Claus Witt

I have previously written about how it might be a business venture for the ones out there with some extra time on their hands to begin producing either flash games, iphone apps or facebook applications. The funny thing about all three types of projects is that it is not needed to be the greatest application/game ever to start making money. Hype is probably more important.

Some Facebook developers have made serious money on creating quite simple applications for the Facebook Platform. A lot of them uses advertising as their main source of income.

The real difference is that iphone apps, through Appstore, and flash games, through Nonoba.com, has the opportunity to make people pay for using the software. Even though there has been rumors that Facebook would provide a payment platform for the website, which could be used by application developers, nothing has materialized yet.

While looking at a post about using memcache for a simple message queue, which by the way sounds very interesting in its own right. I once again found a link to the MemcacheDB project. They have made memcache persistent. It is some sort of and intermediate between regular memcached and a database. I can think of several scenarios where memcachedb would be useful. One that comes to mind is persistent storage of user- og and settings- objects in the system that I am currently working on, for Voicearchive.com.

I haven’t tried it (yet), and it’s probably not something that a lot of people would find that interesting/useful. But I just found an open source ASP 2 PHP compiler, which will take any asp page (written in vbscript) and create a corresponding php page. Sounds fun. If only I had some of my asp based projects from 2001/2002 lying around somewhere… But that would require me to go back in time, and tell my self to make backups.

I have previously blogged about Xinc. I have decided to show how simple my setup really is. The Xinc configuration is a simple xml file containing few commands.

It does nothing more than check if there is a newer revision of the Subversion repository, if there is, it checks it out, and runs the Phing buildscript, and reports if there are errors with a mail. (In the beginning it sent mails upon success as well – I got very tired of all the “nothing is wrong” emails so I decided it was ok to just notify me if something went wrong with a build.

The phing buildfile described in my previous post is almost just as simple.

I described the actions of this file in the previous post.

Today I found myself needing a bit of Textmate magic. I had a sql-file containing a lot of tables, from some of these I needed all fieldnames in an array. I quickly found that Textmate would be my friend. This is mostly a reminder to myself. (I tend to forget these things somehow).

I Pasted all the lines with fieldnames from the sql-file to a new text-document in Textmate. Then i pressed option while using the mouse to mark the beginning of each line and then inserting a quote. (Resulting in a quote on the beginning of each line.) I did the same on the other side of the textfields and added a comma as well. The only problem now is that because not all fieldnames are the same length I now have some unwanted whitespace between the end of the fieldname and the closing quote. Enter regexp, and probably the simplest one I ever wrote.

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It simply matches all whitespace in the file. Thus making it easy to use find/replace, and replace the whitespace with nothing. Downside is, all the time I saved using this technique has been used to write this blog post.

For a while we have worked on making our website at work more responsive. We have a lot of visitors looking for voice over talents, and since we primarily do business across the web, mainly through our website, it is important to us that it is as responsive as possible. Apart from the classic guidelines you always hear when running a website, we have experimented with a hacked version of Typo3 to enable the use of Memcached as a page cache.

And as I suspected, performance was highly impacted by this. Through all our optimizations we have reduced the load time of the page to an absolut minimal. Next we will look at ways to reduce the amount of javascript needed for some of our features.