Got Wills

Sphere piqued my interest two days ago, when I saw that someone had been referred to my blog from there. I immediately recognized the site… I had seen it on TechCrunch and GigaOm. When I had seen it on those sites, I thought it was just another social bookmarking or “Digg” like site. I soon found out it was a great tool for helping navigate the blogosphere.

Naturally, I went to get the code to put on my site, finding only a link to contact Sphere for more information. Sphere looked cool enough to forgo my usual distaste for a ‘contact me’ where a download link should be. I filled the requested information and hit send. Within a few minutes I had received an automatic response… great, I’m at the back of a long line. I archived the email and went about my business. Checking my email, I found, quite unexpectedly, that Tony Conrad, founder and CEO of Sphere had sent an email asking me to download and implement the new plugin for WordPress. About 5 minutes after reading the email… Sphere was running on my blog. I still had to make a small tweak to disable Snap Preview Anywhere, by adding a class, “snap_nopreview” to the link in the plugin file. So, now after each of my posts you will see a ‘Sphere it’ link. If you would like more about some topic I have written about, just click Sphere it, and you’ll be presented with a list of related blog posts. Now, if I could just get some comments… Oh well.

There’s a lot more sites cropping up that help to make the world a more socially responsible place by shaming people and businesses who play dirty. TechCrunch has a recent article on a new service, dotherightthing.com. I agree with Michael when he says this site has a huge potential to become a site where the only people using it are smug, better than you, types that are more interested in making themselves look good by bringing others down than actually trying to hold companies responsible for their social regressions.

These startups aren’t the first to hold companies to a higher standard. Before dotherightthing.com, and other similar sites, there was epinions.com and the rating and opinion system of just about every other shopping site since around 2002 (give or take a couple years). While one or two bad opinions won’t deter me from my intended purchase, a 25% or higher rate of negatives will give me second thoughts about buying from the merchant. The main difference between the two is that the latter are primarily rating online retailers, whereas the former are trying to establish a rating system for online as well as traditional brick and mortar retailers. The other real difference is that the rash of new sites are not solely focused on buyers experiences, but also the social impact that the business is making.

The sole purpose of a business is not to make money. While making money is the primary purpose of most businesses, they also have a responsiblity to build the economy. In most cases, these two objectives go hand in hand, what’s good for one is good for the other. However, all of the thievery and dishonesty going on lately is bad for the economy (and the company), while it makes the few people who are in on it wealthy. This is a horrible direction for the upper management of these large corporations to be taking us. Now, don’t get me wrong, not all CEO’s are bad. It just seems to be the way of things, that all we hear about are the bad ones, at least they’re the ones that we remember.

I just noticed the release of “Ella,” the new version of WordPress yesterday. Usually I don’t upgrade my site stuff the first week of a release, and sometimes I never upgrade it, it’s just too much of a hassle in most cases. However, after looking at the list of new features included in WordPress 2.1, I knew I had to have it.

• Autosave makes sure you never lose a post again.
• Our new tabbed editor allows you to switch between WYSIWYG and code editing instantly while writing a post.
• The lossless XML import and export makes it easy for you to move your content between WordPress blogs.
• Our completely redone visual editor also now includes spell checking.
• New search engine privacy option allows you take you to indicate your blog shouldn’t ping or be indexed by search engines like Google.
• You can set any “page” to be the front page of your site, and put the latest posts somewhere else, making it much easier to use WordPress as a content management system.
• Much more efficient database code, faster than previous versions. Domas Mituzas from MySQL went over all our queries with a fine-toothed comb.
• Links in your blogroll now support sub-categories and you can add categories on the fly.
• Redesigned login screen from the Shuttle project.
• More AJAX to make custom fields, moderation, deletions, and more all faster. My favorite is the comments page, which new lets you approve or unapprove things instantly.

Wow, I don’t know if this was available on WordPress 2.0 or not, but I was just able to drag the “Custom Fields” box out of my way, which is great, because it didn’t move enough when I tried to expand the “Trackbacks” box (probably an IE7 bug). Anyway, my favorite feature has to be the Autosave followed closely by the tabbed entry interface, making it easier to see the code view of your post.

This is really getting annoying. The computer was still on when I woke up, there are no traces in the Windows system log or the Virtual Server log. Hmm, I wonder if the beta service pack will help. I don’t want to try it except as a last result, as my experience with service packs has usually been if it was broken when the service pack was applied, the service pack usually just complicates things.

Oh well, I guess I’ll just limp along until I have an evening to apply the service pack. Maybe I’ll be able to find me a separate server, sometime.

No worries, it’s back up now. Weird, though. I don’t remember shutting down the computer last night, yet it was off when I got out of the shower. After reviewing the event log after work, I found that it was shutdown gracefully around the time I went to bed.

