Yammer has a new desktop client.

I like that you can pop out threads into new, separate windows.  Handy for keeping track of a particular conversation.  Best of the new features.

The new client feels snappier because your own updates are posted immediately in the client.  The sluggishness of the old client had me looking at Present.ly.

I don’t like that scrolling updates moves the input form too.  Very bad usability.

They got rid of the multiple skins.  That’s unfortunate because I like a darker color scheme and this new version is very bright.  But it’s not a big deal.

While we’re talking about Yammer, I’ll throw out some feature requests for the desktop and iPhone clients.

Desktop client:

• Presence indicator.  Like green for active (typed or moved mouse in last 60 seconds), yellow for semi-active (Yammer client open but no keyboard/mouse activity in a while), and gray for not online.
• Setting to resize text globally (smaller, larger).

iPhone client:

• Landscape mode for easy input.
• Search.
• View threads.

The “whoever’s there” conversations that occur in hallways, around a person’s desk, or in the break room are critical components of a company’s culture.

And a company’s culture is its soul.  Success or failure starts there.  So, you know, this meaningless banter is actually pretty important.

When everyone’s working remotely, it can be easy to lose that daily touch.  Without a place where people can just talk to whoever’s around, we lose the team building and serendipitous discovery that comes with talking about stuff that’s too small for IM / email / forums.

This post about what it’s like to work at 37Signals clarified a half-thought that’s been bugging me lately.  For a dispersed team like Killer Aces, a place where “whoever’s there” banter can occur should be the centerpiece of an intranet.

I just discovered Google Chart API.  You can create charts on-the-fly by manipulating a url. This is way easier (and prettier) than the PHP library I was going to use.

Once again I’m very impressed with Google.

(Big hat tip to Stack Overflow for already having the answer to my question about easiest way to create charts in PHP. Stack Overflow is getting more and more useful for devs. Thanks Jeff Atwood, Joel Spolsky and the entire SO team for putting the site together!)

Examples:

1. Create a “google-o-meter”.

http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=gom&chd=t:93&chl=Awesome&chs=400×150

How awesome is Google Chart API?

2. Create a bar chart.

What happens when you chart the top 20 personal finance bloggers ranked by subscribers?

URL for the above chart (you can also click on it to go to the generated image):

http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?
cht=bhs&
chd=t:62862,60462,33124,22527,15092,13488,11252,10526,10417,10052,
7501,7297,6177,5631,5444,5244,5186,5094,4590,4322&
chbh=a&
chs=500x400&
chds=0,75000&
chxt=x,y&
chxl=1:|Generation%20X%20Finance|The%20Digerati%20Life|All%20Financial%20Matters|
Being%20Frugal|No%20Credit%20Needed|The%20Centsible%20Sawyer|
Million%20Dollar%20Journey|Common%20Sense%20With%20Money|Frugal%20Dad|
Stop%20Buying%20Crap|Bargaineering|Five%20Cent%20Nickel|
Consumerism%20Commentary|My%20Money%20Blog|Free%20Money%20Finance|
Coupon%20Cravings|Deal%20Seeking%20Mom|Wise%20Bread|The%20Simple%20Dollar|
Get%20Rich%20Slowly|0:|0|25000|50000|75000

3. Create a pie chart.

Search share of personal finance personalities (searches per month for their name):

URL that generated this chart:

http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?
cht=p3&
chd=t:368,246,125&
chs=550x150&
chl=Dave%20Ramsey%20(368,000)|Suze%20Orman%20(246,000)|Robert%20Kiyosaki%20(135,000)

Got the new VPS. After I added a domain, apache wouldn’t restart. I was getting this error:

[root@vps ~]# /etc/init.d/httpd configtest
Syntax error on line 1158 of /usr/local/apache/conf/httpd.conf:
Invalid command 'BytesLog', perhaps mis-spelled or defined by a module not included in the server configuration

Huh. Did this VPS ship with a broken apache? Not a good sign…

Turns out the fix is pretty simple. Just needed to recompile one of the corrupted shared libs — mod_log_bytes.c. Thanks mydigitallife.

cd /usr/local/cpanel/apache
/usr/local/apache/bin/apxs -iac mod_log_bytes.c

Then…

[root@vps apache]# /etc/init.d/httpd restart
/etc/init.d/httpd restart: httpd restarted

Yeah, baby!

Be a good citizen.

Whenever Firefox crashes I waffle between sending the error report and not sending it. Sometimes the paranoid side gets to me. I can’t even use laziness as an excuse. Clicking “send” takes exactly the same amount of energy as clicking “don’t send”.

