Robots are cool

In case anyone has been wondering "What's up with the ScottishClimbs server recently?", here's a wee explanation (I guess I'm saying, bear with us!):

Yesterday was interesting. I was up and about at 04:30 to catch a flight to London for a conference related to my work. With ten minutes until my taxi was due, I logged into the server to check my mail. BOOM - something was up! Funky "read-only filesystem" errors and more strange behavior all over the place - can't do anything. Check the logs, unmount the drive, remount it but still no joy. Five minutes to taxi. Reboot into maintenance mode and start running fsck. Answer "y", "y", y"... - should've used the "-y" option! Taxi rings, "y", "y", "y"; shit, he's going to leave! "y", "y"... done! Type "reboot"and run out the door. Phew!

Fortunately, it was all good (at least, as far as I'm aware - I wasn't online yesterday) - I'm pretty sure we didn't lose mail (the most important thing, IMO) and I'm assuming SC was OK too. I do think that this filesystem corruption ties into a deeper problem we have though.

You may notice that the server is slow to respond to things sometimes. The lucky devils with @sc mail accounts might have noticed similar slowdowns too. This is usually because the app that runs whatever you're trying to do is busy hauling itself out of swap space. I've spent the last few weeks tweaking the server in various ways - this is part of why things have been up and down recently. The sys admin at work and I have been trying to work out ways to optimise the system, but we're starting to run out of ideas. The fact of the matter is, the server needs more RAM. Put simply, 256Mb isn't cutting it. I'm going to continue to try to find ways to trim the RAM usage and stabilise the system (it's already a lot better than it was), partly becuase I'm really enjoying learning about this stuff but also because we don't want to spend any money we don't have to. I suppose ultimately though, we might need to just upgrade our service.

Note: yes, I realise RAM is very cheap. However, since we use a virtual machine we can't simply upgrade the RAM and need to upgrade our whole service proportionally. In this case it's pretty much doubling our costs which is why we're trying some other stuff first.

We've finally migrated the ScottishClimbs forums. We had been running PhpBB2.x for five and a half years and been getting increasingly frustrated with it for the last three! We've moved to Simple Machines and so far (somewhere around a whopping 48 hours) we're really impressed. Unfortunately, permalinks to the old forums have been broken by this change. Ah well, I have at least tried to keep old links working for SC over the years (sometimes more enthusiatically than others).

We have also migrated all of the written content to the wiki, which is better for everyone. Au revior SC2, you have served us very well. The NRDB and media sections haven't changed at the moment.

Since my work were nice and gave me a free afternoon off I've just spent a very pleasurable few hours browsing around some of the articles on the wiki and posts on the forums. I doubt our enthusiasm will ever be as strong as it once was, but this afternoon has reminded me of one thing: ScottishClimbs is pretty damn cool and definitely worth everything we've invested in it.

For me, the most consistently funny posts are from Pure Ned Brilliant. Here are some particularly choice parts for me:

From:

Don't do it. Keep your work and your re creation separate.

Al is absolutely right. After much deliberation, I started a job shagging supermodels at a thousand quid a day, and it put me right off gloriously abandoned heterosexual lovemaking. So much so, that apparently I am now one of Al's increasingly recurring homosexual fantasies.

From:

Imagine if you have been working a route for two years, and are just about to go for the lead when a passing orang utan cruises up it and then tries to shag the camera man.

From:

I struggle to see how you can find 'utter bollocks' in that statement.

A huge huge congratulations to pete Johnston for he has been moved from squad to team status on the Junior British Climbing team Awesome job pete well done mate keep up the good work

David, I think you're right, it may well be impossible. The best I can do is 'utter bollok'.

I'll have a consonant please, Norrie.

Class.

In case you missed it over on SC, we launched our wiki last night!

We expect the entire site to migrate over to the wiki in the coming months and this is a direct replacement for SC3. A wiki should be such a perfect fit for the community-based contribution model that has been the basis of ScottishClimbs all along.

