Photography

Back in June I picked up a Nikon D90 and started doing a bit of photography. I have been taking classes and attending meetups and feel confident now I have moved from noob to beginner. With that being said I am planning to roll out a new category in the blog for photography to post about the cool things I learn, and in tradition with everything I do, post up some “code” (in this case Lightroom presets) I am creating.

Blog Topics

I find myself going back and forth between branching into separate blogs and then consolidating. I have a couple of ideas for some new blogs and depending on if I can get some cowriters to work with me, they may end up being new categories or entire blogs unto themselves. Most of them deal with social media, but I am hoping not to rant on about the whole “why your company should use twitter” topic that has been repeated over and over, but do more case studies, critiques, etc.

Well like I said, this is a short one… still have a lot of work before the holidays!

My requirements:

• Had to run Ruby on Rails
• Had to support a web server with virtual hosts
• Had to be able to run WordPress
• Had to be accessible via Windows
• Had to be remotely manageable

Now I have been using linux for a long time, so I didn’t evaluate other solutions. It is free, reliable and Ubuntu is relatively painless to administer. That being said, if you have never used linux before I wouldn’t recommend it for a production environment for a beginner, I would however suggest you get a linux box and familiarize yourself with it for down the road.

So with my requirements outlined, I identified that I needed a linux desktop running Apache, MySQL with PHP and Passenger (modrails for Ruby). There are other web servers and database servers (the latest version of passenger runs under nginx) but I wanted to use something that was super well documented and had tons of tools available for any need I might possibly have. Basically I stuck with your standard heavy hitters.

Ubuntu Installation

Ok, so the first thing I did was download Ubuntu 9.04 from www.ubuntu.com. It was an ISO image and I burned it to a dvd. I used the 64 bit version as my development server is 64 it, but I don’t think anything I did should be different with the 32 bit. One thing I do with all my development servers is I remove all the unnecessary hardware. This server is never an actual desktop for me so I took out the soundcard, an extra DVD writer and an extra USB card. I do this just because I am never going to use these features with this machine and the less hardware the less problems with installation/maintenance. I stuck my dvd and went through the default Ubuntu install… nothing special.

Updates

Once I got Ubuntu up and running the first thing I do is update it to include all the latest patches/updates. Bring up a terminal (Under Applications > Accessories) and type the following commands:

sudo apt-get update

and once that is complete:

sudo apt-get upgrade

Now my machine is all up to date.

IP Address

By default your machine should/will probably pick up an IP address from DHCP from your router or some other method. You will want to pick out a static IP address and setup your machine so you can use Apache and name based virtual domains. This is a little tricky to follow so let me break it down:

1. I want a domain name for each of my client projects that is online all the time (I don’t want to share like 3 generic web servers and upload and download all the time).
2. I want that domain accessible from any machine inside my network.
3. I want to have an unlimited amount of domains.

Luckily I can have it all for the bargain price of 8 bucks a year from godaddy. I ran over to go daddy and bought the domain milabs.org (as in My Labs). Call it whatever you want, it doesn’t matter … noone will ever see it but you. NOTE: If you don’t happen to mind having your development server at 192.168.2.15, you can actually use my domain “milabs.org”, but I will get into that in a moment. I registered the domain and used MediaTemple to point a wildcard DNS entry for *.milabs.org to 192.168.2.15, which is the IP address I have chosen for my development machine. Now 192.168.2.* is my internal network so my browser inside my network resolves the domain just fine and points it to my development server, noone else in the world can get to it. Infact if you try to, it will just resolve internally to your own network (that is if you use 192.168.2.* as your network). This is why if we all used 192.168.2.* as our networks and all had our development machines at 192.168.2.15 we could all use the same domains… and hey if you buy a domain and happen to use some other variation like 192.168.1.2 for example, you can post your domain here and others can share that and save a couple of bucks.

