The Code Factory, Ottawa, Canada

Posted on June 16, 2008 by David Megginson

Ian Graham, who is well-known in the Ottawa tech community because of his involvement with Bar Camps, Demo Camps, etc, has a new start-up called The Code Factory that lets you cowork in Ottawa.

Location, location, location …

Located in Ottawa’s downtown core a couple of blocks south of Parliament Hill, The Code Factory has offices for rent, drop-in communal working space with WiFi, and a lot of character (old building, bright with lots of windows, hardwood, rickity old elevator that reminds me of office buildings in SoHo).

No three-year leases

The offices go for around $800-$1,000/month (no long-term lease required), and all have windows or skylights. The open (no cubicles) communal working space costs $5/hour, billed to the nearest half hour, and includes unlimited coffee, cappuccino, or espresso, making it a break-even for coders who spend a lot at Starbucks (think one cappuccino/hour).

Unlimited caffeine

For the communal working space, his target market is coders who work from home, but miss the energy and social life of an office and want to drop in a couple of times a week. Despite all the friendly chatter, I find I’m actually getting more done in four hours there than I do in eight hours at home.

Shut-in no more

At a 45 minute walk from my house, The Code Factory is perfect for me — I’ve worked from home for over 10 years, and the Factory gives me an excuse for a little extra exercise, gets me downtown, and gives me the buzz that comes from working around other coders. I think that Ian has done a great service for the Ottawa tech community — much more so than yet another incubator or government-subsidized fund — and that we’ll see at least one or two successful companies tracing their roots back to the Factory, as well as a lot of happy consultants like me.

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Ready for Prime Time?

Posted on May 10, 2008 by David Megginson

I bought a cheap HP C4280 printer-scanner-copier today, since my old HP 1210 finally gave up the ghost.

Installing the printer in Windows Vista

Installing the printer in Windows Vista wasn’t too difficult. I followed the instruction not to plug in the USB cable until asked, then inserted the supplied CD-ROM and authorized Vista to run the setup.exe program. I had a click through a few screens, then I plugged in the the USB cable, let it autodetect the printer, and left it running over supper. The whole process took less than 15 minutes. When I came back in, it was finished, and I just had to dodge the ads attached to the end of the installation program. I think my non-computer-literate older relatives could have managed fine without any help from me.

Installing the printer in Ubuntu Linux

I turned on the computer. The HP C4280 appeared in the printer list.

Prime time

So who’s not ready for Prime Time on the desktop? No TV show on Prime Time is without flaws, and no OS is without flaws — Ubuntu still has trouble with some wireless networking cards, and pretty-much 100% of the tech support calls we made at XML 2007 were for Mac notebooks (Windows and Linux notebooks just worked, every time) — but Ubuntu makes it hard to argue that somehow Windows and Mac are good enough for the desktop, while Linux isn’t.

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Dealing with strangers

Posted on April 8, 2008 by David Megginson

From the leader in this week’s Economist:

“Financial progress is about learning to deal with strangers in more complex ways.”

s/Financial/Technical/ and it applies just as well. What else are we doing in tech, if not figuring out ways for strangers to deal with each-other? Sometimes we focus on designing safeguards, like firewalls or spam filters, and sometimes we focus on creating opportunities, like social networks or source code repositories.

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A political posting

Posted on March 29, 2008 by David Megginson

Late in 1963, shortly before he was assassinated, U.S. President John F. Kennedy asked Canadian Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson for his opinion on how the U.S. should cope with escalating unrest in Vietnam.

Peason: “Get out.”

JFK: “That’s a stupid answer. Everyone knows that. The question is how do we get out?”

How, indeed? As JFK had finally come to understand, military conflicts, justified or not, are like a Chinese finger trap: it’s easy for a political leader to order the troops in, but very tricky to pull them back out (just ask the British about Northern Ireland, the Russians about Chechnya, or even Pearson’s Canadian successors about southern Afghanistan).

Good luck to President Clinton, President McCain, or President Obama (alphabetical order) in January 2009 — they’re all smart and well-intentioned people, but they’re going to find that the trap has already been pulled very tight, and there’s not much room left to wiggle free.

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Strange web exploit attempt (?)

