Zetetic Blog

Tempo Maintenance Tonight, Sept 1st 11PM EDT

Wed, 01 Sep 2010 14:00:32 GMT

For customers of our time-tracking system, Tempo, the web interface will be temporarily unavailable starting at 11PM EDT tonight, Wednesday September 1st.

Just a couple of small fixes, service should only be offline for a few minutes while we make sure nothing’s amiss. Reporting time entries via Twitter and Email will continue to function without interruption.

On the Subject of Online Backup for Strip

Mon, 16 Aug 2010 11:25:21 GMT

We’ve received a few requests recently to provide an online or cloud-based backup/sync solution for our password manager Strip, in particular as to whether we plan to add an integration with Dropbox, so we figured now is a good time to provide a statement with regards to what direction we’re going.

We do not have plans to provide an integration with Dropbox for Strip at this time. While we agree an online backup would a really cool and useful feature, we’re uncomfortable with tying a core part of the product to another service that might change without consultation. That’s not to say anything at all about the utility or stability of Dropbox (it’s a really useful service done very well), but decisions made at Dropbox will always be out of our control.

Any online backup would require that the database file be stored remotely in an unknown location, with unknown security risks. That scenario makes us and many of our customers nervous, so we are reluctant to move in this direction without serious planning and risk evaluation.

We’ll continue to investigate the possibility of an online backup for Strip, but in the mean time, Strip can be backed up to the desktop with Strip Sync, providing multi-device replication. Our implementation requires authentication, and the files are always encrypted and secured on your local computers.

Strip 1.4.8 Released

Tue, 13 Jul 2010 12:48:15 GMT

A new update to Strip, our password manager for the iPhone, has been approved by the Apple iTunes App Store, version 1.4.8. This is mostly a bug-fix release for version 1.4.7, and makes the changes list below. While this is a minor update, all users are strongly recommended to backup their data and update to the latest version to ensure compatibility with future versions of Strip.

Fixes crash on auto-save of Note during fast-app switching on iOS 4.
Autosave is now enabled when editing Notes with a hardware keyboard.
Displays GUID of data entities to facilitate sync support requests and debugging.
Corrects icon display on import.
Fixes a couple of NIB-related crashes introduced by iOS4.
Corrects a typo in one of the dialog prompts.

More updates are on the way, but they’re still a few weeks out, so make sure you get the latest and greatest. [ Get it on iTunes ]

Announcing Strip Sync for Mac OS X and Windows

Wed, 30 Jun 2010 10:13:53 GMT

As many of our customers have already noticed, we’ve made Strip Sync for Mac OS X and Windows generally available. It serves as a free a companion utility to Strip 1.4 for iOS, the first version of Strip to support our new Sync feature. More accurately, Strip supports multi-device replication, allowing you to safely replicate your data across any number of devices¹. Strip is the first password manager we know of with this kind of awesome and lightning fast sync system.

No longer will our dear customers be relying on and subsequently let down by iTunes for backups and data recovery. Every time you sync your device with Strip Sync, a backup copy of the local database on your desktop is taken for you. You can revert to any of your backups at any time, and the sync service also provides authoritative data restore.

Strip Sync also provides CVS import and export. This allows you to export your database to a spreadsheet that you could print and store in a safe. It also allows you to bulk load new entries, and in the case of the Mac OS X version, you can do bulk updates as well (e.g. export the existing database to spreadsheet, make edits, and import the same sheet).

Now that more folks are seeing what Strip Sync is – or rather, that it’s not a full desktop port of Strip, thus the qualified name – we’ve been getting questions about a full desktop port. We’re working on it! It’s next on the list, Strip Sync had to come first. You can expect minor updates to Strip Sync in the next few weeks as we make some minor improvements (and add bulk-updating to the Windows version).

I should add that there a ton of other improvements to Strip itself in the 1.4 upgrade (free for those who’ve purchased Strip already), including improvements to the display of data, the ability to work with stored data quickly (copying, launching, etc), and better performance to boot.

With regard to iOS 4, things are looking pretty good so far. We have no plans at the moment to take advantage of new features in the SDK just yet, as our primary concern is stability and compatibility. We do have upcoming improvements planned for the 1.4 version of Strip and if any bugs pop up we should be able to address them in forthcoming updates.

¹ When we have a chance, we’re going to post an article about how this works and the technology behind it. Ditto, the replication library, will be made available as open-source software, as was done with our encryption engine SQLCipher, in order to facilitate peer-review and to encourage future innovations from other developers.

Github Auto-Generates QR Codes for Android Apps

Wed, 23 Jun 2010 13:45:41 GMT

Imagine how cool it would be if we had this for the iPhone? Says Github:

For all you Android developers out there, we now will automatically detect when you upload an Android package (.apk) file and will give you a QR code page link on your download page list…. Now you can scan that with your Android phone to automatically download and install that package.

