Bush Mackel

When you’re a budding entrepreneur, (even though at this point, I think I’m full-fledged), you often look ahead to nicer times…

Times when you’re not worrying about keeping your server dues paid, times when you’re not stressed about paying your designers, times when you’re not worried about getting new work…

It’s also these times when you look ahead to when you’ll have some disposable income to blow on the good stuff! Week before last I shared some of the things I’m most excited on incorporating back into my life from insurance to my gym membership, but today I’ll share with you some of the good stuff!

A PS3
If you’ve followed me for any period of time, you may be surprised to hear this but yeah – I’d like to get a PS3 (when I have disposable income that is). I really haven’t come around in my thinking on the system, (being as how there are still only a handful of PS3 exclusives I want to play), but the video game hoarder/enthusiast in me is willing to look past that. Plus, in addition to God of War III coming out soon, I’m hearing that PSN Home is looking a lot better than when I last saw it.

Winterizing My House
As I type this, I’m sitting in my basement looking at the news on my Windows 7 box hoping that getting the latest NVidea drivers will stop Windows Media Center from crashing. And let me tell you, as much as I love my basement, my fingers are freezing. The only reason the rest of me isn’t is because I’m wearing several layers, a hoodie and shoes. It sucks. Last year I tried to do something about this problem myself but it’s way beyond even MY industrious skills.

Amplifier for My Car
I’m not sure if it was around Christmas or my birthday this past year, but around that time I got my some Best Buy gift cards. (SIDE NOTE: If you ever want to make me happy, buy me some Best Buy gift cards). And interestingly enough, “right now” there isn’t too much at Best Buy that I want – Which is to say that I’m at a weird point with my electronics (home theater, computer, etc) where everything is pretty up to date, so the next step up would mean major dollars.

So I was thinking about what I would use my gift cards on, and then I thought that I always wanted to upgrade my car audio. Well after I got a new deck, I had to get new speakers and despite getting rave reviews, I was really underwhelmed with them. So I went onto Crutchfield and asked one of their fantastic advisors what the deal was and they said it’s probably because my speakers are underpowered and that I desperately needed an amp.

I even picked one out at the time, but because I left my cushy 9-5 shortly thereafter, I had to put this little baby on the backburner where she sits to this very day. Truth be told, I COULD buy it using reward points from my credit card but we’ve had a pretty harsh winter so I don’t think I’d be in a rush to install it – Yes, that’s how I roll.

And if you think that’s a lot, think again! I still have more to write but I will not subject my fingers to the frozen tundra that is my basement any longer! Maybe another iteration next Friday?

Not sure what circles you travel in, but those I find MYself in are all abuzz about Steve Jobs’ alleged comments about Flash.

You might be able to say that it all started at the grand reveal of Apple’s long awaited iPad a week or two ago when during his live demo, Steve Jobs went to a website that had Flash content and everyone saw a “plugin needed” icon where the Flash was supposed to be.

I don’t believe Jobs really said anything about it then (you can double check by watching the conference here), but it looks like he didn’t have to ’cause he had already said plenty on the subject before hand.

Steve Jobs Hates Flash
Now I had NO idea that Adobe and Mac were so standoffish, but if you believe this Engadget article (and who doesn’t like Engadget), according to a report in Wired, Jobs was quoted as saying “Apple does not support Flash because it is so buggy. Whenever a Mac crashes more often than not it’s because of Flash. No one will be using Flash. The world is moving to HTML5.”

I’ve read a smattering of things about HTML5, but a quick search on the topic seems that it isn’t fully integrated in popular current browsers and I’m just not sure that its APIs are going to give developers everything you can get from Flash which I think (as of this writing) is at version 10. But be that as it may…

Flash is FAR From Perfect
You may not know this about me Joe Rogan, but I have a LOT of experience in Flash and AIR. And I’m not talking about just cheesy animations either. So let me tell you, one of the more frustrating professional experiences of my life (outside of installing Bugzilla) has been trying to get rid of Flash memory leaks due to its a$$ backwards way of trash collection. So when my friend brought this whole conversation to my doorstep today in a gChat conversation, I think he was FLOORED to hear that I don’t blame Steve Jobs for not wanting to include Flash in his shiznazz!

