Alex Hopmann’s Blog

Today I moved www.alexhopmann.com over to the hosting provider. As I started putting some more images online and getting a bit
more traffic it was both having more of an impact on my home connection as well as just being way too slow for people trying
to access it (since its limited by my upload speed).

Also- had some great meetings yesterday. One thing that I miss about being in a company with a team is the daily interaction with
lots of smart people, but as I’m starting to dig in on new opportunities I’m finding some good ways to fill that in. Two big to-do tasks
for today are getting my tax paperwork together and putting together a resume suitable for consulting opportunities.

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I went up to Stevens yesterday with Eric and some other friends. Conditions were great, especially
in the afternoon when temperatures got up to 50 degrees and the sun came out. Seventh Heaven was great
and I took some of the steeper routes down under the Southern Cross chair that I haven’t skied for years
due to a combination of my being out of shape and poor conditions. What a great day and I’ve now already
almost half paid for next year’s weekday pass.

I did a lot of research on hosting and co-location. Matt recommended 1 and 1
since they let you have shell access and run cron jobs on their shared servers. Eric suggested
rbwtech and Peyman suggests Server Beach
for co-location / dedicated servers. I’m just not quite there yet since I don’t have the actual usage load to justify paying
$100/month rather than $10/month right now.

Given their money-back policy I’ve signed up for 1 and 1 for now and this site will likely be moving there in the next couple
of days. I will be doing some performance testing on the site and will report results back here.

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Today was a pretty good day. I got my Apache logging working using cronolog to create a new log
every day. It took a bit since it was distributed source-only and I couldn’t get it to compile at
first. It has a “configure” command that you run that tests the environment and creates appropriate
makefiles. First step was realizing that I didn’t have gcc, but that was easy since the configure
command gave me a good error message to that effect.

But once GCC was installed it was still giving an error message that it wasn’t actually working.
I tried running the compiler and it gave up an error message that the linker was actually failing
to load glibc.o. A little research suggested this was the standard c library and a bit more research
suggested that it needed to be installed on its own. The package name wasn’t obvious- I think it was
libc6-dev. At this point everything compiled and it was only a few more steps to get the files
installed in the right place and update the apache configuration files to use the log rotation tool.

Of course there were no direct examples of the right syntax to use to configure Apache to use the
cronolog. And when I started Apache and it just didn’t have any error messages, it took a bit to
figure out how to tell what was wrong. I figured out how to shut down Apache in the “service settings” and
run it from the command line where I could read all the error messages and debug my configuration files. A
little while later and its running fine and I just finished up fixing some differences in the stuff I
built between IE6 and Firefox. The key one is that IE6 exposes any extra attributes you sprinkle in your
HTML directly in the object model and in Firefox you need to call .getAttribute() and .setAttribute() to
read and write them.

This linux stuff does feel like its just held together with duct-tape and bailing wire sometimes. I’m sure its mostly
that I’m not familiar with it, but finding things can be tough when they can be in /usr/bin, /var/bin, /usr/sbin, /usr/local/bin,
/usr/local/sbin, or who knows what other directories. On the one hand the way that individual pieces are really building blocks
for each other can be really powerful, but if you have some obscure configuration problem in one place on your system its really
easy for the whole thing to stop working correctly. I’m sure Windows has many similar situations.

The other thing I noticed today was that I really need to get this moved onto a hosting provider
if I’m going to put more sophisticated stuff up here. Running it off my home connection has worked fine
so far but earlier today while I was listening to the radio the media player suddenly stuttered. A little
research revealed it was someone looking at photo libraries on this site. Next step is researching the
different options- The main thing I’m looking for at the moment is someone with good PHP and MySQL support,
the ability to host multiple domain names/sites without paying individually, and reasonable monthly
transfer limits. Any recommendations?

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My efforts today were an interesting illustration of some of the differences between Windows
and Linux. Like I mentioned before this Ubuntu Linux has come miles from what I remember in
terms of the ease of setup. A couple of days ago I installed MySQL 5.0 on my Windows server which
was pretty much 100% automatic. Install and it ran a nice little wizard to help with initial setup and it was all running.