Posted on February 4, 2008 by David Megginson

In the search logs for OurAirports, I noticed a series of searches for URLs:

http://www.feliciano.de/Webgalerie/bilder/Italy/une/yiwul/
http://www.unduetretoccaate.it/codice/aseje/wocobo/
http://www.altaiseer-eg.com/ar/articles/jed/umut/

At first, I thought they might be a kind of link spam — some sites display recent searches — but when I checked one of the URLs, I found something totally unexpected:

php echo md5("just_a_test");?>

They’re all the same. This is almost certainly related to passwords: is there a known flaw in a PHP content-management system like Drupal, or in the PHP API for a search engine like Lucene, where this would do some damage, or is it just a test probing for weaknesses? Is the PHP code supposed to be served up literally like that, or should I be seeing the MD5 instead?

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Delayed echo in the echo chamber

Posted on February 2, 2008 by David Megginson

Some people compare blogs (and mainstream media) to an echo chamber, constantly repeating and amplifying the same messages, but the echoes usually die out quickly. Not so, today, when I found this story on the planenews.com aviation news feed:

21 Feared Dead in Munich Crash.

About twenty one of the 44 passengers and crew of the British European Airways airliner which crashed yesterday near Munich carrying the Manchester United football team and many journalists are feared dead. About eight others are in hospital, seriously injured. Frank Swift, the former international goalkeeper, who had become a journalist, died in hospital.

I didn’t hear about any crash yesterday, but according to the Wikipedia article on Manchester United, there was a crash near Munich on 6 February 1958 that killed eight of the team’s players. In fact, when you follow the full story link in the posting, there is a story about the crash. The phrase “From the archive” is hidden in the deckline, but the dateline is “Saturday February 2, 2008” (probably automatically updated by the site). There’s nothing else in the online version to indicate that this is an archived story from 7 February 1958, though a Brit would probably know that British European Airways ceased operations in 1974.

This is an easy mistake to make trying to keep up a blog of current events, and I don’t mean to suggest that the maintainer is stupid, or that I couldn’t do the same thing — in fact, next December, watch this spot for postings about an air attack on Perl Harbor.

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Is the problem Wikipedia, or David Megginson?

Posted on January 23, 2008 by David Megginson

The Wikipedia article about me was vandalized yesterday (vandalized version) by someone from the IP address 24.225.66.95, which seems to be in or near Raleigh, North Carolina.

What should I do?

  1. Edit the article myself to remove the vandalism? — OK, that’s a really bad idea
  2. Go in anonymously and edit the article? — also a bad idea
  3. Rejoice in the fact that my article is important enough to be vandalized?
  4. Despair in the fact that my article is not important enough for anyone else to have noticed and fixed it?
  5. Reconcile myself to the idea that the edits are not vandalism at all, and I am, in truth, “a freaking looser who knows nothing” and “a noob”

I’m leaning towards #5, though I’m disappointed that kids these days seem to have forgotten how to swear properly: “a freaking loser”???

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Google analytics for XML 2007

Posted on January 21, 2008 by David Megginson

I forgot that I’d enabled Google analytics for the XML 2007 web site. Even though the conference is long over, I though it would be interesting to look and see what some of the trends were from September 2007 to January 2008 (keeping in mind that these stats apply to the kind of web users interested in a tech conference, not to the web at large).

MacOS is still #3

Despite the halo effect from the iPod and the widespread use of Mac notebooks among speakers, MacOS still hasn’t managed to make much of a dent in the visitor logs:

  1. Windows: 80.70%
  2. Linux: 9.57%
  3. MacOS: 9.44%

If MacOS can’t beat Linux on the desktop, I don’t know if it has a bright future.

Internet Explorer below 50%

Firefox is still #2 behind MSIE, but for this crowd, the gap is small:

  1. MSIE: 49.61%
  2. Firefox: 41.14%
  3. Safari: 3.50%
  4. Mozilla: 3.22%
  5. Opera: 1.76%

If you’re designing or maintaining a web site with a tech audience, you’d better be testing on Firefox as well as MSIE.

Screen resolution and colour depth

I know that web designers like big layouts, but the sad fact remains that 1024×768 is still the most common resolution (and remember that the browser window may be much smaller than the screen):

  1. 1024×768: 28.32%
  2. 1280×1024: 25.84%
  3. 1280×800: 10.61%

A long tail of resolutions follows, but it’s worth noting that the classic 800×600 has only 1.96%. Better news comes from colour depth, where almost everyone has 16bpp or better:

  1. 32bpp: 80.29%
  2. 24bpp: 11.89%
  3. 16bpp: 7.37%

Traffic

Search engines, referrers, and direct access were all important traffic sources:

  1. Search engines: 36.77%
  2. Referring sites: 34.97%
  3. Direct traffic: 28.22%

Blogs did show up among the referring sites, but the biggest traffic producers were traditional links from partner organizations (other conferences, IDEAlliance itself, etc.) — these were also the stickiest, since most people coming from these links went on to read more than one page.

