jaybonci's New Writeups

root log: May 2013 (log)

2013-05-02T15:27:54Z

This month is going to be a busy one for me. I'm a newly minted father, and work is getting busy, but that's no excuse (if my wife is not reading this) to get some things done here around the site. Hopefully I can impress upon you a sense of where things are, and where I'd like them to be.

Right now, our big design flaws are:

Themes. Themes add a decision tree when trying to see what htmlpage to choose from. It's very hard to determine which pieces of code are used where without tons of greping through the nodepack'ed xml files. It's also not super obvious which htmlpage choice we'd make when we have to fall back from the original choice of nodetype-displaytype-theme combo.
The container system. We need an actual template system, and from all of the investigation I've done, I think it's going to be Mason2. This means either installing it manually or moving to Ubuntu to get it for free. Moving to Ubuntu means we have the advantages of doing that (newer

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edev: Speeding up your vagrant environment (how-to)

2013-04-23T15:37:20Z

Hey folks. A couple of you have come to me with problems saying that the vagrant VM is very slow. There are three reasons for this, mostly because needing to turn on debugging for new users is a bit trickier than turning off debugging.

Apache is running only one thread. The reason for this is to be able to attach a debugger to that thread or to run Devel::NYTProf to figure out where things are slow. You can adjust this by editing /etc/apache2/apache2.conf and setting the servers to something a bit more sane, like:
```
<IfModule mpm_prefork_module>
        StartServers         4
        MinSpareServers      4
        MaxSpareServers      4
        MaxClients           4
        MaxRequestsPerChild  4000
</IfModule>
```
The VM is execution capped to 50% of available CPU. This is to make sure that the machine doesn't chew through every ounce of foreground power if like me, you leave it running. In the Vagrantfile:
```
  config.vm.provider :virtualbox
```

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edev: Precise-based e2 platform image beta (April 2013) (log)

2013-04-22T13:00:00Z

Hello edevers. I could use your help in testing the app. I'm rolling up the new platform application to test Ubuntu precise over Squeeze. Why might you ask? A few reasons:

Ubuntu's release train moves faster than Debian, so we get more modern components faster.
It will allow me to test our upcoming move to mysql 5.5 (from 5.1)
Amazon's default linux image is based upon Ubuntu LTS, so I don't have to spend as many cycles rolling up our own AMI. I can manage a smaller delta set between the default image and ours, instead of relying on more external AMI providers and script writers.
More modern versions of Moose and Mason2 are available as Debian packages

Debian is our current choice for platform for legacy reasons; it was nate's (and my own) distro of choice, so I continued for compatibility, in an effort to reduce the delta needed to move to AWS. I'd would however like to catch up to more modern software. Sound good? Great! I need extra eyes to test the…

root log: April 2013 (log)

2013-04-20T06:58:55Z

Hey folks. It's been a busy couple of months while my wife and I (mostly my wife), had a child, and I have been working on a longer-term technical debt project that stands in front of our redesign. I talked a bit about this in the State of the Site writeup I did a few months back.

Lessons learned on the road to UTF8

You can hit up a bunch of different websites about some of the technicals here, but this a cleanup so many years in the making. It's taken me a while to really grasp some of the technicals for how and why our database situation is the way it is.

Currently, if you take a look at the HTTP headers that go back and forth between your browser and the site, you'll notice that we always answer in iso-8859-1. This is a fancy way of saying certain english and swedish characters are here. We've long worked around this limitation by using html sequences and the hex of the code. For instance, #928 produces: Π We don't store these characters natively in most…

April 12, 2013 (person)

2013-04-13T04:08:40Z

Gwenneth Bonci, welcome to the world. I'm your dad.

6lbs, 9oz. 19 inches. Everybody's healthy.

She's beautiful. I'm so lucky. I love you, Gwen

root log: March 2013 (log)

2013-03-27T02:29:12Z

Downtime is coming! Well, at least a few hours of it, probably this weekend. I am putting the finishing touches on a very finicky and complicated operation to translate all of the database tables to utf8. This is something that has taken me all month because it's rather dangerous, and there's a huge possibility to mucking it up. The upside here is that when it is set, we'll be able to store non-latin characters in one-true-encoding. I'll announce the downtime a bit closer to the actual event, after I run everything through the appropriate level of neurotic sanity checking
Part of the results of this is checking to see whether or not certain things got truncated along the way. One thing I did find is that there are certain node titles in production that are blank. Seriously blank. node_forwards, debatecomments, tickets a few others. Cleaning those out or retitling as appropriate, but there are 86 of them to go.
Part of this retitling means that a lot of drafts that don't

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