Nginx

Nginx has been getting a lot of attention as the new way to run PHP, Ruby, and Django applications as it’s lightweight like lighttp, but is significantly cleaner – and lacks some memory leaks. The install was pretty easy on Debian / Ubuntu, just had to do

apt-get install  nginx

And then virtual servers are set up very similarly to apache with a sites-available and site-enabled directory (though no nginx_ensite that I could find)

PHP-FPM

Initially, I setup my new cloud server with spawn-fcgi, which worked to start php-fastcgi. Unfortunately, before the end of the night, I noticed my web pages returning bad gateways (502) thanks to Rigor’s emails.

I did some research – and found the php5-fpm would fix a lot of my crashes. I read the reports about the new FPM in the newest versions of php and its many improvements. Installing php-fpm worked really easily as well.

Already Ran Out Of Memory

Next, I noticed that, under load, my mysql instance was crashing. Default Debian error logs only log to /var/log/syslog (so I also set up a conf line to log to /var/log/mysql/error.log) because the system was running out of memory (and this default Debian setup didn’t come with a swap setup, so mysqld was being prematurely shut down.)

More research showed me that php-fpm was starting 20 instances along with some other default pool settings. A little digging around and using my old Apache worker trials, I’ve arbitrarily set the following for php-fpm.

pm = dynamic
pm.max_children = 30
pm.start_servers = 5
pm.max_requests = 50
pm.min_spare_servers=3
pm.max_spare_servers=5

Which should shutdown memory leaks better and keep my php processes refreshed. I also changed some of my apc settings.

Ruby With Passenger

A lot of the reason that I switched to Nginx is for the prospect of doing more work in Ruby and publishing easily (and performance-ly) with some trial projects instead of just used WebBrick. Installing Ruby through the RVM and setting up passenger on Nginx has a bajillion guides on the internet.

Premature Optimization with MySql Percona & APC

I’ve been experimenting a lot with a few optimizations to make things even better. I’ve recently checked out AriaDB and Percona forks of MySQL. I’m using Percona on my server simply because AriaDB is still on 5.3 (versus 5.5) though Maria probably has some nice benefits for Worpress pages that have little advantage of going InnoDB / XtraDB route. One confusing aspect is that AriaDB has an option for the stock InnoDB and lists XtraDB, but Percona only lists InnoDB (which is really XtraDB)

APC allows for a little extra caching for things. But with a low memory footprint, it seems like a good idea to limit the memory available for APC. I’m sticking with 32mb for now. I’m also setting a really high TTL for unchanged files (stat will recache any changed files anyway)

At lunch the other day, a friend tried to tell me that buying a company’s product has the same effect as investing in the stock. This is not true because you receive instant gratification for your payment, while your investment is at risk and may pay you back over time. Additionally, your investment can be leveraged given accepted capital structure practices in the U.S., while your purchase is often not.

Newt Gingrich - By Gage Skidmore

Last week, Newt Gingrich released his 2010 Federal Income Tax return in a move seen as a way to discredit Mitt Romney with a 1% perception. The big “news” is that Mitt Romney pays about 15% on his $250mln of net worth while Newt Gingrich pays a “more admirable” 31% on his $3.162mln annual income.

Qualified Dividends

The difference in tax rates stems presumably from Mitt Romney’s dividend income, which would be taxed at 15% thanks to the George W. Bush tax cuts. Meanwhile, Newt Gingrich, only received $5990 in qualified dividends. The S&P 500 is an index of U.S. stocks that is generally interpreted to represent the entire market and an average of stability – its dividend yield was 1.98%. This puts an estimate of Newt Gingrich’s stock market holdings at approximately $300,000, or 10% of Newt Gingrich’s 2010 income.

The Problem is the Jobs Plan

The jobs plan that every Republican is running under is that lower taxes increase U.S. investment – which theoretically creates jobs because it helps companies grow. The problem with Gingrich’s stock market investments approximated at only $300k is that he is a perfect example of somebody who is investing very little, even though the tax incentives are already there.

Here are the relevant points of his plan:

1. Stop the 2013 tax increases to promote stability in the economy. Job creation improved after Congress extended tax relief for two years in December. We should make the rates permanent.
2. Make the United States the most desirable location for new business investment through a bold series of tax cuts, including:Eliminating the capital gains tax to make American entrepreneurs more competitive against those in other countries; Dramatically reducing the corporate income tax (among highest in the world) to 12.5%; Allowing for 100% expensing of new equipment to spur innovation and American manufacturing; Ending the death tax permanently.