Apple’s Image WORKS
First things first, I’m not the biggest fan of Apple. I had somebody at my last employ who was THE Apple fanboy. His day started, ended and was filled with Apple.com. He had the iPhone, his trusted MacBook, and day after day tried to get everyone on board with his beloved brand. As I see it, he is Apple’s favourite kind of customer – Likes technology, loves to “look cool”, and doesn’t want to take the time to learn anything computer related. NOT THAT I’M FAULTING HIM. It’s kind of like the 360 debate vs the PS3. PS3 is slick, great at displaying media, overpriced (imo) while the 360 doesn’t look AS cool, has a TON of great games, but doesn’t always work as expected. I mean, how DARE customers expect their computers to work!

Look – I build PCs for fun. The idea of Apple framing new monitors and HD as new amazing enhancements for their iMac makes me laugh. I’m saying to myself, “Um… I’ve been able to go on NewEgg and TigerDirect for eons and pick out EXACTLY what size stuff I want. BUT the fact remains that PCs seem to be much more unstable/unreliable than Macs. It’s the tradeoff for being allowed to do whatever the hell we want to them and one that I (being a computer nerd) happily embrace but one that a lot of people would be willing to give up for something that they “don’t have to worry about”.

I Don’t Blame Steve Jobs
And here’s the thing – The whole “don’t have to worry” thing is a LARGE part of Apple’s image. If you think it’s not – You’re an L7 WEENIE. So if Steve Jobs doesn’t want to introduce Flash into his carefully crafted technology which emphasizes reliability and stability – I DON’T BLAME HIM. Furthermore, I kinda agree with him on Adobe. I was learning about trash collection in my HIGH SCHOOL Computer Science classes so if Flash is still struggling dealing with those kinds of issues after 10 major revisions of their product… I don’t even know…

…Though I’m still not paying $1000 for a Macbook, Macbook Pro or Macbook Air.
…Nor am I paying $150 for an MP3 player.

Like most things coming out of Apple, it doesn’t LOOK like the iPad is for me.

At first glance to me it looks like a touch monitor. At second glance it looks like a laptop where they took half of it away. At third glance, I’m just not sure why I would get one instead of a laptop.

But in any event, I do have to give it up to Apple. I swear – No one can get the hype machine going like they can and really take a mundane product and dress it up to the point where it looks so fresh and so clean clean.

What Is Supposed To Impress Me
To be honest – I’m not sure. Um, you can tilt it sideways and see more of a website at a time I guess. And you do have the gesture stuff built into it too… Hm. I’m really struggling to find more stuff and that’s not because I’m an Apple hater and trying to besmirch the device, quite the contrary. I love technology, and I don’t mind paying for it. But even though I LOVE throwing money away on my toys, I have to have SOME reason to initially purchase it. It’s the same reason I didn’t keep my PS3. The reasons I would buy one (at this point) are Uncharted, God of War III, and MGS4 I guess. I already have a Blu-Ray player, I already have a media extender thanks to my 360, and I don’t know what’s so unique to the system that would warrant me shelling out the cash for it (besides the fact that PS3 don’t red ring).

Here’s Where I’m Coming From
First off – I think Apple’s price point of $500 is right on the money for this thing. If it were any more, I’d really be focusing on it not being able to run multiple apps, no physical keyboard and on a Mac OS and wonder why I shouldn’t just get a PC laptop. But at that price with that screen – It seems like it might be the perfect high end impulse buy. Furthermore, I’m tempted to get it just to show off our websites to potential clients and here them say “Oo! Is that one of those iPads?” Then I can reply with, “All the guys at the office really love’em!” (implying that I have an office and that I have employees ha ha).

But the part I just can’t get past is if I’m going to be spending $500 on a mobile device of that sort, a PC just affords me with so many more opportunities to be productive with the device. I can put a FTP client on there, open up some TextPad and Photoshop and I’ll be off to the races. Plus, you know you can always find PC software to download for any situation (including games). But you know what WOULD change my mind? If I could develop for the Mac or iPad USING an iPad. Lord knows I’ve wanted to tinker with iPhone apps for a while now – But not at a $1000 entry price on a new computer. So I dunno. Maybe I’m way off on this one.

What Say You?

Sorry for the lack of posts and tweets this week but as a certain one of my client sites moved closer and closer to release (which we still haven’t hit yet) my time was devoted squarely to finishing it. And as much as I love these clients (and I mean that seriously) I’ll be really happy once we’re finished because it has started to drag a little bit at the end here. Plus – Finishing this site has been on my to do list for literally the past month. No bueno.

See all of you next week!

