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I’ve decided to team up with a friend of mine to create a new application that will be implemented on the web. This is the first commercial venture that I’ve ever taken up personally, but it sounded interesting enough to take a crack at it. My friend actually brought up the idea. He has the domain knowledge and industry connections, but not enough programming experience to pull it off on his own. I have a vague idea of the domain and quite a bit of programming under my belt, so it seemed like a good pairing.

In making the decision on how to implement this software, it was decided to do it in a web application as a service rather than as shrink-wrapped software. This actually has benefits for our company as well as the customer. The customers don’t ever have to upgrade, worry about backing up data, and the interface will be platform independent. Our company benefits by having a constant stream of income from the subscriptions.

Since all of my prior programming work has been in existing company environments, or open source projects hosted on SourceForge, I never had to set up a complete development environment of my own. Since this is my company and I get to pick whatever I want, I thought I’d share what I think is the ultimate web application development environment.

Source Control

I’ve been using CVS both at work and in my open source projects for years. However, Subversion is getting very popular nowadays. After reading the documentation, it seems to solve a lot issues with CVS and has a nice programmable interface.

Bug Tracking

While I’m doing the programming and know that there won’t be many bugs to track, I figure I might as well have some bug tracking software around just for kicks. ;) I didn’t really find any free solutions that got my attention, so I decided to look at some commercial products. I finally decided on FogBugz. I’ve been reading Joel’s website for quite a while, and have also read his books. I figure I’d see if he’s really all he’s cracked up to be and try out some of his software. Plus, it’s not really that expensive.

Backups

If you’ve read my previous blog entries, you’d know that I am a big fan of backups. I’ll still be using SuperDuper! for my mirrored backups, but I’ll definitely want to have remote backups as well. For remote backups, I’ll probably use a combination of Mozy and rsync.

Web Application Software

If you do any work in web applications today, Ruby on Rails is probably on the short list of tools to use. Well, I’ve been using Python as my main language (for personal projects) for quite a few years now and haven’t found any of the benefits of Ruby to be significant enough over Python to take the time to learn it; so I think I’ll stick with Python. In the Python world there are three major players in the web application framework ring: Zope, Django, and Turbogears.

I was a big fan of Zope many, many years ago. In fact, I started learning Python just for the purpose of using Zope. I even wrote several websites using Zope for work and for personal use. It offers a huge number of features and management capabilities, but it is a big pill to swallow. When you get into the world of Zope, you pretty much have to take-it-all, or leave it. While I do still like Zope, I think I’m going to pass for this project.

Django was the next candidate. I don’t really know that much about Django, but I just didn’t feel right when I read the documentation on the website. I also don’t like the fact that they use their own template language (aren’t there enough already). So on to Turbogears…

Turbogears has a philosophy that I really relate to: take a bunch of really good, open source tools and combine them into something cool. The documentation on the website was nice, and there is a book as well. It also supports various types of page templates (much like my LaTeX processing framework, plasTeX)! Overall, Turbogears looks like the framework for me.

Database

I’ve used PostgreSQL for various little projects throughout the years mainly because I liked having transactions, sub-selects, and free software. Up until recently, this was the only free database that had all three of those. However, even though PostgreSQL seems to be the more feature-filled database, MySQL is clearly more popular, and better supported on most web hosting sites. MySQL does support transactions and sub-selects now, and even if it didn’t there isn’t much direct manipulation of SQL in Turbogears, so it wouldn’t make much difference. In addition, FogBugz requires MySQL, so I was going to have to have a MySQL server up anyway. Due to all of these reasons, I’m going to pick MySQL for my new project.

Conclusion

There is still more software that I need to evaluate the business end of things like accounting, customer databases, etc., but the development environment appears to be set at this time. While many of these tools are new to me, and it will take some time to get up to speed, I’m looking forward to trying out a combination of tools that I got to hand pick for my own business.

