I had to really lay into this movie in my Amazon.com review. I tend to write reviews for products that I'm impressed with and just keep quite on products that don't really impress. This movie, however, was the exception. It got such good reviews on Amazon that I felt compelled to give it a look. The Internet Movie Database (IMDB) had some of the best information on this flick outside of Amazon. It didn't make the mainstream movie reviews sites like Rottentomatoes.com since it never made it to the box office. 2 starts was probably a bit harsh, 2.5 would have been more appropriate. I felt the genuine need to remove this movie from the 5 star plateau though as this is genuinely deceitful. My Amazon review follows:



I really live or die by Amazon reviews. 99% of the time, they are spot on. I felt like I was burned a bit by the reviews on this one.

I should have been a bit suspicious when a movie that never even made it to the box office (mainstream, independent, or otherwise) was holding down a 5 star rating on Amazon. Some of the sites that I normally rely on for movie ratings didn't even cover this movie since it didn't get a lot of press and didn't get any reviews by national or regional critics.

The majority of reviews that I read seemed held back on information so as not to give the "plot turns" away. Let me lay it out for you, there are no real plot turns so don't hold your breath waiting for any. Once you get past the opening scenes and understand the premise of the film, it quickly degrades into a typical Hollywood action / adventure type flick. That said, this is no worse than a lot of the trash that Hollywood releases to fill the theaters during the peak summer movie months. In some cases (pick most any action film on installment 3 or greater), it's actually better.

"Already Dead" is a 2-3 star movie that might be worth the low price you pay for the rental at Unboxed or your local retail outlet. Don't go in expecting too much though. There's a reason this didn't get picked up for mainstream distribution.

Having non-static machine keys when hosting on IIS is just one of those things that's just bound to cause trouble eventually. This holds true equally for single server hosting environments and load balanced web farm environments. Especially if your goal is to shield your users from any knowledge of IIS lifecycle activities (e.g. application pool recycles), the use of static machine keys is to be strongly recommended. The implications of static versus dynamic keys are enumerated for several different hosting situations below:

• Single Machine - Most of the recommendations around machine keys involve synchronizing machine keys across multiple machines. There is, however, value in setting static machine keys for a single machine, single worker process environment. Quite simply, if machine keys are not static, the generation of a dynamic machine key for an IIS reboot or application pool recycle will cause any machine key related elements (e.g. view state) rendered before the event to be invalid. This will likely result in exceptions that will impact normal user processing.

• Single Machine / Web Garden - The introduction of the Web Garden option to IIS can be viewed as the "poor man's load balancing". This option provides for a simple round robin routing across multiple worker processes, usually with each process owing affinity to a particular processor. Due to the simple load balancing approach taken, there is no option for web gardens but to synchronize machine keys. This is of course, unless you've managed to make your application completely stateless, in which case (congratulations) none of this advice applies to you.

• Multiple Machines / Web Farms - The applicability of static machine keys to a web farm environment applies, theoretically, only to web gardens in which the load balancing approach does not guarantee server affinity. Once again, to avoid impacting user processing during load balance machine failover or due to recycles or reboots, I'd always recommend using static machine keys. Even when these areas are not concerns, I've found other troubles just seem to arise when you can't guarantee static machine keys across machines. For web events regarding cryptographic exceptions or viewstate verification issues, I've found it best to start troubleshooting with synchronizing machine keys and then working down from there.

The definitive guide to configuring machine keys in ASP.NET 2.0, including .NET code for generating the keys, can be found here. Microsoft has never revisited their ruling that machine key issues can arise outside of web farms. Once again, if you're observing cryptographic or viewstate errors, I'd advise that you start with static machine keys. If compiling and running Microsoft's code to generate a machine key is asking too much, this online program will generate a key for you.

