Fragmented Development

One of the perks of my job is the flexible schedule that goes along with it - I come in around ten, and nobody minds too much if I'm a couple (20) minutes late as long as I make up the time somewhere else.

One of the crappy parts of my job is the flexible schedule that goes along with it - I leave at six, unless I'm not done.

Tonight was one of those nights. We were upgrading one of the servers, and since I work after hours, I was the prime candidate for doing it. Just a simple RAM upgrade, right? No problem. Except it's a server upgrade, and the servers in question just happen to house the financial system that manages the whole county's purchasing and payroll. Goody goody.

So shortly after 5:30 PM, I start hunting down the stragglers that are still logged in (turning off the financial system with people working on it is a great way to get your tea poisoned), and Payroll informs me that they can be done by 6:00 PM. So, I'm starting after my shift ends. But six rolls around, they log off, and I get started.

For those of you who have never seen a server room, it looks like this: There are dozens of servers sandwiched together in what we affectionately call a "rack". If they're put in right, it's a great way to conserve space. If they're not, it's a great way to make them hard to work on.

The first server was not easy to get out. Instead of being mounted on rails that slide out, it was simply screwed to the side of the rack. So, instead of sliding it out and doing the upgrade, I had to wrench the thing out of place and plop it on a desk somewhere. The case required two people to open, so I had to grab a janitor - The night crew are great people. Anyways, that was finished with, so I wrestled it back into place and moved on to server #2.

The first thing I noticed was that this server was installed right, and slid right out. The rails it was on kept it suspended in mid-air right in front of me, which was nice.

The second thing I noticed was that it was completely exposed already. There was no case to remove, I was already staring at the internals of the server. Apparently the last time anyone worked on this server, they neglected to put the case back on. That was three years ago.

If one of the battery backups directly above this server had leaked, the County could have lost millions of dollars in records (all the way back to 2004), as well as millions of dollars worth of work. I quickly did my maintenance, dug the rest of the case out of a corner, and reassembled the thing.

I ended up getting out an hour late, but everything went pretty flawlessly with the upgrades. All in all, things could have gone much worse, and this has definitely shown me how valuable a good initial setup is. Without it, everything from that point on becomes an exercise in torture.

I recently set up the spell check functionality in my text editor, something I have been meaning to do for quite a while. I am migrating the county to a new layout, and I'm revising the text of pages as I go along. Because misspelled words reflect very poorly on the author and their credibility, I thought that spell checking everything couldn't hurt.

I should have been doing this years ago, as I have discovered spelling errors on current wordings as well as the new type I'm adding. For instance, if you visited the government page in the past few years, you could have used one of our helpful links to get a listing of all the "deptartments" in the federal government.

The text editor I use, PsPad, has a built-in spell check function, as does Adobe Dreamweaver. If you use any of these editors, use the spell check function. If you use another editor, make sure it has this feature. While I haven't thought much of spell check in the past, I would now put it alongside syntax highlighting in matter of importance. The best web site out there is only as good as it's content, so make sure your content is correctly spelled!

I recently checked out the browser statistics page over at W3 Schools, and was pleasantly surprised by what I saw. The chart indicated that Firefox had grown to a 31% market share in the year of January. Holy smokes! Do we have the kind of leverage we need to influence the standards compliance of Microsoft's Internet Explorer? Will they finally have to clean up their act to stay alive in the browser game?

...No. No they won't. Unfortunately, the rosy statistics displayed on the browser statistics chart are not being felt everywhere just yet. On all of the pages I manage, I've only been able to see a small drop in IE's supremacy over the past year or so. On the whole, my traffic statistics tell me that 90% of my visitors are still using IE 6 or IE 7. Firefox usually has the second highest percentage, between 5-10%, with browsers like Safari and others making up the slack. Even if I did see the kind of statistics that W3 does, I would still have to make IE compatibility one of my top priorities. If it doesn't render perfectly in IE, then it's not worth my time, because the majority of my visitors would not see the best quality available.

Hopefully, whatever market share percentage it is losing will help Microsoft to realize that it's users are looking for a better experience. I do not believe IE7 delivers that just yet, but I have high hopes for the next few iterations of the browser. Microsoft has seen different alternatives gaining popularity due to the problems they've faced, and will have to start cleaning up their act if they wish to secure their future as a contender in the browser market.

I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to print it anymore.

For the love of cranberries, folks. I have a big problem with web sites that look fine and readable on the screen, but look like a train wreck when you print it out. It would be easier to overlook if it wasn't for the ease of setting up a printer friendly stylesheet.

