Posted by Charlie
Wed, 14 Jun 2006 00:27:00 GMT
Most people still use Internet Explorer as their browser. Unfortunately, from a development stand-point, its hard to work with due to its age (5+ years now) and its many bugs (not to mention its many security problems). I suppose the bright side is that many of its bugs are well-known at this point.
Today was one of those frustrating days trying to get things to work in Internet Explorer. When you move your mouse over a feature on map you'll see that it's cursor changes to a pointer with a blue information icon. It took about 5 minutes to get it to work on Firefox. And then about 8 more hours to get it to work in Internet Explorer.
We can't wait till Internet Explorer 7 finally arrives on the scene later this year - even if it is about three years later than it should have been.
Posted in Development | no comments
Posted by Charlie
Sat, 10 Jun 2006 18:58:00 GMT
Earlier this week we redirected ammonite to point at the new server hosted at Data393. The new server is running the latest MapBuzz release which includes two major new features – discussions and editing.
The discussions feature lets users add their own comments to maps, communities and users. Discussions are threaded, which means that users can reply to other user’s comments. This functionality lets users share information about maps and will be a major part of creating user communities on mapBuzz.
The editing functionality permits users to add their own features to maps. This includes simple point features such as restaurants as well as more complex features such as trails (linear features) or parks (area features). Users can also edit existing features by moving them around or changing their shapes.
We've also started working on two additional new features – rankings and data uploading. Rankings let users assign one to five stars to a map. These rankings are then averaged to provide an indication of which maps the user community finds most interesting.
Data uploading lets users who own handheld global positioning systems (commonly known as GPS devices) to load their data to mapBuzz. For example, users can create maps of their recent vacations by uploading location data from a handheld GPS device. Users can then attach additional information to the map such as notes or pictures and then share the map with friends and family.
Finally, we spent some time improving existing functionality. For example, we expanded search functionality so that you can search for users via email addresses, which was a commonly requested feature.
Posted in Infrastructure | no comments
Posted by Charlie
Wed, 07 Jun 2006 16:26:00 GMT
We've made it to 95% test coverage more quickly then planned. The current value is now 95.4%.
As expected, the increased test coverage unearthed some additional bugs that we hadn't seen before. These have been now logged and fixed.
Posted in Infrastructure | no comments
Posted by Charlie
Wed, 07 Jun 2006 00:31:00 GMT
Over the last couple of weeks you may have noticed that our test coverage has steadily increased. Today we broke through the 90% barrier for our server code. We'd like to get this as close to 100% as possible - our next goal is 95%.
Unfortunately, we don't have any automated tools to show us the test coverage of our client code (the code that runs in the browser). Hopefully with the renewed interest in browsers over the last year (think of Google Mail or Windows Live) someone will put together what we need as an open source project. There a few projects that are close, like Selenium, but don't yet provide code coverage tools.
Posted in Infrastructure | no comments
Posted by Charlie
Tue, 23 May 2006 17:19:00 GMT
Last week we successfully finished setting up our new server at Data393. We've also implemented automatic deployment and testing tools. You can see daily test results at http://tests.mapbuzz.com.
Later this week we'll point http://ammonite.mapbuzz.com at the new server (it still pointing at the old server) and roll out news comment functionality and new editing functionality.
Posted in Infrastructure | no comments
Posted by Charlie
Tue, 02 May 2006 19:45:00 GMT
Yesterday we deployed our weekly MapBuzz update. The update mainly focused on bug fixes, but also added one important piece of functionality - map viewing permissions. Previously you could view any map, even if the owner had not marked it as shared. That has now been fixed, and view permissions are now honored.
Over the next few weeks we'll be working on three main things:
* Comments - Enable users to add comments about maps, features, communities, etc.
* Editing - Deploy richer editing tools that are currently under development
* Automated deployment - Automate our deployment process so its is fully reproducible and reliable.
Posted in Development | no comments
Posted by Charlie
Fri, 28 Apr 2006 16:14:00 GMT
After looking around for a bit, we've found a host for MapBuzz - Data 393. Besides being quite impressed with their customer service and computing facilities, a big plus is that they are located nearby in south Denver.
Data 393 is currently setting up our server, and will release it to us next week. We'll then migrate MapBuzz to it, with a planned completion date of May 14th.
Last, a quick update on our progress. We'll be pushing another release early next week, which will finish off the first implementation of community functionality, add better editing capabilities and fix a number of bugs. I'll post more information once its been released.
Posted in Infrastructure | no comments
Posted by Charlie
Tue, 18 Apr 2006 20:53:00 GMT
The site was down last night from about midnight to 9 am as we upgraded the database server to have additional disk drives. The reason for the additional drives is to boost disk performance.
Read operations from a standard SATA drive (SATA is a newer type of harddrive that replaces the IDE hard drives you find in most desktop PCs) are about sixty Megabytes a second (60Mb/s). By combinining multiple drives together in a RAID array you can significantly improve performance. With the new drives, our read performance is now about 85Mb/s. Although a nice improvement, this is actually less than we hoped. So some additional investigation is needed to figure out the bottleneck.
Posted in Infrastructure | no comments
Posted by Charlie
Thu, 13 Apr 2006 07:25:00 GMT
Over the last month we've made a concerted effort to improve our test coverage. We now have some automated tools that tell us our test coverage for the server part of the system. If you look at the coverage results, you can see that we now have approximately 75% test coverage.
Note that these results do not cover any of the client code (i.e., the code that runs in your browser) or any of the database code (code that runs in the database). Unfortunately there aren't any easy ways to measure test coverage in either of those environments.
Posted in Infrastructure | no comments
Posted by Charlie
Wed, 12 Apr 2006 05:15:00 GMT
We've posted the latest MapBuzz update. This weeks changes include:
- Upgraded to latest Google Maps Api
- Upgraded to latest Rails version
- Improved search functionality
- New profile functionality, which is the first part (out of three) of our planned community functionality
- Bug fixes in editing features
Over the next couple of weeks we'll be:
- Continue to improve our IT infrastructure by implementing automated testing as part of deploying updates
- Improve the search user interface
- Expand editing funcionality
- Implement part 2 of community functionality
Posted in Infrastructure | no comments
