photo credit: j wynia

When my grandparents on the Wynia side moved out of the farmhouse and into senior/assisted/nursing homes, a lot of their things were spread to various family members. We all went to the house and the question was posed whether we wanted any of their stuff (yes, those kinds of moments are weird).

Many members of the family had always wanted the china or the old baby buggy, etc. When I was asked, I thought back to Grandpa's slideshows, in the dark, those old images up on the screen. I asked if I could have the slides. There was a strange look and I remember someone asking if that was really all I wanted. I said "Yes" and have had those big boxes for several years.

I started scanning them a couple of different times, but life got in the way. However a month or 2 ago, I decided I needed to get back on it and committed to getting them all scanned. I've been slowly and steadily working my through the boxes in my evenings and weekends for the past couple of weeks as well as figuring out and improving the workflow for scanning them.

At first, I had hoped to use my Mac to do the scanning, in large part because I do like Applescript for chaining things like Photoshop together with other apps in a workflow as well as easily attaching actions to folders. Alas, my slide scanner (the one with 7200dpi optical resolution) does NOT work with anything but Windows.

So, I set things up on Windows, with a Photoshop macro to do the triggering of the TWAIN driver and capturing the image and an Autohotkey text snippet to uniquely name the output files with a timestamp. Autohotkey does a pretty good job of that sort of thing. You can either have a keystroke like CTRL+ALT+T that spits out a chunk of text or an abbreviation that always gets replaced when you type it, no matter where. If it wasn't obvious, you want to be careful you don't name your abbreviations into something that might get triggered by accident.

For this one, I just used this one line in an .ahk for CTRL+ALT+T inserting the current timestamp. I hit that key chord when Photoshop prompts for a name.

^!t::Send, %A_Now%

Makes the whole process a series of quick actions, punctuated by waiting for the scanner to do its thing. Click. Wait. Punch the naming chord and Enter. Wait. Repeat.

Now, I can't move on from the scanning without mentioning something that I find puzzling. From all appearances, scanning software and drivers appear to be written on The Island that Time Forgot.

I bought my first scanner in 1994 for something like $300. It was a little handheld gizmo that did all of 256 shades of gray. The software that came with it for Windows 3.1 looked like nearly everything else that year. It had that look of "multimedia CD-ROM" that was all the rage.

What's strange is that with 4 scanners in my office right now, all of the software that came with it looks almost exactly the same and has the same kind of crappy problems. These apps (it should be noted that this is on the Windows side of things. It's better on Mac and even Linux) do things like lock the mouse during the nearly 1 minute the scan actually takes, put progress windows on top of everything else and ensure that you can't minimize it, etc. All of this TWAIN stuff has the same big buttons with crude bevels and horrible usability.

It really seems like they keep TWAIN driver developers isolated from the rest of the world on some island. Every year, they ship a new batch of scanners and requirements to the island and get back a bunch of drivers on CD. They're somehow given copies of Windows stripped of all modern interfaces and keep using the same tools.

I'll grant you that Windows Image Acquisition (WIA) makes that much simpler. Unfortunately, a 3000 dpi scan of 35mm slide film isn't one of the handy presets and WIA doesn't provide a box to enter the DPI, even if the scanner supports more than the maximum in the drop down.

Digressions aside, scanning these images at nice, high resolution and staring into the past prompted further questions about family's history. After being tempted several times before, I finally registered for the 14 day trial at Ancestry.com.

The site has a couple of nice features, even if the workflow is a bit stilted. As you add people to your family tree, it marks people where they have information that might be attached to that person. You click, examine that information and decide to attach the info or ignore it.

The stilted workflow comes in that it always seems like the thing I'm trying to do next isn't on the screen anywhere or in the place I last used it.

However, the evidence from the few hours I've put into it over the past week or 2 speaks to its effectiveness in spite of those glitches. I've got 577 people added to my family tree and one chain of ancestors that goes back 13 generations to someone born in 1360 in "Warga, Boarnsterhim, Friesland, Netherlands". (Nearly 100% of my tree so far leads straight back to the Netherlands).

