all.

Additional reading:

MSRC Blog post on how the worm was discovered and responded to.
Department of Homeland Security CERT Cyber Security Alert SA08-297A
Security Focus brief on the issue.
Dave Lewis at LiquidMatrix wins the prize for being the first to bring it to my attention.

Another fine mess

2008-08-28T21:12:03Z

You may notice a few hiccups over the next couple days, I accidentally upgraded the templates on the wrong blog.

I started to quickly go back, but it seems some of my template modules have been backed up up too. Which leads to ...

 mtinclude = barf

That plus I want to use some of the new features... so... I'll be tearing everything apart and putting it back together over the next few days. But I have client meetings all day tomorrow.

In the mean time, I think the RSS feed is still being sent to Feed Burner, so you won't miss anything if you're already subscribed.

Now with 100% more community

2008-08-18T14:04:48Z

Whatever that means.

I wanted to take a minute to point out what everyone else who uses Movable Type a lot has already pointed out: Movable Type 4.2 is out.

Movable Type is now the name of the core (Open Source) product. The generally recommended product is MovableType Pro which is free for for everyone except businesses. If you are any kind of business (other than a sole proprietorship) then you need to purchase a license to use the product. At $399, it is a good value, but now I have the feeling I will have to ask my accountant or the IRS to help me out selecting a license for various projects.

On the bright side, if you are reading this, the upgrade went without a hitch. I was very impressed by that. More to come.

The new visual age of the Internet

2008-06-01T12:14:53Z

Why back when I was a whippersnapper, they didn't have video on the Internets. [sic] We had some animated gifs, sure, but the images we dealt with back then are nothing compared with what we see on websites today.

Serving large files, and in some cases video streams is a whole different can of worms than a couple of promotional product photos and a mug shot of the chairman of the board. As a hosting provider, I understand some of the technical challenges involved, but this article is not about that. Today, I want to write briefly to let you know about two websites that face challenges related to images, and how they face those challenges. It is also interesting to me that although the sites show vastly differing levels of visual development, I suspect they both accomplish the business goals they set out to achieve about as well.

Both are photography web sites, but they could easily be video or any other visual medium for the purposes of this article. The author of the first site is a professional photographer. Within a few weeks of posting this article, my close associates and friends may chuckle to remember this post when I launch a site that looks very much like James Duncan Davidson's site. This similarity is because his, like the site I will launch, is managed with Movable Type's Universal Template Set. (The MTUTS?) I think this is an effective choice, both from a cost perspective and from a communication perspective.

As a photographer seeking to sell photographs, he is concerned with the details of how his product will be presented, and also issues of quality in the production of the prints which visitors can purchase. He has, wisely in my estimation, chosen to outsource both those functions.

At the same time as he outsources the ecommerce and fulfillment function he maintains full control over his ability to promote the "store" using his own website. He uses his MT based site to publish articles about his work, which of course use all the right keywords for the product he is trying to sell. In the comments he hints at future articles he will write to attract viewers, including details of how he works with his printing company to communicate color information:

Indeed, I can post something up about that at some point. The short versions is that I run totally color managed here and check prints on my printers to have a good idea what happens in the translation between transmissive and reflective color and then I ship the photos up to Zen tagged as sRGB, the profile that Zen and Mpix recommend using for the process.

Davidson has started very small, so the image issues he is seeking to resolve (quality of presentation, ability to sell prints cost effectively, ability to have orders fulfilled by yet another service) do not so much center around storage, which is usually one of the central issues with image collections.

Web space is sold based on two metrics, how much is stored, and how much is transfered. Rates will generally vary depending on the quality of the network and platform, and the level of personal attention required. My friend Jesse at PlasticMind has his own private server and he uses Movable Type as the foundation for many of his web design projects, including his own. But every one of the photos he shows in his photoblog, are in fact stored on his Flickr account.