I was told recently that my Math Comment SPAM WP Plugin was actin’ all buggy so I took a second to look at it the other day. Turns out that it WAS in fact actin’ all buggy, and when I went to go look for help I saw that it hadn’t been updated since 2007 or something. Bleh.

But I said to myself that no one really reads this site anyway, so I probably didn’t need to worry about replacing it. Well turns out that even if you don’t have any readers, you can always count on SPAMbots to give you some love. After a day of being eaten live by gruesome comments, I decided to do something about it and I found the SI CAPTCHA Anti-Spam plugin I’m using now.

I’m really liking it so far because unlike other plugins:

• It works
• It’s customizable
• It seems to be updated regularly

So FYI, if you’re looking for something – Might want to give SI CAPTCHA a look.

Saying that installing Bugzilla was painful would be the understatement of the year. From what I’ve been able to piece together through this nightmare, it probably took me 9 hours to get the whole thing done – 3 hours on 3 separate days. And if it wasn’t for @mkanat suggesting that I give it another try, I probably would’ve walked away a LONG TIME ago.

I mean, I believe that everyone who works on large computer projects like myself should have some kind of issue tracker setup and while I’ve been using Mantis very happily – It doesn’t look very attractive (which is important when opening this up to clients and associates). So I began searching for something that it looked a bit better which is when I found Bugzilla. *shaking head*

First Things First
If you’re thinking about installing this on your server, know that it’s not for the feint of heart. There are A LOT of “moving parts” with this thing (Perl, CGI, db stuff) and many of them are things that I don’t have intimate experience with. Aside from that, the install guide that comes up Bugzilla is very vanilla in that seemingly ALL the issues that came up for me were not addressed in the guide either in notes next to the instructions or in the troubleshooting section. Even Google searches weren’t yielding me the help I really needed. @mkanat suggested that I use the Bugzilla newsgroup which I tried, but look – I’ve never used a newsgroup before and at 11:30pm at night well into hour 7 or something… I just wanted to get this done, not learn yet another thing.

So hey, I finally got things going last night so I wanted to put something out there that might help others who are going through the same pain. This isn’t an install guide but just the problems that I had that I didn’t see answered anywhere else. Oh and keep in mind that I don’t fancy myself a Unix Administrator either so if I get things wrong or sound stupid – It IS what it IS.

Getting Started
First you’ll need to probably shell into your server using the username for the website you’re installing it into. That’s to say, even if you think you can only or SHOULD shell in as “root”, you should instead shell in as the group/owner of the website where you’re installing Bugzilla… This will probably fix problems for you later. After you download the Bugzailla tar file and untar it, you have to run this script called checksetup.pl. (You run it by typing “./checksetup.pl” at the command line. When you first run it, you’ll be told about all the Perl modules you need to have installed to get things going. It will also say that to install all the modules, do “./install_modules.pl –all”. When I did that, everything went fine until it prompted me for “pg_config” which is when the first big headache started.

Installing the Modules – Oh and “pg_config” or “pg_path” is the Devil
I found out later that the “pg_config” prompt was for a PostgreSQL module. Here’s the thing, I have MySQL. You can think that you can just skip this by pressing [enter] but when you do, the script quits out and then I was getting an error when re-running it saying “Can’t locate Constant.pm in @INC” blah blah blah. At this point, I couldn’t go forward in my installation. The only way I found to deal with this was re-installing Perl (if you use CPanel, you can follow the instructions to do so here: >http://docs.cpanel.net/twiki/bin/view/11_24/AllFAQ/PerlFAQ#How_do_I_upgrade_Perl After doing this 2 or three times, I think I stumbled onto something through Google searches saying that you may NOT want to install ALL the modules. This was a big turning point. Instead, (after I was able to run checksetup.pl again), I ONLY installed the modules that were required (I think there was about 3). After that, I got past this HUGE hiccup. And again – Why this information isn’t included as a note in the install guide is beyond me.

And Then There Was the Group Owner Permission Problems
After all this, I finally got to the point where I could try and run things again (./checksetup.pl and the like) and I was still getting problems. Turns out now that I had group/owner permission problems… Remember before when I said you should make sure to shell in using the group/owner account of the website where you’re installing this? Well see, I’m using something that I found out is called SuExec… From what I understand, it makes individual websites on your server run scripts by that website’s group name… If you let them run as “nobody” or “root”, it’s a big security thang. So anyway, when I installed all of this Bugzilla stuff as “root”, my owner and group permissions for all these files were all over the place (which is obviously bad). Using the commands “chown” and “chgrp”, I ended up fixed things and I made sure to update the “localconfig” file with the right group name.

