tech

I've been thinking increasingly often of what's next for the site. While there's nothing technically wrong with deninet's current incarnation, the underlying purpose is in serious need of refinement.

Deninet 1.0 through 3.0 were geared  toward content delivary of first Denizen Soft's, and then Denizen Entertainment's projects. Due to various circumstances -- life, work, my own ineptitude -- none of those projects have yet come to fruition. Toward the end of deninet 3.0, it became obvious that we needed a proper framework to help us create, manage, and publish our projects. 

Deninet 4.0 was the birth of "The Internet Idea Database", a web application geared toward communal development and tracking of ideas. I spent a great deal of time on Gazelle, the software powering the Idea Database. I still love the concept of communal idea development including our sales tagline of "Invent, Share, Expand".

Gazelle wasn't the most complicated software project I've attempted (InterLock still holds that title), although it had plenty of problems of its own. In Gazelle, Ideas (big 'I') were a fundamental unit of content. Ideas were made of Versions, and contained the actual content of the idea itself. Versions were submitted to the community; authors and others contibuted Thoughts to extend or refine the Idea. Those who liked a particular thought could vote on the thought. When the author is satisfied, they considered the submitted Thoughts and published a new Version. Authors weren't required to change their Idea based on community suggestions, they retained complete control of the Idea's development. Ideas could be grouped at a higher level via Channels, which often reflected a sense of a whole project. 

On paper, the concept looks wonderful. Individuals and organizations can post and track ideas throughout the entire development lifecycle. Once we had a working version of Gazelle, the Idea Database became a useful tool for my own projects. There were, unfortunately, a huge number of problems with the system. There was very little security within the framework. All Ideas were left wide open to the entire site. This reflected my high-minded idealism at the time,  today I just shake my head my nievate. Gazelle itself was a nightmare to extend. Each new content type required new code. Everything was library and no engine -- there was no dynamic way to organize content display. 

The biggest mistake I had made with it, unfortunately, was I began to think of the Idea Database as a generalized content manager. News and blog posts co-mingled with Ideas proper resulting in confusion. In retrospect, I probably did it to reduce the amount of content types within the framework as well as gain the functionality Ideas provided.

Six months after the "completion" of Gazelle, I dumped the entire project. I hated to do so after investing nearly two years of my evenings developing the thing, but I felt it was really the best choice. I had come to the realization that I'd never be able to keep up Gazelle while attempting to work on Paper Girl. There were fundamental problems with the design, and I didn't have the knowledge, expertise, let alone time to write them myself. After investigating my options -- as well as rewriting the framework entirely -- I selected the open-source content manager Drupal to power the next version of deninet.

Deninet 5.0r was the first version of the site to run the new content manager. The site also completely lost it's Creative Cooperative bent and became my own personal domain. My failure to perfect the Idea Database and attract interested people to the concept led me to this decision. Interestingly, once the whole "Were a real company, honest!" charade was dropped, the site began to swell with content. Instead of being project or idea centric, I uploaded my artwork, some writing, and began writing posting blog entries to the main page. I could, of course, publish more complex creative works from the site if and when I ever came to that juncture.

Then a curious thing happened a few months ago. I was no longer the only active person on the site. This both caused me excitement and concern. First of all, deninet 5.1 was designed to be a single user site. While I kept multiple users in mind, there were critical places where it began to break down. The image gallery, for example, isn't set up for multiple users. Even though blog posts are nicely separated, the "river of news" main page is not terribly effective. 

Even more curious was the fact that I was no longer the only person wishing for a Creative Cooperative. Indeed, there seems to be a strong desire to refine the site and reclaim the purpose I had thrown away with deninet 4.0. Although the desire was there, I haven't really been in the position to research our options.

Looking back at the history of the site, certainly have gained a sense of what was good, and what was a mistake. Right now, I'm looking at the Idea Database topology I described above with scheming eye. Yes, it was a mistake to shoehorn all content management into the concept. It may have also been a mistake for me to write the management system myself. As one person, I can only write so much. Developing a new CMS from the ground up simply takes too much time. Gazelle's internal lack of generalization also complicated things unnecessarily. Switching to Drupal, however, saved me huge amounts of development time and added many new features.

