SSH right on your iPhone!

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Remy is sort of launched.  A very tiny closed beta is happening as I write.  Its been about a week now, and of course I have been obsessing over the traffic hitting the production.log.  I’ve got a constant tail -f going on my desktop machine, and I get so excited when I see someone new checking things out.  Just watching the production.log is giving me great insight into the usability of the product.  I can see where people are clicking, and if they are hesitating, if they are not sure about where they are at that moment, or where to go next.  I’ve made a few tweaks here and there just by watching the traffic in this log, so it has been a huge help and a lot of fun!  What happens when I am away from my desk though?  Perhaps I am hanging at my favorite coffee house, Zume’s, where I pretty much have established a secondary office.  Well, in that case, I’ve got my trusty macbook, and iTerm to handle my tail -f.  But what if I am on the go, gallivanting around town?  This could be a big problem.  I need to be able to see my traffic at all times or my head will explode.  Enter … a new iPhone App.  Searched and downloaded from the App Store, check out TouchTerm.  A nifty little SSH client where I can tail -f to my hearts desire … and boy do I!!  Its got a nice preference pane, to tweak colors and overall look and feel.  Its even got up arrows, so you can simply scroll through your past commands.  Best part is, I get to continue to see my sites traffic in real time, from anywhere I am at that particular moment.  Brilliant!  At a measly $2.99, its the best thing I’ve ever bought for that price … except for maybe Zume’s coffee.

I have been quiet for a reason

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I have been busy!!  Not just busy …. swamped busy!!  The kind of busy when you work from home, and your husband expects to come home to a clean house, and a nice meal, and instead he gets you still greasy, in your pajamas, locked away in the corner room, hyped up on caffeine, with piles of hot messes surrounding you.  Its not pretty, nor healthy.  I am happy to say I am moving out of the woods and reentering the masses!

Its been a couple of months now, and I have made a ton of progress on Remy.  Thinking about getting a beta launched soon.  A few days ago my IT guy convinced me I needed to deploy in a different server environment.  The one I have been using for development has become more and more troublesome as they are adding more and more users to it.  The server crashed twice this week, and the hosting company said they had to reboot the machine due to load.  Not my app’s load … just the sheer number of people they have hosted on this server.  Not going to work for me.  Instead my IT guy did some research and we are trying a new environment called Go Grid.  I’ll let him blog about the details, mostly because it is not my area of expertise (see my entry "not a computer girl").  Anyway, it has been quite the process to get everything moved over to the new server environment.  One major issue we hit was the installation of all the right gems.  In the old environment, it was a hosting company that only dealt with Rails apps, so they had hundreds of gems installed for everyone to use. Starting from a scratch environment, we had to go through and figure out which ones I needed … mostly via trial and error.  The problem that took the most time was a strange issue I was hitting with the file_column plugin.  After the deployment on the new server, I could only get gif files to upload.  If I put in a jpeg or a png, it would error out with "Invalid Image".  I searched and searched everywhere on the internet and found maybe 2 other people having this problem … with no way to fix it.  What a pain!!!  Finally we tracked it down, and I am logging it here for the next person that comes along and is frustrated by it.  It turns out, we needed to install some extra libraries used by ImageMagick, specifically libjpeg-devel and PNG.  Here is a great step by step write up about installing RMagick for use with the file_column plugin. 

Now that we are *finally* all moved over to the new server environment, my IT guy is putting the last few things in place for clustering and load balancing.  It should be a pretty solid, pretty fast, and generally pretty set up!!!  All of this in preparation for the first beta release.  Phew … this has been the fastest two months.  Ever.

IE 6.0 *finally* being phased out

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As a supplement to my entry yesterday, Dave pretty much made my day when he sent me this article.

The Internet Explorer 6 browser was released back in 2001, and Internet Explorer 7, the replacement, was released nearly two years ago in 2006. Modern web browsers such as IE 7, Firefox, and Safari provide significantly better online experiences. IE 6 usage has finally dipped below a small minority threshold of our customers, it’s time to finally move beyond IE 6.

If its good enough for 37 Signals, its good enough for me! I found that IE 6.0 had a few more "issues" in my testing, than IE 7.0. Things mostly surrounding some special CSS hovers I was doing with text. The spacing was also a little different. I’ve decided just to spot check IE 6.0, but put most of my focus on the support of IE 7, and the other better browsers. I just wish people would stop using IE in general, and especially IE 6.0. I know a lot of corporations haven’t allowed their user’s to upgrade yet, even 2 years after IE 7.0 was released. So ridiculous!

In ancient Eskimo culture, when an elderly member of the tribe lost their usefulness, they were set afloat on a iceberg, and pushed out into the vast artic sea … never to be seen again.  IE 6.0 is like this elderly Eskimo.  It has lost its usefulness in the browser world, and should just be set afloat … never to be used again.

Why does my site look different in IE? Ruby saves the day (once again)!