Well, my evaluation of the Mirra Chair didn’t go as well as I had hoped. While my back did feel better in it, the seat just wasn’t for me. After a couple of hours sitting in the seat, I just couldn’t get comfortable so I had to send it back. I’m not really sure where to go now since I’ve tried out pretty much every high-end, ergonomic chair there is. I guess that leaves the low-end.

I went to Staples to look at the chairs that they had and came across some by Sealy. Yes, that’s the same company that makes mattresses. I was quite impressed with their chairs. While they aren’t as stylish as the high-end models, and didn’t come in as many colors, they did seem very comfortable. Not only that, the prices ranged from only $200 to $300. I haven’t purchased one yet. I would like to sit in Staples for a couple of hours while working on my laptop to see if it would really work out for me, so I’ll probably do that in the next few days.

I have always strived to have an ergonomic workstation. Even when I didn’t work from home full time, I would spend my own time and money trying to achieve a workplace that was efficient, ergonomically correct, and of course, stylish. Not all of my attempts worked out however.

The first chair that I purchased several years ago was a black leather executive type chair. While it was very comfortable, and very stylish, it didn’t have any back support. After working in that chair for a year or so, I started to develop pain in my legs. I didn’t realize that it was due to the chair until I started trying out other desk chairs. The ergonomic department at the company that I worked for set me up with one of their ergonomic chairs. It had many adjustments and controls, and a lot of lower back support. It wasn’t, however, stylish.

I used this chair for several months and my leg pain did subside. Unfortunately, I started to develop lower back pain. It took me a while to figure out why. I had a good ergonomic chair with lots of adjustments. I thought that would be sufficient. To figure out the problem, an all out chair shopping trip was in order. I researched the web to see what the most popular ergonomic chairs on the market were and set out to evaluate each one.

The front runners for best chair were: the Aeron chair by Herman Miller, the Liberty chair by Humanscale, and the Leap chair by Steelcase.

The first chair that I tried out was the Aeron. This chair is famous for it’s popularity during the dot-com boom in the late ’90s. One thing that attracted me to this chair was the mesh seat and back. I work in a hot climate, and anything that can make me cooler while working is a plus. I went to a local store (actually about an hour away) that carried the Aeron to try one out. Boy was I disappointed. Maybe my expectations were just too high, but I found this chair to be very uncomfortable. In particular, the lumbar support felt like a 2×4 being strapped across my back. This would certainly not do.

While at this store, I also tried out the Leap chair. I was pleasantly surprised by this chair. It was very comfortable, and was nicely adjustable. The Leap chair did have an upholstered seat, but featured a mesh back. I was very impressed with this chair, but it had a problem similar to the Aeron, the lumbar support felt harsh. The amount of lumbar support could be adjusted, but it still felt like a hard object strapped across my back.

After trying out these two chairs, I realized what was wrong with my existing chair. The lumbar support was just too extreme. While you could adjust the position of the back support, the amount was not adjustable and it was just too much. It was like I was trying to brace my back into an unnatural position with the chair back. With these other chairs that I was trying, the position of support and amount of support were adjustable. This change made an immediate improvement.

The Liberty chair evaluation came about a week later at a different store since the first store I went to didn’t carry them. Luckily, this store also carried the Aeron and some other chairs that I hadn’t considered yet. The Liberty chair is a very nice looking chair; probably the best looking of all of the chairs that I looked into. This is mostly due to the fact that Liberty has a minimal number of adjustments. Sitting in the chair showed that the seat was definitely comfortable. I also liked the mechanism used for the arm adjustments. However, the seat back didn’t have enough tension in it for my tastes. The chair back would recline too easily with just minor pressure. It also didn’t have any upper back support whatsoever.

This store also had an Aeron, and I thought I would give it another try. How could a chair that was so popular be as uncomfortable as I had found it? Well, the second try didn’t change my mind at all. However, there was another chair there by Herman Miller called the Mirra. It was definitely a unique looking chair. The back was very tall and wide, and made out of a slotted polymer. The mesh seat was very similar the the Aeron. Sitting in the Mirra was very comfortable. The back molded perfectly to my back and was supportive from the lower back all the way up to the shoulders. The Mirra wasn’t as adjustable as the Aeron, but I consider this to be a good thing. The number of controls was enough to fit it to your body, but not enough to be confusing.

