Date Driven Development or what I like to call DEE-DEE-DEE
The company I work for has recently undergone a profoundly dumb transformation. Years ago when management seemed to care, we had a small development team striving to move toward a more Agile, test-driven methodology, we scheduled releases based on a realistic feature-set with realistic estimates and due dates. We were on top of our game, the best in our industry, and we cared about our work.
About a year or so ago that all started to change, upper-management made a culture-altering decision, they committed to an Oracle ERP implementation with a two year time-frame for completion, without asking IT how long something of this size might take. So the date was set and the countdown clocks were installed and the "Great place to work" mentality that the company had formerly professed went straight into the toilet. Development began to receive impossible tasks, with impossible dates, and the pressure became unbearable fast. We ramped up hiring and brought on droves of contractors to fill the parking lot and the smoking tents and collect unbelievable fees. Now there is not a person left in IT that is happy about their job or excited about what they do, even the new people hate the place. Our talent has started to look elsewhere and some of our best have already started to leave. The new developers smell the discontent from a mile away and with no allegiance or roots tying them down, they don't last long. Whether the company will make it through this remains to be seen, the word on the street is that nobody has successfully implemented an ERP of this size, which encourages us to throw our hands up. It'll pass.
Honestly, when management picked that magical date out of their asses and made the decision to drive their people into the ground to achieve it, they doomed the company to certain failure or at least us to certain insanity. If nothing else, money has been wasted and years will be spent digging out of this mess, and the competition will continue to surpass us. I believe a company's success is directly dependent on it's people, and I have yet to find a person that believes this project will be a success or believes in the direction the company is heading. I'm sure we're not the first out there to do this, nor will we be the last. We've seen over and over in the corporate world that there are more DEE-DEE-DEE's everyday getting paid huge amounts of money to screw things up, this is a losing battle.
In the future don't bother to ask me how long something will take, just pull a date out of your ass and let me know when you want it D-D-D-Done.
Lighttpd 1.5 rewrite rules for WordPress
GreatWebGuy.com is now running on Lighttpd or "Lighty" 1.5 and WordPress 2.2. The biggest hurdle we had to overcome running our blog with the Lighty http server was the rewrite rules for our custom Permalink structure - /%category%/%postname%/ - none of the rewrite rules posted on the web seemed to work correctly. If you get the rules right, you should be able to accomplish the pretty urls that you want with 5 or fewer rewrite rules, I've seen some examples on the web with as few as 4 and as many as 30. We also ran into problems with the version numbers included in the querystring of the internal javascript urls in WordPress, it turned out they were being rewritten unintentionally.
These may work or not for your setup, a couple of things to note when writing rewrite rules:
- Start your rule set with areas you know need to be excluded, not rewritten, and write rules that result in => "$0"
- Work your way from specific rules to more generic and all encompassing rules
- Attempt to break the rules down into as few rules as possible, realize rule interpretation causes load on the http server
- Use rewrite-once so that Lighty will stop processing rules when it's found a match
url.rewrite-once = ( "^/(wp-.+).*/?" => "$0", "^/(sitemap.xml)" => "$0", "^/(xmlrpc.php)" => "$0", "^/keyword/([A-Za-z_0-9\-]+)/?$" => "/index.php?keyword=$1", "^/.*?(\?.*)?$" => "/index.php$1" )
Upgrades complete at GreatWebGuy, we’re back now and posting
We're still here, just been too busy to blog, it's been a month, but we've done a lot.
First and foremost we found a new host and at a great price. We opted for a VPS at JTLNet, for $19.95/mo. we get 15GB of disk space, 256MB of guaranteed memory, 200GB of bandwidth and the ability to install any software we want. We wouldn't recommend this setup to anyone that doesn't know what they're doing, but it's a great alternative to a dedicated server. The guys at JTLNet are top notch, many a night we've opened support tickets at 1 a.m. because we hit one roadblock or another and they're there and on top of the issue within an hour.
