What's it all about, Alfie?

It's been a while since I started using NetNewsWire, and primarily as an efficient way to look at a handful of sites like Slashdot and Freshmeat, that I had been following for a while. I just got tired of all the adds I had to watch, and while I know where the money comes from, it didn't make it any quicker to go to all the web sites, read what I wanted and then move on. Also, I had to make a mental note of the last article I read on each site, and that made it most convenient to have the sites up all the time. This was a mess. The for some reason I read an article about NetNewsWire and decided to give it a try.

I started with the 'lite' version and after about a month decided that this was the kind of software that I should be supporting with money. It did exactly what it said it did, smoothly, cleanly, efficiently, and didn't try to be the end-all-be-all application. It did one thing, and it did it extremely well. I was sold.

Ever since then, and this may be back in the 1.x days, I can't remember exactly, I have followed the development of NetNewsWire and really enjoyed it's progress. Now it's in version 3.0, and it's as good as it ever was. One of the things I like most about it is the fact that even though many of it's users like to have a nice, big window up for all the lists, etc. I prefer a nice, little window with just the specifics. And NetNewsWire looks and works as well in the small window format as the large window format. Very nice app.

I've recently hosted a site with HostMonster and I have to say that while I suspected that I'd really be glad I did this once it was done, I had no idea how nice it would be. I'm sure a lot of good hosting providers are like this, but the ability to add the Secure POP/SMTP over SSL today was just too much for me! I can now deal with secure email to and from the site within Mac OS X's Mail.app which makes it look like just another part of my InBox.

I'm also amazed at the capabilities of the site for self-management. I'm sure this is why the costs are as low as they are - make it easy to have the folks maintain their own accounts and things will be cheaper to run. But I had no idea that web hosting had tools like these. Very nice. It's really quite amazing.

If you ever need a site hosted - give HostMonster a look, you won't regret it.

I have to say that I love Coda from the guys at Panic. When I first saw the Panic Sans font, I was sold! It's a great tool for keeping moderate-sized web sites up to date if you're a coder, which I am. I mean, I'm not going to give this to my 10-year old daughter - she needs more graphical tools, but for me, this is a great combination of editor/preview/transfer/docs that makes this easier.

But there are some issues I found this morning in doing a major overhaul of my web site at the new host I have. They are not horrible, but just really, really annoying.

The construction tools are great. It's nice that it's all in one tool with a good editor - I've got SubEthaEdit, and like it a lot. I also like the integration with Transmit and have registered that as well. I like the preview, but I wish it would let me set the default fonts like I can with every browser on the market - this would make the preview look more accurate, but I've already sent them something on that.

No, this is about the uploading capabilities of Coda. Basically, I added a CSS style sheet to my web site and that included several graphics files - all of which were placed into one directory for ease of use. The problem was that the uploading of these files didn't respect the directory structure, and so it got "flattened" on upload and made a mess. When I had multiple files in different directories with the same name, the 'latest' one uploaded won. It was a pain to clean up, but now that I know the problems, and until I get a fix from them, I'm liable to use Cyberduck as my uploader as it doesn't make these types of mistakes. I sent them the bug report and we'll see what happens.

OK, I spent some time getting a dual-head system going on a sun box I have at work. It's nothing fancy, but it makes development a little nicer. The trick was in knowing what needed to be done to get things set up right. So here are the steps so that I don't have to figure it out again.

I installed a second XVR-100 video card in the box and did a simple boot -r to get Solaris to see the device. Then I needed to configure the two devices so they were the same. The devices ended up being /dev/fbs/pfb0 and /dev/fbs/pfb1.

  fbconfig -dev pfb0 -res 1280x1024x60
  fbconfig -dev pfb1 -res 1280x1024x60
  fbconfig -dev pfb0 -depth 24
  fbconfig -dev pfb1 -depth 24
  fbconfig -dev pfb0 -fake8 enable
  fbconfig -dev pfb1 -fake8 enable

and you can check the configuration with:

  fbconfig -dev pfb0 -propt

Now you need to change the Xservers file to have both devices and xinerama mode. To do this you need to make sure that /usr/dt/config/Xservers points to /etc/dt/config/Xservers and that there's a like that looks a lot like this in it:

  :0  Local local_uid@console root /usr/openwin/bin/Xsun +xinerama
     -dev /dev/fbs/pfb0 -dev /dev/fbs/pfb1 left -nobanner

...all on one line, of course. Now reboot. The CDE login screen should come up on one display but the mouse should move seamlessly between the two.

Now fix WindowMaker - the trick is knowing that xinit can allow you to completly specify the X server to use. So I made an alias to start WindowMaker like this:

  alias wm 'xinit ~/.xinitrc-wmaker -- /usr/openwin/bin/Xsun
     +xinerama -dev /dev/fbs/pfb0 -dev /dev/fbs/pfb1 left >>&! /dev/null'

with this, I can start it easily and get both heads working as they should.

It's taken months but the final trick to getting stability into the BBGServer has been to take all references to the Bloomberg API out of the main server and place it into a simple, small, single-threaded, C app that can be loaded and run from the server. The idea is that Bloomberg's API is itself not thread-safe. It can't handle several requests coming and going, and everything I tried to do with locking didn't change that basic fact.

So I created a simple C app that would open up a socket connection back to the server and wait for requests to process. When it received a request it sent it to Bloomberg via it's own connection and then waited for the response. When it got the response, it sent it back to the server and waited for another request on the socket. This was the ticket... get Bloomberg in it's own application with only one request pending at a time.

What's happened is that as soon as I put that into the code things stabilized. No more Bus Errors. No more crashes. It was a wonderful sight.