Gingrich’s return also includes $10,754 dividends from tax exempt investments (likely municipal bonds), which suggest another approximate $200k invested. An additional $5,902 are from unqualified (short term or non U.S.) dividends. ( These are still trivial percentages given the small percentage of his income and therefore presumed, much greater, net worth.)

The piracy acts could do this, and could make sites like Wikipedia, YouTube, and Facebook many times slower (say goodbye to realtime updates) and more expensive as reviewing everything posted requires extensive man power.

What happened to the freedom in the U.S.? The government is going to increase in size to manage DNS blockades? It will step in and add regulation to the internet similar to Australia with an easily achievable abuse that would silence free speech similar to the great firewall of China.

To scare you of China some more, consider that church web sites, their videos, and their musicians are some of the most likely to accidentally use copyrighted material.

For what it’s worth, some of the DMCA works. Violations were reported and YouTube and other major (and minor) sites took down content. Isps dropped violating customers, effectively doing what SOPA intends.

The DMCA is not without abuse either. YouTube and Megaupload megavideos have been publicized as receiving many complaints, but in the end, much of the content was original – or even uploaded by the claimant or its subsidiaries – with SOPA, instead of a hit video being blocked for a few hours while it is investigated (and losing revenue) the entirety of YouTube could be DNS black listed.

Easier to Categorize and Add / Edit CSS

SCSS cascades your style sheets further than what is involved in normal css. Good CSS tends to be specific CSS, and when you get specific, you get many many descriptors, divs, and classes deep on any given line. It makes it a lot easier to find your content section and find all tags underneath it than to search through your CSS (which many developers may cascade incorrectly or add to on the fly and therefore be out of order).

Searching also becomes substantially easier with the implicit requirement to order. You can now search sections of code for the specific class or tag that you are looking to change the style for.

So yes, nesting is great.

Your’re Minifying Anyway

On Monday, I heard an argument that you shouldn’t have any code on your server that you can’t change quickly and on the server if necessary. I don’t really agree with that much at all, but the key when it comes to CSS is that you are compiling it anyway if you’re running any sort of high access application – you’re minifying it so that it transfers faster – and hopefully, it renders faster too.

Check it out

It’s easy to get, especially if you already have Ruby installed (or have a current Mac) simply “sudo gem install compass” and read some howtos on setting up your directories. You can then use “compass compile” in your directory structure – or you can set up a listener for changes (which you could setup on your live server if you want.)

Other features

Variables are another great feature. It can become a lot easier to specify a color template or a collection if you can set colors or attributes up with variables. Then, a few line changes at the top of your SCSS will be put in their respective place. Anybody who has developed in PHP or other server side languages has either done this or wanted to do this with their css.

Rather than choosing the banning of cell phones, government could choose to increase driver attentiveness and safety by making laws that ban automatic transmissions. Here are a few arguments for that legislation, but this is mostly backed by some preliminary studies I’ve seen and heard about attentiveness improving in ADHD adolescent males. Some other points I would like to make, manual transmission legislation could immediately:

• Immediately increases the skills and training required for driving
  (Can make training more expensive, increasing the respect driving gets)
• (Anecdotal) Makes drivers decide between talking on a cell phone and shifting
  (though this only matters in traffic)
• Increases fuel mileage
  (the average manual transmission gets better mileage than the same car equipped with an automatic)
  (speed and gearing thinking can use more read ahead and gear braking)
• Decreases other distracted activities
  (Drivers are less likely to eat or try to reach back to children while driving)

GoDaddy.com is one of the writers of the SOPA bill in front of Congress that makes enlarges the consequences and government involvement in copyright issues. They reversed their primary blog post in full support as they lost customers, but they still sponsored the bill.

Historically, I used GoDaddy because it was an easy way to keep my domains in one place. The user interface – and my annoying username is a strange account number presented minor problems. I even used them as a DNS host as it was more central than afraid.org and allows *some* wildcard posting. The whole CEO hunting elephants didn’t bother me. The Danica Patrick and Hooters style models bothered me significantly – but honestly it did help me know that they are a big name in the business (I love car racing, so Danica Patrick is great, but truly using the sex sales method in tv commercials is a bit distracting and not befitting to women.)

Today, I finally made the jump. Is it because of SOPA? Some. Mostly I’ve been seeing competing prices at namecheap – and the managers and login process at GoDaddy have been annoying. Namecheap still has some user interface issues. Their branding is based purely on price, and they are part of a large corporate conglomerate – but their marketing did a great job on the SOPA polices.