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For anyone who has ever done any sort of web development, there comes a point where you need to make sure what you are building works the same across all browser types and versions … or at least the major ones.  If you’ve ever spent any time tweaking your code and fighting with the different browser types, you know that Microsoft has done its best to annoy the shit out of you once again with Internet Explorer.  Because it does not adhere to web standards, it always seems to cause trouble when compared to Firefox or Safari.  The spacing is a bit different, and what really bit me this time was a freakish bug in which a background image url will disappear when scrolling, or in my case, I was hiding a DIV and then making it appear with a javascript toggle.  [SIDE NOTE: The scriptaculous javascript classes for Ruby are FANTABULOUS!  So much fun to code and instant gratification because you can see spiffy results super fast!]  I found some great information on common IE css bugs and some possible fixes for them.  In my scenario, I had to change my code for IE, to accommodate the browser’s inadequacies.  I started looking at javascript browser sniffers, but then realized that Ruby on Rails provides a quick and easy way to get the information I needed for a browser check.  The request.user_agent object, contains information on the client’s browser type, version, and even operating system type! 

<%= request.user_agent %>  #=> Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.0.1) Gecko/2008070206 Firefox/3.0.1

So, if I need to adjust my code for IE, all I have to do is check for "MSIE" as part of the string:

<% if !(request.user_agent.include? "MSIE") %>
 … regular code here …
<% else %>
…. stupid IE code here ….
<% end %>

I didn’t want to compromise the design of my site, by changing the code across all browsers.  I wanted to keep my hidden DIV with the fancy pants javascript toggle for all the user’s who aren’t stuck on IE.  Now, the IE users will get the DIV displayed immediately, while all other browsers will have a cleaner user experience, with the hidden DIV, only appearing when they want it to. 

Thank goodness for Ruby, in making this browser check so easy!! The other solutions I found required a nice chunk of javascript with a technique called browser sniffing.  The other way to do it, is by checking what objects or features are implemented by the browser that is hitting the site.  There is a good write up for determining browser type using object detection, with a chart that shows what objects/features set the different browsers apart.  OR …. you can make a simple Ruby call to the request.user_agent object …. SO EASY!!!!  This is the kind of thing that makes coding with Ruby on Rails such a pleasurable experience!!!

Nerd Girls

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Last week on the Today Show they featured a group of women, who don’t look like your typical scientists and engineers.  The self proclaimed, Nerd Girls are out to prove beauties can be brainy.  I’m all for breaking the typical stereotypes and showing the younger generation of girls that it is cool to be interested in Math and Science and that they can be successful nerds!

All I have to say is … You go Nerd Girls!!

Because he is a water dog

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For the third summer in a row, we spent last weekend at Lake Winnipesaukee, with friends.  Its become sort of a mini tradition for us.  We always have a great time, but no one has a better time than Kobe …

It is a nightmare to keep him OUT of the water.  Its just not possible.  He such such a water dog … a better swimmer than I am for sure!  He would wake us up at 7:00am each morning, with a quiet whine, as if to say … can we get up and go swimming already?!!

It is almost sad when we have to take him home at the end of the weekend.  His walks with the dog walker, boat days on the harbor, and play groups at the park, are obviously not enough.  We are completely depriving him of what he was meant to be …. a lake dog.

Maybe someday … Kobe.  Until then, you’re just going to have hang in there and enjoy the city dog life!

Excerpts

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I continue to enjoy my book, Founders at Work.  A few nights ago, I read through the interview with the founder of del.icio.us, Joshua Schachter.   One of his comments (pp 230) really leaped off the page, grabbed me, and shook me with both hands ….

I have never had a great deal of trust for people who don’t execute on core ideas.  I understand the value of needing someone to deal with that kind of stuff — someone’s got to do the VC pitch and there’s got to be a CFO, etc.  But the guy who says, "I have a great idea and I’m looking for other people to implement it," I’m wary of — frequently because I think the process of idea-making relies on executing and failing or succeeding at the ideas, so that you can actually become better at coming up with ideas.  It’s something you can learn.  It’s a skill, like weightlifting.  That failed; that worked; continue.  You begin to learn how to make ideas.  So if you are someone who can’t execute and all you can do is come up with ideas, how do you know if they are any good?  You don’t really know if it’s a good idea until you’ve executed it.  You need to understand the cost of execution and so on.

I probably liked this quote so much, because I can identify with it.  I have an idea.  I know how to implement it.  So, here I am, giving it a shot, executing, and time will tell if it is any good or not.  Remy is actually not the first idea I’ve executed on either, and in previous attempts, I’ve learned how to quantify what it really takes to put a project together.  The time it takes, the skill level involved, what to think about, etc.  I can definitely see how past experiences have influenced my execution this time around, in a positive way.

On to the chapter about Ann Winblad Cofounder, Open Systems and Hummer Winblad.  It’s nice to see some women founders being interviewed.  I’m always curious to see what their perspectives have been and if they differ from their male counterparts.  The other female interviewee I’ve read so far is Caterina Fake, cofounder of Flickr.  That was a really interesting chapter because Flickr started eons away from where it is today.  In the interview she describes an experience where her cofounder, who happens to be her husband, was told not to bring ‘his wife’ to VC meetings.  Lovely.


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