Yii Radiio popped out of our referral logs today, and we’re really impressed at the podcast (and the clever name). It’s quick, professional, and to-the-point, with a few nice links about the Yii Framework in every episode. If you’re interested in the Yii Framework, it’s definitely worth a peek at the show notes and quick download of the archived episodes.
Edit: It looks like our RewriteRule directives in Apache may have been the culprit. We rarely use a .htaccess file and instead use configuration files to speed up Apache. Since we didn’t change index.php to index-test.php in the configuration, it was redirecting to the index.php!
In the Yii Framework, you can always call index-test.php to use your test settings & database connection. This is handy in a variety of ways. However, we recently found that some actions (redirects) that occurred after a page submit were redirecting us to the index.php – the production site. Luckily, we were still on our local machine, so we had no test cases misdirecting from test to production. To fix this, we set the URL Manager’s showScriptName to true in our test configuration. After we did this, everything worked as expected.
Snippet from our test configuration file:
// uncomment the following to enable URLs in path-format 'urlManager'=>array( 'urlFormat'=>'path', 'showScriptName' => true, 'rules'=>array( '/'=>'/view', '//'=>'/', '/'=>'/', ), ),
Accessing the jQuery Cookie plugin is easy in Yii Framework. Here is the code you will need to put in your PHP file to include the right script references:
$cs = Yii::app()->clientScript; $cs->registerCoreScript('jquery'); $cs->registerCoreScript('cookie'); $cs->registerScriptFile(CController::createUrl('/js/mainsite.js'), CClientScript::POS_HEAD);
Then, in your JavaScript, you can set cookies with:
$.cookie("cookieName", "cookieValue", {path: "/", expires: "7"});
The path tells the cookies to allow full-site access, and expires will set the expiration to a week from now.
Finally, to read your cookie from JavaScript, use the following:
$.cookie("cookieName");
Pretty nifty, huh?
At Hollow Developers, we use Rackspace Cloud for this website, and have started to move over our gaming and education websites to this host. Today, they have announced public availability of their Rackspace Cloud Load Balancing API. We have been waiting for this since November when they first announced a public beta, and are even more excited about what this means for our clients in the future.
What is Load Balancing?
Load balancing allows websites to split up the work of hosting pages and images to multiple machines. Take a site like Amazon. There’s no way that one server would be able to keep up with all those visitors! So, Amazon tells some of its customers to use Server A, and some of its customers to use Server B (in reality, there’s probably thousands of machines at Amazon).
There are a few benefits to this. First, with multiple machines, you have redundancy – your data is stored in multiple locations, and in case one server goes down, your website can still stay online. Second, suppose one server is being overloaded with a very complex request. With load balancing, the other server can pick up the slack until the resource-intensive task is complete. Load balancing also allows you to take servers out of the rotation and perform maintenance, without bringing down your website. The wikipedia article has a long list of other benefits.
Load Balancing For Small Businesses
In the past, load balancing has been out of reach for many small businesses. If your dedicated server that hosted your website went down, your customers would be met with a dreaded 404 page. However, with load balancing coming soon to the Rackspace Cloud Control Panel, this is going to get much easier very soon. Starting at $20/month, Rackspace’s solution is poised to be one of the first easy-to-use and inexpensive cloud load balancers.
Interested in getting your site on Rackspace Cloud? Contact Hollow Developers for a consultation.
HP Keyboard - not cool, HP, not cool!
We recently bought a HP dv7t laptop, and it has been very good to us so far. However, we quickly found a small problem with the way the function keys work on this laptop. In order to press F1, you have to press both the ‘fn’ key at the bottom of your keyboard AND the F1 key (the same goes for all other function keys). Being a development workstation, function keys are crazy-important, and we find it odd that HP ships a laptop focused at the enterprise with this default behavior. Thankfully, after rooting around for a while, we found the method for disabling this behavior and enabling the behavior that has been custom since function keys were first invented. Here are the steps if anyone else is having problems with this ‘feature’:
While we can see the value of ‘action keys’ at laptops directed solely at consumers, it seems like the default function key behavior should remain the default.
It looks like Gmail engineers are experimenting with push desktop notifications in Google Chrome and Gmail. This is a long-awaited feature of web browsers, and will allow web applications to act more like traditional desktop applications. As more applications become web-based, ditching the traditional fat-client pieces, small things like this will help users with the transition.
Is the new option showing up in your settings? (Click on image for full-size.)
Here’s a full explanation from the official Gmail blog.
Technology had some hefty mentions in tonight’s State of the Union. While vague about the details of improving the nation’s technological infrastructure, President Obama did show commitment to investing in the future. The United States has slipped in high speed internet availability, and this must be rectified for continued innovation.
One glaring omission was any mention of “net neutrality”. Recently, the FCC laid out their rules for enforcing neutrality on landlines, but allowed wireless carriers to prioritize and delay traffic at their discretion. As a small technology company, we want to make sure that the big players in the industry can’t overshadow the small companies. With the current rules, big players may get preferential treatment. Innovation comes from both big and small companies, and allowing all companies to have the same guidelines for network traffic will ensure that this continues.
Happy birthday, Wikipedia! The world has changed a lot since 2001, and Wikipedia has been along for the ride. The open source software that powers Wikipedia, MediaWiki, is used for a large number of wikis around the globe. In fact, Hollow Developers has utilized MediaWiki for over 5 years at The World Called Hollow. Hollow’s community wiki contains extensive documentation about the world, and has been carefully crafted by the players of the game.
A wiki provides a great way for many people to collaborate on the same document. Companies are increasingly looking to wikis to provide support for employees, and MediaWiki is a great tool to accomplish this goal.
A few weeks after introducing hefty fees on checking accounts, JP Morgan Chase announces quarterly profits. No wonder they’re introducing these fees – only $4.8 billion profit last quarter. We feel so sorry for this company, and might volunteer to give them a few more dollars a month in fees. Only $4.8 billion profit?</sarcasm>
Luckily, banking is one industry where there is plenty of competition. Hollow Developers has a low profit margin, and these additional fees have encouraged us to move our accounts to other banks. At the very least, this provides a good reminder for small businesses to watch their monthly statements for new fees and save money where possible. The fees that Chase wanted to charge our account is enough to provide for a few hours of peak bandwidth cost, and we would much rather spend our money on bandwidth than banking.
Google will join a a variety of web companies to participate in World IPv6 Day on June 8, 2011. Gearing up for IPv6 is incredibly important for the future of the Internet, as the IPv4 space is forecast to be depleted by the end of 2011.
What is IP?
IP stands for Internet Protocol, and is the method that devices use to communicate with each other over the Internet. In theory, a unique IP address would be assigned to each device on the Internet. IPv4, the Internet Protocol that most devices are using at the moment, has the capacity for 4 billion addresses. In the early 80′s, at the creation of IPv4, this number seemed to be plenty. However, with millions of Internet-connected devices being activated each year, the IPv4 address space is in short supply.
What is World IPv6 Day?
World IPv6 Day is a day for website and network operators to flip on the switch for IPv6, and learn some lessons before everyone is forced to flip the switch on IPv6 in the near future. Hopefully, any kinks in the system will be worked out quickly, and everyone involved will be able to better their networks for IPv6 adoption. Hollow Developers will be participating in World IPv6 Day with our flagship HollowGame website. The IPv4-enabled website will continue to work as it does now, but IPv6-enabled users will be encouraged to visit us at a separate address, which will be announced shortly before June 8.
Happy IPv6′ing!
