For some reason the x-server died when starting up Evolution. I had to kill the email client twice and eventually reboot the server. The reboot hung will one of the CPUs “got stuck” so the power had to be yanked.

The last time the server rebooted was about 4 months ago when we had a power failure at three in the morning and the time between reboots triggered a forced fsck.

I sorta hold my breath when I reboot servers or even my workstation. You never know when it the computer may not come up clean so I just leave them running 24/7. But this time, the server did not come up clean.

When fsck fails in the bootup script you simply run fsck on the device in question, or /dev/sda1 and the problem goes away after the scan finishes and corrects the errors.

Somehow fsck kept failing over and over which brings me to the title of this post “Gin and Tonic.”

At work we have two servers “gin” and of course “tonic”.  Tonic’s been a very reliable server but for some reason we have to reboot it several times a week.  In our geekiness, gin was the next server we added to support software development.

But all I could think after all these reboots of my dedicated server was poor old tonic and it’s root problem which has yet been located.  I digress.

After a few more reboots and a fsck on “/” instead of /dev/sda1 seemed to resolve the problem. Who knows.  I just hope my server doesn’t become a Gin and Tonic problem.

So, I put on my Professors cap and believe that I can answer many of these “How to Write and Develop Software for the Beginner” questions on a new Blogger blog.  As time permits, and while I’m in the office, I try to any beginner or advance questions on writing and developing software.

We sorta do this today on some apps, but the modules tend to grow with bug fixes and new features.  This usually ends up with a mishmash mash up amalgamation of mush.  So much for the software development world.

What seems to work really well are those dirty blue widgets that you can install on just about every content management system.  One company that really does it right is Clearspring where they can make a widget just about of anything.

Like I said, I’m getting excited about widgets again!

It’s not that I like or enjoy assimilation, but every time I analyze the requirements it really comes down to scalability and what it takes to scale and deploy your software architecture as it out grows one, two, “N” servers.

Even though there are some clever platforms, and most of web applications I’ve developed so far can run on a virtual private server (VPS), the Google App Engine by far ensures “scale up to millions of users without infrastructure headaches.”

So I’ve been assimilated. Resistance was futile.  No more Cake PHP …

Joking …

Sometimes you have weird dreams like tossing in the towel and taking a life of a less stressful job like a Truck Driver making runs up and down the frozen lakes of Yellowknife Canada.

I only know of a developer who actually tossed in the towel.  He and his wife sold their house at one of the California housing peaks in the late 80′s.  Quit their jobs and moved to Canada.  Eventually got bored and took a job as a bus boy.

He resumed his development career after he figured out that he was taking the same amount of carp but was getting paid 10x less.

But my Ice Road Trucker dream is still a reality and I’m planning to take off one winter to see if I can at least drive 18-wheels as good as four.  I’m sure that Hugh Rowland would hire me to drive one of his trucks.

Now how do I get this thing out of first gear?

Of course there are lots of off page factors and topology considerations that Google, MSN and Yahoo have to analyze the macro view of the web. Each company has their own algorithms to present this view for given search terms.

All we know is that Google’s publication of its algorithm, via patent disclosure, indicates that links to your content are a contributing and weighted factor in determining content ranking. Other search engines have not disclosed their IP, so an educated guess would be that external links are a determining factor.

Even though you follow the SEO recipe, there are supply and demand factors where you are providing the supply side of the equation where Google and the other search engines are fulfilling the demand for their customers. There is enough evidence that suggests Google, with it’s massive parallel operations, provides new information near real-time where other search engines may take days.

Thus, with the proper SEO recipe, it is theoretical to achieve short and long-term results for certain terms that you are trying to market. But if you want to keep it simple, just become a PPC guy like Amit.

Please, someone at Intuit tell me why?  The last time I had to upgrade from Quicken 2002 to Quicken 2005 was because Intuit changed the QIF API to OFX.   I loved 2002 with a very natural UI and hated 2005 with it’s new UI.  Took me months to get used to it.

After I upgrade to Quicken 2008 and find out that Intuit didn’t change the API or put a stupid Office 2007 UI, guess what, I’m not going to upgrade to Quicken 2011 in three years.

Excerpt From My First Dictation (unedited):

This is a review of Dragon natural speaking. Getting used to the headset is very difficult that tends to squeeze my head and makes my ear hurt. Perhaps this is why it took me almost 3 months to install the software.

So I decided to go to Wal-Mart and picked up a wireless microphone however the quality of the microphone was not good enough so I had to use the default headset.

Out of eight bucks, I installed software ran the utility to train my voice and my dictation and now I’m writing this article without typing.

It’s a pretty good utility that is easy to use, very productive, and very easy to learn.

Some of the important commands are:
“undo” (I had to type this ’cause it kept undonig it)
“select”
“go to end”

The undo command basically is a oops allowing you to correct your mistake. The select command allows you to select words or phrases enabling you to correct those on-the-fly.

The undo command allows you to correct the last mistake; however, it only allows you to correct one mistake. That is, it doesn’t appear to have endless undo commands. This can be a feature of the DragonPad since this is what I am using to write this article. It may not be a limitation of software if I was using Microsoft Word.

The go to command allows you to move within the text you’re dictating. It is very helpful after selecting the word, and correcting your mistake, to go to the end of a line or paragraph. Just say “go to end “and the program will take you to the end of the line.

This is an incredible program which I should’ve bought years ago to help improve productivity and my writing skills. I highly recommend it!

There’s a lot of buts: it’s too slow, it’s not modular, it’s “fill in the blank” … Just get over it. Look for ways to extend the component for your application. Write a wrapper, build an interface, just get it to work.

Configuring CakePHP

I spent some time trying to figure out how to change the default templates. Resulting to grep for a few html tags, I found the “default.thtml” file in the /app/views/layout directory. Apparently I overlooked the obvious, because on the home page of your configuration, it tells you exactly that! Duh.

I copied over CSS, images and updated the default template and started getting that urge of “I can do it better.” I managed to overcome it quick by putting a bunch of “TODOs” in the template. I believe that there are a few ways to configure the helper functions or better yet, extend them to our application.

I still don’t understand the CakePHP architecture and the layers of the cake (pun intended). An architecture diagram would be very helpful at this point in time. This is probably the next thing in the list to do: see if one exists or start drawing one.

Our decision to toss out our in-house PHP Framework FIZZI and start from scratch with CakePHP was not taken lightly. The time, effort and development costs are nothing to the future costs of maintaining and upgrading FIZZI. Simply put, let’s get out of the Framework Business and focus on our core process and system strengths!

Installation of CakePHP

No matter how trivial the Cake Developers made the installation process, I simply can’t brush over this step because I’m a dumb ass. I installed CakePHP on a server with an older version of PHP (4.2). After mucking with the initialization script to set up the include paths correctly, CakePHP was bombed out in a session function that was introduced in PHP 4.3.

I know, I should have read the minimal requirements, but what Software Developer really reads yet implements the requirements? So I had to install it on a server with PHP 4.3+ or PHP 5+. That implies either upgrading our in-house test server and possible breaking ongoing development on other projects, use a virtual server on my desktop or just go for broke and install it on a existing domain at a hosted server.

After the trial and error of installing CakePHP on our test server, installation on the hosted server was a breeze! Three lines of code in the initialization file and three parameters in the database file need changing. Load the home page with success! Ideally, if you had the capability to install cake in /usr/local/src, you should install it there. This will make system-wide upgrades easier in the future especially if you are planning to use CakePHP for more than one project.