That’s not the weirdest part, not by far. After getting the computer back up, I was looking through the feeds I subscribe to on NetVibes and saw that my blog wasn’t sending a feed. After trying (unsuccessfully) to ping the virtual server, I go to the trusty start menu and find my Virtual Server Administration links. However, when I open it, “Page not found.” Hmm, IIS isn’t running, after a quick stop at the services console, the WWW Publishing service is running and I’m able to access the Virtual Server console, at which point I’m greeted with a nasty error message… the virtual server service wasn’t running either, that’s odd. Once again I punch the ever faithful “services.msc” in the run dialog and start the Virtual Server service. Only it doesn’t start. Well, well, well, file not found. “Huh? What file?” After a little investigation, I found that the file that is the service isn’t where it should be. “Where is it?” you say… Only my master file table knows.

Naturally, I did what anybody would do in my situation, I reinstalled Virtual Server (I guess not anybody, but I like to think I’m normal sometimes). Anyway, the service was able to start afterwards, but the virtual machine wouldn’t turn on… something about a bad login. Hmm, that’s an odd error for something like this. After beating around the proverbial bush some I figured I’d remove the server and add it again. The processor monitor started moving… it was beautiful.

Naturally, I start a continuous ping to the server so that I will know when the network is available on it, only it never becomes available. Alright, can nothing work today? Well, it turns out Suse saw the network adapter that Virtual Server setup as a whole new adapter. I guess, even though it was the same Mac, Linux knew that something had changed, oh well. A little configuration in Yast and it was responding to my continuous ping. Wondrously, my blog was still returning a page not found, DOH! Back in Yast, I look through the runlevel services and find that lsws is disabled (LiteSpeed Web Server, duh). I start it (and check MySQL, of course). Voila! It’s alive!

The weirdest part… you thought that was it? No, not quite. Actually, I find it freakishly weird that when I found out my Web site was down all night, I got this sick feeling in my stomach. When I had trouble getting back up, I think I actually started to panic. Whew. Good thing I was able to contain my emotions well enough to think this problem through. You would have missed out on this and many more posts only available on Got Wills. Heh, probably not. I would probably just put it back on my Windows PC, you know, the physical (as opposed to virtual) one. I do still feel a strange longing for the 1 or 2 hits that I may have gotten over what I like to call “The Night the Server Went Down in Holbrook.”

Well, I got it all working, well mostly. The blog is now hosted on my virtual Suse 10.2 server. The only issue that I’m still having is getting the colors of my header correct, it doesn’t seem to take any adjustments I make. I probably just need ImageMajik or something like it. I’ll check it when I get a few minutes.

I only dedicated 128 MB RAM to the server and it seems to be doing fine (thank you textmode). Instead of Apache, I’m now using LiteSpeed as my Web server. It’s supposed to work a lot better with Ruby on Rails. While there were a few stumbling blocks along the way, it was a lot easier than I thought it would be and as I suspected I would, I’ve learned a lot since I started this little project two five days ago (I actually finished 3 days ago and have been trying to write this post since then).

Server Installation

I made it through the Virtual Server 2005 R2 installation without incident, and was soon able to boot to a virtual system that wanted a system boot disk. Next I downloaded the Internet installation of Suse 10.2, afterall, I was only installing textmode and didn’t think I would need the whole installation DVD for that. Later I found out that I could have downloaded CD 1 and it would have been a lot easier… furthermore, I would have completely avoided my first pitfall, no swap partition, which resulted in an impass. After googling it a few times, I decided to use Partition Magic to setup a swap partition for the installation to use. Finally, it was installed successfully, on to the software installs.

Software Installation

I found a nice tutorial on howto forge for setting up The Perfect OpenSuse 10.2. This tutorial was invaluable in getting my virtual system ready to host. I had already installed the OS so I skipped ahead to page 5. Now, this tutorial uses Apache and I wanted to use LiteSpeed for my Web server, so that’s one step I skipped. I also didn’t want ISPConfig as I’m only setting up this host for my own personal use… for now. Also, my ISP blocks traffic on port 25, and I like my Google Apps for your Domain, so I didn’t bother with setting up Postfix or POP3/Imap related material. I also skipped the BIND9 install since I don’t have a static public IP address. Besides, I’m happy with EveryDNS.net.

I used wget to download LiteSpeed and the included installer worked very well. I found later, when trying to make my blog work that the included build of PHP wouldn’t work for me. A forum post led me to a howto that detailed building and installing a custom built PHP for LiteSpeed. A couple of things to note:

Be sure to install libxml2-devel:

yast2 -i libxml2-devel

Be sure to include the mySQL client library that came with mySQL (my mySQL base install was in /var/lib/mysql):

./configure '--prefix=/php5' '--with-litespeed' '--with-config-file-path=../conf' '--with-mysql=path_to_mysql_base_install'

Transferring the Blog

I ran into yet another speed bump when trying to access my database from the Windows machine. I remembered to open the port on the firewall and could access it from the server, but I couldn’t get into it from the host system using the root login and the password I had set. After a bit of googling, I found that mySQL is setup to only allow local access to root, so I proceded to allow access from my host machine using the instructions I found on Hard Hat Hosting. It worked perfectly, I now had access to my mySQL installation and was able to use SQLyog to synchronize my database on the Windows system with the database on the Linux system. I made the name and everything else the same so that I wouldn’t have to tweak my config files.

I uploaded the blog files using sftp to a subdirectory of the LiteSpeed server install and used chmod to set them all to read/execute for everyone except me, well actually root.