This morning I went into the Synaptic Package Manager on the linux machine to install
it. All went pretty easily and I got it installed in just a
few minutes which was mostly download time.

The first snag happens when I go to try to set up some accounts for my
apps to authenticate to the server. The Linux box isn’t accepting the
commands that worked on the Windows one. After a bit of messing around I notice
that the Linux machine has MySQL 4 installed which is pretty radically different
than version 5. I head back to the package manager and am surprised to see
no option to install version 5.

Next I head to the MySQL site which has 13 (13!) different options of linux-based
downloads depending on the specific Linux distribution. I guess “Linux x86 generic RPM” and
download those just to discover that I don’t have the RPM utility. I head to the package
manager to install the RPM utility only to see that it warns me that it will break the
Debian based package installs (which is what Ubutntu is based on).

At this point I’m pretty frustrated but a quick search on Google helped me find
Roland Bouman’s site.
Roland appears to have hit the exact same issues as me and his page describing what to do was an
amazing help as I worked through the rest of the problems. I hit a few more snags including installs
that didn’t work. I didn’t notice at first since the failure wasn’t really clearly communicated,
but I couldn’t find the installed files. Next I hit a few issues with trying to figure out the
capitalization that they used for various files and since Linux/Unix is case-sensitive this all
matters a ton.

In the end I finally got it working although I’ll need to dig in a bunch more tomorrow to make
sure that its setup right, logging correctly and putting files in a reasonable place.

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Getting a lot of exposure to just how much configuration is needed with a linux machine. To be
fair a lot of this isn’t about linux, it would apply to setting up a dev and server
environment anywhere. It does feel like this stuff is more clear on Windows but maybe that is just
because I’m more familiar with it. The cool thing is the learning curve feels very fast.

So far I have-

Created an ubuntu install CD. Fairly painless once I discovered deepburn for burning the ISO.

Installed ubuntu. Totally painless. Last time I installed linux (years ago!) it took forever and was hell.
This was great, answer a few questions and after awhile it boots into a fully functioning GUI.

Installed packages. Installing them is itself painless but figuring out what you need is a bit of a mystery.
Ive gotten used to using “WinSCP” to copy stuff to linux servers and its just lucky I knew to look for a “SSH”
package to install.

I had to install- Apache,
PHP,
PHP modules for all sorts of junk, SSH.

Now that I have apache installed and am connected with WinSCP, I have no idea where to find the apache vroot and config files. After lots of searching I found them in /usr/share/apache2/ . It looks like the default config is to put directories in /var/www/ so Ill give that a shot. It isnt how we had things set up back at Pure but I dont know better so Im in the accept default whenever possible mode.

Speaking of all this configuration stuff, Im looking for recommendations on good books for-

Apache configuration
MySql
Java Struts (or in general Java web-server development)
Tom Cat
NANT and whatever build environments would work for Java

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I’ve been busy the last few days- writing a bunch of code and setting up some machines. I should say that I don’t
have a specific focus of some great buisness idea that I want to tackle yet, but I’ve got a few technology things I’m playing
with. I’ll be putting up some new image libraries on this site in a couple of days that will show off some of the code I’ve written.

In the meantime I’ve also been setting up some servers. This site is running on a Windows 2003 Server box that I’ve had for years-
Its an old Dell PowerEdge SC500 with three (fairly small) disk drives and just a 1.1ghz Celeron. I’ve just recently added PHP and
a full set of other tools to the box.

I also just reformatted another machine I had sitting around with an install of Ubuntu linux. The old machine
was running Media Center, but with no tuner- I was using it for remote viewing of programs since the old extenders suck.
Now that I have an XBox 360, it works as a great extender and I can reuse the machine. I’m busy loading all the assorted packages
on it and it will be interesting to experiment with both boxes to understand better the trade-offs of both environments.

In other technology news that nice XBox 360 already broke- the DVD won’t read any discs, which is fine for use as an extender
but not so fine for playing games. It looks like its going to be weeks before I’m able to get it all repaired which is really annoying.