SO anyway, I go under System > Preferences > Network Connections and I set my server to use a static IP address of 192.168.2.15

Remote Desktop

I use a primarily windows environment for my “front end”, plus my development server is actually not even plugged into a monitor 99% of the time, so I want to remotely be able to administrate it. I can do so using good old VNC. You can set it up on the server by going to System > Preferences > Remote Desktop and check “Allow other users to view your desktop” and UNCHECK “You must confirm each access to this machine”. Now using windows or mac or whatever environment you want you can a VNC client from many different sources… I would surf around google… there are tons of free ones and each one has some custom features that you may want. I just stick with RealVNC cause it is free and simple.

Once you have your VNC client installed, just fire it up, type in your IP address and you should be able to remotely administer your linux box.

File Sharing with Samba

Ok so now I want to get a share on my windows server that I can do my work on my windows apps (photoshop, illustrator, e) but write to my linux machine so the “work” can be “used” by apache or rails or whatever I am working on. Using Samba you can make linux shares accessible to windows (and vice versa, but I am not going to cover that here).

My configuration:

• My ubuntu user name is lwallenstein
• I want to share my home directory as all my work goes into a directory called workspace under my home.

To install samba, run the following command from your terminal:

sudo apt-get install samba smbfs

Once you have completed the installation, you now need to add a samba user and configure that user for access.

sudo gedit /etc/samba/smb.conf

and search for:

;  security = user

and replace (uncomment and add an additional line) it with:

security = user
username map = /etc/samba/smbusers

Save the file.

Next we need to add a samba user. I suggest to keep things simple, you use your ubuntu user name for your samba user name. My user name is lwallenstein, you will obviously want to replace this with your user:

sudo smbpasswd -a lwallenstein

We then need to add a user map to tell it “this samba user is the same as this ubuntu user”. This is why I use the same user name, it makes things simple.

sudo gedit /etc/samba/smbusers

Add your user account in the format <ubuntuusername> = “<samba username>”, so for example mine would look like:

lwallenstein = "lwallenstein"

Save the file.

Last thing we need to do is share our home directory on linux for the windows servers to be able to find:

sudo gedit/etc/samba/smb.conf

Find and uncomment below three lines

[homes]
comment = Home Directories
browseable = yes

and add the following line directly underneath browseable = yes:

 writable = yes

Save the file.

Thats it. All we need to do now is restart Samba and you should be able to see your shares under your Network on your windows machine:

sudo /etc/init.d/samba restart

Ruby On Rails

So I have many Ruby on Rails projects going on. I don’t want to run mongrel or thin for each one, but just like with my client web servers I want them to be “on” all the time. So this is super easy to do with Apache and Passenger, but before I get there, I have to install Ruby, Rubygems and Rails:

sudo apt-get install ruby irb rdoc ruby1.8-dev libopenssl-ruby imagemagick curl
wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/55066/rubygems-1.3.2.tgz
tar xzvf rubygems-1.3.2.tgz
cd rubygems-1.3.2
sudo ruby setup.rb
cd /usr/bin
sudo ln -s gem1.8 gem
sudo gem update --system
sudo gem install rails passenger mongrel capistrano

This simply installs Ruby, gets rubygems, installs rubygems, does a symlink for the command gem1.8 so it accessible by the command “gem” and then installs the rails, passenger, mongrel and capistrano gems.

Apache

Ok so now we have our machine, with its nice shares and RoR running. Of course the power in this setup is the ability to have customer web sites so that like if I have customers Apple, Bannanas and Orange I can get to their sites at http://apple.milabs.org, http://bannanas.milabs.org and http://orange.milabs.org. So next we need to install and configure apache (with PHP and Passenger/Modrails):

sudo apt-get install apache2 php5 libapache2-mod-php5 apache2-prefork-dev libapr1-dev
sudo passenger-install-apache2-module

Next we need to configure Apache to load the Passenger module (and use a development environment as Passenger uses a production environment by default):

sudo gedit /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/passenger.load

and add the following lines to the blank file:

LoadModule passenger_module /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/passenger-2.2.1/ext/apache2/mod_passenger.so
PassengerRoot /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/passenger-2.2.1
PassengerRuby /usr/bin/ruby1.8
RailsEnv development

Save the file.