Creating a stylesheet that's only used when printing saves toner/ink, paper, and a lot of frustration. How many times have you printed out a great article, or a solution to a problem, only to find that half the text is chopped off? That only half of the paper is used by content, and the rest is used up by ads and navigation links that are useless on a printed page? Setting styles in place to hide navigation and other web-only elements is a very easy way to make your page much more usable, and maybe even keep visitors from going elsewhere. Here's a simple way to use external stylesheets to do the trick:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="print.css" media="print" />

So please, if you have content that you can print, create a stylesheet for print media. It's easy, and adds a level of quality to your site that's very noticeable.

I received my first comment on this blog the other day.

I don't believe I write just to get feedback, so I don't mind if my blog goes unnoticed. It doesn't really bother me. However, getting a comment does kinda let you know that there's someone out there that likes what you're writing. Somebody who can use what you're putting out there.

So, when I saw the number of comments on my most recent entry had increased to one, I was pretty excited. I opened up the entry, and lo and behold...

There was twelve pages of mumbo-jumbo and a dozen links at the bottom. I had been spammed.

So, I enabled comment moderation, and re-published the blog. Lesson learned. I guess CAPTCHAS can't keep the spammers at bay forever...

The Project: Bring the Warren County Tourism web site in-house, taking control from a vendor that was payed $1 million last year for that and other tourism-related work.

The Site: In existence for the better part of seven years, it has passed from vendor to vendor. The initial vendor coded using ColdFusion and CFML, and their stuff was written for ColdFusion 4. The newest guys have been coding in PHP, and somewhere someone tossed in some ASP.NET. It's database driven, uses Flash, and the source for the page weighs in at 400 MB. That's without the database of content, too. The table listing for the database is two pages long.

Time frame: Six weeks, starting last Monday.

Can we do it? As the only web developer at Warren County, I'm a little bit worried to say the least. I've got one of our programmers helping me out with database and project details, and my department head is keeping the bureaucratic bullshit off of our backs, making sure we can do our jobs. We may be hiring consultants, we may be buying servers. I may be buying stock in Pepsi Co. and Mountain Dew, just because I believe I will be investing quite a bit in their product soon.

But I think we can do it. At least get it working, at the very least.

Can we do it by December 31st, when the contract runs out with the old guys, and the switchover happens whether we're ready or not? Well, I don't think it matters what I think there. It's gonna happen one way or another, even if I have to sit myself in front of a terminal and write the HTTP response headers myself. Come January 1st, 2007, you're going to be able to open the tourism page without any problem. The question is, how much of Christmas will I be around to enjoy? :-)

I've been trying to phase out my use of proprietary software like Microsoft Office, just because it makes a lot of sense to me. Not paying for software, supporting open source, using open document formats: all wonderful things. But, using products like OpenOffice.org has a few disadvantages: one of which I have overcome today.

One of the things I really enjoy about Microsoft Excel is it's well-placed hot key to bring up the 'Cell Formatting' dialog. By pressing CTRL+1, you are given all the options you need for the cell you're currently working in.

OpenOffice.org, however, does not have any default hot key set to the 'Cell Formatting' dialog. I didn't lose sleep or anything over this, but it was definitely the raspberry seed in my rectum - err, wisdom tooth - for quite a while now. Often I could be heard in the office, swearing a dark oath to my pagan computer gods, that I would do anything for that simple shortcut. Well, the dark lords have heeded my call, and I will share their sweet, forbidden knowledge with you.

OpenOffice.org, being cooler than sliced bread, allows you to customize your keyboard shortcuts. To do this, go to the 'View' menu, and under the 'Toolbox' sub-menu, select 'Customize...'. From there, if you click on the 'Keyboard' tab, you can assign all sorts of keyboard shortcuts to all sorts of functions. The particular one I was interested in was the CTRL+1 combination. To change that shortcut, I simply clicked on the combination, and chose the dialog box I wanted. In this case, it was under the 'Format' category and the 'Format Cells' function.

The only difficulty I ran into was due to a misunderstanding on my part. At first, I was looking for 'Cells...' under the function section, because that's what it says in the 'Format' drop-down menu. Instead, functions are either sorted by the name of the function, or the dialog box they call up. When you click on the 'Cells...' menu option, it brings up the 'Format Cells' dialog box.

One more step on being completely happy with free and open source software. It's the little things that keep me going.

I'm not sure whether I've discussed this before are not, but I have a very big part in a very large choice that's about to take place in our office. We're at a turning point in the IT department, one that will effect us for a very long time - possibly the next decade or so. We need to decide on a development language to use: for web, for applications, and anything else we might do.