Kat
beat me to posting about the Stevens Pass season ticket deal. I’ve been up twice in the past week and hoping for another
3 visits in the next week (weather permitting). With all the late-season skiing I’m getting in the next-year pass will
already pay for itself before next year. I’d also like to apologize in advance to all local skiers- our next season is doomed,
whenever I buy a pass the snow is always terrible. Sorry!

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Kat is busy taking her test this weekend and requested Corned Beef for dinner as a St. Patricks day thing, plus the high-
protein thing is supposed to be good for test taking. I think it turned out pretty good- Whole Food’s had a bunch
they had pre-marinated so I bought a two pound cut and they filled up the bag with a bunch of the brine. I took
it home and put it in the Staub pot with a bit of extra water, some beer, potatoes, carrots, boiler onions, and
a few cloves of garlic. Brought the whole thing to a boil and then turned it down low with the top on for about
4 hours.

I think the main mistake I made was to not skim the surface earlier. There was a bunch of gray congealed stuff
that wasnt very appetizing and while I removed it later it had already gotten all over the veggies. Id also
say that the result wasnt an explosion of flavor- it was a perfectly good corned beef, but it was still boiled
meat Irish-style. Im wondering what is the magical difference between this and the great New York pastrami?

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I just went through hell today trying to get my hard-drive switched over to the new one. The Seagate software
didnt work automatically- when I followed their directions after the copy was done I switched the new drive
to be the master and the computer would come up and say “Error Loading OS”. Luckily the net came to the rescue
and about an hour of Googling gave the following result.

I used a WinXP disc, booted into the recovery console and tried the following-

FIXMBR C:
FIXBOOT C:
COPY CDDrive:\I386\NTLDR C:\
COPY CDDrive:\I386|NTDETECT.COM C:\
BOOTCFG /rebuild

The two copy commands didnt work for me- they gave me “access denied” and I rebooted and it still failed.
After trying about a dozen other things I returned and somehow discovered that my CD drive was mounted
as H: . So modifying the above to-

FIXMBR C:
FIXBOOT C:
COPY H:\I386\NTLDR C:\
COPY H:\I386|NTDETECT.COM C:\
BOOTCFG /rebuild

And it worked! Im checking out the new setup now and so far so good. Google Desktop is reporting that
something is wrong and its time to sign into email for the first time in 20 hours.

A few glitches- my old 2nd drive moved from “F” to “E” and so a bunch of stuff is failing. Switching it
back seems to have fixed it and almost everything looks good. Microsoft Office was still busted but
luckily it has a good repair program and once I ran that everything was actually right.

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My first hard drive was a 40MB one for only $800. Yes, thats MB, and yes, Im sure there are people who dont consider
it to be a classic hard-drive unless it was a 5MB 8 inch model.

I distinctly remember when La Cie introduced a 70MB drive for $550 at MacWorld and
broke the $10/MB barrier. Years later we broke the $10/GB barrier, and a couple of years
ago broke the $1/GB barrier.

Just yesterday I bought a 300GB drive for $69 (after rebates), or in other words, costing
less than $.25 per GB. Its pretty amazing how the drives just keep getting bigger for less money,
even faster than CPUs and GPUs get better performance. Still its also a good reminder that nothing
has gotten at all better at managing all this cruft of information in the home (or workplace for that
matter). This drive from Seagate is supposed to have some software that helps me copy over the OS and
files from my old drive and set it up to boot but so far no luck- Ill report updates tomorrow.

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I would not call today a success at the whole relaxation plan. Oh well, tomorrow is another day.

The big project today was working on my office at home. My office has had stacks of crap all over for a long time now such
that you can barely walk in it. I mentioned yesterday I was looking at some Ikea shelves but I discovered this new “The Container
Store” in Bellevue and they had
some shelves that are not at all
stylish, but do the trick nicely. Getting them into my office involved some major excavation, culling of dust-bunnies
and moving lots of stuff into the other room and then back. I bought two starter packages and one extra solid shelf but probably need
to go back soon for an extra two shelves to finish it off. Of course its going to take me the rest of the week to get all the
music gear plugged back in and running.

I’ve added some new pages to this web site- one for “food”, one for “travel”
and another for “art”. These are supposed
to be lists that I’ll just maintain over time of things I like or want to do.

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