Lemon Bytes

The Demise of Posterous

stanlemon — Sat, 27 Apr 2013 14:47:21 +0000

I have written elsewhere about my frustrations over the demise of Posterous. It’s now three days away and I have received yet another email reminding me to get my content off their site. Fortunately this time Posterous has a plan and a tool to enable its users to vacate its system. The whole mess bums me out thought. While not a prolific blogger, I really enjoyed the service and found their original model of email-to-blog profoundly simple and elegant. The problem is Posterous was a service without a plan or stream of income.

As a developer you can build cool stuff, but without a way to pay for the commodities needed to run it you wind up operating at someone else’s mercy. So when they get tired of their failed investment they either shut you down or sell you off, throwing the entire product you’ve been working on up in the air. In the case of Posterous, Twitter wanted awesome development talent. I get that. Having functioned on the hiring side of software development I can tell you inconclusively it is tough to find top notch developers. So it makes sense to me that rather than search for them Twitter would just buy them.

Unfortunately the fiscal irresponsibility of Posterous has left it’s users in a lurch. I don’t blame their CEO for selling, I blame him for starting the product in the first place. If I were him, making no money on my product, I would sell too. Why not? Better to sell then to fizzle away into irrelevance. People have to start thinking about this when they start a tech company. They need to develop with a business plan, not hope that one catches up to them later. Have a great idea for a start up? Awesome! Please don’t build it until you can pay for it or at the very least know how you are going to pay for it.

The worst part of a closure like this is that it breeds distrust. What services can I put my information on without worrying about them closing up? Will said service hold my data hostage from me when they do shutdown? And what obligations does a company like Posterous have to my privacy once they have closed the door. These questions only cause me to hold my breath every time a new service pops up. Yeah, it may look cool – but is it worth the risk as a user? What this in turn does is hurt the legitimate business that has an awesome idea and a business plan. That to me is just sad.

Filed under: Developer

jGrowl on cdnjs

stanlemon — Sun, 14 Apr 2013 13:08:20 +0000

jGrowl is officially on cdnjs. This means that if you want to use jGrowl you don’t even have to download it anymore. Simply add this code to your page and get started:

Looking for a full-fledged example, checkout:

Or click here to try it out on JS Bin right now!

Many thanks to the good folk at CloudFare for cdnjs!

Filed under: Developer

jGrowl 1.2.12 and cdnjs PR

stanlemon — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 20:21:05 +0000

As promised, with 100+ stargazers on GitHub I’ve submitted a pull request to cdnjs from CloudFare for jGrowl. Before doing so I made a minor release update to jGrowl. There are no functional changes in 1.2.12, however I did improve the README to include documentation on the various configuration options and I also added a compressed version of the library with a source map. If you don’t know what a source map is I suggest you google it, because they’re pretty awesome.

Filed under: Developer

jGrowl in Chrome Extension

stanlemon — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 09:00:16 +0000

The other day someone on StackOverflow asked how to integrate jGrowl into a Chrome extension. They had a pretty good start, but missed some important details. I’ve uploaded a complete working Chrome extension with jGrowl to Github as part of my response to the question.

The question can be found here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15870797/jgrowl-issue-in-chrome-extension

The GitHub repository with the example implementation can be found here: https://github.com/stanlemon/jgrowl-chrome-ext

Filed under: Developer

What is it that I do?

stanlemon — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 01:52:37 +0000

I get asked a lot what I do for a living. I’ve responded in a variety ways, “I’m a developer”, “I’m a software engineer”, “I write web applications”, “I’m an application architect”, etc. Usually people respond by smiling, nodding their head and then professing that they have no idea what that means but they figure it’s important. The truth is I’m not just a “developer” or an “architect”. I do deal with a fair amount of architectural things, design related things and a myriad of operational things too. Tonight I realized one way in which I can illustrate what it is I do… Think of when you buy a new computer. You invest a lot of time in setting that new computer up. You transfer files from your old computer, you setup your email, install software, configure your software, etc. My job is to do all of those steps you take to setup your computer and do it in one step, the push of a button. So I spend part of my day trying to figure out how to setup the systems that your favorite web software runs on in a single step.

Filed under: Developer

Stargazing jGrowl

stanlemon — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 11:00:17 +0000

I get a fair number of emails about jGrowl each week. Two common requests are 1.) Can you include a compressed version? 2.) Do you have a CDN?

I used to ship a compressed version, but quite honestly I always forgot to update it so I wound up removing it. Plus, it never seemed like I was using the right one, as I was always getting suggestions to try a different compression process. Nonetheless I am willing to give this another shot, but with a specific purpose…

CloudFare has their cdnjs.com site which is an awesome contribution to the community for providing a CDN for all of the other JavaScript libraries you want to use. CloudFare’s cited criteria for putting a library up is 100 stargazers on github. So if you are reading this and either like, use or just admire jGrowl do me a favor and go star it over on github. If we reach 100 stargazers I’ll submit a request to cdnjs.com and see if we can’t get a compressed version of the library up on a CDN.