After sleeping on it for a couple of nights, I decided to purchase the Mirra chair. It was a difficult decision between the Mirra and the Leap chair, but my wife really liked the Mirra, and the store was 30 minutes closer.

The store that I bought it from was only a showroom, so it had to be delivered. A few days later it arrived. I decided to get the Citron finish because I’m tired of the typical black/gray office chair. The style and color of the chair fit perfectly into my office decor. I haven’t tried the chair out for a full day yet, but the little bit that I have used it, it has been quite comfortable. The only concern that I have is that the pressure on the bottom of the legs isn’t even. The back of the seat is only mesh, but the front does have some foam to protect against the hardware underneath. The seam between the two seat materials sat right across the point on my legs where I had previously had some leg pain. I’ll hold off any real judgments on the chair until I get more time in it. I’ll let you know my final evaluation at that time.

After my recent scare with my computer, I decided that there are still some types of events that my backup scenario won’t cover. All of my backups are located in one location: my home. If, God forbid, my computer equipment was stolen or destroyed in some type of catastrophe, I would still lose everything. That lead me to start looking for off-site backups. While I have heard of people burning DVDs and keeping them in a remote location, or cycling through external hard disks, those sound like plans that I would give up on because they just aren’t convenient.

Another option which doesn’t require so much manual labor is online backup services. Currently, I’m trying out Mozy. Mozy supports the Mac, gives you a 2GB trial service, and unlimited storage for only $5/month. That seems like a pretty good deal. Uploading huge amounts of data over an asynchronous broadband connection isn’t as fast as I’d like, but I’m hoping that after the initial backup the subsequent partial backups won’t take long. I’ll let you know how it works out after a few weeks.

I’ve been working on improving my workflow in programming lately. This is mainly due to the fact that I now work from home. Working from home poses some new problems since I don’t have a 1Gb connection to my network resources anymore. In the process of rethinking my processes, I decided to play around with FileMerge, one of Apple’s developer tools. FileMerge enables you to visually see the difference between two files and interactively merge them into one final form. This is a very common operation when using CVS and you have a conflict with a push from another developer, or you just want to see the differences between two file revisions. Because I use it in conjunction with CVS so much, I thought I’d add some CVS features to FileMerge.

The result of this work is cvs-opendiff. It’s called cvs-opendiff because Apple supplies a utility called opendiff which invokes FileMerge from the command-line, and cvs-opendiff invokes this command along with various CVS commands to do its work. The feature list for cvs-opendiff is shown below.

• Compares two files like diff
• Compares the current working file with the current revision in CVS
• Compares two file revisions or dates
• Continues running until FileMerge is exited, or the window containing the file comparison is closed

This last feature is the key feature since the opendiff command exits as soon as it finished invoking FileMerge. This behavior is often undesirable when merging files especially when the merge is invoked by a third tool that expects this behavior.

I’d love to hear your comments and suggestions for cvs-opendiff. I’m planning on starting to work with subversion soon, so I imagine I’ll be updating it to work with that eventually.

This was our first Independence Day in Colorado, and it was a memorable one. We went to the free Longmont Symphony concert in Thompson Park. There were a few opening acts featuring local talent, and a best picnic competition. Altogether, very nice. They ended the concert with the traditional 1812 Overture complete with canon fire. I have to say that I was very impressed with the whole event. It was simple and non-commercial.

While at the Longmont celebration, we heard about a great spot to watch fireworks in Boulder. You can drive up to the NCAR Mesa Lab and sit on the side of the mountain to watch the fireworks. Not only does this give you a nice view of the Boulder fireworks, but you can also see the fireworks from the surrounding towns (Longmont, Louisville, Lyons, Broomfield, Loveland, and probably more) off in the distance. It was quite a site to see so many towns setting off fireworks at the same time. If you’re ever in the Bolder, CO area on Independence Day, I highly recommend trying this.