There and Back Again

I have been working on some web design lately. mostly i have been getting back into it, and realizing how frustrating it can be. Normal software design and engineering has its own problems (I am referring to on-screen presentation here), but they are generally limited to the screen resolution and color bit-depth that the user might be running your software with, as well as system font size and color/style, etc. But the actual layout of your design is controlled by the language you are writing with, and you can be guaranteed that what you are working with is what the end user has (for all intents and purposes).

Web Design currently follows none of these rules, and I blame that on every single software company out there that has written a web browser (Internet Explorer mainly, but also Netscape, Opera, Safari, and even Mozilla FireFox at times). There is no guarantee that anything you design will be rendered the same on these different browsers. There are wonderful standards developed for web design, but the problem is that none of the browsers fully support them, or do so in different ways. I came across an interesting rant on the subject, which i thought came at it from a fresh perspective. I am sick of being taunted by a nice clean and easy to use specification for web design, when anything you write using that specification doesn’t work with our existing browsers!

And don’t get me started on flash. Flash can make for some great websites, and to be honest, it does have some good uses. But i do not like the fact that the web is becoming flash this and flash that. Flash probably got its popularity due to two things:

• lack of control over the aesthetics of web design with standard html styling
• the corporate desire to control media and not allow users to save content

The aesthetics argument is a good one, unfortunately there is no other good way to do it really. But what I hate is the bloat that Flash introduces. you need to install it, and it is Slow! I was reminded of this yesterday when i tried to watch episodes of the office online from NBC.com – It simply slowed my computer to a crawl. and this was for low resolution video that i could have played on my old pc 8 years ago! That is why I hate flash.

Thats enough of that. I upgraded WordPress (this blogging software) just now, and was worried that i had forgotten to save some of my customizations, namely the border image around the images to the right. Thank god for browser caching, i was able to pull the image off of my hard drive and upload it back onto my server. phew.

Today I stayed after work for a little while and setup a pretty cool network inventory software – Open-AudIT. Since this involved a decent amount of siting around and waiting / configuring, it also afforded me some time to wait for some calls to get returned from work contacts on the PST clock, which wasn’t all that bad.

Open-AudIT is a network inventory system, meaning that it provides a nice categorical list of all the hardware and software connected to your network. Assuming windows pcs and servers, it can take advantage of WMI to scan all this information from one central location, meaning no intrusion of installing software everywhere. Why?

• Search for a specific application (and version) and find where it is installed
• track license keys for software, and see what computers are using them
• see hardware info on all computers (ok, which servers have 4 gig of ram?)

I haven’t spent much time playing with it yet, but it is pretty cool so far. I also discovered a cool thing while setting this up. We have a virtual server at work (2 actually) meaning that we can emulate a whole computer with just a ‘file’. This came in quite handy, because all it took to install this as a test, was to make a ‘dif’ off of an existing virtual machine – this way i don’t run the risk of ruining any existing servers when i just want to test (think sandbox). This first step took all of 10 minutes. Then i was a little bummed because I had to setup a whole LAMP stack (actually WAMP, since this was on windows) – untill i found this project on sourceforge: XAMPP. This was the cool thing. It only took about 30 minutes to download, install, and reboot this thing. and it was bascially all configured for me out of the box. Downloading, installing, and configuring each of these would have been quite a chore – not hard – just time consuming. Many linux distros have LAMP installation options out of the box, but I was supprised to find something like it for the windows platform (they have it for mac and linux as well).

Today I also decided to dig my trumpet out of its case and give it a practice. It felt good to play, even though I couldn’t last very long. I don’t know when I last played, but it was probably over a year ago. Crazy – It takes me back to high school practicing in my room at home. odd how memories are triggered like that.

I have been having way too much fun at work lately, and it is all thanks to spending my time getting CruiseControl.Net up and running. CruiseControl.Net is a continuous integration server, meaning that as you (or any other programmer) sit there writing your code, all you need to do is commit your code to the repository, and voila! your code gets checked out by the CruiseControl server, and gets built, tested, analyzed, and any other myriad of automated tools that you could want to run against it. you can see an example of this at ccnetlive, where CruiseControl.net hosts is project within a running instance of itself. I love when things are self-contained like that .

I have done some extending of the project to meet our own needs already, such as writing a custom labeller to use the Subversion Revision numbers to label all builds, rather than using one of the default schemes provided with CCNet. If you download the source code for the project, it is relatively easy to see how the labellers are written, and write your own dll to contain the custom labeller of your choice. The catch is to name the dll file correctly, in the format CCNET.anything.goes.here.Plugin.dll. this is documented somewhere in the CCNet documentation, but it isn’t readily obvious. the ccnet service will only load the dll if it follows that naming convention.

If i ever have time, i will set CruiseControl.Net up on my home server and take the time to do some more playing around with it. I have some plans for tasks to write, such as PDF generation from word documents, etc. If i write anything useful i will post it here. unless i can’t for some reason.