I wonder if you can spot when Dave Macleod climbed Rhapsody, the world’s first E11? He also put it in our new routes database and gave us his report of the ascent, which helped the traffic too. The second spike is when UKClimbing went down after a major disk crash.

After about a year of hardly thinking about SC3 at all, we seem to be fired up for it again! We’re still using it as a testbed for ideas that may or may not work, which is one of the interesting bits for me. I also enjoy the fact that I get to work on a project without the time and scope constraints (and the compromises that go with them) that need to be imposed on the projects at work.

Anyone interested in the development of SC should read what Mike has written.

Note: it wasn’t really meant to be, but this post appeared to turn into a bit of a rant about bitching on the SC forums. Anyone reading this might think that it’s all doom and gloom, when in reality it’s not! There are in fact plenty of fresh new faces on the site who are keen and have an open mind, which is just what everyone wants, and all the new traffic is keeping things relatively interesting if nothing else. In truth I was probably just a bit wound up today and that came out in this post, but hey – these things happen! :)

ScottishClimbs is great and I really enjoy seeing how it develops. Our forums have had a reputation for being “dull, yet informative” (paraphrasing from posts on some other climbing forums) for a long time, which I have always taken as a compliment. In fact, I’ve always been proud of our polite and useful debates which don’t tend to tumble into complete drivel at the drop of a hat.

Recently, however, there has been a noticeable shift in attitude of the posts in the forums. More and more people are getting involved in flaming, we now seem to have our fair share of trolls and Dave and the others have been doing more moderating than ever. Sure, more people are using the site now, but at what cost? Unstructured arguing and plenty of the sort of pointless bitchy remarks that the same people would never dare say to someone’s face, it would seem. What a shame.

Of course, most people will realise that many forums on the internet share similar ‘problems’, especially when subjects with such varying views as climbing are discussed. Exceptions to this are forums where people are actually trying to get something constructive done. Web development forums, like Sitepoint, are filled with useful threads and things rarely get heated. Is this because a lot of the people there actually work on the web and grew out of the “let’s cause an argument on the internet” phase when they left school?

I have noted since the start of SC that groups of forum posters seem to come and go, perhaps as people discover the place, get into and then get bored and leave. Maybe this then, is simply a matter of a new bunch of folk appearing, with a chip on their shoulders and a grudge to bear. Myself and the other administrators have always been of the view that we should just let SC head in the direction it wants to take, whatever that is, and we should just give enough nudges to keep things on something approaching reasonable. This will be an interesting time for us then, as there definitely appear to be changes underway. Will we change our minds and set up a draconian set of rules? Will this lot get bored and move on? Will they all get over stop being SAD when the spring comes? Or will the SC team go crazy, shut down the site and start up a knitting forum instead? Only time will tell, I guess.

Here’s a quote from Cassidy, on the SC forums – hopefully everyone on SC will read his post and take it in (but I doubt it). I couldn’t have put it better:

You can’t congratulate kids because they do well in comps, you can’t be a sport climber, you can’t be a boulderer and if you do you will never understand what climbing is… yada yada yada. I compete, I boulder, I climb trad routes and heaven forbid I like sport climbing. Please be decent enough to recognise that those of us who participate in all parts of climbing (for that’s what all these things are) are not ignorant and may actually be just like you.

Man, I’ve been busy recently. A couple of things of note: last week Stuart and I found one of the best tracks I’ve ever seen. A rather perfect technical singletrack down through some steep woods. If you rode it without stopping it’d maybe be a full five minutes of sustained and techincal riding. Stuart and I stopped at several places on the way down though, some sections just being too technical to get first time, if at all. In the end, a comedy tumble down the hillside put a big hole in my knee and put an end to the games that day. I’m afraid I won’t be disclosing details here, but the usual Haddy posse can be assured they’ll see the trail.

More recently Mike and I have been getting back into SC3 and are keener than ever. Or maybe we’re just keen to get it out of the way. Either way, SC3 development is continuing well and I’m making use of, and getting used to, the MVC web application architecture. ScottishClimbs itself seems to be growing well – we’ve recently released our own Apple iPods, with climbing accessories.