At about this time in the process, you can run “testserver.pl” to try and see what’s wrong and even though things were a little broken, it was saying that the group name on the “localconfig” file was different than the name being used by the webserver. Even though it says “this MAY not be a problem”, when nothing is working you tend to second guess yourself so obviously I spent hours changing my Apache httpd.conf file, restarting Apache and then changing Bugzilla’s “localconfig” file and hoping it all worked. Bleh. Let me sum up things for you if you’re a bit confused:

Let’s say that I’m on my Linux box running Apache with Cpanel installed. I’m going to install Bugzilla onto hockeyrules.com – A domain that I own (for conversation’s sake anyway). When I FTP or or login to the CPanel for this domain, I know my username is “hockey”. Chances are, this is what SuExec is using for your group name when running scripts. So this is what you’re going to use in your “localconfig” file’s $webservergroup variable. Got it?

403 Forbidden My A$$
At this point, “checksetup.pl” was lookin’ good but I still was having problems with “testserver.pl” saying that it couldn’t retrieve some PNG file or something. When I checked out the site through my browser, I saw that I was getting a 403 Forbidden error. I mean seriously, could this thing just work!?!? After a little while searching and a little while investigating, I found out that my Bugzilla directory that was supposed to be serving files didn’t have the right permissions. What tripped a flag was when I saw that “Other” didn’t have read permissions which is when I think I chmodded it to 755 to get it to serve…

And that my friends is when it FINALLY worked.

So now I have a working version of Mantis AND a working version of Bugzilla. Oh, and I tried to get into Bugzilla a little while earlier today, but I found myself bamboozled. There’s a lot in there and it’s going to take a while to suss out I think. And don’t worry – I still plan on comparing the two so check back in a little while and you may see a FANtastic (or mediocre) review!

Before my wife got her hooks into me, I used to spend money like it was going out of style. Which is really all to say that I never saved money and just enjoyed a comfortable single guy lifestyle of eating out all the time with friends.

Now that I’m married, have kids, and just “getting off the ground” with web design stuff, I’ve REALLY had to dial it back. But with every new financial foothold I gain back (it’s a rough transition from the 9-5 to this), the more I can dream about life’s little luxuries.

Day Care
By far, the biggest luxury I’m looking forward to in the near future is being able to afford day care again for my 2 kids. Don’t take this the wrong way, the kids are great and I know I’m lucky to be able to spend so much time with them – But trying to program while my littlest one is on my lap turning off my monitors, trying to take conference calls while my oldest is yelling for more apple juice… It can be a bit trying sometimes. And I also look at this as an important milestone because conceivably with more time, I’ll have more of an opportunity to grow my business. Or at least the theory goes.

Insurance
I know you’re going to get a kick out of this one Pete, but I can’t wait to have decent insurance again either. Right now we have the “if you lose an arm, you won’t lose a leg” insurance so for things like going to the Allergist, I’m pretty much SOL. I’ve been pretty lucky that I haven’t been really sick either but just being able to get back on my allergy meds would do so much for my sleeping habits.

Gym
Lastly on my list of “must haves” is the gym. I belong/used to belong (it’s complicated) to a Globo Gym with admittedly, a pretty high price tag. I really want to get back in there because we all know that staying healthy does A LOT for you. But when you’re home with the kids every waking moment, it’s kinda hard to find a yourself out of the house with an hour to lift.

And of course I have a ton more on my list, but if I wrote them all out here, it would be an extremely long post. I think I’ll probably post more next Friday (fun stuff at that) – So make sure to check back then!

I think this might be a good omen. You know, getting a 12 of 12 done in the first month of the new year. Now unfortunately the day couldn’t be any more ho hum, but sometimes married life with kids is like that haha. Anyway, thanks to Chad for starting this whole thing and given me something to post about!

Sometimes when you have a burgeoning web design company, you find yourself doings things you wouldn’t normally want to do. This weekend was such an occasion as I completed my first soup to nuts Facebook application for a local radio show.

Now let me be straight – Helping a radio show I like (with all things web) is something that I would do happily, especially when I met one of the hosts last year during a crazy ice storm where I found myself stranded and he couldn’t've been nicer. But I swear… If I knew what I did now, regarding how much work it would take to get this App off the ground… I don’t even know. I think it took me about 2 days work of straight programming to get this done and it was some of the most frustrating work I’ve done in quite some time.

