Huy Dinh

Magento, the all singing, all dancing ecommerce system that’s heads and shoulders above everything else. It has more features than a Swiss army knife, and best of all, it’s open source and completely free to use!

Mosso is Rackspace’s cloud computing service, it promises to be somewhere between a VPS (Virtual Private Server) and a dedicated server – it’s scalable, dependable, and above all, fully managed and supported like Rackspace’s excellent support.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that the 2 Ms would be a as sweet as chocolate, but you’d be wrong like I was wrong.

Having tested Magento on WebFusion’s VPS, it was unacceptably slow, during peak times it would take 15 seconds to load the page on a fast broadband connection. The problem (probably) is that Magento uses a lot of CPU resources. It does a lot of database queries and reads and writes many files on each request. The caching system helps substantially but on a shared server, it’s still too slow for practical use. Imagine if just a handful of people installed a copy of Magento on their VPS – the server would come to a halt pretty quickly.

In theory, using cloud computing with it’s unlimited resources should speed Magento up exponentially, in reality however, the reverse is true. During peak time, most requests timed out, and the ones that do make it through takes more time than making tea.

Was the problem to do with Mosso? or can it be said of all cloud computing in general? I wont be answering that any time soon, I’m sticking to the ground for as long as I can.

So the only real solution for Magento is a dedicated server, which considering, is not too expensive if you are prepared to get your hands dirty. For the same price as a Mosso installation, you can get a basic dedicated server at EasySpace, and believe you me, Magento is very usable!

So click my EasySpace banner yo!

Spine magazine is finally live!

I’m especially proud of the infinite scrolling on the news and reviews pages. If you have some time, drag the jog slider down and scroll back to the yesteryears!

Check it out at: http://www.spinemagazine.com

The website in Flash AS3 with a bit of PaperVision3D. It’s a complex design with animated interactive links and hotspots. The background and popups are in 2D while the map is in 3D. Check it out here: http://www.originals-online.com/footlocker_cope2/

I’ve updated the income tax calculator using flex, it looks much better than before, and it works great.

This is now updated to calculate this year’s deductions and compare it with last year’s.

The “Hourly” button shows your actual hourly rate taking into account the number of hours you work a day and the number of days holiday (and public holidays) a year.

If you work less than 5 days a week, you can still get accurate results by adding the number of days off onto your holiday (e.g. if you work 4 days a week, that means you have 52 days extra holiday a year, add that to your holiday allowance). If you work more than 5 days a week, subtract those extra days from your holiday!

On Axe (The Lynx Effect) yet again, this time to implement another tracking service into the flash app.

Back in March 07, it was decided that only Google Analytics would be used to track user’s journey through the site. Came July, after the site had been finished, the specifications changed, the client wanted to use Webtrends. Then, somewhere along the line Spotlight and DoubleClick was added… so, that’s 4 tracking service to track one site that doesn’t even display adverts… or… is that the next step?

Oh, I forgot to mention that Traction is also used to track interactions and data submission, making a total of 5 tracking services.

Is that an overkill or what?

Then again, the number of companies involved in the website is 6 (or so), and I suppose each want their own tracking system implemented.

The website for the UK’s first hibiscus flower drink has gone live!

Hib drinks, made from the hibiscus flower, is a new range of healthy super drinks has been launched, and with it, a website with lots of information and background about the health benefits of drinking the “dried calx from the hibiscus flower bush”.

I’ve spent quite a bit of time on the programming, applied the skills that I’ve learned only weeks earlier – to create a flash movie that reads data from an XML file, parse the information and format it for display and animation! The advantage of doing it this way is that it can be edited by anyone easily, without the need to republish the movie!

Anyway, check the site out here: http://www.hibdrinks.com, and look out for the drink next time you go to the supermarket.

I was working on Axe, adding an extra link into the bottom nav... simple task!

...or it should be... but the system wasn't designed properly, links were in the wrong places in the database, the flash parsed the xml using absolute positions. The first 3 elements were ignored, they're the main sections, the next 3 were the original bottom navs, a few more elements make up forms and other areas of the site, and the last, which I've just added sits at position 11.

The original code looks similar to this:

The best practice thing to do would be to move all the bottom nav links into one section, but as usual, time, money, client - all the usual reasons means that the work had to be done yesterday, I needed to find a quick hack.

So this is what I came up with:

Hard coding the posisions into an array allowed me to place the elements in any order I like, it's a good thing because the client wanted the new link between existing links.

Quite a neat trick I think!