Just Journal Developer Blog

JustJournal is partially back up

2012-06-23T17:24:00.000Z

Last week, we did a major upgrade on the database server. A bug introduced in the latest MySQL release has broken a database component we used throughout the site. This was Sun's old CachedRowSet.

As a result, any SQL query using named parameters (something AS somethingelse) is broken. Some queries I can remove the offending as statement on, but others this is not possible due to ambiguity. I've decided to take this opportunity to migrate some of the site to an ORM called Apache Cayenne. I've used it with several other projects and it's quite good. This also has a side effect of avoiding the problem with MySQL.

Normally I would have migrated back to the previous version, but it was a little complicated this time. I appologize for the down time and will continue to fix things on the site as I get a chance. Remember, I have a day job.

Just Journal 2.0

2011-09-24T04:21:00.000Z

Work has begun on the next generation of Just Journal. I spent a few hours tonight working on the rewrite of just journal. The new version will take advantage of newer technologies that have come out since the site was created.

The current plan is to use much of the existing data access code and business logic (but refactored a bit) with a new front end. This will allow me to finally get the website design standardized after all these years. I'm going to drop Maverick and move to a newer Apache framework as well as drop JSP pages on the site.

Once this phase of development is complete, I plan on migrating to Apache Cayenne. A few things are already using it, but there is much to do yet.

I plan on keeping the old servlet around for some time to post blog entries as most of the gui and command line clients use this. The C clients uses the xml-rpc interface, and i may start migrating the .NET client and java clients in that direction.

This is a good time to put in for feature requests. I've already had several lately related to image handling and pictures.

Hardware upgrade complete

2011-09-14T23:51:00.000Z

The second hard drive was installed tonight in the server. The site might be slow as the second drive is synced. It could take a few hours.

The new drives are western digital black 1.5TB. The old drive that failed was a seagate 7200.11 750GB (china factory) . I'll probably RMA the seagate drive and use it for something else. It happens.

Server downtime

2011-09-14T04:17:00.000Z

I had to replace a faulty hard drive today. The server was down for four hours. I'll have to bring it down again later this week to get a second drive in for the raid and remount it.

Internet Explorer 9

2011-03-20T16:25:00.000Z

I've noticed some bugs with IE 9 on the site. (mostly drop down boxes for security settings on post)

I'll look into updating Dojo soon to fix this.

(no subject)

2011-03-20T16:22:00.000Z

I appologize for the downtime last night. The server had a kernel panic (crashed) due to an excessive amount of traffic from Yandex combined with a lot of DNS traffic and some internal processes that happen in the evenings. I can't say it won't happen again, but I'm looking into ways to minimize the possibility.

JJ server

2011-01-16T17:38:00.000Z

I did another hardware upgrade today. The server is now in an iStarUSA rackmount case with additional drive capacity (2 new hard drives).

Server upgrade

2010-12-30T01:27:00.000Z

The website is now running on an AMD Athlon II X4 (quad core) with 4GB DDR3 1333 RAM on an AMD 760 based Asus motherboard. Hopefully it will be a little faster. The old system was an Intel Core 2 Duo 2.13Ghz with 4GB DDR2 667 on an Intel DP965LT.

oops

2010-11-27T16:44:00.000Z

I managed to do a dump and restore to upgrade the hard drive last night. This morning, when i went to switch over the power supply failed. We were down at least 12 hours total. Sorry about that.

Downtime

2010-11-26T07:45:00.000Z

There was some site downtime tonight due to a storm and a tripped GFI outlet. I decided to get clever and put in the new hard drive for the server since it was down anyway. However, it's a new WD Green advanced format (EARS) drive which requires a strange partition table. (the alignment is off) Long story short, I had to bring the server back up with the old drive for now.

Server Downtime

2010-05-16T21:49:00.000Z

Friday morning, we had the boot drive in our server fail. It was an Imation 32GB SSD drive that was purchased on December 27, 2009 and installed in February. The whole point of a SSD is greater reliability and we've learned that's not the case.

The drive is still readable (mostly) but writes to the disk are failing.

About half the services are back up on the server, and this site is one of them.

Just Journal 2.0

2010-03-13T19:30:00.000Z

I finally started on version 2.0 of this website. The new version is going to be a partial rewrite. It will still be open source and in Java though. I'm working on it via a private git repository right now. Until I get the structure just right, it's easier than CVS.

I have several goals in mind:

1. Pictures will be stored on the file system, allowing them to be larger and post processed if needed.

2. Video storage (although don't expect youtube quality because i just don't know how to do that)

3. Exports.. i've promised this for years, but I want to allow exporting via XML in addition to the RTF and PDF formats now. This also allows users to backup their own blogs.

4. Portability. Just Journal effectively runs on Tomcat right now with a very specific configuration. I want to get it it usable on other domains, platforms, and maybe even databases. I like MySQL, but it's future is uncertain with the Oracle acquisition.

5. Ajax. I may not go crazy with this, but I've had to learn a lot of AJAX with Dojo for work in the last year and I might as well experiment with it here.

6. Improved mobile accessibility.

SSL Certificate

2010-03-03T17:15:00.000Z

A new Just Journal SSL certificate has been installed.

Server upgrade

2010-02-05T02:23:00.000Z

We had some downtime over the weekend due to two things. First, our router died connecting us to the internet. Second, we got a new frontend server (this site runs from 2 servers combined). We replaced an 8 year old dell precision workstation with a new HP server. It's much faster and hopefully more reliable.

I'm testing some new RSS code tonight. We'll see how well it works.

The good, the bad and the ugly

2010-01-02T20:31:00.000Z

The new site update introduced a few new features and a few new bugs. I'm now using jtidy to process HTML based blog posts. It cleans up several invalid HTML tags. However, it's also formatting the entire blog post as an HTML page. Until I can extract the body of the post out, it may cause a few rendering bugs in browsers and add extra white space around entries in PDFs. Sorry about that.

The good news is that PDFs can now include private blog entries when you are logged in and accessing your own blog. It should also work if your blog is marked private.