As far as search engines go, I was surprised to find that nothing really matters but Google (assuming that Google Analytics isn’t biasing the numbers):

  1. Google: 94.16%
  2. Yahoo!: 3.46%
  3. Live: 1.51%
  4. MSN: 0.45%

I knew that Yahoo! and MSN were behind in search, but I had no idea just how bad it was (at least in the tech crowd). More than half of the people who found the site via a search engine went on to read more than one page.

The top search phrases were rather dull and predictable:

  1. “xml 2007”: 28.50%
  2. “xml conference”: 8.22%
  3. “xml conference 2007”: 3.20%
  4. “xml conferences” 3.04%

And so on through a very long tail. Individual speakers’ names start appearing soon, but none with more than 10 searches. I trolled through the low-frequency search phrases for something funny (and maybe risque), but all I came up with was the number “736”, which resulted in three visits. I gave up trying to find the site in the Google results for that number. Does anyone really search for a single three-digit integer, and if so, how many pages of results will that person scroll through?

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LAMP stack stability

Posted on January 10, 2008 by David Megginson

I’m using a single dedicated server to host ourairports.com, megginson.com, and a couple of minor domains. OurAirports is a database-heavy application using (currently) a MySQL v.5 database hosted on the same server. I’ll offload the database to a separate server if traffic keeps increasing, but as long as I’m getting compliments from tech people for my fast response times (mainly thanks to MySQL’s built-in query caching), there’s no point paying for extra hardware.

Uptime

My ISP set up the server for me last summer with a bare-bones Ubuntu distro, then I installed the extra packages I needed using aptitude over ssh. Since then, I’ve done many Ubuntu in-place upgrades, rolled out hundreds of changes and upgrades to the web apps and dozens to the database schema (some very significant), and upgraded WordPress n-teen times. Check this out:

$ uptime
 13:08:31 up 175 days, 10:02,  1 user,  load average: 0.23, 0.06, 0.02

That’s right — since my ISP first set up the server with a basic Ubuntu system, I’ve never had to restart it. In fact, if Apache and mod_php (PHP5) had ‘uptime’ commands, they’d show almost the same amount of time, since I restarted them only to make configuration changes in the first few days of setting up the server (unless apt stopped them to install a newer version during one of my upgrades). I’ve restarted MySQL more recently, but again, only to experiment with configuration changes (especially for fulltext).

-1 for being cool, +10 for having a life

Using reliable old technologies like Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP doesn’t win any cool points, but it certainly makes maintaining a web server and its applications easy. I can go on vacation, for example, without worrying about being able to get online to fix or restart my server every couple of days. I don’t have to stay up until 3:00 am on Sunday night so that I can take the server offline to roll out new software versions or bug fixes (aptitude installs any security fixes in place). I spend lots of time with my family. I go to my kids’ school concerts. I learned banjo and mandolin (why not, since I have the free time?).

It’s the developer, not the language

And yes, my PHP web app is easy to maintain and extend, because I designed it to be that way (I can often implement, test and roll out new features in a matter of minutes, even when they require database schema changes) — it’s the developer, not the programming language, that determines the quality and maintainability of an app. A lot of newbies use PHP, so there’s a lot of bad PHP out there, but the same can be said for any language, even Ruby.

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Social web sites: the new Proprietors?

Posted on January 3, 2008 by David Megginson

Image: Thomas Penn, second proprietor of Pennsylvania, not as nice as his dad William.

Almost a year ago, I wrote that Open data matters more than Open Source — it doesn’t matter (to you, the end user) whether a web site is using Open Source software or not, if they still keep your data locked up.

Here’s a nasty example: Robert Scoble has just had his Facebook account disabled for running a script to try to scrape his personal information off the site (since Facebook doesn’t provide him with any other way to get it).

I understand that Facebook needs to protect against malicious bots — and they might decide to restore his account once they know what Robert was actually trying to do (though for now all traces of him have vanished) — but do we really want to have hope for the good will of social sites and beg for our own data every time we want it? Are web site owners the new version of the Proprietors in the early American colonies, who can grant rights as favours when they see fit?

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