The RageNET Weblog

It has been a hectic week working on our webapp. I planned to put up regular updates but have been so busy coding that I haven’t been able to keep up with it. Here’s a big update of what we’ve had going on for the last week or so. We’re coming up on the home stretch with the contest deadline looming on friday..

Marketing
Cherie has been hard at work. She’s been working on creating the product description, writing a rough draft of a marketing plan, doing competitive research, putting together a board of advisors, and coordinating the efforts of our graphics team.

Branding
Our graphics artist, Chris Barela, got us a great logo last week and we’ve gotten some great website mockups. HTML/CSS guru Jean Leitner has been hard at work converting the mockups into code. Here’s the new logo:

Infrastructure

Our application runs in the AWS cloud. We’re using EC2 instances. We’re using S3 to cache some web API results. There are other AWS services we use which I won’t dive into here.

Right now our app is running as a single EC2 instance, however I’ve partitioned the components out on this instance so that they can be spread across machines. On the front end we’re using HAProxy, with apache/mod_passenger (aka mod_rails) running rails instances, with MySQL as the database. We’re using memcache for a performance speedup, as well as S3 as a cache. I’m doing deployments via Capistrano which works pretty well.

‘I have a dream’ of having instances come up and self configure. Sometime in the future (probably when things are burning down) I’ll set up iclassify and puppet, and perhaps even configure user auth via LDAP. And then systems will spin up, register with iclassify and I’ll be able to provision them mostly automatically. I’d hoped to use pool party, but it’s in re-write right now — perhaps when it is finished.

I also got nagios set up to monitor from an existing machine, and during the process found one of my nameservers was broken - funny things you find out when you start monitoring things!

Collaboration
We’ve been using trac to colaborate - and we’ve managed to proxy tickets from email into trac’s bug tracking. So testers can click a mailto link when something breaks on the site. Very neat! Trac also has a subversion browser I’ve used on occasion and I’ve been posting links to system management pages and whatnot there.

So that’s where we’re at. More news as it happens!

I’ve been cleaning out my email today, and finding several gems among the cruft..

A friend sent me a link to a pretty rocking collaborative whiteboarding application: Dabbleboard

I found this great slide-deck from a presentation at the Velocity conference done by Adam Jacob. It’s a great introduction to the latest tools that you can leverage for ‘deploying to the cloud’. Check it out:
Building an Automated Infrastructure (Powerpoint Slides)

Right now I’m busy hacking on an AWS Startup Challenge entry. Our entry is using the theme ‘redefining search’. The product is called Zortit, and will be leveraging the AWS cloud services and be built around Ruby on Rails. Keep tuned in for more updates!

One of the important things of maintaining a big network environment - with a small staff - is to keep up to date documentation on configurations, customizations, and instructions for frequently executed tasks. Commonly when I walk into a new company the documentation is terrible? Why? Because there is either no thought to maintaining documentation or the documentation system/procedure in place is too time consuming to use.

If a documentation system us hard to use it wont be used at all. It should take less effort to update a piece of documentation than to send an email. Locating a document should be as easy and should support freeform text searching. Thats why the best documentation setup I’ve worked with is a wiki. It’s easy to create, locate, and change documentation which encourages people to actually document things! You will have current verbose documentation when you need it.

If you do use a wiki to maintain your documentation produce an offline copy of periodically and burn it on cd. Put this CD along with one copy of every vendor supplied CD into a CD wallet and keep it at the datacenter. it will prove invaluable when you have outages.

Heres the wiki engine I’ve used - and liked - in the past. It runs on top of your vanilla LAMP stack.

tikiwiki.org — TikiWiki CMS/Groupware

This is an example of how not to behave if you are a small business on the internet. A friend of mine simply posted a question on a forum, the entirety of his question was: I’m curious if anybody knows anything about Lucas Environmental Stormwater Services, Inc.? This simple question has led to the owner threatening legal action in email and via rambling voice-mails. It is never a good idea to threaten someone unless they are blatantly in the wrong and doing something clearly illegal. Otherwise you just rile people up and turn what should have been nothing into a huge negative-publicity exercise for your company. For more information see: mhalligan: Greatest voicemail transcript EVER

Technorati Tags: lucas environmental services

Avvenu got them selves some very good press after releasing their music player app at CES. They showed up on Techcrunch which linked to the article Go2web2: Your own iTunes PC! They’ve even gotten themselves well Digged. Their application allows you to listen to the music on your PC from anywhere, on most any device. Works for most mobile devices and web browsers. The coolest feature though, is the ability to share your music with your friends! You can share a playlist and your friends can listen to it via a nifty little flash app.

They posted a funny little demo of the Alpha version of the product.

Technorati Tags: avvenu, itunes, mp3