Tuesday, December 23, 2014

Project Box explorer

I've adapted my "Automated CAD design" system to go a few steps further and have it generate all the data and metadata needed for an interactive website that lets you explore a canned(for now) set of design permutations.

I've got a lot of polish to do on the html itself, but I finally got it to a minimally viable web app.

Check it out: https://anibit.com/box

Friday, December 12, 2014

A blog post about a video about a blog post.

I attend monthly meetings at Triembed, a hobby electronics enthusiast group in Central North Carolina.

The group holds 2 hour meetings, and in the first hour, people are invited to present things they've worked on, If you're convenient to the Raleigh area, and can make it to NC State's campus on the second Monday evening of the month, you should check it out! It's a great group of people.

At last week's meeting, I gave a brief talk about my "Automated CAD design" post. Pete Soper, one of the founder's and organizers of the group, was kind enough to edit and post the video of my talk to Youtube. If you've read my post, I don't have much new information in the talk, but I do say "um" a lot. (I have a secret podcast I've been working on, and I probably would have published it by now if I could stop saying the u-word so much).

Anyways, thanks Pete!



--P

Sunday, December 7, 2014

Stupid Simple Website Metrics

I wrote a tool that I am open-sourcing to keep track of website server performance. It is very un-fancy. It tries to do one job and do it well: Log and display page load times. (Wait, is that two jobs?)


Background


Over the past several months, I've spent way more time than I had anticipated stressing over, testing, and trying to fix the abdominal performance I had on anibit.com. I was using a low end hosting service intended for personal websites, which I had expected to on the slower side of things, but it got so bad that page loads could take up to 45 seconds. That was even at times when I was the only user other than the failed spam-bot log ins once a minute or so. I would have been satisfied with 6 second loads even though that is considered a generally poor user experience. Something had to give. Anibit was on a shared server with probably dozens (my host service doesn't reveal that I'm aware of how many websites share your host). Any of them could misbehave and bring the server to it's knees until the hosting service brought the hammer down on them, which it frequently needed to do.