1. J Wynia
2. Louis Wynia Jr.
3. Louis S Wynia
4. Sam Wynia
5. Suster DeVries
6. Johanna Wynia
7. Eeltje S Wynia
8. S Jans or Wijnia
9. Foekes or Wijnia
10. Sijtses or Nijda
11. S Sijes or Nijdam
12. Willems or Nijda
13. Willem W Nijdam
14. Willem W Nijdam
15. Sijts Ids
16. S Van Idsinga
17. Ferckje G Aytta
18. Gerbeth Aytta - b1360

I can definitely see how sites like Ancestry.com have consumed all of the hobby time for a lot of folks. This is definitely some interesting stuff to dig through. If you've ever been curious yourself, it's worth checking out.

photo credit: threedots

A couple of weeks ago, Antonio Lupetti shared a list of 10 "handwritten" fonts that he uses in his design projects. He also does a brilliant job of integrating that stuff into the diagrams in his posts, which is why I paid attention when he put out a list (just take a look at his archives and you'll see what I mean).

As I was looking at those fonts and downloading them, I was thinking about sIFR, which I've mentioned before. It's a way to replace text in web pages with Flash on the fly, using fonts that aren't on a user's computer. I've wanted to include that on this site and on several others for quite a while.
Read the rest of this entry »

photo credit: izarbeltza

There were a few questions on yesterday's post about migrating this site to Mosso's hosting. I thought I'd write up a quick explanation of what led to this migration and how it went as well as my take on Mosso as a service.

For several years now, Wynia.org has been hosted alongside a batch of other sites that I own or was co-owner of on a series of dedicated servers. At first, I took care of the administration myself. Unfortunately, busy life got in the way and an unpatched vulnerability led to one of the servers getting hacked.

When it was done getting completely scrubbed and we went to set back up, we hired a company that provided both the dedicated server and the administrator to keep things patched and do things like compile new PHP modules for us. That combined service was something that we thought well worth the $229 it cost.

Over the last year or so, that arrangement has lost much of its luster. The server's stability has been horrible, with services like email and MySQL going down regularly and requiring restarting and frequent reboots to resolve the collapsing. Beyond that, the customer service and support has crumbled as well.

Then, early this year, my business partner and I split and he took the largest of the sites running on that server and I kept the server contract itself. That shift made me review the whole setup and consider my alternatives.

First was the fact that I still have multiple sites, some with some decent traffic (5000+ page views a day). While some of the cheap managed hosting companies allow multiple sites, most are horribly oversold for things like bandwidth and I've heard way too many stories of people getting shut off for "abusing" the service when they reach only half of the bandwidth advertised in a month.

I also know that I don't want to be the one managing the patches and upgrades. I don't have the time for it and don't particularly enjoy it. However, just getting another dedicated server with someone managing it didn't sound all that appealing either.

That's because, as your sites grow and consume more resources, you outgrow the server you're on. That has happened to me several times. Things start slowing down as you start hitting the ceiling of the server's capacity. All of the dedicated server companies I've dealt with take this opportunity to move you to another server.

Granted, they often will do so without any major cost, but having moved WAY too many sites from one server to another, that's something I don't want to do more often than necessary. I'd rather have a reasonably priced approach that lets the arrangement just grow over time.

That led me to look at the emerging clustered/cloud hosts. There are several of these companies that offer the "equivalent" of a dedicated server (i.e. real storage and bandwidth numbers) and a reasonable path for growth while taking care of the security and management of the servers by putting the whole works into a giant cluster.

I looked at Joyent and MediaTemple first, because of the amount of buzz around them. Neither one was a good fit for what I was looking for. While this site is powered by Wordpress (and thus PHP), I haven't been doing much of my new development in PHP for the last year or 2. I have been doing a lot more of my experimental code in C#.

Since my existing dedicated server was a Linux box (without Mono), I haven't had a good place to deploy much of my new code out on the web. However, I've been wanting to do just that. Unfortunately, neither Joyent nor MediaTemple supports .NET. Joyent specifically says "Ideal for PHP, Rails, Python & Java" and MediaTemple is really heavily targeted at PHP. I think if you're doing either Rails or PHP development, those are really good choices, but not if you're doing predominantly C# and PHP.

However, at the time I started looking, there was a newcomer called Mosso (though a subsidiary of an old timer, Rackspace). What was intriguing about their service was that their cluster was simultaneously a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) stack and a Windows .NET on IIS7 environment. A single domain can host both types of code.