Currently, we are using FoxPro for our desktop applications, and PHP on the web side. Our IT Director is pretty pro-Microsoft, and only allowed me to use PHP when an old co-worker informed him of how much they were using it at his current place of employment. However, he's pretty much on the fence about where we should go next.

Microsoft has shown no interest in supporting FoxPro, even though it's a fantastically fast language that comes built-in with it's own database. That leaves our in-house applications looking like they were straight out of Windows 3.1. Our director would like to (if possible) use a unified language for both web and application development, because he would like to see the two become much more closely tied. "The web is the future", as they say.

So, we're re-writing an in house application in ASP.NET to see what it's like. I have a bunch of PHP development under my belt, so I know what that's like. So, my opinion will have a big part in the final choice.

Here's hoping my opinion leads to the best answer...

Here at the County, we're getting hammered by a web crawler named "Pita+". The only information it provides for itself (and the only information I could find on it) was an e-mail address, which was 'webmaster' at 'pita.stanford college'. It didn't actually say 'pita.stanford college', but I'd rather keep that e-mail address spam free, even if it's spamming our site.

Here at the county, we sit on a lowly T1 line, which means getting hammered is pretty effective; and here at the county, we have around two gigs of downloadable schtuff. So, getting hammered by an over-zealous web crawler is really kicking the internet line's ass.

For now, I've added a line to our Robots.txt file disallowing the files being assaulted, and e-mailed the webmaster to see if Pita+ will obey robot guidelines such as "Crawl-Delay". However, our upstream bandwidth is still hitting the roof, and I'm currently only able to "ask politely" for them to stop. Perhaps, if this continues, I'll look into more forceful ways of controlling our visitors.

Oh, if you're interested, here's the full user string for the robot:

171.64.75.174 Pita+(webmaster@pita.stanford.edu

A few days ago, the tallest building in Glens Falls caught fire. It was an electrical fire on the 10th floor, and it shut down the building and almost every office in it.

The Warren County Office for the Aging is located on the 3rd floor of that building. They got the next day off.

Two days after it happened, we had them up and running in a small spare room in the municipal center. Instead of missing their files and not being able to work, their biggest worry was the annoying squeak of their hand-me-down chairs.

We had their server up and running within three hours of being allowed into the building to retrieve it. Six spare workstations were converted into fully-functional OFA PCs before they arrived. Their phones had been forwarded to the new room, with no changes visible to the outside. By the time I arrived to work that day, they had full access to everything they had at their office. The robustness and scalability of our network surpassed even my expectations so much that the only thing they could complain about were the squeaky chairs.

This is the power of a well run network, this is the result of our IT department organizing and becoming a force to reckon with. And the best thing?

We've only begun. I love my job.

Our Telecomm guy had a suprise for me the other day: one of the DAs was getting a Blackberry, and he had it for a little bit. He stopped by, and brought up the Warren County web site.

No CSS, No Javascript. Just the beautiful text of our site, and a few images that aren't gracefully implemented yet. All of the useability crap I've been struggling to implement actually payed off. Fantastic.

It's good to know that some of the things that we do as web designers is not just because it's the "Right Thing To Do". Somebody's going to enjoy using our site because we put effort into being useable. Kinda makes it easier to go back and hack through another accessibility hell with the next new page, you know?

This has been driving me crazy for YEARS! Adobe Acrobat's Distiller feature constantly crashes, no matter what I'm using it for. But now, I have a solution.

You know that little 'acrotray.exe' program that Adobe has running in the background? The one that most people eliminate because it just takes up memory? Well, turns out it is required to run the Distiller. Open it up, and all your Distiller woes are gone.

Thanks go to Frederik Slijkerman for the solution. Found his post on a message board.

Recently at work, I received a new workstation. This was necessary, because my old workstation was pretty quirky and very slow. But that's neither here nor there.

After getting my workstation set to my liking, I ended up browsing the web a little bit. A few pages in, I noticed that I wasn't getting any ads. 'That's funny,' I thought to myself, 'I haven't installed AdBlock yet.' A few more pages, and it hit me; I hadn't installed Flash yet, either. After that, the waves of epiphany came crashing down.

Flash has never touched my workstation, and I don't think it ever will. Most web sites are perfectly useable without flash, and many that aren't are not worth visiting in the first place. As an added bonus, I haven't been asked to "Hit the Monkey" or "Stretch the President" or "Claim your free iPod" since I went about this behavior. That creepy 'talking head', advertising speech synthesis services, has all but disappeared. The dancing silhouette girl? She's a no-show.

