Ben Benner’s Blog

… a whole lot of bread and php!

I have not blogged in a while. It is not due to a lack of stuff to talk about. But more so that ever nagging lack of time to write. There are many out there that would aptly (justly and most likely with righteous fervor) say that I need to MAKE the time. To which I have but one simple answer (excuse).

I cannot make anymore time.

I have managed to find time to practice some new bread recipes (which in the grand scheme of things doesn’t take nearly as much time as some might think), I have written several small applications (in php) for side projects, been assisting with some home renovations and to boot attempting to keep my stress level (and sanity in check).

Work has changed up quite a bit in the last 60 days, I am no longer the VP of Product Development, I am also the VP of Product Management and Development. Thirteen little letters added to my title have added at this point countless hours at the office after the normal quitting time. I say countless because well I am salaried, so at some point counting them all up is too aggravating.

I don’t want to paint a picture that I am there until midnight or anything, but I do believe the latest I have been at the office has been about 10pm, and if memory serves I got into the office early that day and more or less clocked a 12 hour day.

It is the age-old tale of “Doing more with less”, there was some re-organization and I got a title change and once again have staff (the Jaduka development team reports directly to me). I was immediately tasked with hiring two new developers to work on some web applications. Can’t go into the details just yet, but when we launch I will make sure to post some more information.

The search took some time, but I managed to find some good additions to the team. We threw them into the deep end and we are about 3 weeks into their first project. Things are moving along well, but we have had quite a few other projects creep up in October that were not originally planned for, these projects are customer related, so that means that it is NEW business. And new business is always a GOOD thing.

I had gotten into the habit for the last few weeks of once or twice a week bringing bread into the office. I haven’t done that yet this week, but I think I will be able to line that up for Friday. I have done some experimenting.

There is of course my Sans Raisin Bread, my Gingerbread squared (Gingerbread bread) and my Great Pumpkin bread. The last batch of Great Pumpkin I think turned out very well, everyone in the office felt the second batch was better than the first. The secret was to add a second can of pumpkin (not pumpkin pie filling, ‘raw’ canned pumpkin). There was also my attempt at Log Cabin bread, which just didn’t have enough maple syrup flavor, not quite sure how to overcome that without having to put like 2-3 cups of maple syrup in, which keep in mind is A LOT of maple syrup. (talking about the real stuff, not that corn syrup junk)

I enjoy bringing in bread and getting feedback from folks on the taste, texture, etc. I also enjoy stealing what I think are the best two pieces for myself. I am not sure what will be next on the list for bread. I will likely make something ‘boring’ like buttermilk bread, but it is an old standby at this point. I use the buttermilk recipe as the base for most of my experiments.

We cleaned out the garage this past Sunday. If you have to clean out a garage or are planning any sort of home renovation project that will produce any significant amount of construction waste/debris, I highly recommend that you see if your can use TheBagster (www.thebagster.com), we used it to get rid of all the junk (mostly construction waste/debris) that had accumulated in the garage after the various other projects that we had done.

Last night I hung a new ceiling fan in Gina’s office. I also installed new closet doors and a bi-fold door in the hallway entrance to the laundry room. I did the demo(lition) and room prep for Gina’s office, clearing out the old carpet and baseboards.

John installed the laminate flooring the other weekend and put in the new base boards. Gina caulked everything and painted the trim, spackled some spots in the drywall. It has been quite a little renovation of Gina’s office.

We hit up IKEA and she got herself a new desk and some new wall hangings. Everything isn’t quite  back together yet, I think that is on the agenda for tomorrow night.

This evening I came home, wrote up some specifications, got my laptop rigged up to run the code for the latest web project we are doing at work and poked around in the repository to see how the guys have been doing.

On Monday I fly out to Reston, VA to attend a user conference (tradeshow) that is hosted by Appian, a company that Jaduka is partnered with. I will be out there to demonstrate our integration and discuss with the attendees how we can help improve the efficiency of their Appian installations with Jaduka’s services.

It has been a VERY, VERY busy October, thus far.

I really want to try and knock out a batch of Pumpernickel, but I think that will need to wait until I get back from my trip next week.

Oh, did I mention that I also managed to catch that cold that has been going around Austin (particularly our office)?

