Sunday, 23 April 2006
Living With War
In case you haven't heard, Neil Young has a new album coming out that's entirely dedicated to George W. Bush. The first single is called "Impeach the President".
“This talk about a 9/11 mentality. No one, George Bush or anyone else, owns the 9/11 mentality. It belongs to the United States of America. It belongs to everyone who was sitting there with their family, watching those buildings get hit by those jets. It belongs to George Bush and his family, it belongs to John Kerry and his family, it belongs to me and my family, my American family. I have a post 9/11 mentality. It’s just not the same as George Bush’s.”
Posted by flow Frazao on April 23, 2006 at 04:17 AM in America, Current Affairs, US News, War on Terra | Permalink | Comments (1)
Tuesday, 18 April 2006
The Great Kiva Migration pt. 2 - Transition
I am exhausted.
For the past week I've been staying up until 5AM writing code and getting an architectural framework in place so that Kiva's development can continue to scale. Matt and I have done so much work it's hard to even remember what we've accomplished. Here's a short list that is by no means complete:
- Switched our version control tool from CVS to Subversion
- Set up a new set of domains at Dreamhost (our most excellent hosting service)
- Migrated the database to a new schema that could definitely beat up the old one
- Fixed about 100 bugs
- Ate Zante's Indian pizza and drank a lot of beer
After all that and much more, I'm proud to announce the new release of Kiva! If you haven't checked it out yet, now's definitely the time. We've made a lot of changes, and I think the site is looking pretty good. Also, I'd love to hear what you think of it. Anything confusing? Anything you really like? Anything you really hate? Anything broken (please god, no)? Any and all feedback would be most welcome.
Tomorrow afternoon Fiona, Matt, Premal and I are heading down to LA for USC's Microfinance and Beyond conference. I wasn't going to go - I'm still pretty nervous about the new website and I was going to hang back in case of emergency - but Fiona and Matt talked me into it. The lineup is really good too. Pretty much all of the big names will be there (including rockstar microfinancier Muhammad Yunus).
We're going to make the seven hour drive for what I'm sure will be a great conference, but the whole time I'll just be silently praying that the new website doesn't break. Wish me luck.
Posted by flow Frazao on April 18, 2006 at 12:39 AM in Kiva/VEF | Permalink | Comments (1)
Sunday, 16 April 2006
Easter Egg Hunt
Here's a quickie - type "about:mozilla" in the firefox link bar. It's no Excel 97 spacefield egg, but it's pretty cool.
Posted by flow Frazao on April 16, 2006 at 05:16 PM in Cool Stuff, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0)
Friday, 07 April 2006
The Great Kiva Migration pt. 1 - Coming Up For Air
Wow. It's been a while since my last posting. I've been so supremely focused on dominating the new Kiva website that I've forgotten the most important thing in the world - blogging. I've also forgotten less important things like personal hygiene, basic nutrition and keeping in contact with people (sorry!!). Somehow my life has become totally absorbed by things like HTML tables and PHP magic quotes. It's crazy to think that I was this close to having been in East Africa right now instead of in a rented room in San Francisco.
For the past two months, we've been working our asses off on rewriting all of Kiva's code from the ground up. I can't remember the last time I went to bed before 5AM - not that I'm complaining - code is meant to be written by moonlight, and anyone who says differently is a punk who doesn't know a class from an object. By now, Carl's left for Uganda (according to my watch he's just landed in Dubai), and Matt and I are left to switch the site from the old version to the new one.
Neither of us has ever done anything like this. Basically, here's what the switch entails:
- Disable logins on the website and logout all the current users
- Put a warm and polite "Kiva is down for maintenance" message on the old server (where the URL 'www.kiva.org' is currently pointing)
- Write a massive SQL script that will import all the info from the old database into the new one. The current Kiva database has 16 tables, and the new one has 27. I'm a little nervous about this part because between the two of us I am the most experienced at SQL. That's scary, cause I don't know shit.
- Pull all the new code onto the new server and sanity check it by logging in and testing the crap out of all the new features.
- Redirect the URL 'www.kiva.org' to point to the new server. This is called a 'DNS Change', and it usually takes between 48 hours for all the servers to be updated with the new information. The effect of which is that when you type the address into your browser there's no way of knowing whether or not you'll get the new site or the old one - it all depends on which servers your request gets bounced around by. During that time, Kiva will remain down.
- Drink beer, watch ultimate fighting, eat Indian pizza, and pray.
Hopefully by Monday the new site will be up. Don't get excited though - the stuff you'll see will remain largely the same. You probably won't even notice any differences. This version is primarily focused on functionality for Kiva's partners (i.e. the people in Africa/C. America/E. Europe/etc who will be posting the businesses).
I'm both really excited and really nervous about this. If it works, it'll be awesome - our partners will have total control over the businesses that Kiva users will be lending to. However, if it bombs/is mad buggy it'll be like I've spent months training for the Octagon only to lose the fight because of a strategic error like allowing myself to get caught in a figure-four leglock.
Posted by flow Frazao on April 7, 2006 at 07:43 PM in Kiva/VEF | Permalink | Comments (0)