I’ve also just had a look at the new KiteWorld magazine. It’s not very often that I say “Fuck me!” when I look in kite magazines anymore, but this issue has some pretty special shots of wave riding in Indo. Definitely worth checking out and it’s made me really want to get away somewhere with consistent wind and waves.

Warning: techy post alert, but if you’ve got past the title, you might just be interested. I’m just experimenting with MVC in a web environment at the moment, so please don’t take anything I’ve written here as gospel. I’ve written this mostly because it could be interesting to read it again in six months – “What was I was doing that for?”. There are several good sites to read about this stuff if you’re interested, although the nature of it means that it’s all open to interpretation and modification.

I’ve been messing around with MVC as a framework for SC3 recently. Mostly I’ve just been trying out ideas and getting a feel for how things work to see if I want to use MVC at all. Because it was the first site I had developed with any sort of database interaction, ScottishClimbs currently runs almost completely on procedural code. Recently however, I have been frustrated by looking at the spaghetti mess of code that was left over from SC2. At university I did a lot of work with Java, and have a decent understanding of object-oriented programming, so it made sense to start looking at object-oriented frameworks for the development of the new site.

I already knew a bit about developing applications with MVC and have recently done a lot of reading about converting that to web applications. MVC is a great way of separating business logic from presentation logic and data logic, and this is the aspect of MVC that I really like. However, it has some features that seem awkward for web development. In order to stick to the MVC model a lot of people are having a single controller (FrontController) and limiting access to the entire site to one page (usually index.php). The controller then takes various $_GET parameters and determines what view (page) to display. I daresay a single entry point for the app has some advantages, but for me it seems to lack flexibility and certainly complicates the code. The alternative is to simply structure the site into pages as normal (index.php, viewpost.php…) and have a controller per page (PageController).

Once I’d implemented a couple of pages though, it was apparent that the PageControllers were doing little more than running some procedural code, so I scrapped them and moved the code to the page itself, which simplified things again. I think object-oriented programming is great, but I’m not sold on the idea that we need to make everything into objects just for the sake of it.

At the moment I’m at the stage where I’ve implemented a few pages, all of which access data only, but the trickyness and ambiguity of MVC is starting to show. Plenty of ‘Where does this belong?’ type of thoughts are floating around my head. I’m not sure the situation is helped by the structure of the new SC3 site – by it’s very nature accessing the data almost always involves multiple joined tables (how should models be separated: by table? Some sort of logical grouping?) and often displaying the data involves a call to fairly nasty XHTML generation function of some sort (that I wrote last year, thankfully!).

Currently I’m using several models equating to my logical grouping of the site data, the actual page as the controller and one view per page. Some of the models, like the PostModel – used for getting, wait for it… data about posts – have an associated helper class. This class simply provides a set of functions, used by more than one view, for helping to display the data – like generating a list of areas and categories nested in a list of posts. A view builds a page by creating a template object, calling on a helper (if necessary) and setting some variables in a multi-dimesional array (currently $content, $sidepanel, $title and $heading). When the view is rendered by the page it simply displays the XHTML file associated with the template and fills in the variables. I’m really happy with the way the XHTML is isolated from the rest of the application like this and I think the template system I’m using is simple and elegant.

MVC was designed so that the presentation, data and business logic could be easily separated and it does a great job of this. However, it’s not entirely clear what should go where sometimes, and other times things just don’t make sense when fitted into MVC. The model and view certainly make quite a lot of sense to me, the controller just doesn’t fit as nicely. The major drawback for me is the added complexity – there are a lot of different classes floating about – and this is an area that I really want to see if I can improve in my MVSomething system. MVC isn’t the perfect architecture for web development but, so far, I’ve not seen anything better and I think I’ll continue to use some form of it with my development work in PHP.

Dave has released the first half of his fictional Scottish climbing tale, The Unusual Suspects. It’s a bit of a fantasty epic involving bouldering, murder and deceit (and a fair amount of that Redpath style :)) amongst some of the characters of the Scottish scene in the boulder strewn Corie Lagan.

