Uncategorized – Daniel X's Blog

Why Wiki’s Suck

Wikis suck because they (as of yet) are never worth the additional complexity over regular web pages. They have a special syntax that can’t quite do exactly what web pages and links can do. They make some things easier, but others harder, the primary example being linking to a page within the wiki and a page “external” to the wiki.

Another major problem is that they are almost always focus on using templating languages rather than complete programming languages. This makes working with data sources (json, xml, recent statistics) a pain because the document is dead as soon as it is written. There is no way to express template generation within the language itself.

In order to overcome this wikis would need to be much more of an ecosystem.

Ability to create interactive visualizations that link to historic as well as current data.

At the bottom it should all be compiled into “regular” web pages so no special software would be necessary for hosting or interoperating with other static pages.

Rather than collecting words on a page, as in an encyclopedia, people using this kind of tool would collect data transformations, references, aggregations, and higher order functions related to simplifying these things.

Daniel X Moore Talks about HyperDev on The New Stack @ Scale Podcast

Daniel X just spoke on a podcast about HyperDev, organizational structure, and agility, check it out!

The New Stack @ Scale Podcast

“It’s easy to think that developer tools to make life easier for developers. It’s actually a lot broader than that. What we found when developing HyperDev is, as the barrier gets lower and lower, more people in the organization, people you might not traditionally think of as developers, are able to contribute, are able to build applications, are able to solve their own problems.” – Daniel X Moore

GitHub Pages Custom Domain with SSL/TLS

The Overview

Route53 -> CloudFront -> github.io

You’ll get the joys of having SSL/TLS on a custom domain https://danielx.net backed by the ease of deployment and reliability of GitHub Pages.

The Price

Route 53 ($0.50)
CloudFront (pennies!)
SSL/TLS Cert (free!)

The Details

Get the certificate for your domain at https://aws.amazon.com/certificate-manager/. Be sure your contact details on the domain are up to date because Amazon uses whois info to find out where to send the confirmation email. I like to request a certificate for the wildcard as well as the base domain, i.e. *.danielx.net and danielx.net, that way I can use the same certificate if I want to have other CloudFront distributions for subdomains.

You’ll need to click through the links Amazon emails you so that they can validate your ownership of the domain and activate the certificate.

Next, create your CloudFront distribution. Choose “Web”. Configure your origin, in my case strd6.github.io. Choose “HTTPS Only” for Origin protocol policy, that way CloudFront will only connect to you GitHub pages over HTTPS.

Configure the caching behavior. Here I add OPTIONS to the allowed requests, I’m not sure if this is necessary since GitHub pages enables CORS by adding the Access-Control-Allow-Origin: * header to all responses. You also may want to customize and set the default TTL to zero. GitHub sets a 10 minute caching header on all resources found, but won’t set a header on 404s. This will prevent CloudFront from caching a 404 response for 24 hours (yikes!)

Here’s where we add our certificate. Be sure to set up the CNAME field with your domain, and be sure your certificate matches!

You’ll also want to set the Default Root Object to index.html.

You can also add logging if you’re feeling into it.

If your domain is hosted somewhere else you can transfer your DNS to Route53, otherwise you can set up the DNS records on your domain provider.

Create a Route53 Record set for your domain then create an A record. Choose Alias, and select the CloudFront Distribution as your Alias target. Note: you may need to wait ~10-15 minutes for the distribution to juice up.

Caveats

You need to be careful with your urls (you’re careful with them anyway, right?!). You must include the trailing slash like https://danielx.net/editor/, because if you don’t and do https://danielx.net/editor GitHub will respond with a 301 Redirect to your .github.io domain, and it won’t even keep the https!

If you hit a 404 CloudFront may cache the response for up to 24 hours with its default settings. This is because GitHub doesn’t set and caching headers on 404 responses and CloudFront does its default thing.

Using Multiple Cloudfront Domains with Paperclip

In order to speed up asset loading using a CDN is generally regarded as a good idea. It is also recommended to split up requests among separate hostnames to allow the browser to parallelize loading.

Enabling this in Rails with Paperclip is pretty easy, though the documentation isn’t extremely rich.

You’ll want to set the s3_host_alias option to a proc which determines the correct domain alias based on the id of the object the attachment is for.

  has_attached_file :image, S3_OPTS.merge(
    :s3_host_alias => Proc.new {|attachment| "images#{attachment.instance.id % 4}.pixieengine.com" },
    :styles => {
      ...
    }
  )

This sends requests to the following hostnames:

images0.pixieengine.com
images1.pixieengine.com
images2.pixieengine.com
images3.pixieengine.com

The best part is that the same image will always have the same hostname. I’ve seen some people suggest randomly choosing a domain, but that reduces caching potential as the same item could be requested from multiple different domains over time.

The Advantage of Code Based Game Development Environments

Game development environments that leverage graphical interfaces and parameterized editors are interesting. They have the ability to lower the bar required to get a game up and running without making serious mistakes or getting lost in dead ends. Therefore they are a valuable tool in broadening the population of game developers.

However, there always remains the need for the capability to drop into the source code and edit the algorithms directly. Data structures and algorithms are what software is made of, and if our only interface into game creation is a parameterized editor where we can only configure values, then it will prevent breakthroughs just as much as it prevents failures and dead ends. This is why that no matter how many wizards, GUI tools, application builders, etc. that we have, we must always be able to go to the source and edit.

True progress is born from changing the paradigm, not changing the parameters.

Contrasaurus Christmas

Start Writing Your Blog

Do you have a website? Do you have a blog? I’d totally love to read it.

The thing is though, that it takes a while for it to get good. I started with STRd6 almost two years ago, and it’s still not good. On the plus side though it adds incentive to keep cranking out the content. Each new article adds a new layer of better content to cover up the old.

So what are you waiting for? If you want a really high class blog then you’ll definitely need to start today. I bet you even have some ideas for blog posts saved up. You could easily write four in the first month.

So go ahead and do it already. You don’t need to worry about being better than the blogs that are already out there, just as good as they were when they started. I’m not even going to link back to my early posts… too embarrassing. And only 20 posts in 2008? You can totally beat that.

Add your new blog in the comments. I’ll check it out in a few years when it’s good.

Onion Eyes

The onion reminds me of my frailty. This simple vegetable brings me to tears and there is nothing I can do about it. It’s easy to forget how fragile I am. The best technology can do is to hide my vulnerability; the worst is to allow me to forget it’s truth.

Billions of years of serendipity have allowed me the grace of existence in this world. Meanwhile it is all I can do to rise slightly above the chaos, knowing the whim of chance can take it all away. I come from a long evolutionary line of stupendous bad-asses. So do onions. All the denizens of this world do. Except for the most powerful; they come from nothing, and are all around us.

The onion reminds me to strive for clarity. To persist through the fog. To try harder. I now have a delicious dinner.

i see _why, he wanted one in his book

It's Easier Than You Think

Take some time and further your life goals. Spend at least 30 minutes. You already know what you want. Take the time and do it. It’s easier than you think.

The Chasm of Compromise

You and your friend are trying to decide whether or not to jump across a chasm. You want to jump across to the other side where you will be rewarded with delicious berries. You friend wants to stay put and eat the so-so berries here. So you decide to compromise: you each jump halfway across the chasm and die.

Not all situations are chasms, but the really important ones usually are. Compromise can kill you; go for consensus if you can. If you can’t, go alone.