Monday was a horrific day in Boston and its been an uneasy day after. I don’t have anything to add to the discourse but I would like to urge you to join us, along with the technology community in supporting the victims.
TUGG has setup a fundraise.com page here – https://www.fundraise.com/technology-supports-victims-of-boston-marathon-bombing and over $100,000 has already been raised.
In 2009, an engineer using the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto introduced a new digital, open source, currency to the world called “Bitcoin”. Since then, the buzz, excitement, and adoption of bitcoins has grown at a phenomenal rate, with the total value of bitcoins in circulation hitting $1 billion as of April 2013. Talk of a bubble has coincided with the buzz, but both have also served to highlight the tremendous potential in the Bitcoin ecosystem.
Paraphrasing from Wikipedia:
Bitcoin is a decentralized digital currency based on an open-source, peer-to-peer internet protocol. […] Bitcoins can be exchanged through a computer or smartphone locally or internationally without an intermediate financial institution. […]
Bitcoin is not managed like typical currencies: it has no central bank or central organization. Instead, it relies on an Internet-based peer-to-peer network. The money supply is automated and given to servers or “bitcoin miners” that confirm bitcoin transactions as they add them to a decentralized and archived transaction log approximately every 10 minutes.
I’m going to butcher any explanation I try to provide but Quora has several good writeups on what Bitcoins are and how they work. A reasonable analogy though, is think about “Bitcoins” as a type of precious metal that has no intrinsic value but is able to store value, transfer value between parties, and be mined to find new pieces.
The key takeaways about how Bitcoins work are:
There are dozens if not hundreds of startups playing in the Bitcoin space and several “large” companies have also started adopting Bitcoins as an alternative form of payment. Several high profile investors including YCombinator and Union Square Ventures have also made significant Bitcoin related invetments, signalling that savvy investors believe a potential market exists. Personally, I’m excited about companies attacking the following:
Hassle free, instant, and international money transfer. Paypal was supposed to allow us to do this, but even in 2013 its difficult and expensive to transfer people money – let alone internationally. If someone can address the current concerns of fraud and money laundering using Bitcoin they’ll have an instant winner on their hands.
Catapult in legalized online gambling. In the last few years, there’s been an ongoing discussion about if America should legalize online gambling and if so, how it should be done. Because of the decentralized, anonymous nature of Bitcoin, it’s conceivable that the emergence of a large enough Bitcoin powered gambling market would force the US government to legalize online gambling in order to get access to the additional tax revenues. This would obviously be a boon for struggling social game companies like Zynga, but also provide an enormous opportunity for new startups.
Provide a viable alternative to credit cards. Recently, there’s been a lot of action in the payments space including innovative companies like Square and Roam which are aiming to alter how consumers pay at the point of sale. Unfortunately, almost all of these new payment solutions still rely on existing credit card infrastructure to complete the payment which leaves them at the whim of interchange fees. Boston based LevelUp is tackling this issue but at the end of the day they’re still getting hit by the fees somewhere. An innovative Bitcoin company which provides a viable alternative to this existing credit card infrastructure would open the door to radical innovation in the payments space by eliminating hard interchange fees.
There’s a huge amount of opportunity in the Bitcoin space and the ecosystem is just starting to build out. With the Bitcoin boom of 2012 already inked on the Wikipedia entry, the next few months are going to be a critical time for the nascent currency. The single largest to Bitcoin is ultimately going to be regulation from sovereign governments. The US Department of Treasury has already issued several statements regarding Bitcoin and its clear the government isn’t happy with the situation as it stands now.
Regardless of what regulation is passed, Bitcoins are technologically different from previous virtual currency and the ecosystem has already demonstrated its resilience and innovation.
Just a quick one out there as I saw a bunch of posts trying to get around the following error:
The error of the occurs on the cache warmup part of the clearing. After looking around people referenced a bunch of different solutions, the most popular being to do a –no-warmup. However, we wanted to try to fix the problem rather than just avoid warming the cache.
The solution fairly quick and really easy. This is using 2.1.X of Symfony and 1.3.* of the JMSDiExtraBundle. Before we had in our AppKernel.php the following:
I noticed in one of the docs for the JMSDiExtraBundle it has the JMSAopBundle in the list BEFORE JMSDiExtraBundle. We tried moving this up and had success, so the final one looked like:
Hope this saves someone some time.