Finally, I've been asked a couple of times about the downsides of sharing static machine keys across machines. This depends upon what you use the machine key for. In most cases, I wouldn't advise that you use the machine key for anything more than viewstate encoding. In this case, a machine key compromise will mean that someone can theoretically hack your viewstate. If they got your machine key, it also means that they have access to your web.config file, in which case you usually have bigger concerns than viewstate hacking.

I've been contemplating the move towards a self-hosted Subversion repository for quite a while. My earlier attempts worked but left me with a lot of inconvenient and sometimes quirky side effects. These experiences always led me back to hosting Subversion on Linux, which is really where it works most naturally. Recently, however, I decided to retry my luck with Subversion hosting on Windows and I made the call to go with a "package" instead of doing the Apache / Subversion integration myself.



The tool that I went with, VisualSVN, is a Windows version of Subversion that targets primarily Microsoft developers using VisualStudio as their development platform. Matter of fact, the Subversion server package is freely distributed and the actual product that is sold is the Visual Studio plugin that allows you to tap into Subversion from Visual Studio. With a 30 day trial period and $49 price tag, I decided that it couldn't hurt to try it out. My findings are below:

• VisualSVN Server - The VisualSVN server, as mentioned earlier is a freely distributed product. You can get this piece of software whether or not you ultimately decide to buy and use the Subversion Visual Studio plugin. The server runs exclusively over HTTP / HTTPS (using OpenSSL) and does not support Subversion's binary protocol or running Subversion over SSH. Obviously, this means that Apache is in play. A version of Apache is included in the distribution. Initial configuration of the server is very easy, the setup instructions describe the extent of it. As I blogged about previously, this changes a bit if you try to get Apache and IIS to run side-by-side. In this case, you need to be very explicit and tell the very greedy IIS to stop listening on other IP addresses so that port 80 can be shared by IIS and Apache. I included links to the Microsoft article in my earlier post. In this case, you'll want to use httpcfg delete iplisten -i xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx to stop IIS from listening on the port Apache is running on.      
  

• VisualSVN Visual Studio Plugin - As useful as the server is, the real product is the VisualStudio plugin. The most recent version of this plugin works on VisualStudio 2008 so I thought I'd install it and give it a whirl. Installation is fairly easy. Both TortoiseSVN and the VisualSVN plugin must be installed. I don't know exactly how VisualSVN communicates with Tortoise but it seems to make sense to leverage an existing Windows Subversion library rather than building everything from scratch. Using both the plugin and Tortoise gives you two ways to work with Subversion. In my experience with other Java IDE plugins (Netbeans and Elcipse), this is sometimes necessary to get around the shortcomings of the browser plugin.

This looks to be my keeper for Subversion hosting. Now I need to port over my existing repositories into the VisualSVN server.

I've been busy since returning from vacation on getting my new iMac up and running. Aside from the machine being a physical work of art, it's also been performing very well and runs so silent that I'm hearing all kinds of new noises in my house that I wasn't aware of before. This doesn't mean that I've completely forsaken Windows. In fact, the move to the Mac has allowed me to finally move to Vista on my home machine and install Visual Studio 2008, which is killing my work laptop. For those of you remotely familiar with the Mac, running Windows side-by-side with OS X has been possible since the release of the Intel-based Macs. This started with Boot Camp and gained serious traction with the release of Parallels. Most recently, VMware jumped into this space with their Fusion product for the Mac. I went with Fusion due to reviews on both Apple's site and Amazon.com that seemed to indicate that Fusion was more stable and that there were far more converts from Parallels to Fusion than in the opposite direction.

I'm running 3 operating systems now on this machine, 2 of them under Fusion 1.1. Mac OS X Leopard came pre-installed with the machine and Vista and Ubuntu Linux are running under Fusion. Despite the 64-bit Intel architecture on the new Macs, both the Vista and Ubuntu installs are 32-bit. I didn't hear enough good news about the 64 bit releases to convince me that they were worth pursuing. All of this is running on 4GB of memory. Only 1 GB was stock and you'd be crazy to pay Apple's prices for memory. Other World Computing (OWC) will get you to the 4GB maximum for less than $100. The memory install took all of about 10 minutes and OWC's service and delivery were nothing short of outstanding.