Restart Apache so it will load Passenger:

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

You may get some errors about not reliably being able to determine the server’s fully qualified domain name, you can ignore them. They are just warnings and are benign.

Now we are done with Apache, but before I go into configuring client environments, lets get MySQL installed and out of way.

MySQL

MySQL is pretty simple to straight forward to setup. I setup MySQL in my development environment using the user root with a blank password:

sudo apt-get install mysql-server libmysql-ruby php5-mysql

Virtual Hosts/Client Configurations

Ok, this is what makes it all worth while. For each client we want a development environment so that we can use:

http://clientname.domainname.com

to access their files, whether it be a static web site, a ruby project, a wordpress installation… basically a web project.

Now we configured the server to a static IP address and registered a domain name and using a wildcard DNS entry we pointed the domain to the server. This mean *.domainname.com will resolve to our development server. * being anything. So using the wild card we never have to think about DNS again… it just resolves anything I type in to the server and NOW Apache will decide if there is data configured for that domain name and respond if there is.

For each of my clients I need to setup a virtual host configuration. This is fairly simple:

cd /etc/apache2/sites-enabled

For each of my clients I need to create a virtual host file using and tell Apache what domain name I want to use and where to point it. For my example I am going to make a virtual host for a company I work with called Kiobo. So I create the file:

sudo gedit kiobo

and in the file I am going to tell it to respond to kiobo.milabs.org and point it to my kiobo files in /home/lwallenstein/workspace/clients/kiobo/www

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName kiobo.milabs.org
DocumentRoot /home/lwallenstein/workspace/clients/kiobo/www/
</VirtualHost>

Save the file.

Restart Apache for the new virtual host to be loaded (ignore the warnings)

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Now if I use my browser on my windows box and go to http://kiobo.milabs.org I now see my web site I created for Kiobo. I can edit the files using my E text editor on Windows and Apache will use PHP or Passenger/Modrails to do any development processing.

Thats It!

UPDATE: I got this in an email andI am sure it will be helpful to some of you, so I thought I woudl share:

Joseph Barnes of RAD Solutions, Inc. wrote:

I tried a little trick since I didn’t have a fixed IP address.  I registered a domain with HostMonster.com  then I changed the DNS servers to FreeDNS and pointed them back to the same servers/ip addresses as they were when HostMonster resolved them.  Then I added a subdomain DNS server using Dynamic DNS, install Bind 9 configuring it to resolve internally and externally separately using view.  To add additional virtual apache servers for each contract I used ispconfig 3 which allowed virtual apache, ftp and mail for each contract/client.  Unfortunately Comcast scans the ports so I had to get the log from my router and block the Comcast security but by then they had blocked my dns and mail ports which I had to switch to alternate unblocked ports.  It’s an alternative but was a pain to figure out why internal and my dmz things resolved but didn’t from internet.

As it stands Embark will include the following features:

• User Management
  • User SignUp
    • Standard SignUp
    • OpenID SignUp
    • Facebook Connect SignUp
  • Retrieve Password
  • Edit Profile
  • Delete Account
  • User Page
• Administrative Tool
  • Dashboard Report (How Many Users)
  • Query Tables
  • Delete Accounts
• oAuth Integration
• Capistrano Recipes for deployment and maintenance

We are looking to you the community to see what other sorts of standard things… things you would find in 90% of the web apps out there, to include in our framework. So leave a comment and let us know if there is anything you would like to see or feel free to follow the project and contribute!

• WordPress Themes
• Web Site Inspiration Galleries
• Color Inspiration
• Icons
• Tutorials
• Adobe Photoshop Brushes
• Firefox Extensions
• Visualizations
• Fonts
• Flash
• JavaScript

You can find all my delicious bookmarks at http://www.delicious.com/lwallenstein

Also, when I start a project I use one of the following “frameworks”:

• Standard Web Project
• WordPress Web Project

Hope this helps!