Not having to deal with obtrusive, annoying flash ads is a great benefit to keeping the plugin away from my browser, and I highly recommend it to anyone who is less concerned with being the lucky 317,496th visitor and more concerned with getting stuff done.

The plain red second hand of the plain brown wall clock struck twelve, registering ten thirty in the morning. It was Saturday; a single bead of cold sweat rolled down my left temple. It was time. With a few quick keystrokes, I opened Remote Desktop and type in the name of our web server.

I was ready for this, damnit. I even had a test server to the right of me, humming along, in which I had tested the upgrade yesterday. It was still there, perfectly intact, running a near mirror of the software we were using on the web server. Everything was fine - it actually went unnervingly well. Upgrades never go this well, but there it was. I had meticulously crafted a set of instructions, documenting each step. I had tackled just about everything. I even had a maintenance web site set up in IIS, one that would catch unwary visitors that tried loading the page during the maintenance window, and inform them of what was happening. Like I said, I was ready for this.

With the maintenance site in place, catching any traffic that hit the web server, I took down the main site. I clicked around the management console quickly, efficiently changing references and upgrading the script engine that our templates use. After the last component of IIS was altered to use the new version, I held my breath and re-started the main site. The maintenance web site was still catching all traffic, so I could safely test the site inside the sterile environment of our office, instead of opening it up to the world and hoping for the best. So I opened up a web browser and called up the main page of our site.

Invalid access to memory location

"Run for it rollback restore from backup move to Mexico blame it on the network guy switch back to static HTML check over the instructions just do SOMETHING!" ran through my mind as the error registered with my brain. Invalid access to memory location? What a rather vague, rather dire error message. Luckily, I knew there were very few differences between the main web server and the test server I had set up: one of which involved application pools.

On the web server, I had created a separate application pool as an attempted fix for IIS errors I keep receiving. After switching back to the Default app pool, I loaded up the site once again, praying to the secret technology deity that people don't like to talk about. The site appeared flawless, but I wasn't convinced. I loaded up a page I knew depended on scripts quite heavily, the contact scripts, and sent a message to myself. Moments later, my mail client 'dinged'. Crisis averted. We were patched, and the server now had the latest version and was a little more secure because of it.

This behind-the-scenes computer work is why I love the field of technology. The fact that anyone working in IT is fighting a secret war against crackers and script kiddies is sometimes exhausting, sometimes exhilarating. Forever patching, watching exploits, trying to stay ahead of the game. Sure, most of the work we do is thankless, but it does come with a sense of pride. Knowing that everyone else in the industry knows how hard keeping up to date is definitely gives you a vague sense of community. If that isn't enough satisfaction, the adrenaline rush after a successful upgrade is enough to keep me hooked.

All ye connecting with phoneline modems, all ye who make sandwiches while waiting for files to download, I feel your pain. For I am a web minimalist.

You can often find me pouring over HTML, over CSS, looking to trim out unneeded characters. Comments are wonderful for explaining the reasoning behind code, but with CSS and HTML, visitors download those explanations along with the code that makes everything work. Comments had to go. When I found out that the normal hexadecimal format for naming colors (a pound sign [#] followed by six numbers) could be simplified for any colors within the web-safe 256 colors, I instantly shrank all of my blacks and whites (along with anything else I could). It only saved three bytes here and there, but I like to think about it using ridiculous figures.

In 2005, the Warren County web site had 158,569 hits (that were recorded; We don't monitor all pages yet). Let's say we get that many this year as well (even though it looks like we'll get more). The size of the Warren County web site main page, in 2005, came in around 83.4 KB. If that was downloaded 158,569 times, that rings in around... 13.2 GB of traffic. Holy shit.

With my minimalistic tendencies, I've gotten it down to about 59.17 KB, all while adding three 300px X 150px images. You have no idea how happy this makes me. But nevertheless, if this page was downloaded as many times as the 2005 version was, the total bandwidth used would be 9.4 GB. Saving nearly 4 GB a year in bandwidth is nothing to shake a stick at.

Regardless, this is not a highly trafficked site. Simple CSS and HTML minimalism, applied to a site that gets millions of hits a month, could theoretically save a company thousands in bandwidth costs, not to mention saving those with slow connections the trouble of having to download your bulky site. Our smaller site takes a little over one second on a full 56K connection, which must come as a great relief to people that use that to come to our site. In the age of multi-megabyte web sites with flash, videos, music, and more, the guys who keep their sites small seem to fall into good favor with search engines - and the percentage of people still dialing into the internet.