trisweb.com

After a long time “waiting” (I really didn’t care that much) Wordpress 2.5 is out and trisweb.com is running it. The upgrade went as smooth as any previous one and it’s been very nice to use so far. The admin redesign is beautiful (surprised me, even) and all is working well.

It’s been a very long time since I’ve posted anything here, but I’ve been very busy with my startup and everything else. I’m currently in Boston with my business partner coding away, we’re making huge progress, and I’m more and more confident that it’s going to be the ‘next big thing’ for our market, and indeed maybe a paradigm shift for enterprise software in general. Time will tell, but it takes a lot for me to be confident in an implementation, and I’m finally seeing it come together.

Other things that have been going on… hmm. Zenphoto development is as hot as ever. If you haven’t checked out the latest versions or the new site, now’s the time to upgrade.

Speaking of Zenphoto and Wordpress, despite Wordpress’ having some decent new photo management features in 2.5, I think a Wordpress+Zenphoto plugin to integrate with the new “Add image” pane would be great. I’ll look into it and see if it’s plausible.

Well, this is my april fool’s post then I suppose. I’m not really posting, it’s just a joke. Happy Spring!

It’s not hard to realize that starting a company is hard work—it just is. And I’m doin it. It’s incorporated, a real corporation, with prototypes and models and a business plan, and it’s going somewhere. Probably somewhere you’ll never see, but somewhere none the less—it’s software for a specific industry where good interface design is a nonexistent far-off dream, so it’s a good niche to be in. I’ll update as I can.

Unfortunately all this hard work means that trisweb.com has been on the back burner. It’s always sort of been that way, if you haven’t noticed, and it probably always will, but just thought you’d like to know that posts may be fewer. However, I did just upgrade to Wordpress 2.2, so maybe that’ll be some incentive.

I’ll try to keep on working on Zenphoto, and I expect complaints to abound, but I just don’t have the time to give to it right now. Starting a company, you know. But I’ll try to set aside some time. The sub-albums management interface is a needed addition for a 1.1 release, following which it should remain stably usable for a while. We’ve got EXIF in SVN and I just saw a Google-maps geospatial view addition posted to Trac (thanks for that) which I’ll try to add. Point: I’ll keep making progress, but slowly, sorry as usual for the delay.

If you want to help out, keep submitting patches and improvements on Trac, and if you get involved enough I’ll then give SVN commit privileges so the project can stay active even when I can’t give it time. Thanks to everyone who supports it, it’s been a real pleasure working with all of you so far, and I hope it will continue into the future in some manner.

Until next time, enjoy life

Update: This is old info, and not correct anymore. The problem was a result of a bug in Apache2 (or Ubuntu’s version of it) in which apache processes swapped out to disk would not release, and would consume all memory and crash the server. After an ‘apt-get upgrade’ on 8/30/07, apache2 was upgraded to ‘2.0.55-4ubuntu2’ and the problem has disappeared. For users experiencing this issue, I recommend upgrading your version of apache to the latest.

I have just discovered the reason for the sporadic server crashes I’ve been seeing over the past month or so. The symptoms include: Server slowing to a crawl, Apache reaching max_clients and never releasing its connections, Apache processes getting “stuck” and never going away, and finally, all open requests are for wp-cron.php?check=[somelongnumber] (which you may find out through apache-status, which looks like this).

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During my server setup I discovered an interesting new way to solve the age-old http://domain.com http://<em>www.</em>domain.com problem, one that I think is less resource intensive and more logical.

The problem, for those unfamiliar, is that Google sees those two sites as separate, assigns two PageRanks, and can even duplicate content. That’s not good! To try to combat this, in their webmaster tools page, you can select which address you prefer, but that’s been unreliable for me. Zenphoto.org still has split PageRanks even though I told Google to always use the www subdomain. For that reason (and others, like consistency of the URL users see) I think it’s best taken care of server-side.

Yep, that’s right, trisweb.com, zenphoto.org, and the rest of my sites have been moved to another new web server.