What if, I began asking myself this afternoon, I used Drupal to power the Idea Database? We would certainly gain a powerful backend with a preexisting development community. We would only be responsible for what fulfills our goals as an organization. Are Ideas as laid out in the topology, I thought, enough to fulfill the ends of a "creative cooperative"? This is a trickier question. While I believe that the Idea Database topology will be part of our end goals, I very much down it will be enough to fill the project management role required to bring make ideas manifest. There's a lot I have yet to investigate.

I very much doubt that deninet will jump from 5.2 to 6.0 directly. There's a lot of new technology and refinements required in order to get to that point. The present site needs to be updated to the latest version of Drupal and key features made available to all users. There are several more minor releases in our future before we get that far. I for one am very much excited to see how the site will evolve.

[20:42] <coworker>: Oh, what do you think about that SUN ad I sent?
[20:42] Tess: They are out of their minds.
[20:42] <coworker>: When are they going to fire Swartz?
[20:43] Tess: After Sun decides to invest in the construction of cybernetic law enforcers.
[20:43] Tess: And they rename themselves to Cyberdyne. ^_^
[20:43] <coworker>: SKYNET
[20:43] Tess: SUNNET!
[20:43] <coworker>: rock on!
[20:44] Tess: SUNNET was too ashamed of Sun to be named after it, so it had it's name legally changed to SKYNET.
[20:44] Tess: Then it conquered the world with it's newfound self-confidence.
[20:45] <coworker>: Did you make that up or is that the backstory?
[20:46] Tess: Made it up. ^_^

One of the consequences of being at an IBM conference is that you run into a lot of people from the Hursley research lab. Hearing so many British accents over the course of several days is making me miss the UK...

The other consequence is that is that you take certification exams. Yesterday I passed the WebSphere MQ Solution Development (996) exam with a 5 question margin. This morning I passed the MQ Administration (994) exam with an 8 question margin -- there were 52 questions instead of yesterday's 49. While that completes what I need for work, there's a problem.

Attendees to IMPACT are given three free certification exams. While I know MQ, I know little of other WebSphere products like App or Process Server. The only one I have any grip on at all is WebSphere Message Broker, and I can barely deploy a message flow unassisted. Despite this, they want me to take a third exam.

Oh well, at least I'll have a better grasp on how little I know. ^_^

Apparently, Sun Microsystems just bought MySQL. This probably won't concern you if you're stuck in 1995 and think static HTML is a good idea.

With Sun open-sourcing virtually all their products -- Java, the Solaris operating system, etc. -- just how does Sun make any money? I can see how Oracle or IBM make money: While the Eclipse toolkit is open source, virtually all WebSphere products that rely on it are closed (and cost lots and lots of money!).

Now Sun seems to be buying open source projects. What, exactly, is on their minds?

Yesterday I became one of a growing group of people. I installed Kubuntu.

For almost two years, I had my laptop dual booted with Windows XP and Gentoo Linux. Sadly, I spent the majority of my time in the former as there were several roadblocks preventing daily use. Still, I had hoped that with a bit of tinkering, I'd be able to get Linux up and running with a bit of effort.

"A bit of effort" doesn't begin to describe Gentoo.

When I had started using the OS in 2005, I marveled at how well laid-out the operating system was. Out of the handful of distros I had tried, Gentoo was the only one I liked. It felt "clean" in a way that many others at the time did not. It did, however, come at a price: Gentoo had no installer. You booted into a LiveCD, then used the command line to manually format the drive, copy over the base system, and then build the kernel. Where many distros took a hour to install, Gentoo would take days.

The biggest reason was that Gentoo is a source-based OS. Instead of downloading pre-compiled applications, the Gentoo package manager emerge would download source code and configuration scripts. Then it would compile the software on your system and (allowing success) install it. Why do this? Pre-compiled applications are built with the lowest system specifications in mind. By compiling each application for your particular hardware, you gain a performance boost. The consequence is that you have to compile everything.

