I know it’s over 10 years ago that the same thing happened: early, promising companies did an IPO with very little accounting for things like earnings or prices.  It took several years before the country got back on it’s feet.

Hope I am wrong.

However, the approach is “What can be done in the next 5 minutes?”.  Tried explaining about the process involved – cross links, one-way, meta data, competition, keyword targeting, etc… to no avail.

So, I am putting in all these little, quickie changes like change the wording of the title.  Maybe over time may get enough in there that sum total does something.  Fully expect to be complained that the changes weren’t done correctly.

Overweight Web Designer Needed (city)

- I am one of the lucky people running Vista at home (probably runner-up in bad MS products)

- IE auto updated on the home machine

The first screen from IE, regardless of what you set the home page to be, takes about FIVE MINUTES!  At first I just assumed the cable dropped and had to reset.  But, no, could get the first Firefox page up in about 5 seconds.

Looking around the internet MANY people are complaining about this.  There is the nice little ‘Disable Add-ons’ box that pops up in IE after a minute of doing nothing.  I tried disabling/removing most things that I didn’t recognize.  No help.

So I have told my family not to bother with IE going forward.  Just use FF.  It’s usually what I use working anyway.

Then I sit down to watch television for a while and that IE9 ad from MS shows displaying all the wonderful things on the web (I wonder how many of those sites portrayed were developed using MS products or are running on the Windows).  Kept expecting the fine print to show up at the end of the ad.  Something like ‘Your experience may vary’.

You can read the report at Attacking the Washington D.C. Internet Voting System.

When I read the report I was at first amused at the bad practices in place.  Later it started to bother me.  Got shivers from bad memories of the plans for SOPA.  I really don’t understand though:  if you are doing something of a technical nature that you really don’t have any expertise in why not hire some people who know what they are doing?

So we have:

• I am sure there was enough slushy funding available to get good people to develop a secure system.  They obviously did not do that.
• Use really bad practices.  At this point I guess nobody was paying attention anymore?
• Throw down the gauntlet to people who know better that they couldn’t possibly break in!
• Not even pay attention to the process and notice that someone did break in.

Reminds me of some parents bragging about how great a <pick you sport> little Johnny is.  When you see him actually play you are saddened by their ignorance and embarrassed to watch anymore.

The Scala site has lots of doc and quick start and the like.  Downloading the server and getting that running was very easy.

Finding an IDE was somewhat of a pain.  I had just expected with the amount of noise about Scala that I would be able to pick from a number of IDEs.  My first choice was to continue using Eclipse and just use the Scala plugin.  Maybe it’s my version or something, but the Eclipse plugin really doesn’t work.  Get all these silly errors.  Looking around the internet people have real remedies like close and re-open the app, close and re-open the file, close and re-open the IDE…  How on earth can you do any real coding with this?

One of the posts mentioned using IntelliJ.  Being a long time Java developer I had heard about IntelliJ but did not realize they had a Community Edition (read=free) version.  At this point being so frustrated with Eclipse, why not?  What a sweet IDE!  Quick, easy to use, no goofy errors, auto-complete, compile.  Has everything.  I am thinking of dumping Eclipse completely at this point and just using IntelliJ.

As to the language – has some nice ruby-like constructs.  The additional actor library does a lot.  I realize that you can write much more concise code in Scala than Java.  Scala can be easily run in parallel (not sure I have had the need to do this).  Not entirely convinced on the switch to Scala yet.  Plan on doing much more.

Of interest to me was just getting a simple (mini in Amazon terms) server in place and running a PHP application.

There is a wizard that will walk you through selecting the correct image, but more importantly is creating a ppk encryption pair to be used on all instances.

Next, setup a security model that maps the interactions you expect with the server.  In my case SSH and HTTP.

Now you can setup your server.  Again, a wizard is provided.  However you need to pick out the exact version of Windows or Linux that serves your needs. Each of these versions are called on image.  There are amazon specific images and public images and …  Just select that you want to poke through All images and you end up with a good list.

I had thought it would be pretty simple find an image with a LAMP stack.  You need to research into the images that have the word LAMP in the name to determine if the versions are sufficiently modern for your app to work.

Once the wizard is complete (referencing the ppk pair and the security model you set up earlier) Amazon goes on it’s way to getting the instance running.  The instance will have some odd looking subdomain of amazon as a DNS entry that you can use for all other access.

You now need to create a PPK file from the security model generated in AWS earlier.  I am using putty for SSH which also provides puttygen to take the security file from AWS and create a PPK file from it.  You can then connect to your instance using putty for SSH with the DNS name of the instance and setting the auth information to the PPK file created.

At this point I used SSH to make sure the instance I ended up with really does have the LAMP stack up and running.

You also need SFTP to transfer your app to the instance.  I used WinSCP referencing the same DNS and PPK file for the connection to the server to transfer files.

You should now be able to access your instance using a browser.

Lastly you probably want to make sure the billing is coming through for the instance choices you made.  Back on aws it gives you a breakdown per hour of use for the instance features you selected.  During my several trials I had picked a SUSE instance which gets a magical cents per hour fee over and above other Linux versions.  Similarly I had picked small instead of mini at one point and get a larger cents per hour fee than expected.  I am not sure where the advertised ‘free’ instances were lurking.

As a note if your instance is incorrect I don’t think you can just change it.  You need to terminate the instance and create another with the correct image/settings.  The good news is you can re-use the ppk and security settings.  You just need to reference the new DNS name for the new instance in all further access.

Not sure this is a good idea or not overall.  The cost for a mini looks like it will end up at about $10 per month.  Not exactly competitive with other hosts.  I can’t guess how expensive some of the mammoth images cost, but if you need something that big I am not sure you have another option.

It is interesting.  Looking forward to putting scala and mongodb and whatever else I can dream up on the server and see how it goes.

- 15 BILLION page views a month

- 500 MILLION page views per day

- Some parts of architecture running at 40 THOUSAND requests per SECOND.

Humbling.   Of course the author sounds as calm as can be.

Google to the rescue! (I don’t know how they control what people spend time/money developing)  I saw a reference to Google Fonts in a HN post the other day.  What’s that?

Google Web Fonts provides high-quality web fonts that you can include in your pages using the Google Web Fonts API.

Just like everything else you can use google for, (especially CDN access to includes and the like) you can make reference to some non-standard font in the Google font set and then use it pretty much like any other font in CSS (have to quote the font name versus plain text(=standard font)).  Again, with their simple example:

<html>

<head>

<link rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css” href=”http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Tangerine”>

<style>

body {

font-family: ‘Tangerine’, serif;

font-size: 48px;

}

</style>

</head>

<body>

<div>Making the Web Beautiful!</div>

</body>

</html>

So, next time you are graced with a design present you can just smile.

Here is an image of the sample (note, the round outs at the bottom of the selected tab):