beTech :: Evolve Already

There’s a free conference about open-source databases planned for November 14-16 at Cityspace (inspired by beCamp, which is a local BarCamp event I attended earlier this year). Free meals, good times. (We have sponsorship from Sun, Google and others. There are opportunities for local sponsorship, too

A lot of the most illustrious names in open-source databases will be here. This will definitely be a place you can meet people who know how to make databases sing and dance. For example Peter Zaitsev of mysqlperformanceblog.com fame will be here, as will the creator of SQLite and many more.

It would be great if you would

1. spread the word — put badges on your sites, blog about it, tell
   friends to come
2. help organize
3. attend!

See http://opensqlcamp.org/

Grab badges from
http://www.xaprb.com/blog/2008/10/04/opensql-camp-badges-are-ready/

Today Ian Brill demo’d ITC’s VMware infrastructure. A similar system is hosted by BeTech to host any number of web software development efforts. Currently ITC hosts ~150 web servers utilizing four servers clustered and running VMware. Ian described Vmotion (product for moving live virtual running virtual machines), Virtual Center Server (product for managing the details of virtual machines), VMware High Availability (product for managing automatic replication and fault tolerance), and DRS (product for virtual load balancing).

This stable VMware infrastructure appears to be a solid solution for hosting systems with a high available requirement. Contact ITC Microsystem, ITC-Microsystems@virginia.edu, if you are interested in standing up a new system in this popular VMware system.

If you are interested in developing a test system in a VMware environment, you can get started free of charge by emailing betechlabs@virginia.edu.

Great talk Ian! Thanks from BeTech.

This Wednesday, February 20th, Eric Pugh will present on OpenID (using RoR specifically), a decentralized single-sign-on system now used by Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and the rest of the world. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenID for all the juicy tidbits/history/etc.

Fascinated by the “craft” of software development, Eric Pugh is the owner of OpenSource Connections, a member of the Apache Software Foundation, and a committer on many projects including DBUnit, Maven, and Jakarta Commons.

When/Where:
* Wednesday, February 20th
* 2:00pm-3:30pm
* electronic classroom in the Science and Engineering
Library, Clark Hall. (http://www.virginia.edu/webmap/ACentralGrounds.html)

Also, Eric would like to get the beTech community involved with the planning and organization of the next beCamp and bring us up to speed with the progress that has been made on beCamp Squared…, beCamp Redux…, beCamp Part Deux…

Hope to see you there!
–Doug

NOTE: For Post Meeting Notes, Read The Follow-up Meeting Post and Any Comments to This Post

For the designer or pre-production person, one of the top-ranking moments of dread has to be when you need a logo for the client’s Web site and print materials and they send you a 150 pixel JPG (or other bitmap/raster image) file. You, of course, need a vector graphic that will scale nicely between icon size and billboard size without pixelating; and they, of course, have nothing of the sort. This is where a vectorization tool comes in.

Unfortunately, most vectorization tools cost too much, are a pain in the keister to use, and don’t really produce usable results without a lot of finagling. I haven’t tried the Corel product in years, but Adobe Illustrator’s Live Trace leaves much to be desired. It tends to round corners in the strangest of places and make up new colors to fill in the pixelization blend areas. Thankfully, we now have another alternative: Stanford University’s VectorMagic.

VectorMagic is a free online application that takes your randy little raster images and converts them into amazingly accurate vector EPS or SVG file. Comparing it to the Adobe and Corel products is unfair, but we’ll do it anyway. Looking at the images side-by-side, VectorMagic does what we’d expect and want a vectorizer to do: take a big-picture view of our messy, aliased (that stair step, building-block appearance) artwork and churn out something appropriate. The other applications seem to be taking a pixel-by-pixel approach which probably accounts for the additional colors and the unusual corners. It looks as though the big boys (Adobe and Corel) have some catching up to do. Kudos to James Diebel and Jacob Norda, the Stanford University Artificial Intelligence Laboratory research project developers, for their work.

All that’s required to run it is a modern browser, a Flash player, and an image to vectorize. And, while we’ve been talking about logo conversion, you certainly don’t have to restrict your images to graphics. There are already a couple of photos in their examples that look quite stunning as well. Take it for a spin and let us know how it works for you.

Before you bring your Web server to its knees with that application, be sure to check out Nick Skriloff’s beTech presentation on Load Testing next Wednesday at 3:00. Nick will walk you through some of the work he’s done to load test and profile J2EE and Ruby on Rails applications. For the J2EE side we will look at using The Grinder and the Mercury Diagnostic Profiler. For the Rails side we will look at using The Grinder and ruby-prof.

Nick Skriloff has been developing software since 1990. He is presently the Director of Quality Assurance for an arm of the Darden Business School called Darden Solutions. He has logged hundreds of hours doing performance testing web applications in production and looks forward to sharing his discoveries.

And don’t forget to join the beTech bunch after work this Thursday for our monthly beerTech happy hour at South Street Brewery. We’ll chat about load testing, Nick, and whatever else comes up.

Comparing files in Dreamweaver (DW) is so useful that it’s a wonder it isn’t already built in. Whether it be for comparing a locally saved file to one on a shared Web server or comparing recently downloaded source code updates to existing application files, finding files differences with the help of a suitable application is far more productive than “eyeballing” the differences. The good news is that while that functionality is not native to Dreamweaver it is rather painless to hand off the work to a third-party application.

On my Mac I was able to configure DW to use TextWrangler (a “must-have” text editor for Mac OS X) with ease. I can’t vouch for the Linux and Windows alternatives, but a little Googling did bring up these free applications:

• KDiff (Linux, Mac, Windows)
• WinMerge (Windows)

Once you’ve downloaded and installed your compare application, open your DW Preferences > File Compare category, and enter the location of the application (default TextWrangler location: “Macintosh HD:usr:bin:twdiff“). The full instructions are at Adobe’s Livedocs site.

Henceforth, comparing local or remote files is as easy as selecting them, right-clicking to bring up the context menu, and then choosing Compare Local Files, Compare with Remote, or Compare Remote Files (depending on the files you selected). The compare application typically shows three panes: one that identifies the location and nature of the differences (seen here at the bottom) and the two other panes that highlight the code differences. Pretty neat, huh?

Of course, if we were all good little programmers, we’d be using a proper revision control system such as Subversion and relying on the integrated diff/compare features. Someday. But until then, if you’re maintaining any sort of simple file backups you can still compare those files from the comfort of your Dreamweaver’s Files screen.

YSlow for Firebug is the latest must-have extension for Web developers working the bleeding edge. It’s primary purpose it to analyze your pages and tell you why they’re so slow (get it?: [Yahoo||whY]Slow), but it also has some other handy tricks up its sleeve. In one cool little tool, you get:

• a performance report card (based on the Yahoo! 13 Simple Rules for Speeding Up Your Web Site)
• an HTTP/HTML summary
• a list of components in the page
• other tools including JSLint

(Those with a keen eye may notice that YSlow is an extension for Firebug—which is itself a bad-ass Firefox extension.)