As far as the individual operating systems, they are all running fine. That said, everyone puts different kinds of stresses on their machines. Mine is software development and I require each of my operating systems to run at least oneIDE. That's actually the reason for the existence of these VMs in the first place. Although my initial research prepared me for the worst, I've had no issues with running IDEs concurrently on all 3 operating systems. I've encountered some small quirks, which I've documented below for anyone who might find this sort of thing useful:

• Mac OS X Leopard - I'm running NetBeans 6.0 with the Ruby-only configuration. Much to the chagrin of many Mac developers, Leopard did not ship with Java 6 even though it was included in some of thepre-releases. This proved to be a non-issue for the installation of the latest version of NetBeans. Obviously, running NetBeans in Ruby-only mode means that I'm not exercising the JDK and thus avoiding what could potentially be a lot of issues.
• Windows Vista - Although I've had issues getting used to the Vista operating system from the Windows 2003 Server / Windows XP I've become so familiar with, I've had few issues actually running Vista. I'm running Vista with the 1 GB RAM that Fusion recommended and have had no issues thus far. The only issue I encountered was trying to install Vista in Fusion Easy Install mode with multipleCDs , as opposed to a DVD. This is a documented issue with Fusion that I didn't become aware of until I ran into it head-on. Simply switching to a normal install solved all of my issues. On top of Vista, I'm running Visual Studio 2008. This runs pretty quick - even on 1 GB and builds of moderately sized solutions are pretty fast. TheIDE is really responsive and you really only notice that your running in a virtualized environment if you try to resize the entire Vista window to get more real estate for the IDE.
• Ubuntu 7.10 - Despite the size of the operating system, this installation took longer than Vista. I chose not to use one of VMware's canned virtual appliances and go with a fresh install.  I would probably re-examine this decision if I had the chance to do it all over again. Ubuntu is running NetBeans 6.0 with the full Java EE stack. The install of NetBeans downloaded directly from netbeans.com went really well once the proper Sun JDKs were installed. Both the Java 5 and Java 6 JDKs were available directly from Ubuntu's installation utility. I installed Java 5 first and, after realizing that it was a vanilla 1.5.0 release that didn't meet the requirements for NetBeans 6.0, I installed Java 6. Things have been just dandy since then.

After a long hiatus, I just got done working my way through a 6 month photo backlog, arranging and backing up photos and picking the best ones out for uploading to Flickr. You can find the new photos in the photo section of my blog. I was working my way through videos as well and preparing to convert some of these to Flash for uploading. If you look at the videos section of my blog, you'll notice that there are no new videos. So what happened?

Although I'm really happy with On2 Technologies Flash encoding software, the process of importing and transcoding video is time consuming and CPU intensive. Then there's the entire upload and markup creation process, which is a royal pain that I should have long since automated away - but I haven't. What I'd really like is a process similar to the one that I have with Flickr: I upload photos using a OS-specific program (uploadr) and they just appear on my blog. I've known that this process needs to be replaced for a while, I've just been hesitant to pull the trigger. Enter Smugmug...

Smugmug, the family owned photo service that leans heavily on Amazon's S3 service for file storage, announced last week a significant upgrade to their video hosting capabilities by supporting the H.264 video format. Right now, Apple's QuickTime plugin provides the best support for H.264 but Adobe's newest version of Flash will also be supporting H.264. If Microsoft wants to remain competitive with Silverlight, they'll be following suit as well. So what does this mean? This means that Smugmug will automatically transcode your uploaded video. Depending upon your membership level, video can be encoded at DVD resolution (960x540, for power users) or HD (1280x720, for pro users). You upload it and Smugmug transcodes and hosts it, providing unlimited bandwidth and storage space. Since seeing is believing, click on the image below to see a sample SmugMug Thanksgiving video and tell me you wouldn't like to have online video of this quality.