NOTE: This theme is still very beta … I would love to get some feedback across multiple operating systems and multiple browsers. Please feel free to contribute any changes in Github.

Like many designers a good chunk of my projects involve WordPress and customizing WordPress themes. My coding process typically starts with taking the default theme and coding in my new design. The default WordPress theme, Kubrick, was designed by Michael Heilemann many years ago and the WordPress team adopted it and it now gets included with every version of WordPress that you download. Unfortunately this theme isn’t maintained what so ever, infact Mr Heilemann doesn’t even use WordPress anymore.

I can see why Kubrick was chosen as the WordPress default. It is clean, modern and simple. Unfortunately from a design perspective, I find it a nightmare to work with. This is probably because of the age of the code, but the lack of things like resets, the structure of the page and just some bizzarre code choices force me to do a lot of work before I even start my design work.

I am fed up with it.

The Theme

So here is Designers Default. It is a modification of Kubrick, designed to look and function just like Kubrick but “updated” in concepts and code. If you aren’t a designer, you aren’t going to appreciate this, because beyond some small visual changes, it will look just like Kubrick from the outside.

From a coder perspective, that is a whole other story.

Designers Default includes things like …

• Eric Meyer’s Reset template included ( http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/css/reset/)
• 960 Grid Template (http://960.gs/)) added for easy sizing control.
• Print stylesheet added for cleaner blog printing – hides useless components when you print like footer and sidebar
• CSS Templates added for IE6 and IE7 Exceptions
• IE6 Transparent PNG fix included.
• Debugging CSS Added (Commented Out) for easy theme debugging
• Post content broken out into seperate template to reduce repetition
• Navigation content broken out into seperate template to reduce repetition
• About template broken out to make it easier for beginners to edit.
• XHTML 1.0 Strict doctype
• Moved About Post data into definition lists
• Comments put on each template so you can tell what to edit by looking at the source.
• Comments put in the CSS source for quick changes.
• Header broken into layered transparent images so you can change the color with a simple hex or upload an image to be the background.
• Page frame broken into layered transparent images so you can change the color of the background with a simple hex
• Added RSS Icons to footer.
• Added Calendar and Tag Cloud added to sidebar and styled – just so you can see it is there.
• Page width expanded to 1024px which is the standard in page width.
• Line height on paragraph increased to 1.5em
• Includes PSD for graphics

This all being said, I think it is a great start point template. It was not built with performance in mind, meaning the code isn’t optimized or compressed as its intentions are for designers to dig in and code. If you want to compress the code at the end, go ahead… thats your business.

Right now the theme is still very beta, I probably will need to use it for a couple of client jobs and fine tune it, but it is mostly there so I figured I would share

This weekend I had the unique experience of contributing in the RailsRumble 2008 contest…. because of course I didn’t have enough to do with my customer work

Overall I think we came up with a great entry and given the fact that we only worked 48 hours on it I am really proud of what my team did. I want to thank Dan, Nate and Will for putting up with my insanity and exhastion. I couldn’t have asked for a better team.

That all being said… there are things I would do differently next time (aren’t there always?) and here are some lessons I learned for next years RailsRumble, MerbRumble (If that comes through) or any real short term app development.

Make Sure ALL Members of your Team are Prepared

Although this is really circumstancial in that this was a volunteer contest so it takes a backseat to work/life however I feel that we could have benefitted to a couple of preprep meetings over the couple of weeks before the competition. We had many document exchanges, but there is nothing like everyone getting on a call/webcam/campfire and just going over their understanding and making sure they are on the same page. Although this won’t stop technical problems from arising (and they will) this will stop those “so how do you see this working” questions in the middle of your time crunch.