The change was pretty simple, though, I wish that I had found a better designed import / export system for eep codes and DNS management. Ultimately EEP, SPF, and Domain Keys were the biggest pains as I had to go through each domain that had these (DKIM is going to be different anyway) and it was relatively cheap – cheaper than renewing at stock prices next year anyway.

It’s worth noting that I’m a small player, only had 8 domains.

PolioTracker

Poliotracker was the project that I “worked” on. By I, I mean mostly Jeff setting up a Ushahidi instance that would help us report cases of polio and map them out in a nice report.

The idea came from Cyrus Shahpar of the CDC as they currently experience issues with reporting and field agents with WHO who find cases and then sending medical teams and supplies to deal with outbreaks.

You can view it at http://poliotracker.crowdmap.com – if you have an Iphone, Ipad, or Android device, there is a Ushahidi app that gives a nice interface to report and see cases.

Because there won’t always be data available as agents travel the length of the world. Ushahidi also allows SMS (text messages) that describe a location to be sent to the service and processed through Frontline SMS (somebody the CDC / WHO can use as a supplier)

StreetSafe

Street Safe is an app that helps alerts (urban) explorers know when the area that they are in may not be safe. Jeff made sure to extend the resourcefulness by making it time sensitive as well – so if there is only crime in Home Park when it’s night, then it won’t warn you at 10am as you are walking to class. It’s a web smart phone client that sends a json encoded location string to a PHP server. The PHP server responds with crime reports relavent to that area.

The demo works, so that’s pretty awesome. They’re not actually using real data.

They have sort of addressed my qualms with reenforcing biases by proposing an alogorithm to actually determine if an area is safe. It also has a “hot/cold” functionality.

Clinical ER

The idea is to help deliver ER response in situations where medical services may not be necessarily nearby. There is no working prototype, but the process list / design is covered. The goal is to crowdsource medical emergency response while keeping it easy and free. The difficulties are protecting medical providers from liability issues.

The idea goes towards what many people would like to see WebMD become; where Doctors and Nurse practitioners are on call to diagnose and solve a problem remotely and then later provide some sort of medical solution.

Businga

MARTA in Atlanta just began offering real time bus information by sharing gps information from their busses – so this is a highly relavent topic. In Inidia and other countries commercial and municipal bus systems are apparently even less reliable than they are in the U.S. Rather  than leaving the onus on the bus companies themselves, this crowdsources the idea to cell phone users via both HTML5 and SMS (through Twilio) – the server seems php based.

The working demo is a webapp (mobile compatible – jquery ombile) where you can get status or set status of routes. When you get status, it tells you the last seen location of the bus route that you are looking for so that you can predict the time at the next stop.

My comments: It would be neat if bus riders could install this in the background so that their phones are always updating their status. Given many people (6+) moving in the same location on the bus route, you can track the bus. This would also be good using Open Cell location tracking – track just pure cell phone movement along the route and identifying clusters.

Spork

Trying to solve the problem of food recovery – good food getting thrown out, while Georgians go to be hungry. They have an objective document to (by 2013 to decrease the amount of waste food by 5%.

The app uses Django on the server end and uses Twilio for SMS. The team plans to work on this afterwards. And would like to solve the stated objectives by working with restaurants and groceries.

The beta launch in 6 months would involce SMS, an incentive program, email and voice, QA – and more.

The slogan is “Where a good meal goes a long way”

Thanks

I’d like to send a big thanks to the sponsors that include GTRI, ATDC, MailChimp, NerdWerx, and others as the food, drinks, and qwerky door prizes / schwag help encourage people to come.

Stephen Reid

How are text messaging costs still plaguing us 5 years later? I can’t believe that these aren’t unlimited yet! Also, unlimited data means that my google voice is an extra free text messaging service.

Imessage will replace this – but there is no android equivalent. Of course, somehow it’s not enough that I can facebook message, tweet, and text on my phone – much less gtalk, and fully email.

What are are your thoughts on these group messaging platforms?

I’ve had a couple of friends that have had their cars stolen in the last couple of years. One was a 1998 Dodge Intrepid and another a 2001 Dodge Stratus. I also had a chance to ride in a 2001 Chevy Malibu recently – which is really what brought out a lot of these thoughts.

My 1989 Luxury Car

• No power locks
• Loose carpet interior
  (a finely stitched interior is nice, but american cars have a fluffy composition)
  Not to mention the fabric and glue is more likely to tear and come unglued
• No Active Ignition Disabling System
  Long before even the Gone in 60 Seconds Mercedes encoded keys
• Nothing that looks like an alarm (on vehicles without an alarm)
  BMWs all have a “clown nose” that looks like an alarm. A little blinking LED on a radio or the dash does a lot.