I Have Developing for Facebook
Like most of the things I work on intensely, my wife gets to see all the peaks and valleys of the journey. Well this was no difference, and after two days of burying my head in my hands and occasionally pounding my fists on my desk, my wife asked “What’s wrong?” Now usually this question would drive me up a wall but she’s getting to be really good at finding the right times to ask these questions, so I answered her in words that she would understand…

• Facebook’s developer documentation sucks
• There doesn’t seem to be clear instructions on how to setup your dev environment
• The tutorials don’t help that much and seem to use nothing but depreciated functions

Now maybe I’m way off on the above but look, I think of myself as a developer. And I’d like to think that over the past two days of furious work that if the above were NOT the case, I would know it by now. So I could go on and on and let this Facebook rage consume me talking about all the problems I had and what I did to try and fix them… But instead I will tell you about what irked me the most…

Facebook Has Crappy Documentation
Over the weekend I would run into the same code snippets from the same PHP tutorial using Profile.setFBML. (You’d think I’d run into other tutorials but there seems to be only one PHP tutorial people can find for Facebook). Anyway, when trying to figure out why this Profile.setFBML wasn’t performing as expected, I pulled up the following on Facebook’s Wiki:

So this is great. Not only will this method be depreciated, but it will happen oh… RIGHT ABOUT NOW. Unfortunately we don’t know if it HAS been depreciated or NOT, so I guess we gotta just roll the dice if we’re going to use it and hope that the depreciation hammer hasn’t fallen. Oh, and if you follow that next line about “application tabs” you know, if you wanted to program for the future, there’s basically no functional information in there either and instead points us again to the Developer Roadmap. If you go THERE, you will see the following:

And if you click “Detail” you get this: “Going forward (in the short term) application tabs will be the only way applications can integrate into profiles and Facebook Pages.” Soooooooo, application tabs are coming SOMETIME in early 2010 (but nobody knows when) and it will be the only way to integrate your apps into the profile, BUT there’s nowhere to find information on how to do it… *GROAN*

Again, this was an exceedingly frustrating weekend, but I got the App done, the programming is awful and sorely needs to be cleaned up but a Win is a Win. Screw you Facebook.

On my post Care For Your Clients yesterday, I relayed a story about a certain client who I gave tech support to even when they didn’t have the money to pay my employer and even after I was ordered to stop. I did that out of a responsibility I feel towards my clients, but Ian brought up something else that I tend to forget these days..

Just out of the virtue of you knowing things about computers or technology, people feel that they can come to you with any of their problems and that you will fix it for them for free. I think a lot of people in our industry have gone through this before. For me, it was my family who was always coming to me with their problems and expecting that I could not only fix ANYTHING they threw at me, but would do so out of the goodness of my heart.

And the majority of times they were right.

I Love This Stuff
It’s true, and that was a large part of the problem. If I didn’t like all this computer nonsense, it is a mortal lock that I would’ve tried to find any excuse I could not to work on computers and everyone’s associated problems. But because I love learning, I love tinkering, and I love helping people – I would eagerly sign up to do everything I could to fix their stuff. What this usually resulted in was me spending a LOT of my own time and often some of my OWN money in the pursuit of their happiness. And I remember at one point that I looked around at all the things I “needed” to do one day, and most of them were computer freebies – Which sucked. I mean, who wants to be doing free work for everyone else that takes up your entire day’s time? Personally I would’ve rather tooled around on XBL given the choice.

So I Started a Company
At the beginning, I think I started my company so I could write off my hosting fees that I was paying regardless of whether I had any paying clients or not. *laughs* I think that my thinking was, “If I can write off my hosting fees, I’ll have a ton more money!”. Well let me tell you cupcake – That’s not quite how it works. But I’ll tell you that almost immediately, it had a radical effect on all these people trying to get the free work out of me. Next time I saw them I just said, “I’m really excited to start this new company of mine and if you have anything WE can help you with, please don’t hesitate to ask.” Almost immediately, people stopped asking me to do stuff for free. And amazingly, these people would still come to me saying that wouldn’t mind paying since they trusted my work and wanted to support my new endeavour!

So I don’t know kids… Pople are getting paid for way less out there and for me personally, organizing a business was a BIG turning point in my life. Don’t you want to write off your hosting fees too? (#):)