Filed under: Developer

Premature Jesus

stanlemon — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 11:00:49 +0000

Normally on March 25th the church celebrates the Annunciation, when Mary is told that she will conceive and carry the Son of God in her womb. Typically this falls during Lent, which at first glance can seem odd, but then we remember a baby normally bakes for nine months, and nine months from now is Christmas… Well then it all adds up. Here’s the thing though… This year Jesus is going to be premature when Christmas comes around. He’s gonna bake about two weeks less this year because March 25th falls in the Monday of Holy Week. I’m told this would normally transfer the festival to after Holy Week, because nothing trumps Holy Week. But then there is the Octave of Easter and you can’t do the Sunday after Easter because Sundays during the seasons of Easter are privileged. So the Monday one week after Easter becomes the day we celebrate the Annunciation. That’s April 8th, the Monday of Quasimodo Geniti if you weren’t tracking yet.

I’ve been trying to think of how to adjust the algorithm on Sanctus.org to make this happen and quite frankly I think I’m going to take a Mulligan. Transferring a festival one day, I can handle, but transferring it two weeks and across a month presents some challenges. Nonetheless, in full disclosure I wanted to make it known that if you’re looking around for the Annunciation you won’t find it on Sanctus.org this year. Never fear though, Higher Things has you covered with an awesome Reflection for the Annunciation.

Filed under: Lutheran

Percona, MySQL and Puppet

stanlemon — Sun, 24 Mar 2013 10:00:31 +0000

MySQL is one of the most widely used database servers for web development. It’s free, has a wide range of support and is easy to get up and going. Add to this native bindings in just about every language and you’ve got a pretty powerful databasing tool at your hands. Percona is a MySQL consulting company with a super-awesome distribution of MySQL tuned for performance. For the most part Percona packages should be a drop-in replacement with MySQL. When it comes to system administration tasks I like to throw Puppet at the problem, it makes it easier to replay the configuration down the road and I can track the configuration changes in git. But there’s a problem when you change the package name for the defacto-standard Puppet MySQL module. The referencing of the service and the default pid file in the Percona distribution and subsequently the reload following install fails, as well as anything downstream of those items. This was unsatisfactory to me so I poked around to figure out a way to make this work, despite the bug in module. Below is a Puppet manifest with some hackey’ness if you’re using Percona that will get it working and allow you to use the rest of the Puppet MySQL module without problems.

Filed under: Developer

MySQL Strict Mode on OS X

stanlemon — Sat, 23 Mar 2013 10:00:52 +0000

If you are a web developer on OS X you probably are sporting your own installation of your database server. If you are running MySQL you might be haunted by strict mode. MySQL has modes as documented here that effect the behavior of various parts of the system. In strict mode values do not get casted between types, which is where I ran into issues. My favorite ORM was passing a boolean true into a tinyint(1) and causing the transaction to abort. This is thanks to STRICT_TRANS_TABLES in my case. The first thing I checked was my /etc/my.cnf to see if “sql_mode” was set in the [mysqld] section. It was not. So I tried setting it to something other than STRICT_TRANS_TABLES and restarted MySQL. No luck, the setting was still on. After a lot of poking around I found out that MySQL for OS X from Oracle ships with a /usr/local/mysql/my.cnf which is loaded on startup. In this file is a sole configuration directive for sql_mode=NO_ENGINE_SUBSTITUTION,STRICT_TRANS_TABLES. Once I commented this out and restarted the server strict mode was off, my ORM worked and I was happy.

Filed under: Developer

Composer on OpenShift

stanlemon — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 10:00:24 +0000

Yesterday I talked about running composer on Amazon’s Elastic Beanstalk. There it is builtin and works out of the box for you. If you are on OpenShift (my preferred PaaS) composer does not come out of the box. Matthew Weier O’Phinney has posted an article on the steps he took to get composer installing his project’s dependencies, and that’s definitely a worthy read. However, my deployment hook for OpenShift is a little bit different and I wanted to share that.

There were two things I wanted to accomplish. First, I did not want composer.phar in source control. Second, I wanted to take advantage of composer’s ability to cache dependencies to speedup my deployment process up. So here is what I use in my ./.openshift/action_hooks/deploy script:

As a bonus here’s a tip about markers… OpenShift will restart Apache and Zend Server with every deployment. You may not want or need to do this. If you don’t, simply touch a file to ./.openshift/markers/hot_deply and then next time you push your changes up OpenShift will leave all those services running when it deploys.

Filed under: Developer