So I’m vowing to always send the error report from now on.

Join me. Just click SEND next time Firefox crashes. It doesn’t hurt you at all. Except to make Firefox even more awesome.

After the server instability this morning, we were hit with a couple surprises this afternoon.

We started getting mysql errors with the word “corrupted”. The specific error was different for various tables. Then we noticed lots of recent content was missing. Oh shit.

Luckily, fixing these corrupted tables was easy. Using REPAIR TABLE did the trick. Thank goodness we didn’t have really screwed up tables that required advanced voodoo magic.

mysql> check table table1,table2;
mysql> repair table table1,table2;

We did this for every table and it looks like no content was lost. Phew! Going to backups wouldn’t have been too bad (no new content today due to server instability), but we might have been down much longer.

I guess the time to move to beefer hosting is now. We actually don’t have a choice. We got evicted today:

We’ve determined your account to be using an excessive amount of CPU time and memory on the server. Your site is currently responsible for 10-20% of the CPU time and up to 33% of the memory usage on the system over the past few weeks. Per our Terms of Service, this site will not be able to remain on our shared hosting service and will need to move off. Please contact me so we can discuss your options.

I’ve never been kicked off a host for being too big. :) It’s kinda cool except for all the downtimes.

Based on our few months with ASO, I have nothing but good things to say about them. Their shared hosting plans are very fair and they have the most responsive customer service I’ve ever experienced. We used most of our bandwidth and definitely more than our share of resources. And the kicker? They have a public customer forum. A company with that level of transparency is very rare.

For moderate sized sites (say, under 250k monthly views), I would wholeheartedly recommend Tim Dorr and his crew at A Small Orange. (Tell them wisebread.com sent you.)

This is what a shared hosting server looks like just before it runs out of memory (both physical and swap). My shell is hung. The sites are down.

top - 06:13:44 up 28 days,  2:47,  1 user,  load average: 83.66, 37.25, 16.93
Tasks: 343 total,   1 running, 341 sleeping,   1 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu(s):  3.9% us, 13.5% sy,  0.0% ni,  0.0% id, 82.3% wa,  0.0% hi,  0.3% si
Mem:   2058360k total,  2044548k used,    13812k free,     2000k buffers
Swap:  2048276k total,  2048276k used,        0k free,    36644k cached

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
31462 nobody    15   0  303m  39m 2696 S    5  2.0   0:00.92 httpd
   64 root      15   0     0    0    0 D    2  0.0  19:49.36 kswapd0
31581 nobody    17   0  200m  12m 2928 D    2  0.6   0:00.11 httpd
31341 nobody    16   0  258m  29m 2864 S    2  1.5   0:00.65 httpd
31347 nobody    17   0  200m  14m 4136 D    1  0.7   0:00.06 httpd
31356 nobody    15   0  239m  28m 3028 D    1  1.4   0:00.98 httpd

And I can’t poke it. Damn shared hosting.

I got the dreaded white screen of death (WSOD) for our activeCollab installation today. I moved the hosting for this site yesterday, so it’s probably related to that. I just had no idea what the problem might be. No errors on the screen, nothing written to the apache logs. Damn. This is going to be a pain to track down….

(If you didn’t know, activeCollab is basically a free open-source version of Basecamp. You have to install it on your own server, but it does a pretty damn good job of mimicking the functionality of Basecamp.)

After searching around the activeCollab website, a user mentioned “turning on error messages in the config file”. That was the key hint I needed. Here’s the fix.

Look for this line in your config/config.php file:

define('DEBUG', false);

Change “false” to “true” and you get debugging messages printed to the screen.

The problem was clear as day once debugging was turned on. The error message mentioned not being able to access a certain file. The path to the file was pointing at the old server setup.

I figured the old path was hard-coded into some config files during setup, but I had no idea which files needed fixing. To find the offending config, I ran a find and xargs. (Run this from your ssh shell.)

find ./ac -type f | xargs grep oldpath

This command says: find everything in the “ac” directory that is a file, then grep through each file to find a mention of “oldpath”, and print the results.

Turns out I needed to update cache/autoloader.php. This file contains hard-coded paths to various AC scripts. They were still pointing to the old paths. A simple search-and-replace of the old path with the new path, and our install was back in action.

1. Install Microsoft Virtual PC 2007. It’s a free download.

2. Install this free image of Windows with IE6. It’s time-bombed to stop working August 17, 2007. But check back on the MSDN IE blog for an updated image.