KevinGH

Thanksgiving

I am grateful for everything I own, all the people in my life, and opportunities I am presented with.

The people in my life give me the opportunity to experience and own new and exciting things.

Change of Pace

I just had one of those life epiphanies you get as you grow up and learn more about yourself.

For years I have always programmed for myself, my clients, and my job. When I was younger this wasn’t a problem since my energy levels grew unchecked. Now that I’m older, things are not as simple anymore. Just last week I learned that if I work on personal software projects during my work breaks or when I get home, I become less efficient at it. It’s like running all day every day, and using your breaks to run some more.

To say the least, this really sucks! I love programming, the deep thought and focus that goes with it, and the sense of accomplishment I derive from completing projects. I won’t be stopping anytime soon, but I will be slowing down considerably. I’ll be programming on weekends, if I have time, instead of during the work week. I guess I’ll do more creative things like write music.

It feels like I just wrote that I’ll only play games on weekends.

Budgeting RAM on MediaTemple’s (ve) Product

If you take a look at my portfolio right now, you will notice that it’s pretty barren.

I decided to switch from WordPress.com to MediaTemple (mt) because of the lack of control I had over my own website. Having experience using WordPress on multiple private hosts, I had trouble stomaching being nickel-and-dimed to death. That, and advertisements on a portfolio did not look very professional to me.

Originally, I used MediaTemple’s (gs) product. I was not very happy with the performance, and I figured I could save $20 a month by moving to free solutions (like WordPress.com). After having experimented with that for a few months, I decided to jump ship and switch back to (mt). However, this time I decided to try their new (ve) product.

I love everything about (ve), except for the amount of memory available. I am paying $30 for 512GB of RAM, which is all I can afford at the moment. This isn’t a knock on MediaTemple, since this is about on par for the price. First attempt at setting up my website was a success, until I tried running Redmine using Unicorn. That chewed through so much RAM, I had to convince myself it wasn’t worth running.

I also had to fine tune Nginx, MySQL, and PHP FPM to run fewer workers in order to compensate for the low availability of RAM. So if you decide to get a virtual private server, make sure you can afford at least 1GB of RAM. The higher quantity of traffic you get, the more RAM you’ll need to have server daemon workers running in standby. Otherwise you’ll have clients getting dropped or waiting in long queues.

CODEAlchemy Log Library

In my quest to find a modern, object oriented, PHP logging library, I found precious few. Because of the respect I have for Symfony and Sensio Labs, I decided to take a look at the Monolog library that was bundled with it. I must give props to Jordi, I can see why it was decided to be include it with Symfony.

However, I did not like the design of the library. This is a matter of personal preference. I did not like that it defined its own severity codes, while PHP offers its own standard set of error constants. I also did not like the use of processors and formatters.

Since this is just a difference of opinion on how logging should be handled, I decided to write my own library instead of bugging Jordi with sweeping changes.

My Log library is the result of that effort. It’s

• simple to use
• fully unit tested with 100% code coverage
• PSR-0 compliant
• offers decent examples on usage
• released under the BSD license

I even took inspiration from Monolog. The Queue class is similar to Monolog’s FingersCrossedHandler. It holds onto all of the log entries until a certain kind of entry is added. Once that special entry is added, all of the queued up entries are dumped to the log along with the special entry.

You can find examples on using the library, including the Queue class, in the repository.

Google to Facebook

As I wrote my last post, I realized something, which should have been obvious to me.

There is a very fundamental difference between Google+ and Facebook.

Facebook is oriented around establishing and maintaining associations with other people.  This means that contact information is exchanged through profiles, videos and photos are shared between friends/family/associates, and people can converse with each other through wall posts or (instant) messages.

Facebook is for your common person.

Google+ is oriented around sharing content.  Unfortunately, that’s all there is to it.  Talking to one another is “unnatural” since you have to hijack a comment thread for some shared item.  Hangouts are great for when you care to have face-to-face conversations, but that’s rarely the case with many people.

Google+ is not for your common person.

I think this is why Google+ will never be a competitor to Facebook, and will be abandoned by Google, in the future, like so many other projects that flopped.  Google+ will never gain the kind of moment Facebook did because it’s not fun to use for common people.  Sure there’s games to keep you entertained, but social networking isn’t about games.

Sharing content is a superset of social networking, not the other way around.

There needs to be a true Facebook competitor, oriented around people and not content.  Personally, I’m hoping that Diaspora can help me break free from Facebook.  I would love to share some aspects of my life with family, friends, and strangers online, but I want to do it in such a way where I have full control over it.  Facebook makes me nervous as they continue to push the boundaries of the definition of privacy.

Google+ Needs To Catch Up

Updated: My comment about submitting photos through the web UI was incomplete. I meant using my webcam to submit pictures.

After having used Google+ for about two days, I can safely say I would really enjoy it were it not lacking some basic functionality.

• The ability to 
  • mute individual people
  • mute a whole circle
  • mute GIFs posts
  • create a custom stream
  • submit photos directly through the web UI using my webcam
  • change submission visibility after submitting
  • hide submissions shared by an individual person
  • share directly with another person
    • This is something that is already offered by Facebook. It’s basically just leaving a wall post on somebody else’s wall.

These are not features.  Features are extras on top of an already usable service.  Functionality is something basic required to make the service usable.  When I have an entire stream plastered with animated GIFs, Google+ no longer becomes usable.  There will always be one or two people who you want to maintain an association with, but have no desire to see their submissions.  Others just decide to share too much.

As for features, here are a few that I hope Google will implement:

• Filter out submission types from a person
• Vanity URL
• Twitter and Facebook integration
• Share items straight from Google Reader

Also, there happens to be a problem with the Android and iOS apps for Google Apps members.  The one I have personally experienced is the iOS one.  The app will go through the login process, but then state that you need an invitation to use Google+.  As a result, I cannot share anything easily using my phone.

If anything of the things I mentioned have already been done, Google has not made it easy to find or use.  Not even a Google search helped.

How Politicians Work?

Sure, it may seem obvious to many, but I’m still young and learning.

Politicians spend most of their career (which it shouldn’t be) pursuing the interests of the people who paid for their election campaign.  Only the months prior to the next election cycle do they even attempt to feign interest on fulfilling their campaign promises.  The gimmick is that they start to push for things, but promise to follow through if they are re-elected.

And the cycle continues.