Vol II will be coming to your favourite Scottish climbing website next month.

Top effort Dave.

I’ve finally got back into coding mode for SC3, after doing the Wind Things team site and generally messing about.

At the last meeting it was agreed that the posts should all be single page afairs, even if they are very long. This is the internet, and people are used to scrolling down. Thankfully, this makes life much easier coding wise!

Right now we’re working on the ‘SC3 core’, which consists of the posts, the categories and area tagging system and the gallery. The true core of the site is just the posts, but we feel that the gallery is such an important part of the site that we need to develop it at the same time. We have designed the site to be modular – new route facilities, winter conditions, personal profiles, event lists etc can all be bolted onto the site.

Ratho climbing centre is one of the biggest climbing walls in Europe. The concept was pretty cool – cover an existing rock climbing quarry with a big roof, keep some of the existing routes climbable, stick in a huge climbing wall and plant a building there with offices, cafes and shops.

Unfortunately it should have remained just that – a concept, a dream. As Mike suggested to me, they should have built a big warehouse type building and stuck it in a field somewhere for £1m. Add some offices and a climbing wall for another �1m and that’s �18m saved. I’ve never built a climbing wall so I’m probably talking rubbish, but you get the idea. Building it in the quarry has always seemed like a needlessly frivolous expense. It’s a great shame that it’s future is so uncertain as it is without doubt a great facility. Hopefully they can sort something out, I might not have a chance to climb there!

Let’s just thank God they did it at Ratho, not Cambusbarron :)

Categories:

Trad Sport Bouldering Winter Dry Tooling Indoor Foreign Office Site News/Announcements Misc. Climbing issues

As Mike has pointed out, we’ve been having a major re-think of the entire viewing experience of SC. After deciding to go down the line of massively linking all of our data it quickly became apparent that the current system of categorisation is not really all that ideal. We’re aiming for a system where users browse the site and are constantly presented with links to associated information. This, we hope, will make the site much better for browsing, especially for those who don’t know exactly what they’re looking for.

As well as linking the data we’ve got at ScottishClimbs, I’d also love to have related information from some of the other sites on the net. New routes are the first obvious choice where entering a route on another site would either automatically add it to the SC NRDB or just display it on the site, and vice-versa of course. Weather information would be another excellent resource to bring in from the specialised weather sites.

Of course this relies on the other sites actually wanting to take part in this (the incentive is that we would drive traffic to their site), but I think that aggregating data in this way is going to play a major part in the internet in the near future.

One problem with all this related information is where to put it all! We’re going to need to think hard about how to get everything onto the site without making the site too busy as screen real estate is in short supply. We’ve certainly got plenty to do!

The bare bones of the Admin Panel is nearly done and our focus is moving now to the implementation of the ‘SC Browser’ (or whatever it’s getting called) and the NRDB. I really want us to improve the usability of the NRDB and that’ll be another good challenge.

This post reminded me to write something about the Slashdot Effect. I hadn’t heard of this until a couple of weeks ago when ScottishClimbs was down for a couple of days because of it.

The Slashdot Effect is where a very popular site, like Slashdot, links to an article on a much smaller site which is unable to handle the sudden large increase in traffic. We’re on shared hosting so (unfortunately!) that downtime wasn’t actually caused by us.

I’ve also had a good nosey through the stats for SC and the blogs. Nothing particuarly amusing to report for SC I’m afraid. This site has been getting loads of visits from searchers of “broken back”, “css transparency” and “css blog”. I can understand the broken back thing, but there must be many more relevant sites than this one about CSS transparency. I’m still not sure why blogs get such good search results in Google, maybe I’ll look into it sometime. Yesterday someone got to the site by “cock up” which I thought was a strange thing to search for!

Both Simon Willison and Adam Kalsey have made excellent posts about authentication security. This has come at a very appropriate time as Mike and I are developing an admin panel for SC3 just now. I’ll definitely be implementing a delay in the login script (for starters) as there are only three of us using it and I’m sure we won’t mind. Definitely something I’m going to have a good think about. Any thoughts Mike? (those posts are code free ;)