Smarter Sheep

I’m really liking Ruby and Rails development. I have been working through some rails books the last few weeks along with evaluating various php frameworks and at this point I have to say that Rails kicks the snot out of anything else so far. phpCake is a close second. I also found Netbeans to be my editor of choice. Coming from a .net world where we have had some amazing editors that I often took for granted, I found it hard to find a good editor for php and rails, but Netbeans is amazing so far and I am quite impressed.

For those, like myself who didn’t attend or even know about the Google conference in may, I ran across a cool area that google has setup with videos and downloads of all the presentations. There is coverage for many of their applications as well as building apps on their new python based appengine. Check it out here

Today wraps up a long week of Vacation Bible Experience for the kids here at Capital Christian. There have been hundreds of kids from the church as well as the community. I ran across the following passage in Ephesians chapter 5 of the Message Bible this morning:

Watch what God does, and then you do it, like little children who learn proper behavior from their parents. Mostly what God does is love you. Keep company with him and learn a life of love. Observe how Christ loved us. His love was not cautious but extravagant. He didn’t love in order to get something from us but to give everything of himself to us. Love like that.

It’s all too easy to get caught up in everything going on and miss out on what God is doing in lives via his ability to simply love us for who we are.

2:00 pm - just finished 2 days of work moving pages around in our Sitefinity based website. Performance was dead slow so it took much longer than it should have.

2:05 pm - testing all the pages in the website menu structure. Hmm.. none of the most important ones are working. I’m getting a generic error message that something failed in the framework.

2:10 pm - logging back in as admin. Can’t edit the pages either. Same generic error message. I’ve seen this before with the framework and I’m concerned.

2:15 pm - go to sitefinity website and login to get latest framework patch which i’ve been avoiding. Hope applying this will fix the issue.
2:20 pm - download completes, unzipping and getting ready to upload to site. Good thing I made a backup last week.
2:25 pm - Put up a website maintanance page and start uploading Sitefinity patch… nearly 3600 files…

3:01 pm - 1 cell call, 1 google chat and 1 text message from 3 different people that the main website was down. No maintanance page or anything just a big server error.

3:02 pm - panic
3:03 pm - @#$%$#
3:04 pm - time of repentance and healing (had to keep it short for obvious reasons)
3:05 pm - checking site, ftp into server, start checking logs
3:08 pm - no logs to be found, editing global.asax file and turn on custom logging feature I wrote for such an occasion.
3:12 pm - log into host account and resetting asp.net
3:20 pm - still no luck…so editing web.config to turn off any caching etc and checking settings
3:30 pm - locating backups
3:35 pm - modifying backup web.config
3:40 pm - short prayer
3:41 pm - ftp and upload 7500 files to restore website file structure from backup
3:44 pm - realize this is going to take awhile… more repentence
3:50 pm - opening more sockets in the ftp client..hey hey.. that helped … short praise time
4:01 pm - backup restored..
4:02 pm - site still not coming up
4:04 pm - log back into hosting server and remove and reapply .net.
4:08 pm - site comes up yeah!
4:10 pm - testing menus because something doesn’t look right. A large group of pages won’t come up without the generic application error message.
4:15 pm - log into admin interface on website
4:16 pm - admin interface errors out
4:17 pm - sinking feeling
4:18 pm - panic, prayer, repentance (I’ve almost got this down now)
4:20 pm - try several other routes to login and finally get in. I can navigate anywhere within admin interface except to the pages screen which is where I need to go to try and repair any of the pages. Same error message there that I get on all the failing pages.
4:30 pm - create a trouble ticket with hosting company to see if they have anything in their logs that may help.
5:00 pm - still working on admin interface but no luck, hosting company responds that their are no errors logged in IIS so it looks like it’s all in our Sitefinity framework.
5:15 pm - make descision that we are going to lose the last several days of work on the site and have to restore database backups.
5:18 pm - log support ticket with hosting company to restore last week’s backup.
6:35 pm - hosting company says they have it done.
6:40 pm - something is wrong. Doesn’t look like they restored anything. data is the same.

7:00 pm - 1:00 am working on other things while waing for hosting company to reply to my ticket that something is wrong with their restoration of the database.
1:00 am - 1:40 am - tickets back and forth with hosting company as they realize they were trying to restore wrong database on wrong domain…. scary! they have always been superb in the past… must be a new guy having a bad night as well.
2:15 am - database backup finally successfully restored.
2:30 am - main church website is finally up and running again, but without any of the recent changes so it looks like a “do over”
2:35 am - testing pages and logging in to admin interface of website framework
2:40 am - looks like all is well and we are back to where we started… except for our main xml files on the site rotator got nuked during all this and I have to recreate them.
3:00 am - testing in several different browsers and it looks like we are back online.
3:05 am - sigh of relief mixed with thoughts of having to redo all the work and how to do it without the framework corrupting our data again.
3:10 am - prayer and thanks to God for getting us through another day in the church IT department. I’ve learned long ago that things could be much worse

We have been using Endian Firewall for the last year as our firewall and content management filter. We have it loaded on a PIII 1U Dell server with 1GB of memory. It has done a pretty good job. One of my beefs has been that we are running the free version and it’s been a year waiting for the new version to rollout that has the performance upgrades from the latest version of Squid. I finally started looking at other options and found Untangle. Our primary requirements were NAT and Content Filterting and remote access. Untangle appears to fullfill all three. It looks like a pretty good system and they have offered us a free trial as well as non-profit pricing on a monthly support subscription. I checked with the Endian folks and they were nearly double the price and they are not here in the states so it makes support etc a bit problematic. You can also get a free community version of Untangle to run as well if you want to setup your own box.

Thinking we could add a new conference area like this one to the office. Or maybe it could double as the prayer meeting area as well.

The big issue is who has the ego to stear?

Amazing video for the week

Found this great video on Ken Holsinger’s blog and just had to share it. Each of us have a story.

Ever wonder what would happen if Thursday were really Friday… or Friday was Thursday at the office?

1. Friday Reflections post would come a day early.
2. We would race around all morning to get stuff done in hopes of sneaking out of the office a little early to get good seats at the Boston concert. (Btw: Michael Sweet, the lead singer for the 80’s Christian rock band Stryper is fronting the Boston tour so that makes it Holy if someone judges you for going)
3. We would have sushi for lunch.
4. I would be asking the studio where my website rotators were and reminding them that they promised to have them to me the day before … which would have been Thursday … or in this case Wednesday because we are only pretending it’s already Friday.
5. My kids would be asking me to have friends over to stay the night and have band practice in my back living room…. THE WHOLE BAND….