Take the Next Day Off

Although I was fortunate to only have a light work load on the following Monday, I was dragging. My body was going through caffiene withdrawl and even after 14 hours sleep I was exhausted. Infact up until about an hour ago (over 36 hours after) I didn’t feel “right”. I don’t care what age you are, you just shouldn’t do that to your body…. that often

Get Sleep Before the Last Day

We started off fairly strong and slept a bit on Friday night/Saturday mornings… this got us going well on Saturday night, but come Sunday morning we were dragging and snappy at each other. Holding it together till Sunday night was rough and there was many points where I felt that I would rather sleep then finish. Perhaps being better prepared  would have helped,

Environment Preparation

I think we really excelled here. Dan spent times going through the plugins and gems we wanted to use and made sure that he understand how they worked and I did some trial runs in setting up the server and getting it up and running with github. These two tasks probably saved us tons of time in plugin/gem debugging and administration, neither which would have helped us achieve our goal in anyway. Dan wrote a great article outline the work he did before hand and I signed up to Linode and ran practice drills so I knew the environment inside and out. All that prep work aside, the Rumble threw up for a little curve by not allowing us to be administrators of our own github account so I had to setup the configuration different then planned. Having a grasp of how the system worked though was a great help as I easily adjusted my plans and we were completely 100% up and running within the first hour in terms of checking in, checking out and deploying.

Don’t take Yourself Seriously … You Win no Matter What

I think if we had taken ourselves seriously there would be a lot of disappoinment in the end. We didn’t win anything… infact we didn’t come close. I am not going to gripe or complain about it, I think Dan says everything I want to say here, but I honestly feel we can walk away proud as we created an app that I personally am in awe of as well as I think something that people can use. It is a great showpiece for our portfolio and best of all it accomplishes a goal.

To sum it up, will I do the rumble again? I dunno. Honestly if the judging/rating system doesn’t get worked out I probably won’t be doing this particular rumble again as we can easily do the same sort of thing for a portfolio piece on our time frame when we are ready…. but that being same the community was a lot of fun and I have heard whisperings around of a nonprofit rumble for all Ruby frameworks that may happen and I would definately be interested in that.

Enter social bookmarking.

Delicious and Magnolia have an unbelievable resource of information of human classified quality resources. It is a giant listing of sites that people have thought were worth saving, categoriezed by tag and updated with the freshest sites. Social Bookmarking is the future of search directories.

So to show my love for delicious and magnolia, Dan and I created Player.icio.us. Player.icio.us is basically a little app that plays bookmarks like a movie. Type in a tag word and it will “play” for you the most popular sites for that tag. We even extended it to include user names so if you want to see what your friends or fav internet celeb is up to, type in their delicious or magnolia user name and check out their latest saves.

I apologize in advance for my cold that makes me sound crazy nasily… that and I am from Jersey so, you get what you get.

As always feedback is appreciated… it is a little rough at the moment and we are working some of the bugs out, but would love to hear what you think.

I was able to turn something that seemed boring and a waste of time into an adventure… despite the sunburn and sand in my bathing suit.

Sitting here, getting ready to do another long nights work of coding, testing and design, I started to think… how can I translate this into my professional career? Well the answer seems pretty straight forward… I need to figure out how to see my job through new eyes. I need to find a way to take the same spark I get when I am learning somethign new or working with something cutting edge and bring it to my more mundane/repetative work.

So this is sort of my declaration of sorts of my plan to get more involved with perhaps a mentorship for design/UI and or find ways to take what I do and perhaps make more projects out of them… contribute to a framework or two.

I will keep you all updated as to how this is going and any comments/suggestions/stories are greatly appreciated!

danahern.com

Do you ever find yourself giving advice to others that you should really be taking yourself? My colleague Dan Ahern has recently made the switch over to the mac platform and because the fact that he is going to have to relearn everything all over again I figured it was a prime opportunity to start breaking his bad habbits… particularly that of writing really kick ass applications for the web 2.0 world, but taking advantage of none of it. We are talking a man here who writes lifestreaming, clickstream tracking and delicious mashups on a daily basis but doesn’t use any of these services (we are talking not even foxmarks to syncronize books marks people).