If you're going video, you've got to go big and at $150/year, Smugmug carries with it a fairly large price tag. However, when I factor in that I can cancel my Flickr subscription, stop upgrading my Flash encoder, decrease my bandwidth utilization on my hosting service, and have a hassle free upload and transcode experience... in HD, I'm sold. As an added bonus, Smugmug has just added an adaptive imaging sizing capability they call "SmugMungous" that automatically selects the right size picture for your screen. To get the full effect, this needs to be tried on a fairly large monitor. And by the way, you can point to your smugmug gallery using a custom domain or sub-domain and you can share video updates as an iTunes Podcast that friends and family can subscribe to.

SmugMug is just one more piece in my grand attempt to upgrade my life to HD. We went with HD TV almost 3 years ago now and it's hard looking at a normal signal now, especially on a large 16:9 screen. I'm strongly considering Smugmug for its HD capabilities but this is going to cause me to reexamine two other areas of my life that need HD upgrading: my HD recording capability and HD playback capability. I'm waiting for Santa Claus to drop an HD TiVo down the chimney. The $1000 dollar price tag for the original Series3 TiVo was a pill I couldn't bring myself to swallow, no matter how much I love TiVo. AT $300 and almost all of the features of the Series3, the HD TiVo got my attention. I'm also looking at an HD camcorder, an essential item if I'm serious about the Smugmug thing.

That's a lot of upgrading to do. Still, there are several areas that I'm not upgrading. I'm waiting for the Blu-ray / HD DVD war to show some signs of abating but this is definitely a medium worth revisiting in 2008. HD Radio - now I just don't get this one!

Another in the installment of Rails on Windows “gotchas”, there are some things to be wary of when working with the Simple_Captcha plugin in the Windows environment. In terms of basic background, the Simple_Captcha plugin facilitates the integration of CAPTCHA (Computer Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) image recognition tests, like the example below, into a Rails application. Facilitates is perhaps not a strong enough term. The plugin makes CAPTCHA integration dirt simple.

The Simple_Captcha plugin uses RMagick for generation of the CAPTCHA recognition images, allowing for various image styles and distortion levels. The CAPTCHA can be integrated via the controller (this one is dirt simple) or via the model (this one is just silly simple). You can find out more about these and various other integration options on the plugin’s page.  

If you’re doing Rails development on the Windows platform and are not feeling especially masochistic, the rmagick-win32 gem, which is bundled with a copy of the ImageMagick Windows installer, is really the only way to use RMagick. For a long while, the 1.13.0 rmagick-win32 gem was the standard. However, this gem is likely to cause you issues and you should really upgrade your gem to the 1.14.1 gem or greater. These gems are fixed to work with RubyGems 0.9.4, which is the most recent version of this gem as of this blog post. If you don’t perform this update, you’re likely to see ImageMagick issues bubble up at runtime.

On Windows, these runtime errors frequently manifest themselves as ‘cur_image’ issues. Several of these issues have been reported on the plugin’s page. My post on 10/6 covered fixing these issues by upgrading your RMagick gem. Please don’t downgrade other gems, as suggested in some other posts; this will only make your life more miserable in the future.

All-in-all, the RMagick Windows gem is an excellent way to make powerful image processing capabilities available to all, including those unfortunate enough to be stuck on a Rails on Windows development platform. The plugins built on top of RMagick such as Simple_Captcha and Attachment_Fu are incredibly powerful and remain very simple by leveraging RMagick’s capabilities. Just beware if you’re developing on Windows, a little bit of tweaking and debugging may be necessary to get these plugins to work as advertised.

I’ve posted about how impressed I was with NetBeans as a Java IDE and the incredible progress this product has made in the last couple of years. I knew for a while that Ruby on Rails and JRuby support was coming for the next major Netbeans release (v 6.0), but I hesitated moving from RadRails to NetBeans until the feature set had stabilized. Last week, the Netbeans 6.0 beta was released and, with RadRails stagnating somewhat under the Aptana brand, I caved in and made the switch.