Setting Up the Virtual Host

I used the nifty LiteSpeed configuration page to add a virtual host. I ended up using the PHP_SuEXEC template and instantiating the member virtual host. I was then able to setup a new listener to direct requests to the correct virtual host. I simply restarted the service by clicking the “Apply Changes” link in the top left corner and voila. My blog is up and running.

Let me just say, WOW. I am impressed with the web interface and complete web control of Virtual Server 2005. It’s not at all what I was expecting (something like Virtual PC). I’m installing SUSE 10.2 on it right now. I plan to setup my Web server on the virtual server and get my blog and any Rails apps I would like to host, like SimpleTicket (which I will be blogging as soon as I get a working copy going).

Virtualization is the way the IT industry is moving and I can see why. It’s not only cheaper to upgrade a system and install another (Virtual) OS on it, but it’s not any harder either… I might go so far as to say it was easier. I didn’t even need to burn my ISO file to a disc. Just load the ISO into Virtual Server and your ready to boot to it.

Link to Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2

There’s something to be said about living in a small town. Sure, the job market is non-existant and there is nothing to do unless you create it yourself. However, there are some benefits, as well. Sure, there’s the lower crime rate and fewer violent crimes, but I attribute that more to the town having a lower density of people than the overall population, but that’s just my theory, and that’s not what I wanted to write about today.

In fact, I wanted to write about a wonderful experience I had at one of the local Mexican restaurants called Romo’s, last night. My wife wanted a chicken taco dinner, so I called the order in for pickup. I know the owner, Phyllis, and she happened to be the one who took my order. She is a great person. She has successfully operated her business as long as I can remember, and I’ve lived here and Joseph City (a tiny town about 10 miles away) my whole life. Phyllis gave me part of my order for free and even gave me some of the salsa that she usually only serves in house. This was the first time I had tried the jalepeño salsa and it was wonderful, although I still prefer the original. In fact, the original is my favorite hot sauce.

I’ve always loved Romo’s and suspect that I always will. Hopefully, I’ll start getting more calls to fix computers and setup Web sites for people so that I can afford to eat there more. Thank you Phyllis, for being a great neighbor, a great business owner and a great person.

If anyone is interested in the jalepeño salsa, she only serves it in house on Fridays. If you ever pass through Holbrook and want to have the best Mexican food you will ever have, be sure to stop at Romo’s.

I meant to write about this yesterday, but it was insanely busy around here. Snap Preview Anywhere is a piece of Javascript that you put on your Web pages. It then adds an Ajaxy feeling preview box when you mouse over the links on the pages.

SPA is beyond simple to install, just copy a bit of custom Javascript into the <head> block on each of your pages and you’re good to go. It’s even easier to install on blogs, thanks to Ajay D’Souza’s plugin for WordPress and the widget for TypePad. There is also a quickstart for blogger.com.

I first saw Snap Preview Anywhere on TechCrunch and knew I had to have it for my blog. It is an excellent tool and I imagine it will help to keep people from clicking away from your site. As always, let me know what you think.

Techcrunch » Blog Archive » 2007: Web 2.0 Companies I Couldn’t Live Without

Mike has an excellent post about some of the Web 2.0 services he uses everyday. Here’s what I use from his list…

800-Free-411

I use this one all the time, especially since finding out how much Verizon charges for 411 service. I don’t mind listening to the occasional ad in order to get a simple directory listing for free.

Digg

I love Digg, it’s the greatest news site on the internet. Sure, sometimes old stories (olds??) will get back to the front page, but they’re usually worth another look. This is the direction the internet seems to be going… interaction on every level.

Flickr

I’ve been using flickr for almost a year. I started using Flickr because my family said it was too hard to access the pics through Coppermine.

GMail

I started using gmail years ago. One of my coworkers got an invite from a forum that he was a member of. He promptly sent me an invite and soon, it was the only mailbox I used. Now that box is choked with spam and I’ve been signed up with Google Apps for Your Domain since it was just GMail for Your Domain.

NetVibes

I started using NetVibes about a year ago, but stopped when Google created their custom home pages. I’ve recently started using NetVibes again, however, because I love the in-page feed reader.

Pandora

Pandora is the greatest thing that ever happened to internet radio. No commercials, no searching for a station that plays only the music you like, just instant access to great music that’s already adjusted to your taste. Just enter a song title or artist and it will create a station with music that has the same qualities. If it happens to play a song you don’t like, just give it a thumbs down.

WordPress

What can I say about WordPress. They make the best blogging software I’ve tried, hence, my WordPress blog.

YouTube

I haven’t really caught the fever for online video, but when I see something interesting on the news or something, the first place I check for a video is YouTube. Their site is easy to navigate and the tags make finding similar content super easy.

Flock

I saved Flock for last because I’ve been disappointed in the browser, lately. They’ve dumped support for Shadows, which I had already setup all of my links in. They still support Delicious, but although Shadows has a tool to import Delicious bookmarks, Delicious doesn’t have a tool to do likewise with Shadows. Furthermore, everytime I update the browser to the latest release it takes longer to load and seems to cause more problems with my PC, especially if I leave it running.