So I figured we would start 101, I got him to install the delicious toolbar and started poking him about his blog. We got a decent looking theme installed and set him up with a little flickr rss. I imported the like 5 blog entries he has written in the last 5 years and told him to have a go at it. He did post his first blog entry this year, so we are congrats of that.

But like most starting bloggers he asked “what should I write about?”.

Well thats a good question. I think Dan falls into the same trap most bloggers start off with… they all read like 10 blogs about some topic they are interested in and are like “wow I want to make something like this and get lots of reader!”. I myself have struggled with this issue, should I do a topic based blog? Should I make it all about work? Should I make it all about my hobby? What do my readers want?

So here is my 10 cents on the matter.

Unless you are a professional writer with no other job you are not going to be able to put in the effort/attention/details needed to research and write out well thought articles at a rate that is going to keep readers interested.

That being said, I think everyone should have a blog/homepage. Think of it as your front lawn to your internet life house. If you “work” on the internet and publish any sort of content (code, video, music, art, writing), people are going to want to know a little about you and a little about the things you do. It is of course up to you how much of it you want to put out there, but I recommend trying to be as open as you can, (I am not talking your sex life schedule… unless you want to) commentary on things you learn, events you attend, links to sites you discovered… most likely if it sparks for you it will spark for someone who is interested in the things you do. I have also found a light sprinkle of personal interaction gives your reader a human touch. Again I am not asking you to necessarily share your entire life, but did you just go out and have drinking with some colleagues and discuss a cool topic… share!

Now I know what your thinking… what if I DO want to do the research and write really kick ass articles. Well I would suggest guest blogging on more popular established blogs. If you write a well written article and submit it to blogs for consideration, there is a good chance they will publish it and credit you and link to your blog… they get free content, you get bragging rights! You will definitely get more eyes then if you start fresh on your own, and you basically will build up a following. This method also allows you to diversify your interests without discriminating your audience, ie keep your programming life and your sculpting life separated ENOUGH that it gets the attention of the interested audiences and sucks them in!

So now that I have told you all this, time for me to put together some well written articles and share… gotta walk the walk.

Working with developers is another matter all together. Now I know development is much more complex in that it isn’t as simple as passing it through a validator or pulling up a page and looking to make sure it looks right… there are infinite variables based on user input, many more environment issues and global UI operation considerations. That being said, I am shocked by the complete lack of self QA developers feel they should do before delivering code. I know there is a place for QA and I don’t expect a developer to spend hours and hours testing the intricacies of their code, but a simple things such as does the new compile run… does the page output 500 errors when I try to run it… DOES THE CODE WORK AT ALL! I would expect a developer to do some basic QA on anything they write… and I am talking SUPER basic…. does my code run at all… it the output I expected delivered … are errors handled gracefully. Thats it… I am not expecting devs to figure out if I type Japanese characters into the email address and click on the clear button on a Flash form that my code bugs out… that is what QA is for, but if you have a link to bring up a form and clicking on that doesn’t do anything and you deliver that code.. you my friend are not a good developer.

Now I know some of this is defined by the quality of the developer… a bad dev with bad habbits will always be a bad dev, but I know a lot of good devs that this seems to be happening to more and more. It seems we have an epidemic of either lazy coders or coders taking too much onto their plate and therefore the quality of their work suffering. Whatever it is, I think the development community needs to take a lesson from the web designer book and figure out whatever is wrong with their development cycle … not enough time… no testing plan at all… not having the right environments … and FIX IT. Depending soley on QA for all levels of testing extends the development cycle and utlimately reflects on you as a developer for your turn around time for projects.

When it is all said and done, you will be judged.. even if are responsive to QA requests, the fact that you have 1000 simple bugs that took time (reporting a bug, fixing, retesting) to resolve will reflect on your reputation and ultimately your pocket.