JohnBs personal blog

I’ve just seen that Mozilla foundation have released 1.0.2 of Firefox, details available here.

Jared’s post here caught my eye. It’s an interesting concept although as he says himself - ‘a possibly pointless Fusebox tool’ may be true. I’m not sure why you’d want (or need to) mess with the application.fusebox structure at runtime - I’ve certainly never needed to. Since application.fusebox is pretty much ‘frozen’ when you change an application from development into production mode messing with the structure seems a risky business.

So in designing a new infrastructure for our public facing sites today i found a flaw in my initial design and figured i’d use my blog to find out how others are set up.

Here’s the situation. We’re going to be moving to CF Enterprise to get all the benefits it brings and as always we’re keen to keep the costs down. We’re an MS Shop, so servers will be Windows 2003 and IIS 6.0. Db is MSSQL already in place on a SQL cluster. All our sites run in a CMS.

We’re going to use Windows network load balancing between the two servers (3km apart) with a 1gb connection between the two. This is where it starts getting messy. Applications we’ve developed are simple, we know what we need to deploy so the entire application can be deployed to both physical servers. It’s the CMS that is causing me troubles. Because of the load balancing when contributors upload content (JPGs,GIFs,PDFs etc) the incoming file must be available to both servers to serve immediately. We could sync folders across the boxes but that seems like it could get complicated if we start adding more boxes. Obviously we can’t host the files on one box since (if we made them admin the site on one node and not the load balanced address) if this fails the files are unavailable so now I’m leaning towards using a clustered fileshare so both servers now access their files from a well connected file cluster. That way, incoming files are available to both both boxes without the need for folder replication etc but with a downside of potential latency between the web server and the file cluster. With trusted caching enabled we’d be able to minimise traffic so it’s only the GIFs/JPGs going to/from the file cluster after the initial requests.

Has anyone else run into a similar situation? - i’d be keen to hear how you addressed the probem.

Today I needed to get an error message over to a company whose product we use - cutting and pasting the error didn’t really work or at least, didn’t give enough insight to the third party as to the events that triggered the error.

So, what did i do? I used Captivate to record a movie of what i was doing and then sent that to the company!!!

Browsercam.com is one of the hidden gems on the internet and an engeniuos idea. If you already use it you’ll know what i mean - if you don’t use it then after reading this you probably will.

So what is it? Basically it’s a pile of PCs and MACs to which you can either submit the URLs of your websites or VNC (remote control) into to test your sites behaviour against a whole range of browsers and OSs’. If you go for the first option BrowserCam goes off and takes screen shots of your specified URL in the selected browsers/OSs’ which are then available individually, as a ZIP file or as a PSD file.

There’s a free trial which lets you take 200 screen shots in a 24 hr period, but even so a single days access to their services is $19.99 upto an annual plan (for 25 users!!!) for $479.40 which is still pretty reasonable considering what you get! It’s well worth checking out if you don’t want loads of PCs/Macs in your office just to QA against!

My cell phone rings…

me: Hello

courier: Hi, I’m from DHL and I’m outside your flat and have a packet for you

me: well I’m at work right now, who’s it from?

courier: not sure, it’s small and in a yellow and red packet

me: no kidding?

I mean honestly, a DHL courier telling me a package is in a yellow and red packet? Doh! Anyway, turns out it was a copy of Discovering Fusebox (the second edition) that was being delivered which is actually for a prize giveaway at my Scottish CFUG Fusebox presentation in April - might try and flick it though(carefully!)

For some reason my site started giving odd error messages tonight, ‘Invalid access to memory location’ and something about deep recursion - messages i can’t explain. Restarting IIS still resulted in the message being displayed, odd thing was that other virtual sites were working fine. I deleted and recreated the site, it would work for a while then i’d test restarting IIS and it would error again…so there was only one solution - ditch IIS!

So i did - under an hour i got rid of IIS and installed the latest Apache and setup all the virtual hosts. I’ve always found the whole config file a little bit of a pain but least the server is working and it seems faster now - maybe Apache should have been tried before now!!!

I just got to play on one of these little beauties!!! My god, the graphics are awesome, the speakers are a little bit ‘tinny’ but if you use headphones the sound quality is amazing. Since they’re only officially available in Japan the game (Ridge Racers) was mostly in Japanese but you can live with that when you have graphics of this quality in your hands! The media format (UMD) is like a mini disk but with a curved bottom - at just short of 2gb they’ll fit an entire movie on them too! The PSP also has a Memory Stick Duo for game saves and MP3s etc - all in all, these things are going to BIG this year! If you haven’t seen one yet get to your local video game shop to try one yourself!!!!!