Powershell deployment script to help decrease page load time
by RyanFrench on Nov.15, 2010, under ColdFusion, IIS, Javascript, Powershell, Programming
Currently the main focus of my work has been on developing a web portal that allows users to control hosting based services, and automates the provisioning, so there is mininal work to be done manually. We recently deployed a new version of the front-end, which incorporated extensive use of jQuery as well as AJAX to give the site a more modern look, as well as improving it’s usability. The main issue that we found once we had deployed the software is that it resulted in some very slow load times, so I spent a few days working doing what I could to increase the performance of the site. After all, a site might be fantastic, but if it’s not quick, people aren’t going to use it.
Luckily my boss has given me permission to share some of the benefits of my research both here and on the companies blog. The versions I write here will contain a slightly slimmed down version of the original posts.
Creating modal popup’s in ColdFusion
by RyanFrench on Jun.09, 2010, under ColdFusion, Javascript, Programming
One of the great things about my new job is that I am constantly running into little problems that I am having to figure out, and some of them are interesting enough that I’m going to try and post what solutions I can here, so that hopefully it can help other people with similar problems.
One issue I came across recently was creating modal popup’s in ColdFusion, so that a user could click on a button, fill out a form, then when they submitted the appropriate part of the form was reloaded, and they never had to navigate away. The example that I am going to use is a standard select box with a list in it and a button that opens the window to modify the contents of that list.
To do this we will be using a cfwindow. For this example I’ll assume you already have the page that you would like to display in the window, and have some basic CFML and Javascript knowledge.
New job, old city.
by RyanFrench on Mar.23, 2010, under Uncategorized
This is a quick update on a fairly major decision that I made a couple of months ago. Back in early Febuary I resigned from my position as Business Analyst and Lead Developer for TechCertain, and at the start of March, I started a new position at LayerX, working with an old friend of mine, Mike Lowen.
The main reason for this change is that the position is much closer to what I enjoy about working with computers. The work is varied and challenging, and I feel the decision was a very good one. I have already worked on a couple of interesting projects, with the main one being theCloud, a hosted services platform that we will be releasing in May. I hope to post a few things about stuff that I am working on or things that I have learnt (without revealing any work secrets of course) but I will leave those for another day.
This also means that I will be moving back to Hamilton sometime in the next few weeks, so hopefully I have a chance to keep updating through the move, but things dont always go to plan.
Website Update
by RyanFrench on Feb.12, 2010, under Techy Stuff
Yesterday I spent the morning updating my website. I customised a new theme for it, added some new widgets, integrated it with Twitter, and upgraded to the latest version of WordPress. I’m pretty happy with the result, now if only I could learn to start posting more again.
Problems with booting after upgrading to Ubuntu Karmic Koala
by RyanFrench on Nov.21, 2009, under Techy Stuff
So yesterday I decided to upgrade my installation of Ubuntu from 9.04 -> 9.10 on my file server at home. This system has no screen attached to it and no keyboard so I just ssh’d in and followed the how-to on the Ubuntu website for doing the distribution upgrade.
Everything went smooth until I rebooted the system, and after a while when I tried to get back into it I noticed it hadnt come back online. I plugged a monitor a keyboard into the system and rebooted it to see what the issue was and I saw this screen.
mountall: /proc: unable to mount: Device or resource busy
mountall: /proc/self/mountinfo: Not such file or directory
mountall: root filesystem isn’t mounted
init: mountall main process (2025) terminated with status 1
General error mounting filesystems.
A maintenance shell will now be started.
So I hit the internet and tried to figure out wehat was going on, and found out this appears to be a problem for a lot of people, but none of the solutions I found worked for me, mostly because my fileserver has no cd drive and booting from a flash drive doesnt seem to work either.
From what I can gather the main reason this issue is happening is becase Grub is broken during the update process and is pointing at the wrong drive/kernel. Most solutions involved booting into a live cd and fixing menu.lst from there or using grub-update. Eventually I managed to fix the problem by going into grub and manually editing the boot command to point at the correct drive and the correct kernel. The easiest way to do this for your system is to use tab completion as it will tell you all the options and using a little trial and error you can get it going.
Hopefully this saves someone else from hours of torture.
Updated to a new server
by RyanFrench on Oct.10, 2009, under Uncategorized
This site, along with a couple of other sites, have all now been moved to a nice new shiny server. Once I finally got around to setting everything up it hasnt seemed too bad, and looks to be right back to where it was a week ago before moving over.
Mono Migration – Stage 1 Continued
by RyanFrench on Sep.21, 2009, under Uncategorized
So a couple of weeks ago I mentioned the Mono Migration that my work was attempting in an effort to reduce costs and enable us to move our product onto EC2 as we are looking at some new projects that require us to be able to expand our system quickly and easily.
Since then we have had quite a lot going on at work, and are only just starting to focus on the migration again, so here’s where we are up to at this stage.