I was doing some malloc checking on Solaris today and noticed that I was getting a malloc trap on the auto-detect Sybase library version method of SQLAPI++. You can have the library determine the version of the library in use or you can specify it manually. Up to this point, I've been doing the auto-detection with the code:

    mDBConnection.setOption("CS_VERSION") = "Detect";
    mDBConnection.setOption("CS_APPNAME") = "myApp";
    ...
    mDBConnection.Connect(server, user, password, SA_Sybase_Client);
    ...

but in the Connect() method the malloc checker saw a problem. So, now I'm trying to set the version I know I'm using (12.5) with the code:

    mDBConnection.setOption("CS_VERSION") = "CS_VERSION_125";
    mDBConnection.setOption("CS_APPNAME") = "myApp";
    ...
    mDBConnection.Connect(server, user, password, SA_Sybase_Client);
    ...

Tests are looking much better so far, and that's really encouraging.

OK, in the saga of the FTP SSL/TLS problem I've come to a wonderful find. FTPeel from Freshly Squeezed Software in FL has an SFTP, FTPS, FTP client that looks as nice as Transmit. It doesn't have the "your stuff"/"their stuff" two-pane approach, rather it has a single view on the remote data that you can download, edit and upload. It's clean, simple, and works perfectly well with Comcast and that's all I need.

Seems like a lot of digging to find this, but now that I have, I'm an owner and that means great upgrades, etc. Gotta love that.

Last Friday I was dealing with a vendor that I haven't had the best luck with when dealing with problems in their code. Typically, their company policy has been that we (meaning I) must be the problem and we just aren't using it in the way it was intended. This in interesting as we are their only customer, but let's forget that for now and get to the real problem - me. I get way too bent out of shape when I deal with these people. I get upset because their calm, cool, demeanor as they say it's all my fault reminds me of the sales person in the Monty Python skit The Pet Shop. And I'm the guy with the dead bird!

OK... there it is. I've been able to find why it bothers me so much. I love Monty Python, and I can so understand the incredible frustration of the guy with the dead parrot. Here he is, trying to get someone who sold him a dead bird to care that he sold him said, dead, bird. Put in these terms it's clear why the person is calm - he knows that there's nothing he has to do. He has all the cards - the other guy has the dead parrot and he has the money. All he has to do is to not say or do anything illegal and chances are, the guy will leave. Give them nothing to fight against, and there will be no fight.

This is such an interesting philosophy! I have to agree that prior to writing this down I hadn't seen it in this light. Now that I see it in this light, I'm not sure what the best approach is to solving this problem of mine is. You see, I still have the horribly built code (dead parrot) and unfortunately I can't just bury it in the backyard. I have to live with it.

If I were to take a page from their playbook I'd pass this along as a nice, living parrot and let the users figure out that it's dead. But this has a problem - the customer won't ever go into that Pet Shop again, and I can't have the users thinking I'm no smarter than the Pet Shop employee, so I need a better alternative. Hmmm... what can it be?

What I need is to have something that the vendor wants - that I can control, be just as dead (useless) as my parrot and then we can trade - I'll give you a live cat if you give me a live parrot. Interesting idea... now what can they want that I can say is alive when it's as good as dead to them? Hmmm...

Got it! I did some tests on their code and it's in a terrible state - memory problems, and their hurried design of the new updating scheme has got some serious problems. So I've suggested another way to achieve the same ends, and all they have to do is to unroll the changes due to the new updating scheme and put in a new feature for me and it'll be working like a charm. Wonder if they'll take it...

What really helps is that I know I'm the guy with the dead parrot... whenever they start to get to me now, I just have to giggle as I know I'm the guy holding the dead parrot, and the trick is to try and have at least a little fun with the ex-parrot... the one that is no more...

Well... I finally got all the information I needed from WebPipe (and Leslie) to get their web site up and running on the production host. What a wonderful group of folks! They have top-notch servers, darn good response time and the price is just too good to be true. With the database information I built the database and set the constants on the server-side PHP scripts to the proper values and Voila! it worked like a charm.

Well... I did notice a few style problems that were easy enough to fix, and I finally did a proper job of making sure all the references to North Hollow Farm were in the singular, but that's something I should have done a long time ago. Better now than wait for this to go live and have to worry about fixing them while it's live.

More good news is that the site seems to work fine with the counter from SoVer.net - which was a concern for me. I'm sure that WebPipe would have something to handle the page hits, but it's nice that we don't have to hassle with that for the time being. Lucky break we cought on that one.

I also mailed off to someone who sells SGI hardware a question I have about the maximum RAM I can fit into my Indigo². I have read conflicting reports, and I wanted to get the straight story from a good supplier. SGI says the max is 384MB, while I've read it can go to 640MB. If this is the case, then I can certainly see getting a memory upgrade from 256MB to 640MB to make things a lot faster. Right now, Netscape and CVS are a lot slower than I want, and I'm looking for something to give them a boost.

Then again... it's not going to be anything like the Blackbird x4 I get in a few weeks...

I started the process of moving naturalmeat.com from Cydian to WebPipe by going to Network Solutions (their registrar) and starting the move. I changed the technical contact to Leslie and then told her what to do with the email Network Solutions would be sending her. So it's on the way!

Leslie has checked on the web site, and likes it, so it looks like we're ready to go. Once the domain is changed, I'll go in to the constants and put naturalmeat.com in place of the WebPipe tag, but that's only cosmetic. The WebPipe site is up and ready to go, and I've done 98% of the work myself. No need to worry about this anymore... I can certainly handle it.