Having the freedom to pick your own software and not be bound to what your host is running is a beautiful, yet time consuming, thing. I've swapped out the Apache web server for Lighttpd (Lighty) 1.5, the mod_decompress module in Lighty has reduced our page sizes by 85%. For those that don't know, Lighty is a lightweight web server that serves up PHP via FastCGI faster than Apache using mod_php, it's still in Beta but so far it seems stable enough and pretty quick. We upgraded our PHP version to 5.1.2 and MySQL to 5.27 to gain any performance improvements the newer versions are bound to have. Last but not least we migrated to WordPress 2.2 and added some Ajax goodness to the site, notice as you click around we're no longer refreshing the entire page, but just the post content.
All in all things are running smoothly now, not to say we didn't hit several hurdles upgrading and migrating to a new server and platform. We'll be sharing the details of the upgrades and our troubles in our upcoming posts.
Ubuntu might give Linux a chance for those willing to try it out
It's no news that Ubuntu has been getting a lot of press lately for it's ease of install, ease of use, and fantastic packaging system, allowing you to install tons of software very easily. I'm writing this post from my newly installed Ubuntu laptop. I've done Linux installs before, many years ago and always ran into a slew of problems with driver incompatibilities and confusing directions, which usually ended up in me saying, "F- this it's just no worth it," and going back to good ole Windows without looking back. This install was nothing like those days, the long and hard part was the download, once the CD was burned I was 45 minutes from being connected and posting, it was a lot easier than installing Windows.
I just recently purchased a new laptop with Vista installed, I had a long internal struggle about whether I should buy a Mac and use it's virtualization features if I ever missed Windows. I don't mind Vista so much, it's pretty, but what's the point, do I really need a big fat OS like Windows (Mac commercial reference) to surf the web, and do what I need to do? I think with the negative publicity about Microsoft's latest demon spawn and the choices available, a lot of people are asking themselves whether or not they need to continue sticking by Windows. The thing that ultimately kept me from the Mac was the price, I would be paying a premium for the Mac's sexy form factor. My old laptop was still kicking around, so I decided to check out Ubuntu to see how easy it really was, and boy it was easy.
If you want to see what it's all about go out to Ubuntu.com and download the Desktop version, we all have DSL right, and burn the iso to a CD. The CD is bootable and will actually run the OS straight off of the CD, this way you can have a good look around, try out the included software and see if you think it'll work for you, without harming your computer. Once you decide you want it you just click the install to disk icon on the desktop and answer the questions and before you know it you'll be done. My install is on a Gateway 600YG2, 2.4 GHz, 1 GB RAM, it found everything, including my wireless card and wireless network and I didn't even have to be involved other than clicking the Forward button. It's taken some getting used to getting around the system so far, but my beloved Firefox 2.0 is here, and my delicious plug-in by Yahoo is installed, so I'm happy.
Imhosted blacklisted by GreatWebGuy
So the webguy was out and about looking for a good hosting provider and thought a good deal was found at ImHosted, well the webguy was WRONG!!
I set up the account the night before last and received my order confirmation email, which stated that I needed to activate my account, so I click the link to activate my account and follow the instructions, which I'm then prompted that I'm already activated. Funny thing was I had no host account details, so I tried to contact "live" online support, this required that I install ICQ and attempt to talk to dijo, who doesn't ever answer. I give up and open a support ticket, late the next afternoon I received the Account Activation email, which has all my details. I wonder what happens if my site is down, do I wait a day and a half for a response? So I log into the cpanel to check things out and find that the Unlimited domains, Unlimited hosting accounts on the account I paid for means nothing, since there's no way to modify my DNS zone records within the Control Panel, so I fire off another email and support ticket, which went unanswered today. I'm tired of waiting for support to get back to me, I found another account with more space, more bandwidth, and less money at 1&1 Internet and I have plans to call and cancel the other account in the morning, provided they honor their 100% Satisfaction guaranty.