Joe Crotty

Just finished a rather lengthy fresh install of the the latest and greatest Mac OS X Snow Leopard upgrading from Leopard. Snow Leopard is considered a maintenenace release that packs few new features instead focusing on beefing up core functionality. By “fresh install” I mean that I didn’t just upgrade from Leopard to Snow Leopard or use Time Machine as part of the install process to speed up an upgrade, but started with a true clean install and then meticulously installed Apps, configuration files, development websites, etc all from scratch. I was hoping the fresh install would help to clear up some restart and latency problems I have been seeing over the last three months.

The results have been great.  System boots faster, runs faster, consumes less resources, has a smaller foot print and in general seems a bit more stable. I’ll post in another few months what the overall Snow Leopard experience is like but so far I am loving it!

For the last seven years running I have been in overkill mode with my home firewall.   In my desire to learn more about networking I went overboard, as usual, and immersed myself into my own DIY home firewall project.  The objective was a solid firewall built on the tenants of modern network engineering. Basic hardware/OS setup was as follows with number one being the exterior and bigger numbers moving towards the LAN:

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I plan to upgrade and simplify  my current firewall stack and am selling off three Soekris Engineering net4801s. All machines are working and undamaged.  I would prefer to sell all three at once if possible.  $300 and all of them are yours!  Buyer pays shipping.  Pictures of them in action below the specifications.

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As promised the site was down for a few days and now back up!  I have decided to go with bluehost.com which was very easy to get set up and rolling.  Their fees are cheap due to the bulk hosting and I am hopeful the pipe throughput is decent however long I stick with this host. Ideally I would buy my own rack mount hardware and have it collocated at a data center.  This gives the greatest control (i.e., I am a known control freak) but adds the usual system administration headaches.

An example of the upshot of having your site on a host like bluehost.com with a tool like CPanel is typical OS, CMS, and various other software updates are all handled automatically behind the scenes or at the most with a mouse click. Not to mention that they take care of all the hardware, redundancy, faileover, etc… issues.  Sometimes, it’s just easier to pay for it and be done!

Later today around 3-5 PM I am dropping my current ISP Speakeasy ADSL internet connection and switching to Comcast cable internet connection.  I was on Comcast from 2000-2002 which was a good service until late 2002 when the service badly degraded due to an influx of new users.  That’s when I jumped ship to Speakeasy which has been solid for almost seven years running.  However, lately I noticed Speakeasys’ excessive latency and a few days and phone calls later I have made the decision to return to Comcast (i.e., long story and I am tight on time currently).

The upshot of all this is I will have better speeds with Comcast for daily surfing which is important to me the software engineer.  The downside is Comcast does not allow open ports and my web server, sitting behind me on the floor in my apartment from which the page you are reading is hosted at, will have to be moved to a data center somewhere.  In the intern my website will be down. Probably take a few days so be patient, please!

Work continues on unabated on the NFP application from my earlier rough sketch.  The general framework of using WordPress as CMS and then adding in the NFP functionality as a plug-in is working out although there was the usual one week “I want to rip my hair out” period when I really had to dig deep to understand how to get the plug-in working fully.  With that hurdle surmounted fingers type joyfully and the mind wanders to finish putting the basic user frame work into place.

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I am starting to put more time into a current project to build an NFP application to do basic NaProTRACK™ biomarker charting.  My main objective is to build a charting tool that my wife could use in addition to her regular pencil/paper approach.  I think e-charting holds a couple of distinct advantages:

1. Beginners make lots of mistakes and the first few cycles usually end up being a mess trying to read.
2. The paper approach does not have much room, chart wise, for teachers and/or students to make notes about mistakes and easily re-arrange biomarkers.
3. Stamps placed over other stamps due to errors, mistakes, etc… are hard to denote.  Notice a trend developing here?
4. Paper charts don’t calculate anything for you meta data wise.  No post peak phase, total cycle days, etc…
5. Paper charts don’t tell you when you are making mistakes while your in the process of charting.

Envision an e-chart that has history for every biomarker including all changes, mistakes, and dates available at a mouse click combined with auto detect logic that senses when the user is making a mistake and prompts them with the correct data input and reason.  Pencil/paper is hard to argue against for the bare bones approach, but a web solution done right would be a great learning utility for all NFP practitioners.

The current NaProTRACK™ tool I have built is still in the early beta phase (FYI – more like Alpha in reality).  Architectural ground work, data model, and CMS have all been completed and integrated.  Just a matter of flusing out the functionality with robust OOP code and a boat load of testing – always easier said then done!  I’ll be back with an update in August.

I know – it’s been way to long since I posted an update.  Been really busy with the Holy Trinity website cranking out new releases every two weeks or so for the last few months.  I plan to slow things down on that front now and am looking forward to ramping up on some other projects.  Mainly, I would like to work on an idea I have for a NFP application to track bio markers.  I have mocked up a data model, but need to do some more research on using some sort out of the box version of RAILS that would give me a fairly granular UI for administering user accounts.  I am sure someone has built a modular code base already, but having trouble locating anything so far that fits the bill.  Also, it would be fun to build a Google Maps mashup of the existing ArchDen parish data for more of a visual presentation that I would think could get more folks to Masses on weekends.  Now that excites me!

It took two years and three months, but it finally did happen.  Thanks to the help of the good God and everyone who supported me along the way as they say in mountain climbing circles “it’s in the bag!”  Along the way I learned a ton about CMS’s especially Drupal and WordPress.  After working on this project with Drupal for two full years I jetisoned it for WordPress and couldn’t be happier.  Not that I am down on Drupal as it’s a great CMS, but for this project WordPress gave me  and the site users/admins what we need faster and easier.  I think out of the box, currently, WP is just more likely to fit the typical blogging cross informational website needs better and there is no denying the UI is superior.

I’ll continue to update the Holy Trinity site probably for another few releases until I can get the look and feel to a certain baseline level – probably another few weeks of work.  Currently, I am working on a new layout to accomadate some typography changes that must happen along with setting up an active tabbed navigation and putting in a nice visual header/splash.  Can’t wait!

Tour de Firewall  just concluded and I am happy to report that it’s been fully up-graded.  What a war!  Spread out across two full months I can’t say things were easy.  But, with some new docs in place maybe next time it’s just a battle and not a full blown war.  Due to general security concerns I’ll spare all the details and suffice to say it’s ship shape.  Thankfully, back to the Holy Trinity web site project.