devnulled: A stream for software developers and engineers

BarDiver, a Django powered site which is essentially a social site for Denver, Colorado area bars has been launched. A friend and I discussed doing a project like this after having a frustrating time trying to find happy hour specials before heading to a concert, and this site looks to be a pretty well executed example of how to find bars which are places you’d like to go.

As for myself, I seem to end-up in a lot of old Kerouac haunts for whatever reason.

I was curious to see if I could still find the old listings of ColdFusion Certified Developers from the original 4.5-5.0 test period. After looking around the dark, dust covered areas of the Adobe site and thumbing through some URL’s one ID at a time, I finally found the page where they are grouped by the first letter of your last name. Unfortunately the URL mapping is a bit incorrect, so you will need to copy and paste the links and reformat them to get them to work.

Basically all of the URL’s in that page look something like:
[code]
http://www.adobe.com/Handlers/index.cfm?ID=18499
[/code]

Change it to this if you’d like to view a particular page (just prepend v1/ to Handlers):
[code]
http://www.adobe.com/v1/Handlers/index.cfm?ID=18499
[/code]

Maybe Sean will see this post and can relay this bug back to his old web team at Adobe. Though honestly it’s such an old part of the site that it probably doesn’t even get visitors now– it did take me awhile to /intentionally/ find it after all.

As for me, I passed the 4.5 test which was then upgraded to include 5.0, and haven’t really found a need to do it again since then. Just for reference, I started poking around CF at my first web programming job during the middle of the upgrade to ColdFusion 3.0/3.1, though I know many of the big names out there have been using it since 1.5.

This blog has obviously turned into one of mostly technical matters. At the moment, I have a pretty strong readership all things considered (about 1,500-2000 unique visitors a day) which mostly seem to be looking for technical content, so that’s what this blog has been for awhile. About half of those look to be subscribed to my RSS feeds which are technical in nature, so I think it’s time to move the personal stuff to a different domain and hone this down to software development and other general Unix and geek type stuff.

I’ve owned other personal domains for quite some time and plan on putting up something a little more personal for friends and so forth looking to keep up with me (using one of said domains). If all goes as planned, look for something new from me on this front before the end of the year.

While I keep poking around Django, I have yet to do much other than from simple stuff with it. That said, it’s definitely starting to gain some ground, particularly in the media space. Locally in Colorado, both the Boulder Daily Camera and the Steamboat Pilot have converted their sites to using Django, and recently one of the lead developers, Jacob Kaplan-Moss, flew to Colorado to work with a local group of Pythonistas over a weekend to add Oracle support before Django hits 1.0.

Subsequently, they have started work on the Django book slated to print next year, and it’s much like the online editing format which the Subversion book is under. I really like the community driven aspect of the book and will probably pick-up a copy once it’s released.

While it seems that Ruby On Rails seems to get most of the buzz these days (especially those silly arguments how the /framework/ Ruby on Rails is going to replace the Java /language/), I think Django is doing a bit better in the commercial space, particularly in publishing. And by commercial I mean established companies, not “hey look how cool and web 2.0 we are” sorts of startups. Not that there is anything wrong with that as I prefer to work in startups actually, I just thought I’d make the distinction.

If you’re reading this message, a DNS change has finally been relayed to your DNS client and you’re hitting this site on my new server.

After many minor problems hosting at home (mostly outages for various networking/power reasons) and not having enough bandwidth to survive being digg’ed or Slashdotted, I recently decided to seek a hosting plan which allowed me to have all of the control that I had by hosting my site at home, but none of the worries of connectivity, electricity, bandwidth, etc. Though I started out looking for a cheap dedicated server, I found that after an exhaustive amount of research I decided I was a better candidate for an unmanaged VPS (virtual private server). The main reasons I chose a VPS over a dedicated server were:

• The servers that VPS’ are hosted on are typically quad CPU, dual core servers with large amounts of RAM, SCSI RAID, etc.
• Given the hardware specs, the performance of a VPS is going to be better as long as they aren’t overloaded vs. a cheap dedicated server up to a certain point/depending on what your hosting requirements are.
• Lower monthly cost than dedicated servers

Server virtualization has really been progressing by huge leaps and bounds within the past year or two, and VPS hosting plans are actually getting fairly ubiquitous at this point. Although VMWare and Windows Virtual Server are popular in the corporate space, it seems that most of the hosting providers use Virtuozzo.

Essentially I was looking for a plan which offered at least 512 MB of RAM, at least 20 GB of space, and had an unthrottled port of at least 100 GB of bandwidth per month which was not on an oversold network. Many hours of research, reading reviews, and looking at the various plans, I made the final decision of getting a plan with Future Hosting. Generally speaking, this was my criteria for finding a VPS provider:

• Connected to a Tier 1 network
• Bandwidth and servers not oversold
• Reasonable pricing. I’m an individual just running a few personal sites and projects, not a company, so I’m a little more price sensitive than “5 9’s” sensitive.
• Good support. I usually only need support for things outside of my control, but when this happens, you definitely want someone who can respond quickly.

So far the service has been rock solid, and the service has been nothing less than fantastic! While I was setting up the machine I regularly saw download speeds greater 900kB, so the bandwidth available is also very impressive. I’ve submitted several tickets during the setup and got literally instant responses if not resolutions. The only complaint I have (which is unrelated to Future Hosting itself) is that I’m stuck using Debian Linux rather than Ubuntu. At this point very few providers offer Ubuntu yet because apparently SWSoft does not yet offer a supported image of Ubuntu for Virtuozzo though it’s in the works. The good news is I’m slated to beta test a Ubuntu VPS soon, and hopefully I can get moved over to one later.

Admittedly it’s a little strange for me to be switching back to Linux from FreeBSD. When I originally started hosting my own sites from home circa 1998, I started off on a DEC Alpha Running RedHat 5.2. I quickly got tired of the dependency hell of Linux and switched to FreeBSD 3.x, and have stuck with it up until now. Now with apt-get (which is very much like the FreeBSD ports system) I no longer worry about the problems I used to have with Linux. My only gripe is that it seems like the packages for Debian are a bit outdated in general. I’ll be interested to see if things such as python 2.5 are already packaged into Ubuntu.

It’s late and I’ve been working on this for the better part of the evening so it’s time to wrap this post up, but I’ll try to get around to posting more about this if anyone is interested. I do still have a few things to move and/or configure, so hopefully there aren’t any major show stoppers happening at the moment.