Summersault Blog

At Summersault we build websites with a modified version of the Titanium framework. While Titanium continues to work very well for us, I always like to keep up with other possibilities. There are always new places to find inspiration and there’s always room for improvement. In that spirit I’ve recently explored HTTP::Engine and Mojo. Looking at how these options fit into the bigger picture of Perl frameworks, I wrote an article called Evolution of Perl Frameworks for Perlbuzz.com. Here’s the full article.

At Summersault we have been using darcs for source control management, and have found it to be a great tool for us.

To review darcs 2, I reviewed hundreds of bugs entries in the darcs bug tracker, checking to see whether the bugs were fixed are still present. Through this process I became as intimate as the developers with what had been improved in darcs and what remained to address.

What I found was that darcs 2 closed over half the bugs in the bug tracker, literally hundreds of bugs. This was possible because it addressed not just specific bugs, but whole categories of bugs were closed by major architecture and design improvements.

You can read more about the update on my personal weblog.

Earlier this year, I made some notable contributions to various open-source projects, including:

• Tim Bunce, the author of Perl’s DBI asked me to be a committer on the DBIx::HA project, a high-availability/load-balancing Perl module.
• I uploaded a new release of CGI::Session, version 4.30. As the official maintainer of the module, I worked closely with Ron Savage who did most of the release work. Summersault will likely take advantage of these improvements in the future.
• Multiple people gave me praise for my help with the Darcs 2 release. One person wrote, “Mark Stosberg was an unsung hero of the darcs-2 project for diligently triaging and following-up on hundreds of bug tracker tickets. His quality-assurance work (including setting up automated buildbot tests) is an important reason that darcs-2 is much less buggy.” By patch count, I’ve committed the third most patches to the project due to numerous documentation and test suite improvements.

These are just some of the ways that Summersault staff participate in the online community and in the open-source software movement.

Today I uploaded the first release of Titanium, a web application framework. This project really began about eight years ago, with first release of CGI::Application.

CGI::Application was and is a great foundation for web applications and has always been well defined with a small scope for what it would provide in terms of a framework. Because of this it was able to mature and stabilize with few bugs ever reported and always provided great performance because of its small size. It grew in popularity, and over 50 CGI::Application plugins were released.

The contributed plugins were a great gift back to the community from the many users who made them, but for newcomers, the choices could be daunting. They meant getting started with CGI::Application for an application of any size often meant wading through the many options for plugins, yet often coming to the same conclusions about which ones to choose.

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I recently discovered some new source code control workflows that are possible with darcs.

Just after I record a patch in my local repository, I often feel compelled to review it one more time before pushing into the central repo. “Did I record changes in just the files I meant to? And even within specific files, did I include just the changes I meant to?” With darcs, this check is easily done
after recording with darcs changes --interactive --last 1 or just darcs changes -i --last 1, for short. They key part here is --interactive which launches darcs in interactive mode.

I press “x” to view the list of files affected, or “p” if I want to review a kind of “diff” in a pager, and of course “?” if I need help to remember what the options are. Very handy!

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We recently found ourselves with several dead computer backup batteries on our hands (they help keep things running smoothly during power outages), as well as some other computer equipment that we were ready to get rid of. This “e-waste” contains toxic chemicals that, if absorbed into our bodies can cause a number of serious problems like brain damage, so we wanted to make sure it was disposed of properly, even if it meant paying a fee. In our attempts to “buy local” even in waste disposal, some research led us to Rumpke and their “E-waste Recycling” program. (I’d like to provide a link to a web page with more information about this program, but Rumpke doesn’t have one now.)

The minimum cost for this service was $98, which covered a full service visit with two people coming into our business, and carrying out all the e-waste that we requested. Our contact at Rumpke was Brian Huffman. You can contact him at 1-888-242-0510 ext. 5294.

There are other options in Indiana, but finding information about them is also frustrating due the lack of accessible information. The Indiana Recycling Coalition publishes a directory of reuse and recycling options in Indiana, but it is not user-friendly. If you have an old computer to get rid of, do you think you would call a “Broker”, a “Processor”, a “Processor/Broker”, a “non-profit”, or one of the “Other Players in Indiana”? Your guess is as good as mine. Those are the category choices provided, and no detail at all is provided about the services provided by each organization. And since about half of these recyclers don’t have websites, finding the best option for your e-waste recycling needs, or any viable option is currently a daunting task in our area.

There are organizations like ours interested in recycling, and organizations in the e-waste recycling business, but there is currently a missing link between them— a failure to use the web effectively to provide information potential recyclers need to make purchasing decisions.

I hope this situation improves soon.

Microsoft Exchange is a common choice for organizations looking to share contacts and calendar events internally. It also works as a central mail server, allowing emails with large attachments to be sent around internally as well.

There are two major problems with Microsoft Exchange as a solution.
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As an internet professional, I use e-mail constantly. Mutt, a popular e-mail client for command line geeks had been wearing on me. I found Thunderbird 1.5 a capable replacement for my needs, and have since cut the average size of my Inbox in half.

Here are five tips I use to get the most productivity out of Thunderbird.

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Now that the dust has settled on Indiana’s switch to Daylight Savings Time on April 2nd, 2006. here are some notes on what worked for us at Summersault.

As a web hosting and development provider, we have been located in Richmond, Indiana since 1997. We have never had to update our time zone configuration or even change our clocks until now.

Although there already some good resources about coping with the change, my search turned up a number of additional resources I thought would be useful to share.

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As a Linux user, I’m a fan of “Flash Video” for Video content delivery on the web, used most visibly now by Google Video.

Flash video depends only on the Flash plugin, which nearly everyone has, is well supported on Linux and seems to generally “just work”. There also seems to be a lot of flexibility to integrate the player with the design of a particular website, which is a nice feature for developers.

Finally, Flash video is nice for the smaller file sizes of the video format. For example, converting my AVI file to the FLV format reduced the file size by about 75%!

I was pleased to find that there are already free, open source tools that allow me to publish content in the FLV using Linux. (But I believe the same tools could also work on Mac and Windows and provide some pointers for those platforms at the bottom.)

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