As a hacker, that makes me straight-up jealous. I ordered my iPhone 4, but I’m not going to lie, I sweat this stuff.

Alexis Rondeau tells me that you need to configure the Market app to allow this behavior explicitly. I’ll take it.

Tempo Update: release Macross replaces Voltron

Mon, 21 Jun 2010 13:31:22 GMT

Last night we delivered an update to Tempo, our time-tracking service, called Macross. The previous release version had been named Voltron internally. The reason for naming them, beyond internal version control and tracking, is that we want to start providing some more communication going forward about what’s on the road map for Tempo, and having names for the releases makes it a bit easier.

In any event, Tempo release Macross went into production last night. It brings a number of badly needed performance improvements and runs off the latest and greatest stable version of Rails (2.3.8) AND gets us off Ruby 1.8.6 (now we’re on 1.8.7). In particular, users with very high numbers of projects and users will be happy to know that the management screens are way faster thanks to implementing some over-due pagination. There’s still a lot more optimization we’re planning to do, and we’re starting to consider changes we might make to the UI on the Projects and Team screens to make them more useful, in particular for our larger account holders. If you’ve got your own ideas, please get in touch and tell us what you’d like to see.

Another important update in last night’s release was switching our Twitter API interaction over to OAuth from HTTP Basic Authentication, due to their ~~upcoming switch-over on June 23rd~~ now-postponed conversion to OAuth. Whenever they do make the switch, Tempo will continue to scoop up your time entries via direct messages to @keeptempo.

Macross, named after the TV show Macross and the SDF-1, is mainly a stepping stone, to move us off some really old tech and to better position us for further infrastructure upgrades and service and UI improvements. This is now the current version of Tempo.

The next release, Macross Plus, is currently shaping up. The biggest thing I want to tackle there is moving Tempo to Rails 3; we anticipate that this will deliver some really great performance gains, as well as make on-going development far easier. We still need to firm up the list of other improvements and features that will be in Macross Plus – it will likely remain in flux, so it’s not a contract, but I will post it soon.

Strip Sync Beta Update: Almost There

Thu, 17 Jun 2010 13:56:52 GMT

Update: Fixed bad link to the beta sign up.

As many of our customers have noticed, Strip Sync is still in beta (you can sign up here). We have a few finishing touches to work out and a final set of builds to run through the beta before we declare it official. Y.T. has to update the documentation, as well. We are planning to do a public release early next week.

I’ve just pushed an update to Strip Sync for Mac OS X (0.2.2), that we hope is a good if not final release candidate for that version. An update to Strip Sync for Windows is on the way to resolve many of the data import issues that were discovered in the last build (turns out that an MSFT data adapter was behaving somewhat badly, and we’ve got a fix on the way). This next update of the applications also provides a minor bug fix for multi-device replication.

Both the Mac OS X and Windows versions of Strip Sync automatically check for signed updates, so you should only need to run the software and you’ll be asked if you’d like to download the latest and greatest.

Inconsolata - Excellent Coding Font

Thu, 17 Jun 2010 13:45:10 GMT

Recently I visited Mohit Muthanna’s blog 0xFE for the first time (a great nerd tech read, subscribed!) and came across this post about his new favorite font for programming, Raph Levien’s Inconsolata:

It’s super, super snazzy. Switched both TextMate and XCode over to it as my default, it’s quite pleasant. I’m not exactly a typography connoisseur, and while I’ve looked at other mono-space fonts before as an alternative to my usual default of Monaco, this is the first I was ever tempted to really switch.

Also, it’s free. Apparently, variants of the font are breeding rapidly, although I’m not feeling any of them in particular. Also, I don’t need straight-quotes, I think the quotes look just fantastic:

Many thanks to Raph for making this available! Check out the aforementioned home page, this Google engineer is quite an interesting character!

Custom URL Shortener for Google Analytics using Rack

Mon, 14 Jun 2010 22:58:42 GMT

Rack::Zetetic::Campaign

A Rack-based URL Shortener for Link Tracking

If you’re like us and you like to send out a newsletter once in a while about one of your new products – in particular if you’re running promotional ad campaigns and your own marketing efforts – you’ve probably tried tacking on Google’s various utm_.* variables to the URLs you are sending people. These are really handy in that Google’s analytics code looks for these when users visit your website, allowing you to start tracking which of your ads, promos, and newsletters is performing well, and which are bombing.

The only problem with this is that you end up trying to put links like this into emails, and they’re long enough to be problematic on display, in particular in plain-text emails:


Write a blog post about Strip telling us what you like and 
what you don't like, and we'll hook you up with a candy-
bar! Click here to learn more: (not an actual link)

http://getstrip.com/promos/blogging?utm_medium=email&utm_term=&utm_campaign=new+promotional+offer&utm_content=textlink&utm_source=newsletter&

We’ve all seen emails where that URL gets garbled and cut into two lines.

