The Compulsive Coder

I like MySQL. I do. Much of the work that we do is based on MySQL. However, that usage is based out of necessity because many of the frameworks that we use (e.g. Drupal, Joomla, Wordpress) do not adequately support Microsoft SQL, which I would MUCH rather use.

MySQL has seen great improvement in version 5; the feature list has grown to include views, triggers, stored procedures. The implementation of these features leaves much to be desired (no indexed views, cursors in stored procedures are…quirky) but version 5 was a step in the right direction and has us eagerly anticipating version 6.

Yet along comes “Drizzle”, the brainchild (brainfart?) of MySQL’s director of architecture, Brian Aker.

Drizzle will have a micro-kernel architecture with code being removed from the Drizzle core and moved through interfaces into modules. Akers has already selected particular functionality for removal: modes, views, triggers, prepared statements, stored procedures, query cache, data conversion inserts, access control lists and some data types.

Source: Builders.au

Mmmm…WTF?

I mentioned the other day the impressive power that my Sprint Mogul (aka HTC 6800) puts at my fingertips anytime, anywhere.

This weekend provided a great example: my wife and I enjoyed a short getaway to Kansas City where we stayed at a nice hotel, did some shopping, and ate some great Indian food (don’t open this link if Firefox, it will crash your browser). But whilst walking through Banana Republic, I received an IM via Octrotalk that a server move was underway and that I needed to check in some code.

So I stood right in the middle of Banana Republic, connected to my network via VPN, remoted to my computer, and did a Subversion check-in. I then connected to the server via SSH, updated, and then IMed that everything was ready to go.

Obligatory jab: I couldn’t have done that with an iPhone.

Reality check: the demographic that needs to be able to VPN, SSH, and RDC from a mobile device is tiny. Apple would be foolish to care.

Honest truth: I sorta want an iPhone 3G. Or a Macbook Air. I just want to feel hip and informed, because that’s what owning an Apple does.

I thought that it was pretty cool that I could used my Sprint Mogul superphone as a router by installing PDANet. It brought one-click simplicity to computing whilst traveling while also allowing my to circumvrent Sprint’s silly data charges.

But WMWifiRouter makes my Mogul even cooler! It quite literally makes my Mogul into a wireless router, so any computer close enough to my phone can connect to it just as they would any other wireless network.

Netstumbler indicates I’ve got a range of about 30 feet before the signals pretty much degrades exponentially. However, that’s a heck of a lot better than having use a wire to connect the thing to my laptop, plus now multiple computers can connect.

It’s powerful applications like this that make it easy for me to overlook the shortcomings of Windows Mobile.

We have a number of clients who regularly ignore our advice, usually to their detriment. The latest debacle involves a client who sought our advice on hosting. We told them to just spend the money to get a Rackspace dedicated server. We also told them that under no circumstances should they use a GoDaddy solution.

Naturally the client chose to use a GoDaddy Virtual Dedicated Server. After all it only costs $50 a month! That’s $250 per month less than Rackspace! And besides, we don’t need all that horsepower!

So they signed with GoDaddy, but not before we told them that we washed our hands of any server related issues. If we were called in to deal with an issue that was determined to be server related, they would be obligated to pay our full ad-hoc rate.

You can imagine my (lack of) surprise when I opened up my Gmail this morning to find panicked emails from the client. The site was behaving strangely. After a bit of snooping, I found that both PHP and MySQL were running out of memory…no great surprise since this great GoDaddy deal only came with 256MB of RAM and since this web application involves some very complex queries on some decent sized tables.

The client called GoDaddy to see if they could upgrade their RAM allocation to 512MB, which they can…provided they move to a different server.

Let’s run the numbers on this deal: I’m dinging them for $125/hour, not excluding taxes. They’ve already used about 6 hours of time this month on server related issues, not counting the two hours I spent this morning. The server move will probably take another 6 hours, especially if they ignore my advice (again) and refused to spend the money and migrate to Rackspace. That brings us to 14 hours, or just under $1900 with taxes. I know for a fact that their guys have spent about 20 hours (not just on this issue) trying to get the server to play nice…say their guys make $35 an hour, that’s about $700. The annualized cost of the server is $600.

That comes to $3200 invested into this server, they’ve not yet been up two months, and it’s been one thing after another with this GoDaddy Virtual POS. Rackspace would have come to $3600 per year.

I have several other clients on equivalent Rackspace platforms and guess what we’ve had to deal with for server issue? Zip, nil, nada, null. Factor in the incredible customer service that Rackspace provides, the ridiculous connection speed, easy scalability, managed backup and it should be an easy decision.

(I don’t work for or have any affiliation with Rackspace other than being an extremely happy client).

The project about which I posted in March was a cluster learning experience and is the reason I’ve neglected this blog for so long.  At some point here I’ll pontificate about what went wrong and how I can (or have) learned from it.

In the meantime, I’m going to try to be more consistent with this thing.  I even went so far as to set a reminder in my Google Calendar.

In unrelated news, The Steampunk Workshop is a really cool website.  I’ve never really been into the steampunk thing, but I could see myself getting into it. I like working with my hands and it would be fun to engage in some less cerebral activity.