Last month, a post started making the rounds on the internet decrying the dire state of the WordPress codebase. James highlights several legitimate gripes but unfortunately he muddles the discussion by mixing major problems with otherwise minor concerns. Another problem, is that James’ post considers the issues purely from a technical perspective but ultimately business concerns are going to motivate a drastic change in WordPress. Looking at James’ post and from my own run ins with WordPress, the biggest problems with WordPress as it exists now are:
Broken data model: As James pointed out, as people have started to use WordPress like a CMS with by adding things like custom post types and plugins it’s clear that the underlying data model is too rigid to properly support this need. The result of this, is that developing custom database functionality is notably difficult and it limits the types of extensions that can be built purely inside WordPress.
Limited separation of concerns: Throughout WordPress, globals are heavily used, templates are free to interact with the database, and there’s generally no concept of MVC separation. Apart from being confusing, this makes it difficult to effectively reason about the behavior of a WordPress install, making “smart” caching impossible. Additionally, it makes it difficult for dedicated “frontend” developers to work on templating since they’re often left juggling PHP code. Both of these issues ultimately make running a WordPress site more expensive since you’ll need more resources for operations and development.
No OO/Encapsulation, No Namespaces, No API: Owing to its PHP4+ heritage, the core WordPress code is entirely procedural and because of this every function touches the global namespace. Also, WordPress doesn’t have native support for serving as an API backend and exposing its data in different formats or interacting with non-browser clients. The OO and namespace issue is largely technical but it makes it difficult to develop modular WP components or mixin off the shelf PHP packages. The lack of a robust API makes it impossible to use a single WordPress installation to serve content on the web but also serve as a service for mobile clients, which ultimately limits its utility.
“Fixing” an application as large as WordPress is obviously a herculean undertaking, especially because of the need to balance the existing ecosystem with the need for a clean, strong foundation. The reality is that modernizing WordPress is ultimately going to require a full rewrite but I think it could be strategically orchestrated to win community support for the backwards compatability breaks.
Without further ado, here’s how I would do it:
June ’13 – Release Twig for WordPress
Twig for WordPress is a fully featured implementation of the Twig templating engine for WordPress. It allows developers to write WordPress themes in Twig instead of mixing PHP and HTML. Along with Twig, the plugin includes modern template caching techniques like partial page rebuilds and ESI support. In order to leverage Twig and its related benefits, developers have to write their themes with reasonably strict View/Controller separation since variables must be explicitly passed to Twig templates.
Theme designers are initially hesitant but once they see how much easier tracing the structure of Twig templates is versus straight PHP they’re converts. Developers are also fans since they enjoy being able to make the necessary page variables available in a template and then hand pages off to be themed. Benchmarks are done. Hackathons are sponsored. Themes are converted to Twig.
September ’13 – Release Doctrine Power Tools (DPT)
Leveraging Doctrine2, DPT enhances WordPress by augmenting it with the Doctrine2 ORM and associated “power tools”. This allows developers to seamlessly create new MySQL tables and then automatically generate administration CRUD for those tables. In addition, custom plugin code can choose to leverage Doctrine2 to interact with the new tables. With DPT, WordPress administrators are also able to design custom forms to insert data into custom tables and then filter and export the data in these tables.
Developers familiar with ORMs are immediately excited and after they try it out they’re hooked. They start evangelizing DPT in the community because it takes the drudgery out of creating custom database functionality in WordPress. Enterprise users slowly get wind of it and adopt it as well since it empowers their marketing team to do more without involving developers. WordPress has an ORM. Everything isn’t being stuffed into wp_posts.
January ’14 – Release WP Paladin Alpha
WP Paladin is a PHP 5.3+ object oriented rewrite of WordPress with an additional “compatibility layer” which provides compatible legacy plugins and themes access to the normal WordPress API. From a user perspective, Paladin has the same installation procedure, Admin UI, and basic functionality as stock WordPress. Additionally, a handful of the most popular plugins have been ported to be 100% compatible with Paladin. Technically, WP Paladin shares several key Symfony2 components with Drupal 8, notably the HttpKernel, which allows interoperability with other apps using HttpKernel. It also supports Twig templating and ships with the Doctrine2 ORM and DPT.
Since Twig for WP was released in June ’13, dozens of Twig themes have become available and early adopters are eagerly experimenting with Paladin. Although it currently only supports a handful of traditional WordPress plugins, it’s faster, easier to develop on, and plays well with others. The excitement is palpable. Blog posts are written. SXSW tickets are bought.