What we used to do for this was to employ a URL shortener like bit.ly or tinyurl.com, resulting in links like http://bit.ly/abc123. This solves the problem of munging, but brings on two new problems: your links are dependent on bit.ly always being available and working correctly, and they’re not always easy to “fix” once they’re out there. In particular if you decide to change up the various UTM variables you’re sending to Google Analytics. PITA.

Suffice it to say, many sites are choosing to implement their own URL shorteners to ensure their carefully crafted links don’t rot, and we decided that we’d do ours as a tiny Rack application with a YAML file:


# Rack-up config
require 'rubygems'
require 'rack/zetetic/rack-campaign'
run Rack::Zetetic::Campaign.new('/path/to/your/campaigns.yml')

To install:


gem install rack-campaign

Here we list our campaigns out in YAML:


blog-rack-campaign:
  url: http://dev.zetetic.net/blog/2010/06/11/introducing-rack-campaign
  tokens:
    campaign: rack-campaign
    source: blog
    medium: internets
    content: example link

blog-getstrip:
  url: http://getstrip.com
  tokens:
    campaign: rack-campaign
    source: blog
    medium: internets
    term: strip rocks!
    content: example link

At the top level of our Nginx config, we define an upstream directive for Unicorn, which will host our Rack application over a unix socket (mwahahaha):


# define upstream for campaign routing
upstream campaigns {
  server unix:/www/campaigns/tmp/sockets/unicorn.sock;
}

Then, in each of our Nginx vhosts, we add a location directive for /c, telling the server to forward all such requests to the unicorn process:


location /c {
  proxy_redirect     off;
  proxy_set_header   Host             $host;
  proxy_set_header   X-Real-IP        $remote_addr;
  proxy_set_header   X-Forwarded-For  $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
  proxy_max_temp_file_size 0;

  # forward everything else to the mongrel cluster
  if (!-f $request_filename) {
   proxy_pass http://campaigns;
   break;
  }
}

Now, we can pass out the link you may have seen on Twitter:

http://zetetic.net/c/blog-rack-campaign

When you visit it, you get redirected to:

http://www.zetetic.net/blog/2010/06/11/introducing-rack-campaign?utm_campaign=rack-campaign&utm_source=blog&utm_medium=internets&utm_content=example%20link

Isn’t that neat!?

This needs to perform very well, so we did a little testing with Apache’s ab testing tool and found it runs as fast as a normal nginx rewrite. Here’s what a basic rewrite looks like (/software rewrites to /code):


$ ab -n 500 -c 10 http://zetetic.net/software
...snip...
Non-2xx responses:      500
Total transferred:      191000 bytes
HTML transferred:       92500 bytes
Requests per second:    4626.33 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       2.162 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       0.216 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate:          1721.00 [Kbytes/sec] received
...snip...
Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
  50%      2
  66%      2
  75%      2
  80%      2
  90%      2
  95%      2
  98%      2
  99%      2
 100%      2 (longest request)

And here’s how rack-campaign is performing:


$ ab -n 500 -c 10 http://zetetic.net/c/blog-rack-campaign
...snip...
Non-2xx responses:      500
Total transferred:      167500 bytes
HTML transferred:       7000 bytes
Requests per second:    2749.78 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       3.637 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       0.364 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate:          896.43 [Kbytes/sec] received
...snip...
Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
  50%      2
  66%      2
  75%      3
  80%      3
  90%      4
  95%      4
  98%     13
  99%     14
 100%     39 (longest request)

Obviously, there’s some differences but so far, it looks like rack-campaign is doing well enough here. I’m sure it could be faster, and I’m sure that over time a YAML file could become a cumbersome manner of storage, but for now it’s good ’nuff. Feel free to fork it and use a SQLite database (which in this case would likely be very fast).

Installation

gem install rack-campaign

Hampton's Ruby Survey 2010

Mon, 14 Jun 2010 08:39:42 GMT

The 2008 and 2009 results are listed, too. If you code in Ruby, you should fill it out and have a look at the previous stats!

Among the expected results are that Rails appears to be pulling more users away from Merb, due probably to Rails 3 being the merger of the two frameworks. Also, readership of the pickaxe is down, but only a little.

Meanwhile, I continue to be surprised by how few people use Haml! I just assumed that because it was so easy and that I personally found it such an important tool, that everyone else would, too. Well, shows me!

Perhaps the auto-completing short-cuts that many folks use for HTML and ERB make this a non-issue. But I can’t stand to write ERB anymore. Grumble, grumble.