Wolfe Web Services

Back in July of 2010 I began a project at work to completely rewrite my company\'s website (the UI portion) using XSLT on top of an XML based HTTP api. The XML based api was built not to construct pages, but to get data for different types of objects in our system. Unfortunately our backend was not built with a good MVC framework which would have made binding data from the model to the view much easier and more xslt-esque.

So that I don\'t divulge any company information I will make up a hypothetical problem which would have a similar set of problems that I had to solve.

For quite awhile now I've been baffled by the reason/s for netflix's lack of support for linux. And while I could think of some reasons, none of them made complete sense. The first and most often used one is that "nobody uses linux". While the numbers may be small they are not laughable. It may be a measly 1% or less of the desktop market, but that 1% actually accounts for quite a few people in the U.S.

If you are web developer who prefers to use linux, but must (for the most unfortunate of reasons) test with IE6, then virtualbox has probably become your friend.

As I've mentioned before, my sites are hosted by Bluehost who so far I've had mostly great things to say about.
However, today I went to visit one of my websites, which happens to run drupal in a Multisite Installation, and the none of the CSS/images loaded, leaving my website looking like something from 1992.

I found several tutorials about how to get Cisco Anyconnect VPN software running for ubuntu 64 bit. However, I'm a very minimalistic person and I knew that the instructions I'd seen Here where overboard. I couldn't figure out why I actually needed to install firefox 32 bit if I only needed some libs from the 32bit version of firefox.
I tried installing the libraries (ia32libs and lib32nssmdns) and then symlinking to them from /opt/cisco/vpn/lib

I find all kinds of tutorials on the net about how to install php/apache/mysql for Ubuntu.
Its incredibly simple to get the basics setup, but creating a methodology for doing real development, for multiple clients simultaneously, is a bit more complicated.

Typically I would start out with something like this:

sudo aptitude install php5 mysql-server apache2.2 php5-mysql php5-mysqli

Over a year ago I discovered the beauty of Drupal and the amazing things that could be done with it, and typically without doing any major programming. Modules like CCK, Views and the helpers for these modules make developing dynamic websites a snap. You will most likely need a bit of knowledge in terms of html/css (modifying templates to suite your needs) but in my experience I've had to do only a very moderate amount of actual PHP coding. If anything, I could add some specific behaviour to the page through the use of javascript.

Today I had an annoying message appear while doing apt updates. The message stated I only had 1.8gb free on my root partition. The partition has something like 50gb total, and I've barely put anything on it besides the OS and a few dozen apps (none of them very big). I fired up the Disk Usage Analyzer and found that /var/log was using a bit over 30gb on its own.

After building the UI for a reasonably sized web application (which happens to be very heavy in javascript), I found that with around 40 JavaScript files being included into the page and the size of all of the files together caused for some poor load times on anything but a very fast internet connection. A common technique to solve issues such as this is to use a JavaScript compression technique such as js-min, YUI compressor, dojo compressor, and others. Because the YUI compressor gives very good results (better than the others in the tests I saw) and is very easy to use, I chose it.

Although this is probably a rare and fairly random issue, I thought I'd write a blog to address it because it was so darn hard to track down.
While building a webapp for my company, once we turned SSL on we faced some common gotchas (and some not so common) that most SSL websites face. One such issue was trying to suppress the warning that Internet Explorer gives about accessing secure and insecure data from the same page.