The joy of Hofbrauhaus Las Vegas - lager, pretzel, sourkraut and more sausage than you ca shake a stick at.
Would you trust an atm with the defcon logo on it? I wouldn’t
Ok I’m headed to Vegas for a conference. Hopefully this should give people something to play with while I’m out and about.
Basically I fixed a bunch of small problems - including giving you a better warning when you are not logged in as “admin” but you are trying to access Postie.
Also there are a number of image related features - Imagemagick can now be used to make thumbs, flash files embed in the page, and the first draft of pulling the first frame out of a 3gp movie are in there. Currently there are no instructions on how to get ffmpeg or imagemagick - I’m leaving that as an exercise for the user.
Finally I’ve thrown my hands up over the time difference issue - Postie now tracks it’s own time differential - if that doesn’t fix the problem - I’m going to need some help.
BUGFIX: handles email addresses that are no name and just
FEATURE: Basic support for embedding flash files
BUGFIX: Postie now handles creating the correct URL on non Unix platforms
BUGFIX: Fixed problem with file attachments not being put in the right place.
FEATURE: You can now choose to use imagemagick convert to handle making thumbnails
BUGFIX: Rewrote Cronless Postie to use direct sockets
BUGFIX: Time offset is now settable just for Postie - hopefully this will fix problems for cases where the normal time offset doesn’t work properly.
FEATURE: First draft of frame for a 3GP video
FEATURE: Option to embed 3GP in QuickTime Controller.
This is probably one of those things that is already obvious, becomes obvious once you read this post, or you never thought about it :)
I spend a lot of my time building systems. Especially systems to help people get processes done using software. One of the things I had never taken much time to think about is the pressure that growth puts on a system/process.
Bascially there is a huge difference between desigining a system for 100,000 users and one that is designed for 100 users but ends up having 100,000 users. That is not to say that if you knew up front that there were going to be some many people it would be absolutely simple to plan for it (especially if you had never worked on a system before that had so many users). It’s more that knowing up front that it was going to be big makes it easier to justify building in extra support in the system to handle the weight of all those users.
With 100 users you can think about how do I keep this small and simple. The other one you know that performance is going to be sensitive from the start. What I’m really getting at is that sometimes you build a piece of software or you design a work flow and it seems fine - actually it seems great. Then it goes into action and it functions correctly. If you just did it a little more often you might occasiontally find problems with it (there is a dependancy you weren’t aware of in the work flow that can sometimes slow things down) but really those are just the normal bumps in the road. But if every day the process is used more and more because there is an ever escalating number of customers - the problem isn’t just that you find a problem in the flow that needs a solution - but instead that every day there is a new and different problem that needs to be fixed. The pressure of growth adds stress to the system and that stress makes any flaws or weaknesses in the process show themselves that much quicker.
I’ve tended to beat myself up about this sort of thing. Especially because I’m normally very good and making it so there are not a lot points in the process that can buckle, but it still happens. And for a long time I wondered why it seemed like new things came up over time instead of the same thing over and over - and it turns out this is the reason. Every environment I have evern built for starts small with a woefully inadequate estimate of how large it is going to get - or how much it is going to change.
One school of thought is probably that you should just plan more upfront and weigh in the factor that everything is going to grow too much, but that just doesn’t jive with me. My view is to stick to my Agile knitting - and say that the my solution is to try to keep things as simple as possible with the understanding that there will be gaps. There will always be gaps, so instead of beating myself up about it , I want to build things that make it easier to fill the gaps that matter the most. This path may start in chaos but it will quickly stablize if you pay attention and adapt the system to what is going on. I’m sure there are examples where this is a bad idea - but so far it turns out I don’t work on those….
I got a sweet dev laptop several months ago - it’s an hp zv5000 with a AMD64 3700 in it. So far I like it a lot. The dock sucks in comparison to the one I had for my Dell but otherwise it is awesome. The version I got shipped with Bluetooth built in. At the time it wasn’t supported under Linux. It turns out that since I switched keybaords I didn’t really use the Bluetooth that much. Now I’m headed to Las Vegas for DefCon and I won’t be using the network inside the hotel since I’m actually staying where they have the conference. Instead I’ll be linking up thru my cell phone over bluetooth to the GPRS network which should make things more difficult. Anyway I got everything setup under XP last night so I can connect to my phone - while I was doing some research I found out that low and behold Linux now supports my laptop’s bluetooth. I switch over to my Debian install, ran my dial up scripts, and bingo I’m on :) So Linux loses points for not supporting it on day one - but it’s pretty cool that it supports it now :)
I’m back from Chicago - and mostly in one piece - my voice is a bit weak but I assume that will come back at some point. I came home to a stack of stuff to sort out - a new widget to connect my ReplayTV and my DirectTV box that will let me access the local channels, the rest of the parts of a counter pressure filler (pictures soon), and a note from FedEX that my replacement case for my fileserver is waiting for me at their main location.
When you mix that with the projects I had in play at work and home before I left, the fact that my laptop is still barely booting anything useful, and that I leave on Friday for DEFCON - I’m left feeling a bit overwhelmed and seiously under the gun….
Double char dog with cheddar , and everything(mustard,tomato,relish,onion,pickle,hot peppers,celery salt)
Art-o-mat.A thing of beauty and cheap wearable art. In vendy form.
Cocunut crusted french toast
This place really understands - order mini-burgers- add a can of pr for $1