Beyond that, the pricing makes a lot of sense. Storage, bandwidth and CPU cycles are what you are charged for, getting reasonable amounts of each for $99/month and one of the most straightforward "overage" pricing schemes I've ever seen. That kind of pricing means I can run all of the stuff on the existing server while lowering my initial costs and still be able to handle the future growth without going over my original budget for quite a while.

So, I set things up with Mosso.

Right about then, life got really hectic and getting the sites migrated kept getting put off. One of the biggest reasons is people's email accounts. It turns out that when you migrate a site from one server to another, the biggest problem isn't the site code or the databases, it's people's email. Moving those accounts over, keeping all of their email, dealing with the DNS propagation and where the emails end up, etc. is a HUGE pain.

Which is why I ended up bringing Google into the mix. With Google Apps for Domain, you point your MX records for your DNS at Google and they handle everything email.

I tested it on a small domain and, when everything worked out swimmingly, I made a decision. All of the sites are to move and if you want to use email on that domain, it gets moved over to Google. I'm not going to even mess with trying to keep email hosting working.

This makes migration far easier. You set up Google mail on the old server's DNS records and the new one, get it all working with the old one and then move the site over.

That said, it's still taken me most of the first half of this year to tackle this site's migration. The email's been moved over for months, but the database and code migration wasn't something I was willing to take on in the midst of the chaos.

I wish it wasn't so, but that delay has both cost me quite a bit of money in doubled-up hosting fees and has stunted my list of improvements and fixes to this site. See, when you have a big task you "should" be doing and you sit down to do a "less important" task in the same area, that work ethic guilt kicks in. However, since you still aren't ready to tackle the bigger task, you instead abandon all of them and go and do something else.

Thus, things like hiding the advertisements if you've posted a comment here have lingered on my TODO list for a long time.

Actually migrating went as smoothly as can be expected. Given that my Wordpress install had 4+ years of incremental upgrades from the original install, I took the opportunity to do a fresh, clean install. The data was a bit trickier because of how Mosso does their MySQL setup. Depending on when you create a database, it might sit on a different server, so every database gets it's own user and needs a different connection string.

At this point, I've been running a couple of smaller sites on Mosso for a few months and this site for a couple of days. Overall, my impressions are quite positive. Nearly everything I have wanted to be able to do I could. For the other stuff (like SVN-driven deployments), it's not like anything other than a completely dedicated server would either.

I haven't seen any MySQL issues, which stands in stark contrast to the number of issues I had with it on my dedicated server. However, I'll still be aggressively using things like the Wordpress plugin WP Super Cache to minimize needless hits against the database. Wordpress without that plugin is really WAY too hard on the database compared with what it needs to be.

The support has been top notch. Some of that is probably due to it being in startup mode, where the first few people who get in get extra attention. I know that when I complained on Twitter about not being able to figure out how to get ASP.NET MVC apps to run, one of the founders replied. That was great, but I would be VERY surprised if that continues over the next couple of years for new customers.

Regardless, the tickets I've had to put in were fairly technical (like setting a particular directory to integrated pipeline mode for IIS7), and were handled professionally and I wasn't treated like somebody fumbling around with their first PHP script.

I have, indeed, been able to run both PHP and C# on the same domain and both worked well. The control panel is a little spartan if you're coming from dedicated hosting with either Ensim or Cpanel, but definitely capable. They're steadily improving it and have told me that things like the integrated pipeline change (which is what you need to do to get ASP.NET MVC apps to do the nice routing without the .mvc extension on paths) are coming.

I keep monitors running against all of my sites and haven't seen any outages. Granted, I'm only checking every half hour or so, so it's possible I just missed one, but that still beats waking up to find out that the server crashed at 12:30 last night.

To sum up (and if ever something needed summing up, this article does), I think Mosso is a great solution to the outgrown-shared-hosting-but-don't-want-the-hassle-of-dedicated problem. With extra bandwidth at $0.25/GB and extra storage at $0.50/GB, expansion is much more straightforward than having to go from the "basic" server to the "deluxe" server and migrate all of your sites.

