In Valid Logic

Adorable photo of Nick we got back today. Yup, my son is a looker. Gotta run, he is on my lap, desperately reaching for the keyboard.

More exciting things will be coming… after initially showing this to Jason, Scott, and Rob, they’re already wanting to see more. And who am I to deny them that? <smile>

A quick little pet project from over the holiday weekend might see some light of day later tonight.

A while ago, I had signed up for just receiving an electronic copy of my cell phone bill. So earlier this evening, I had been trying to log onto my Verizon Wireless account to look at last month’s bill and was having some trouble logging. Basically, I’d login but would get a “System Failure” message right when I log in and basically would be stuck.

So I call them and the customer support rep is walking me through logging in and they just weren’t understanding what I was saying. It went kind of like this:

• Me: When I log in, it takes me to this ‘System Failure’ message
• Them: Well, when you first log in, do you see the sidebar which shows your phone?
• Me: No, I’m at a ‘System Failure’ message, their is no side bar
• Repeat above
• Them: Well, log out and close your Internet Explorer (note: I didn’t want to confuse them even more by being on a Mac)
• Repeat from beginning
• Them: Well, it shows our site is up and working, so it must be a problem with your server (note: I really hate when non-technical people say that kind of thing)

So eventually, they got the bright idea and wanted to try and log in as me, so they asked me for my username, which I gave, and then asked me for my password. I was like “Excuse me? I am not giving that to you.”.

Had they never heard of phishing? I was shocked that they even asked. How many times have I read security notice emails about “we will never ask you for your password”? Shouldn’t that kind of thing be at the top of any customer service rep’s DON’T list these days?

A few weeks ago, I made a post evaluating options for hosted Subversion services. At the time, I was basically drawn to an empty conclusion. Now, I’m relabeling it “hosted source control” rather than “hosted subverison”, since my end goal is to have a nice solution for both subversion and git. The more I look at git, the more interesting it looks, but mainly for non-Windows development, since using it on Windows isn’t quite as refined.

I tried using git with hosted-projects.com, since they offer WebDav space according to their site, though I couldn’t get it working. I tried running litmus against it, a webdav testing program, and it failed pretty bad. So that was out.

So I was considering the likelihood that I may just need to set up my own virtual server for it on one of my servers. Then just a few days ago, as I was looking at using a git plugin for Trac, I found this program called Warehouse which was almost exactly what I was looking for. It is an application you install rather than a service, and it allows you to manage repositories, browse the source, and doesn’t have the bloat of wiki/forums/tickets/etc, but it has a plugin architecture so it could eventually, if they were available. And better yet, on its forums, there was talk of git support in the next version.

Around this time though, I got a beta invite to Github. I had signed up there around the time of my previous post, but at the time, I thought it mainly did public/open source hosting, but it does allow private repositories. You can’t create/manage your own users, but rather just grant access to other users on the site. It is appealing, but again, there is no clear subversion AND git solution as of late. They also announced their pricing recently for post-beta, which looks pretty decent. One main advantage to git is its portability. You can move it, sync it in multiple places, or just about anything you want.

Shortly after my first post, Josh Frappier, the co-founder of Unfuddle contacted me and I talked with him some. First, as I’ve mentioned before, I find it very appealing when those in charge of the companies whose services I use contact me. He was a very nice guy and talking with him made me like Unfuddle even more. He told curious why I hadn’t considered Unfuddle more, and it was mainly because I was after personal repositories and Unfuddle has a 1-1 relationship for repositories-to-projects. Not sure if all the stuff he was talking about is public knowledge, but in short, he said they’re working on some stuff that will make Unfuddle much more suitable.

Where do things lie now? As of yet, still undecided. Short term, it looks like using Github for git and Warehouse on my own is where I’m at. Long term, it looks like I’ll have two options. I could run it myself and handle both with Warehouse, or have it hosted and managed by someone else with Unfuddle. Only time will tell. Part of it is primarily that git only went “mainstream” recently. As it catches on more, I’m sure more options will crop up.

In the meantime, going to continue evaluating options. I may just try and using Git 100% for personal stuff, even on Windows stuff, simply to see whether the tools under Windows really do interfere too much. You graphically view a repository on Windows with QGit. There is also a cygwin-less port of Git called msysgit in the works. So might not be as bad as one would think.

I had previously mentioned that I had moved my site over to Mono, however last night I actually moved it back to IIS. The main reason is that I was experiencing some CPU spikes where Mono would take 100% of the CPU. I had tried tracking it down over the weekend, though wasn’t able to find the cause, and mean while, my site was going up and down as far as accessibility. Since I wasn’t able to narrow down the cause, and wasn’t able to dedicate a whole lot of time to it just yet, I figured I might as well switch it back to IIS for the time being so I can get it resolved without having my site down, or having to go onto the server and kill/recycle the mono process.

Hopefully in the next couple of days, I’ll get it nailed down. I had a list of a couple of potential causes, and have crossed off a few of them. This morning, think I might have figured it out, but haven’t had a chance to test it yet.

No, not the bad kind of mono, but the good kind. The kind that lets me run .NET applications on Linux.

Some time ago, it was announced that Graffiti CMS would run on Mono, allowing for easy cross platform compatibility. Well, I think I am now the first one to have their blog up on Graffiti using Mono.

So there you have it. My blog is running on Gentoo Linux 2007.0, using nginx + FastCGI with a build on Mono from subversion (from today) and using VistaDB, and also running a Ruby based processor monitor called God, which is set up to make sure the service stays available and watches memory and CPU consumption.

What does it take to get Graffiti up on Mono? Really, not a whole lot. First, you need Mono. Graffiti currently requires Mono 1.9, and it looks like the Mono 1.9 Preview 4 was just released today. Then download and extract Graffiti, go into its main directory, and to test it locally, just fire up xsp2. xsp2 is basically a mini-webserver, kind of like the light built in webserver you can fire sites up in with Visual Studio. Nothing else is really needed. By default, Graffiti will use the small sample VistaDB database.

You would more than likely need Preview 4 to use all of Graffiti’s functionality. There were some bugs in Mono that would have made Preview 3 a requirement, but if you have a Graffiti license, there was a bug with the some of the methods our licensing uses that was fixed either the day of the Preview 3 release, or the day before, and might not have made it in.

Probably the most common configuration to go with for a live site would be Apache and mod_mono, however I like to be a little different. I run some little Rails apps from this same virtual server, and in the Rails community, Apache is often viewed as a little bloated. A popular combo is to use nginx, and since nginx supports FastCGI, figured I might as well try and get the two to work together. Lighttpd is another popular web server, but I already had nginx in place, so figured would just keep that.

I’ll probably post some more details soon, including my configuration scripts for nginx and for god. I also think I might try and do some basic benchmarks. Set up a couple of virtual machines here on a spare system and test Graffiti’s basic performance under IIS6, IIS7, nginx, lighttpd, and Apache+mod_mono. Could prove interesting, so will maybe make it a weekend project.