I know of two benefits Jesse gains from this. The first is performance. If you are serving large multi megabyte images files off the same web server as your thirty kilobyte HTML files are served from, one or the other will suffer. (For the other web server administrators out there... OK, this is a gross generalization, but you know its true! If not why would there be so many web servers such as Apache, Mongrel, Lighty, Ngix, Lightspeed, etc? )

The second is sheer storage. If you have ever managed more than a few hundred megabytes of files on a remote server somewhere you know that the just issues of backups can be pretty costly to deal with, both in terms of dollars and time. Not only does Flickr provide a particular kind of storage (pictures) at a good price point (free and professional accounts are available) but their service also helps to promote the images thought their own business model. (Well, Yahoo's business model anyway.)

All of this reinforces my thinking that traditional small web hosting providers and the sites they host need to become the glue that holds together their client's extended Internet presence. Small providers that are aware of and promoting this idea to their small clients will help their customers use the Internet to its maximum impact while keeping costs inline with the scale of their customer's business.

Keep it short and to the point.

2008-05-12T11:41:37Z

Thats what Jakob Neilson would have us do, if you can read all the way through the 1068 words he uses to tell us this. (Which his summary would have us believe you probably won't.)

Summary: On the average Web page, users have time to read at most 28% of the words during an average visit; 20% is more likely.

Neilson is a usability expert. This means he studies the way we use the web and he suggests ways in which we can design the sites or pages to better for users of those pages. Many of the things he talks about are relevant to my own business consulting with other small businesses and developing web sites for them. More and more, I am encouraging my small business people to take the time to write their own websites with me. If you are thinking of writing your own web pages, you may want to see this article.

How Little Do Users Read?

Page vs. Entry

2008-04-06T13:18:36Z

Movable Type 4 gives us a rich vocabulary of information elements from which to construct small business web sites. As I write this the ultimate irony is that I am using version 3.xx to tell my clients about a feature of 4.x; I really must get this blog cut over to the new version.

An Entry in MT is sometime called a post. This is because MT was originally weblogging (blogging) software. Blog posts, or entries are sequential over time. The last one you write is more current than the previous. Over time they will both become history, archived as it were, but no longer front page news, so to speak. For many business web sites, blog entries serve the same function as news.

Entries can be organized into Categories, and they are placed in chronological Archives by default.

A Page in MT has only existed as a separate informational entity since the latest version, 4.x. Pages are similar in their scope and general information make-up (such as title, content, keywords field, etc.) to a news item but they are more timeless. The information they contain is very slowly changing if at all.

Pages can be organized into Folders.

Both Entries and Pages can be indexed using logical devices called Tags.

The three (?) faces of MT4

2008-02-17T14:42:58Z

The latest version of Movable Type, MT4, comes in three distinct flavors, plus an enterprise version. Since I work with small businesses, and individuals, I thought I would take a minute to go over the various features and license terms as I understand them.

MTOS (Movable Type Open Source)

I have seen the company call this the "core" product, that which underlies all their other versions. And that seems to be decent description. All the normal stuff is there: Catagories, Entries, Periodic Archives, Comments, and Trackbacks. The new and very useful: Page and Folder appear along with an Asset Management tool. (The Asset Management was pretty weak in 4.0, although the community seems to be saying it has improved a bit in 4.1)

This version has a GPL, which means that you may use it for any purposes, including commercial, i.e. business. This version is available from the publisher free of charge. The Movable Type Community site (.org) has more information.

MTP (Movable Type Personal)

Movable Type without the Professional Pack. I am not sure if there are any functional differences between this version and the Open Source version. If there are I haven't noticed them, and no one has made it clear in the stuff I have read.

This version is for non-commercial use by a single user. It is available free of charge from the publisher on their commercial web site.

MT (Movable Type (TM). )

Movable Type with the Professional Pack, and including support from the publisher. The professional pack includes features such as Custom Fields, and the Universal Website Template sets. Template sets are a new feature that is implemented in all versions of the product, Universal Website Template Set is currently only available to those who purchase it with the Professional Pack that comes with MT (TM). With it small businesses could create a simple web presence in a matter of hours.

The commercial version is licensed based on the number of active users, i.e. authors, and starts around $300 for 5 users; which includes support from the publisher for a single user for 12 months.