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Interview with the guys from 3Tera:

Interview With 3Tera’s Peter Nickolov and Bert Armijo, Part 1

Interview With 3Tera’s Peter Nickolov and Bert Armijo, Part 2

A related article by Jesse Robins.

Interview With 3Tera’s Peter Nickolov and Bert Armijo, Part 3

And non related:

Social Network Fatigue: Different Personalities Want to Spend Time Differently

The Medici Effect: How Do You Make Creativity A Process?

Good weekend!

I never liked drop-down menus… at first because I had a bad mouse, then because the guys over at my online bank went dumb and decided to display the top menu sub-itens horizontally (with the link I wanted in the farthest end). I complained and received no reply, but after one or two months they eventually got the link I use most in the first position. Hurray for me! Too bad for the people who might want the other links… :\

Then we have the fact that we can click an item or hover it (bringing up a unexpected popup box). What if an item has sub-itens? Can we click it anyway? What content will there be? Does it make sense to have links on these navigation itens? If I navigate down the sub-itens will there be a pathway nearby to remind me of the full path I just followed?

Think about it we you browse around through you favourite sites.

But other than these, today I have a better reason to dislike javascript menus: they make navigation hard for people with accessibility problems.

Most javascript menus depend on browser hacks to just function right, and when it comes to accessibility most of the menus around just plain suck. Again… TAB away your favorite sites to see if you can do the things you normally do.

Well… getting back to the title subject. Joomla administration backend uses JSCookMenu which, as you can see in its site, can’t be reached without a mouse. :/

One of the people I’m working with happens to be blind and until now he couldn’t navigate the administration backend properly. To apply a quick fix (time doesn’t abound) I picked up JSCookMenu’s menu structure and rendered it using nested <ul>s.

To prevent the visual clutter from this tree I chose to hide it using a globaly positioned div. Here’s the code to add to your admin template (after rendering JSCookMenu):

<div style=”position:absolute;left:-2000px;top: -2000px”>
<h1>ACCESSIBLE MENU</h1>
<script type=”text/javascript”>
function entryNameOrLink( entry ) {
name = entry[1]; href = entry[2];
if (href) return ‘<a href=”‘+href+’”>’+name+’</a>’;
return name;
}
function printEntry( entry ) {
document.write(’<li>’);
if (entry == _cmSplit)
document.write(’-');
else {
document.write( entryNameOrLink(entry) );
children = entry[5];
if (children)
printMenu( entry, 5 );
}
document.write(’</li>’);
}
function printMenu( menu, start ) {
document.write(’<ul>’)
for (var i=start; i < menu.length; i++)
printEntry( menu[i] );
document.write(’</ul>’)
}
printMenu( myMenu, 0 );
</script>
</div>

Interesting enough, I had to repeat the procedure for VirtueMart’s menu, but since it also uses JSCookMenu the fix becomes easier! Just add the following code on line 344 of /administrator/components/com_virtuemart/header.php:

<?
echo “div style=\”position:absolute;left:-2000px;top: -2000px\”>
<h1>VirtueMart Accessible Menu</h1>
<script type=\”text/javascript\”> printMenu( vmMenu, 0 ); </script>
</div>”;
?>

Hope this might be useful to someone.

Ahoy RSS followers (and Hugo :))!

For those who might have been in a coma for the last months… Amazon EC2 is a pay as you go way to get computing power.

The prices are not the cheapest around:

$0.10 - Small Instance (Default)

1.7 GB of memory, 1 EC2 Compute Unit (1 virtual core with 1 EC2 Compute Unit), 160 GB of instance storage, 32-bit platform

$0.40 - Large Instance

7.5 GB of memory, 4 EC2 Compute Units (2 virtual cores with 2 EC2 Compute Units each), 850 GB of instance storage, 64-bit platform

$0.80 - Extra Large Instance

15 GB of memory, 8 EC2 Compute Units (4 virtual cores with 2 EC2 Compute Units each), 1690 GB of instance storage, 64-bit platform

BUT this isn’t your regular deal. With EC2 you can bring scale your application as you need, adding node when you get Digged or shutting them down when word comes out you’ve been killing kitties in public places.