Well, I need to get to bed I am supposed to be into the office early tomorrow as to help ensure that I can leave at a decent time.

Laterz

bdbenner work bread, floors, garage, PHP, programming, renovation, the bagster, thebagster, travel, work

Twitter’s problems have even hit the world of InkTank, which is one of the web comics that I read. The artist who draws InkTank used to have a GREAT comic called Angst Technology, I learned a lot and have always wished that we had some IT ninjas (or that I was fast enough to snatch the pebble from master’s hand).

I have to say that the WordPress interface here is pretty boss, it is a bit more intuitive than the Serendipity interface (notably I am running an OLD version of Serendipity, but still I think WordPress wins).

I am likely going to have to try to roll my own header image rotater, which honestly I think will be a fun little project to work on. I tried out a couple of different ones last night, none of which gave me the effect I was looking for.

I have setup the main page of my new domain, Ben.Dominguez-Benner.com, with some temporary links to stuff. I am still not entirely sure what all I am going to post and do with this new domain, but it is going to be about me. I have found that even in the digital world I tend to keep to myself.

My blogging lately has been very sparse, I need to increase that, but I also want to share my thoughts on various topics that aren’t necessarily about what is going on in my life. Believe it or not, I can be quite opinionated, particularly about technology.

I had a great conversation the other night with a buddy of mine in Dallas, Bobby Goodwin, about the .NET and how it has some advantages over PHP.

Let it be known that I have always stated that .NET is a good structure for the Enterprise, for an environment where the users might be accepting of some downtime (do to an upgrade, or a mishap). However, from what Bobby has told me, .NET might just be ready for some real action on the Web.

Those are probably fighting words for the folks out there who the annoited accolytes of .NET. However, the one thing that I have seen time and time again with commercial and even OpenSource frameworks (or even blog packages), there is a certain crossroads when it comes to handling a web app in a multi-server environment.

And as Bobby stated that night, .NET can do all the stuff PHP can (and more apparently). My statements about .NET possibly not handling a multi-server environment (ie the same app running on multiple servers at the same time) is not about the programming language. I made the comment that night that the operating system would be a factor.

I think I have to retract that, because with some proper load balancing schemes (DNS load-balancing appliances, or a DNS service that does the load-balancing), then all the load balancing is done in an agnostic fashion to the operating system.

I think it is a bit of a culture issue, and honestly I am not sure culture is the correct word.

With enough money you can build out as redundant a system using Windows and .NET as you could using Linux and PHP. I think for me the idea of being able to buy a server, load a FREE OS, FREE Database, Free Web Server make me think about the architecture of a system (say like a big micro-blogging service that has been having problems) as merely a need to buy a few more boxes that can handle the particular part of the overall system that is innundated with requests.

In part because the cost of the hardware is very negliable these days. I mean for a small indie project $1,500 for a server is a killer (which really means they should be using $300-$500 cheapo servers vs say DELL), but to a company $1,500 for a server is ultra-cheap. But cheap is relative, back in the early days of my career the most stable UNIX like servers were RISC based, which meant IBM, SUN, and HP were your best bet.

They were also your most expensive as well, costing back in ‘98 easily $100k for something that could handle some load and in 2000 it was more along the lines of $30k-$40k. With cheaper and more powerful x86 servers out there and a stable (FREE) Linux OS you could begin to get POWERFUL servers for about $2000-$10,000 between like 2004-2007.

Today $10k will buy you a VERY POWERFUL server.

However, when you start tacking on Lincensing costs for the Operating System and a Database engine, the nature of your architecture usually changes, I belive you typically look for ways to grow your architecture vertically vs horizontally (ie buying BIGGER boxes instead of MORE boxes).

I have gotten way off topic here and should probably look to follow up this post with seperate posts on these topics.

In closing though, I find it funny that the issues that Twitter has had made it’s way in the InkTank universe, I also thought it was good timing considering that I had just made a post that made fun of the Twitter API stability issues.

Back to the grind.

Laterz

bdbenner InkTank, Technology, Uncategorized, newTechnology, webcomics .NET, AngstTechnology, architecture, comics, hardware, InkTank, PHP, programming, twitter, webcomics