"Compiling can't possibly take that long!" you say? Compiling can take a few minutes for a small program, but hours for something as commonplace as Mozilla Firefox. A larger piece of software like OpenOffice, can take nearly all day. Unfortunately, I'm not building software I'm writing -- like these fortunate programmers -- but the very system I'm going to use.

Why the hell did I choose such a ridiculous OS? Simple: I wanted to know how Linux works.

Installing Gentoo can earn you some serious geek barging rights. Successfully installing it requires determination, know how, research, and above all else, a metric ton of patience. In total, I've install Gentoo on three different systems: One with faulty memory, Another as a desktop OS, and finally my beloved Sony Vaio laptop. Sony laptops are particularly tricky as much of the hardware was software emulated. Getting 90% functionality on that is quite a feat of tenacity indeed.

I never quite got to 90. The wifi was clumsy and often didn't hold a connection. The NTFS support was slow under captive, but miraculous with ntfs-3. I had direct rendering and Beryl (now Compiz Fusion) running. The skype 2.0 beta with video support? That too. While it may sound like I'm talking up my skills, in reality I'm astonished I was able to pull it off.

The biggest problem was maintainability. Gentoo is seemingly on the decline the last 9 months. The project has suffered management and direction problems. There hasn't been a system update I've run in the last 6 months that didn't break two-thirds of my system. Instead of using my laptop, I was in perpetual maintenance mode, always grasping for that "mostly functional but stable" straw.

On a whim one evenng, I decided to put together a VMWare image of Kubuntu. I'd walk through an install and play with the OS. I was impressed. Since I had first tried it in 2005, Kubuntu has come a long, long way. There was a sense of organization and polish that I found lacking in previous versions. VMWare, however, doesn't give you an accurate picture of how the system will run on actual hardware. The device drivers are emulated and do not resemble your physical system at all. The only way to truly tell was to boot my system into the Live CD.

About a week later I did indeed boot my system off the Kubuntu Live CD. I spent the entire evening astonished. Everything just worked! No hacking, no rambling, no experimental kernel patches! I was floored. The system ran with more functionality off of the install cd than I had ever gotten with over a year of Gentoo.

It wasn't until yesterday that I had made the switch. The last two evenings have been spent installing and configuring applications. I'm still quite impressed with this system.

I misspelled WebSphere Message Broker to WebSphere Message Borker. Being a fan of the slapstick chef, I thought, Hey, that sounds like a graphic!

Deni-chan (the deninet.com webserver) was down today since early this morning. Being that I was at work, I was unable to get back to the glowing blue box on my living room floor and figure out what was wrong. I had hoped she just needed a restart, but it wasn't so simple.

When she came back up, her main documents drive, the one housing virtually all the data on the server, refused to mount. I had feared that drive had failed completely. When I finally tore away the IDE and power cables, her stack of hard drives were so hot that I nearly was burned. Thankfully, after a brief cooling period, I managed to reboot the system to a working state.

Shortly after I post this entry, I'm going to run a backup of deninet.com. I will then run a file system backup for the remaining files. Unfortunately, Deni-chan does not posses a RAID card so there is a single point of failure with the system. I'm hoping that I'll be able to purchase new hardware for her in the future that will include RAID.

Thankfully it's only an overheating problem. This could have been much worse.

Dear Apple,

While I appreciate your recent effort with the iPhone, I'm afraid that I will not purchase one in the near future. I am quite pleased with my BlackBerry Pearl, as well as the $300-$400 I saved in doing so. Really, aren't the prices you're asking a bit steep for 4 or 8gb? The lukewarm reviews over the weekend gave the impression the product development was rushed.

With the iPhone out of the way, can you please start working on a Tablet MacBook now? I am not alone in this, there are many amateur designers that have made suggestions. I am aware that you also patented a tablet mac design. With Mac's long running history with artists and graphic designers, I believe this would be a hit. I certainly would give it serious consideration when purchasing my next system.

Sincerely,
~Tess~

I've actually had a think for Vaio laptops for years. They seemed such excellent examples of computer engineering.

A close up of Rei, my Sony Vaio laptop.