Tinkerbox Solutions Feed

Tinkerbox website relaunched (finally)

Mon, 04 Aug 2008 23:55:00 GMT

Yes, we’ve finally gotten down to creating our own website. As you can see, we’ve undergone a major design overhaul. We’re still using Radiant CMS but the design and layout is now entirely our own. You’ll also probably notice a few empty pages here and there; the portfolio isn’t up yet and we don’t have a lot of content and activity. All that will be changing very soon.

Web standards (or lack thereof) in Singapore

Tue, 05 Aug 2008 05:20:00 GMT

Update: Cuefusion’s website passes validation.

I’ve yet to see a Singaporean website conform to web standards. I know they must exist, lurking somewhere in the shadows of the internet. So today, I did a quick search on web standards in Singapore. It seems like there was marked interest in web standards some time in 2006, continuing all the way to 2007. Right now, the last vestiges of the local web standards movement can be seen at WebSG with its last post dating back to August.

What gives?

We're in the Dropbox Beta

Wed, 06 Aug 2008 11:22:00 GMT

For those of you who don’t know, Dropbox is going to be the best tool to sync your files over multiple computers. I’ve been trying it out today and it’s working like it’s not even there. Which is a good thing, of course. I browsed through the forums and there were so many people suggesting improvements and it reminds me of how I really want to have my own web 2.0 startup one day. I already have the idea in my head, so some time soon perhaps? Dropbox was a Y Combinator startup.

Anyway, if anyone wants an invite, feel free to let me know. I still have 3 invites remaining. Plus, as a beta tester you will have 2GB of space instead of the 1GB that free users will have at launch. Hurray for me, and you if you want the invite.

SEO, Web design and Copywriting

Tue, 12 Aug 2008 13:24:04 GMT

I was prompted to write about this topic after reading this article.

Thus, I believe that both SEO and Web design are extremely important to make a website successful. However, since I have to choose one, I will pick SEO. But I am not saying that you should only focus on SEO and ignore web design. Take your time to build the website carefully. Spend sufficient amount of time on both but spend a little more time on SEO. This way you will get traffic and still have a reasonably attractive website.

This makes perfect sense, since nobody can appreciate your design if they can’t find it through the search engines. But what if you throw copywriting in the mix? Given that the SEO and design are important elements of a web page, why does copywriting take a backseat? What if you had your web page set up to be both aesthetically pleasing, functional and search engine friendly but your copy couldn’t sell a dollar for 50 cents?

A couple of new articles, and we're working with Java

Sat, 13 Sep 2008 11:27:59 GMT

Actually not quite, I’ve written a couple of articles, mainly for fellow students at the university. See, this semester, the year twos will be taking a module in software engineering, where we will be implementing a facility booking system in Java. Since the project requires us to work with Subversion and databases, I thought it was a good thing to write these two articles:

Do spread the word if you find them useful, and report any glaring errors or improvements if any. Apologies for still not having a commenting system up yet. Mainly because the last time I tried it, the code generated by the Radiant plug-in was not standards compliant. Since producing compliant markup is one of the competitive advantages we have at Tinkerbox, I decided against installing it.

I’ve had some experience with Java back in the polytechnic, but I was won over by the dark side with .Net and its popular C# language. Ken is also an awesome J2ME developer and is far more experienced than I am with Java. Right now, he wishes to develop some stuff on the iPhone but that’s another story.

While I still prefer to work with Ruby on Rails, I guess brushing up on my Java wouldn’t be such a bad thing. But then again, I miss the simplicity of ActiveRecord a lot. Most people think that Hibernate is more powerful, or more flexible, but I think ActiveRecord can hold its own. Yes, you might have to tweak a lot, but then again, it’s not going to end up more work than using Hibernate with all its configuration files (or annotations). Perhaps, I will be in a better position to comment after this semester’s done.

Server rigged to use Phusion Passenger

Wed, 17 Sep 2008 13:35:42 GMT

We’ve just upgraded the server to use this excellent gem, which allows Ruby on Rails applications to be served like PHP applications. Previously, updating Rails applications entails a lot administrative hassle. Managing mongrel clusters was a huge burden to deploy and monitor and we had to do it every time we wanted to deploy the latest changes to the application.

Of greater concern was its wanton consumption of memory. I brought the MediaTemple server down after running 9 mongrels concurrently and had to reboot it in order to restore the system. From what I gather, Passenger, is an Apache mod, so pages are served by Apache rather than a mongrel server daemon that runs in the background.

Apache takes care of multiple concurrent requests, and through Passenger we can define the number of instances available to serve up incoming requests. I haven’t done any real benchmarks, but overall, memory consumption is markedly lower and speeds are up due to efficient caching. Furthermore, Ruby Enterprise Edition, a fork of the Ruby runtime can also be used to decrease memory consumption, which is what we’re going to explore next.

Also, I’ve updated the Hibernate/NetBeans series with part two.

8 Tips that May Save You & Your IS203 Group

Thu, 25 Sep 2008 12:15:20 GMT

This is yet another entry that’s targeted at SMU students doing IS203. Working on a group project of this scale gets very difficult for students, even though it can be easier. As often is the case, spending some time on researching the right way can save you a lot of time in the long run. Plus, you will probably score better as a result. Less work for better grades, are you listening yet?

Here are 8 tips that save you time & increase productivity, ignore at your own peril.