This brings lots of opportunities to startups! Instead of investing your kids university fund on more machines, only to have them end up doing nothing when the kitties story gets know… You could just pay as you needed them. No upfront investment required!

Chicken. Chicken. Chicken. Chicken. Chicken.

Where was I? Ah! What’s in it for you?

For once, you can get a Ubuntu image with Ruby on Rails ready to go (with everything you need, including Capistrano for your deployment needs)… no need to waste time doing it yourself.

Other than that… did I mean the elastic part? Turn it on, add more instances, digg it, rinse, fix some bugs, add more instances, reddit… well, you got the point!

Problems exist though.

• EC2 does not provide static IP addresses (hostyyy… where are youuu???)
• EC2 is stateless (data puff!)
• Individual EC2 instances are limited (no chance for scaling up in RAM or CPU!)
• EC2 does not provide a database solution (use S3?)
• EC2 is expensive (expensierrr… at least, but its advantages cover this one)

Argh, problems, problems, problems. I prefer positive things!

Lets shift the subject to Erlang and EC2.

I’ve come to think about Erlang as the underdog, or for the Portuguese readers “Os Lobos“. But as EC2 go, I think (or have been reading into belief) that Erlang and EC2 is a match made in heaven:

• With Mnesia, the app server is the database server - Mnesia provides a database designed from the ground up with fault tolerance and distribution in mind. You have your choice of an in-memory (ram_copies) or disk-based (disc_copies) approach, and both can be periodically logged to S3 (using mnesia:dump_tables). This approach also means you have a single EC2 image to worry about, rather than separate images for app servers and database servers.

• Commissioning / decomissioning instances is easy - The same could be argued with Rails when using a reverse proxy like Swiftiply which allows app servers to register themselves, but Erlang and OTP are specifically designed to allow for seamlessly growable, fault tolerant clusters. When you want to take a node down, just fail it over then shut down the instance.

• Footprint is lower - This is perhaps the biggest problem with Rails on EC2: the memory footprint of a single Rails instance, combined with single-threaded request processing. You will simply need more EC2 images to process the same amount of traffic simply because of the overhead of a framework where concurrent request processing is not possible. With no plans to make the Rails framework thread safe, and with each version increasing the framework’s memory requirements, Rails simply isn’t suited for systems without a high RAM : CPU ratio. Erlang frameworks like Erlyweb allow concurrent request processing with a single application instance per node, and distributed Erlang and OTP allow seamless scaling of a distributed app cluster with relatively no work on the part of the programmer.

And then we have some Erlang folks already deploying stuff into EC2! I follow Joel Reymond’s posts, since he shares lots of information about deployment REAL stuff using Erlang.

Humm… just for the record I also found this interesting post about using S3 for “data intensive sites” - the guy hypothesizes about using EC2+S3 to solve Twitter’s now fixed scalability issues. Ouch! PUTs are expensive!

Chicken. Chicken. Chicken. Chicken. Spam. Can Amazon Make Startupping A Science? Chicken. Spam.

Chicken!

Out of nowhere lots of work opportunities just popped up!

In a way this is nice because it means I’ll be having a positive money flow for a while, but the downside is that all these websites I’m building are driving me away from my “creational” goals.

Heheeh… but it the end all is well!

In 5 months I’ve learned a shiitttttload of stuff and (with my parents help) my bank account is restored to its pos-Eurotrip values.

I’ll be doing some sites using Joomla and some hands-on PHP but in November I’m thinking about refusing any more “biscates”. They bring good vibes to my surroundings as: “Look!!! Davide is making money! Who would imagine… :O, but they’re killing me on the inside: “Must learn interesting stufff! Must get something done! Must implement ideas!”. 

As for schedules go… humm. Lets just say that if I travelled to the States now I would feel much of a jet lag.

All in all, I have to say that freelancing is GREAT and investing on oneself opens a lot of doors as well as new opportunities. And best of all! You pick what to do with them!