Firstly. we are going to move the database from MS SQL Server 2000 to PostgreSQL. This in itself will be a massive task as there is no easy way to move the hundreds of stored procedures over (or so I’m told, I havent looked into it much yet). Once this is done we will be running the code as is against the new database and hoping that it works. I’ll let you know once that is done and where we are going from there.
On a side note, this blog along with a couple of others hosted on this server will be moved to a new server before the 30th of September. As long as everything goes smooth there should be minimal downtime for the site, and I should be able to keep all the info currently on here. I’m going to be backing everything up just in case though.
Checking access to files on a server
by RyanFrench on Aug.02, 2009, under freebsd, Uncategorized
So recently I put some files up on a file server I rent with a couple of mates, mostly ones used in my CV so that prospective employees can check papers etc that I have written. In an attempt to try and figure out who has accessed these files I, with the help of my friend Paul wrote a smal script that uses the access log, grep and whois to figure out the domains that have accessed the file. To be honest its a small script, and if I had more experience with bash I probably could have written it myself. In fact, if Paul had wanted to, I know he could have written it no problems, but it was all experience. In case someone wants to use it, here it is.
#!/bin/bash
FILE=”/tmp/$(basename $0).$RANDOM.$$.txt”;
echo Searching for access to files with $1;
sudo cat /var/log/apache2/access.log | grep -i *PUT YOUR NAME HERE* | grep $1 > $FILE;
if [ -z "$2" ]
then
echo “no exclusions”;
else
echo “excluding files containing $2″;
cat $FILE | grep -v $2 > $FILE;
fi
cat $FILE | cut -d ‘ ‘ -f 1 | sort | uniq -c > $FILE;
for i in $(cat $FILE)
do
echo -ne “$i - “; whois $i -H | egrep ‘OrgName|descr’ | head -n 1 | cut -d ‘:’ -f 2;
done
To use it, just copy the script (replacing the part that says *PUT YOUR NAME HERE* with your username) into a file, set it as an executable using chmod +x, then run it. The first argument is the string you are looking for access to, e.g. pdf will show all pdf’s, and there is a second optional string for if you want to exclude files with names containg a certain string.
Mono Migration – Stage 1
by RyanFrench on Jul.14, 2009, under freebsd, Mono, Uncategorized
Well I promised I would be updating on how the effort was going to migrate our VB.Net/ASP/SQL Server 2000 product here at work to Mono, and as the first steps are now underway, I have a few things to talk about.
For starters we are looking at porting our code to C#, rather than VB.Net in Mono, and removing the ASP stuff from it etc. We are also looking at implementing localisation of the site. Originally when looking at this in Visual Studio we would have to look at purchasing a tool to pull out all the translatable strings in the program. Luckily, I found out mono-develop does this for free. Awesomeness.
At this stage the idea is that we are going to go for a proof of concept and move the code over to Mono as it is in it’s VB.Net/ASP form, then we will look at doing the actual port, as time is a little critical for us.
The first step is to setup a virtual machine for running Ubuntu (our OS of choice for the cloud) and install Mono/PostgreSQL etc on it. I choose to use VirtualBox for 2 reasons, 1) I hadnt used it before and it looked very interesting and 2) VMWare was causing my machine to go into an infinite “Cannot load Drivers” loop on the windows host, so it wasnt really an option at all.
Once I had completed this I downloaded and ran MoMA. This tool will scan the assemblies for your program and tell you what problems there are with running the code on Mono. We have a few problems on ours, but most of it is SQL calls that aren’t implemented, so I’ll find a way around this.
At the end of the MoMA tool there are links to a few sites that have definately helped me in moving the code over for the first test. Now there is just one last step before attempting to build the code in Mono and see how badly it breaks.
Clean the code. It is pointless trying to port everything over unless you need everything. I have currently removed about 50k of code from the site that is either no longer used and, thanks to my predescessor, has never been removed. I also found thousands of table entries and a good 30+ tables and another few hundred stored procedures that are either not used or obsolete. I’m still in the process of cleaning up before I try the build, but once that is done I shall let you know how things go.
My new big project (sadly it’s for work)
by RyanFrench on Jul.09, 2009, under freebsd, Mono, mpls, Uncategorized
Here at my new job we develop in ASP/VB.Net, running off of an SQL Server 2000 (yes, it horrified me too when I found out). The company has been around since ~2000 and we have decided now that it is a time for a change. We are hoping in the next few months to be moving away from a single server based model that we have now, onto something a little more modern, a cloud.
At the same time as we do this, we are wanting to make the move to using OSS. This is going to be quite a move, with our development enivronment being firmly embedded in MS technologies at the moment. So we have a few steps that we are going to be going through. I am hoping over the next few months to share my experiences in moving our product from the MS environment to running on Ubuntu server using Mono (the C# variety) and Postgresql. It will be interesting, with the need for a demonstration of the new product by mid-August.
Also, on a side note, I have moved out of where I was staying temporarily into a new place, and once I have sorted out my internet issues I shall be looking at finally getting around to working on MPLS again.