March ’14 – Release WP Paladin Beta
WP Paladin Beta is similar to the initial release except the “compatibility layer” has been removed, critical bugs have been fixed, and the platform is significantly more stable. The beta version is launched at an exclusive SXSW party to a frenzied mob. It’s taken a little less than a year, but the WordPress codebase has been modernized and new features have added. Additionally, the most popular WordPress themes and plugins have been ported to be compatible with the Paladin codebase.
The download counter hits 1 million by the end of SXSW. Congratulations are in order. VC Money is raised.
Doing something like this would certainly be a great way to “earn your stripes” but ultimately it’s going to end up burning thousands of man hours for an unknown payoff.
But who knows, maybe a company with deep pockets, talented engineers, and a disposition for risk will give it the ole college try.
We’ve heard some people are having a few small issues with getting AWS up and running. I’ve whipped up a quick guide to get you up and running, for FREE, on AWS within a few minutes. Let’s get started.
First you need to get signed up on Amazon in order to use their accounts. Head on over to http://aws.amazon.com/ to create an account. Creating an account is 100% free, even though they do ask for your credit card. Click on the ‘Get started for free’ button in the middle of the page. From there you’ll be taken through a quick registration.
There are are tons of different instances you can choose from. For this tutorial we’ll just give you a simple Ubuntu 12 image. Click https://console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/home?region=us-east-1#launchAmi=ami-3bec7952 this will take you to the launch instance screen:
Click on “Continue”. On this screen for now just make sure that the Instance type (top right of screen) is “T1 Micro…”. This is their free tier. You get 720 hours of run time for free on it. The other options on this screen allow you to customize the number of instances and their location, but for now just click “Continue”.
This screen is the advanced options screen where you can select some extra options such as the kernel and monitoring for the instance. The defaults here are fine, so just click “Continue”.
This screen will let you configure the storage for your instance, again the defaults are fine just click “Continue”.
This screen you can put different tags on your instance. If you have a ton of instances it can be helpful to tag them, however as this is your first and only instance, no need to do anything other than click “Continue”.
This screen is important. You are going to setup your SSH keys to access the server here. Amazon does not launch the server with passwords, instead is uses https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/SSH_KeysSSH Keys. These let you identify with the server without having to specify a password. Read up on them, their really helpful.
You’ll want to click “Create a new Key Pair”. Amazon does not currently let you upload your own public ssh key, you must use one stored on your account.” Enter whatever name you want for the pair and click “Create & Download your Key Pair”. This will download a file to your computer.
You’ll be automatically advanced to the next screen when is has downloaded. Here you’ll configure which security group you want the server to be in. A security group is pretty much just a set of firewall settings. Use the “default” group. Click “Continue.”
It’ll allow you to review your settings and you can click “Launch”
Your instance is now being launched. You’ll see a “pending” on the screen under state until it is fully up and running.
Once it is running the state will change to “running”. Click on the server. At the bottom of the screen you’ll see information about the server. At the top of it under the top line “EC2 Instance ….” there is a URL. This is your servers public DNS record. You’ll use this to connect.
Before you can connect to your server you need to update your default security group to allow SSH. On the left side of the window click on “Security Groups”. Click default. In the bottom pane click “Inbound”. Select “SSH” in the dropdown for “Create a new rule:”. Click the “Add rule” button. Then do the same but for “HTTP”. At this point click “Apply Rule Changes”. If you do not do this, it will NOT save your updates.
Now open your terminal. Navigate to where you downloaded the file from earlier. Now it is time to SSH into your server. You may encounter a permission error, if you do run the chmod command from the gist below.
Congratulations, you’re now on your own server!
Now that you are on your server you need to install the LAMP stack. The next steps we’ll do is have you become the super user, run apt-get and install the LAMP software. apt-get is a package/software manager.
You’ve now setup MySQL, Apache2, and PHP. You can verify Apache is running by going to your public DNS in your browser. You should see the following screen.
You now have a fully functional LAMP web server. To modify the files that are being served you’ll need to go to the webroot on the filesystem at “/var/www”.
Don’t forget to turn your instance off, as once your free tier runs out they will charge you. When you turn off your instance you will not be able to recover anything on it, so make sure if you have any files you want to keep you download them first.
Congrats on launching a LAMP server on AWS. Good luck and let us know if we can help you out on AWS or your next project!
Want to learn how to do other things on AWS? Leave us a comment and we’ll do our best to help out!