 

George Cook does an excellent Job of running through the new features with lots of nice pretty screenshots. If you’re looking at moving to Netbeans as a Rails IDE, it’s the first place I suggest that you go. Some of my favorite features of Netbeans (with screens shamelessly stolen from George’s site) include code completion

 

 

 

…and debugging

 

 

There are several features from RadRails that I miss and that I hope the NetBeans team will consider integrating over time. These include the ability to import a project directly from Subversion and the test window that allows you to visually check the status of your tests and select particular tests to run. Those features aside, I don’t plan on going back to RadRails. NetBeans has made so much progress so quickly, I can only imagine that it’s going to put significant distance between itself and RadRails in the near future.

 

You can get Netbeans 6.0 here, available as a skinnied-down Ruby only version if you want. Finally, since Netbeans uses JRuby as the default interpreter and expects the Derby Java database, this article on wiring NetBeans for InstantRails should get you up and moving with the standard Ruby interpreter and MySQL database configuration, regardless of whether you’re using InstantRails or not.

 

Final note if you're brand new to Ruby on Rails and reading this post. Skip right to Rails 2.0, which is now in preview mode, to avoid dealing with Rails 1.2.x deprecations and to benefit from some of the new defaults. Enjoy!

During a discussion the other day, I found myself repeatedly asking the question of how many organizations could make the leap from an organization dabbling in services (SOA believers) to an organization living SOA and benefiting from services (SOA achievers). I kept referring to the SOA chasm, this nearly insurmountable gap that needs to be crossed to move from an SOA believer to an SOA achiever. The image below is my visualization of this gap.

 

 

Why is it so hard to make it from one side to the other? It’s because this leap requires an organization to rethink everything; fundamentally changing the way they fund, govern, build, and host their applications. If you’re wondering what an SOA achiever looks like, check out this article on the Amazon.com architecture. Note the stat near the top of the page – between 100 and 150 services are accessed to build a page. These guys have made the leap.

 

I’ve heard a lot of contentions that the move to an SOA represents an evolution, not a revolution. I think this is true for only so long. An organization can incrementally improve their capabilities as an SOA believer but once they reach the end of the SOA believer cliff, it’s an all-or-nothing proposition. When an organization has completed the construction of their utility services and the time comes to tackle the core business entities, functions, and processes, it’s the SOA moment of truth. That quote from the Matrix before Neo tries to jump the chasm between two buildings rings in my head, “You have to let it all go, Neo; fear, doubt, disbelief. Free your mind!"

Tad Anderson posted about the release of an SOA-related e-book from Microsoft concerning Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). This is one area in which Microsoft has remained notably quiet compared with competing enterprise software vendors such as IBM and Sun. As Tad points out in his post, Microsoft has made some forays into SOA publications and they have been pretty readable.

Their most recent publication, SOA in the Real World (mirrored here), is one of the better pieces of SOA writing that I’ve encountered, vendor-specific or otherwise. It uses Microsoft technologies to illustrate certain principles but it manages to maintain a largely implementation-agnostic viewpoint. The e-book has multiple authors but it was edited together in a very seamless way, which is not always the easiest thing to pull off.

The e-book appears to have been pulled together by Microsoft’s Architectural Resource Center (ARC). No authors are listed specifically and the ARC branding is new, somewhat resembling the branding used for Microsoft’s Architecture Journal. The publication includes a pretty sound enterprise SOA approach, detailed explanations of how some of the major pieces of a SOA come together and a description of how Microsoft’s technologies fit in the mix. Whether one architect’s opinion or the Microsoft party line, there are some insightful and succinct explanations provided, such as the differences between Workflow Foundation and BizTalk when it comes to implementing workflow.

This book is a great read for anyone looking for a solid introduction to SOA and could well be the definitive read for anyone dealing with SOA and Microsoft technologies.