The previous moves were all opportunistic. Back in the day, I hosted on I was hosted on Berkeley’s Open Computing Facility, which was cool until I ran out of space. I moved and stuck with wha.websensei.com for a long time, who had a great deal going with a hosting “alliance” (same webmaster as caedes.net, highly recommended if you have some kind of artistic site).

Then I got in on a “startup,” and moved all my sites to their new dedicated server we got for “development.” I say “development” because no “development” actually happened, and in fact nothing ever happened. Great. They notified me that they were taking the server down in three hours, and that I should probably back it up if I wanted to keep anything. Bye guys!

From there I scrambled to find a host. I searched reviews and forums and settled on PolurNET, mostly because they had a 30-day money-back guarantee. Turns out these guys were great! I super-highly recommend them if you need any kind of general hosting, they really are a great company with reasonably-priced and feature-complete service. I spoke to the president, Anand, personally in a support chat, and he was surprisingly open and responsive to my problem.

But then I found slicehost a month later. Because, of course, you can never find what you’re looking for when you look for it—it has to be discovered when you least expect it.

Slicehost is awesome. Period. It’s a developer’s dream come true. Brand new servers with highly featured VPS plans designed for developers by developers. As soon as I saw the site, read the description, got the overall feel of it, I signed up. That’s marketing at its best, my friends. And no one was lying—they get it. My VPS server (“slice”) has been great from day one, except for a series of hardware-related crashes that I’m ignoring entirely for two reasons: one: they were on top of it immediately and kept everyone updated, and two: they refunded my payment for that entire month. I’ve had no problems since and only great experiences. Jason and Matt (owners/developers) really get it and it shows in their company. Thanks guys!

So I’ve been setting up my slice for the last month or so, off and on. It’s been fun and educational… it’s the first Linux server I’ve ever set up from scratch. I’ll post a couple of articles in the next couple days about the server configuration problems and solutions I encountered.

Also, now that I have my own server, Zenphoto will get Trac this week. It’s not JIRA or Confluence in usability, but it will work (and it won’t eat gigabytes of memory in the process… stupid Java… when will you learn…). SVN will move yet again so Trac can have access.

The bottom line: this should be solid for a long, long time. I’ve got full control over this server and my hosting now, no longer at the mercy of shared servers or bad sysadmins—except myself, of course ;-).

It’s been way too long since trisweb.com had a facelift, so I decided to change it back to blue and add some new stylings and photos for the header. Many of them are from my recent trip to Europe, or just random other photos that looked good up there. Check out my gallery for more.

This design has served me well for many years with little changes here and there. Let me know how you like this latest iteration. Thanks!

I’m finally back up! I found new hosting immediately, but delayed restoring the backups for personal reasons. The break was nice; just one less thing to think about for a few weeks. I lost all ranking on Google, and probably many transient readers, but those aren’t things to care about much. It is, after all, only the internet.

Goings-on over the past three weeks, list style:

• Cal beat Oregon State, Oregon, Washington State, and Washington in four straight games. We’re now 7-1 and ranked 12th in the nation. Go Bears!


• My dad shipped me his Olympus E-500 to use for a while since mine was stolen. It should keep the pictures flowing. Thanks dad!


• I flew to Massachusetts for my grandfather’s funeral (he was 96 years old!). It was a fun family reunion of sorts and the fall colors were beautiful. I’ve got to get out there more, I quite like the east coast. Pictures of that will be up soon for those waiting.


• I’ve decided to apply to grad school at Berkeley, in the Computer Science HCI department! I’m taking the GRE in two weeks and I’ll go from there… wish me luck!

That’s about all I can think of right now. It’s been busy overall, just one thing after another with work and band and family and all. Just feels like every week there’s more and more, and nothing ever stops and everything’s always changing, and at the end of every day I just wish we could take a two week vacation in Hawaii. I guess that’s life eh?

Trisweb.com, zenphoto.org, and other of my services are going down for the time being. There’s been an emergency with the people hosting me on their private server and they have to get rid of it, so I’m currently frantically backing up everything.

I’ll try to be back up sometime soon, but no promises…