It's stable in my experience, well-supported and runs the code I want it to. Now I just have to get the rest of the sites moved over.

photo credit: jurvetson

If you're seeing this, your DNS has propagated and you're using the new Wynia.org, hosted by Mosso.com. There are lots of reasons for the move and it's been sitting on my TODO list for more months than I feel like admitting in public.

At any rate, I also took this opportunity to prune the site a little bit, starting with a cleaner Wordpress install and holding back a bunch of cruft from being set up on the new account. I'll be watching the 404 logs and restoring or replacing functionality that actually gets used. However, there was a bunch of stuff that didn't need to be on the site and that stuff is gone.

If my deletion removed your favorite feature or you find something broken, let me know. I won't necessarily restore it, but at least I can tell you so directly.

At some point, you've probably found yourself hating your job, dreaming about your hobby and how great it would be if THAT was your job. If you voiced that desire to someone else, there's a pretty good chance that you heard one of the favorite lines of motivational speakers and self-help authors the world over: "Just do what you love".

The sentence is usually accompanied by anecdotes of riches-to-rags-to-riches stories of high power lawyers who quit their jobs to make a new form of jewelry that turns out to be the next big thing and ends up happy and even richer than before.

Unfortunately, that's the kind of advice that leads people to believe that they can turn their hobby directly into a business. Nevermind that it's extremely difficult to make a living directly doing most unmodified hobbies. Writing poetry, keeping fish, painting landscapes, taking still life photos, playing jazz piano, etc., etc., etc. are all things that people do, indeed, make a living at. However, there are hundreds of people who would LIKE to do those jobs for every one that actually does.

I've seen more than one person get all charged up by this and start drawing up plans to jump right into directly turning their hobby into a business or a career. That's because they didn't have all of the pieces necessary to make money doing something you love: Skills/Talent, Passion and Market.

Passion
This is the part most people start with: Stuff I Enjoy. If you're going to spend a large portion of your days and weeks in an activity, you have to actually enjoy it. Seems obvious, I know. However, it's something that more than a few miserable people ignore when picking a career or field. They see people making a bunch of money and jump in.

If there's an area of life that you already have a passion for, you're far more likely to have put in enough effort to have a pretty good foundation.

If I were starting from scratch and looking for a career, I might look, things that meet this criteria might be: writing software, watching movies, drawing, writing fiction, trivia, playing guitar, singing, photography, and reading.

Skills/Talent
In order to make decent money at anything, it needs to be in the set: Stuff I'm Good At. While there are some exceptions, people who make a living at something despite being below average at it, if you start out at least a little bit above average in your talent and skill, you won't be fighting a headwind.

If I look at my list of Stuff I Enjoy, it's clear that there's not a 100% overlap with Stuff I'm Good At. I'm a pretty good software developer and a decent photographer. However, at playing the guitar, singing, and trivia, I'm actually average at best and am not a very good movie critic at all.

Market
This dimension is probably the one that's least included in these discussions. In order to make any money at anything, it needs to be Stuff People Pay For. The market isn't exactly clamoring for another Great American Novel about the coming of age of an awkward teenager or a 32 year old guy who plays video games, or someone who reads all day. Neither is the market falling all over itself to buy my little experimental Flickr API client in C#.

The Sweet Spot
Now, there are plenty of things that overlap in 2 of the 3 circles. I was a decent technical writer and the market was there for it, but it turns out that I don't actually enjoy it. I enjoy photography and am pretty good at it, however except for wedding and high school senior portraits, there isn't a huge market and the market that DOES exist is much smaller than the supply of people who want to do it.

Whenever you don't have all 3, you're looking at a situation where you'll be fighting uphill the whole time. However, when you find something that lands in The Sweet Spot, you've got something that you can really run with.

In my case, developing custom business software is The Sweet Spot. I enjoy it, I'm good at it and there's a market. Now, of the software that I aim to write, business apps aren't what I'd write if money were no object. That stuff I write in my spare time. Because I know there's not much market demand, I don't try to push it.

The added benefit to specifically seeking out the sweet spot is that it's highly unlikely that the thing you enjoy the MOST is what will end up in that little patch. As such, your day job ends up being enjoyable, but the thing you really enjoy is saved from the destruction of your intrinsic motivation.

In short, if you're dreaming of a new career, and it doesn't land in The Sweet Spot, you might want to re-think your dream.