Well after two years in The Gambia I have left.  Melanie and I have started travelling from The Gambia across west africa. A trip we have had planned for quite a long time.  When I was back in North America last summer we were beginning preparations and now we have commenced the journey by car in our white van.  Now we find ourselves 3 weeks in and already three countries deep. 

Mela is updating her website a lot more than I am, but unfortunately you will find much of it is in German... not much good for most of my friends. 

I'll try to write more but am using most of my computer time on work related items.  Currently we are in Dabola, Guinea a funny little town with a dam nearby.  So though it is surrounded by darkness this village has near constant electicity and even a decent satelite feed for internet complements of the French government and CCF.  It makes it a nice place to relax a few days and reconnect. 

Sometimes strange things happen around here.  Even before we manage our coffee in the morning.  The other day we woke up to the dogs barking and discovered they had somehow caught a Drimmo, which is a giant Gambian rat up in a tree.   We took some video footage of us trying to get it out of the tree and the resulting disaster when it jumped out. 

Warning, this video is not for the weak at heart. 

Well, after 16 months of development I am very proud to annouce that our software product .geographical media is finally availabled to everyone via our website at http://geographicalmedia.org. 

I hope everyone who visits my website will take the time to try out of software.  Its free and makes a great blogging platform.  If you are thinking of starting a blog or you or your company needs a website please try us out!  This website (joshua.perina.com) is running the product. 

Here's the sales pitch:

Geographical media is a powerful, easy to use, web publishing platform.  It features an incredible site design tool.  Based on the principles of CSS Zen Garden and a community developed style library every website owner is able to create a completely custom, great looking web design in minutes without knowing anything about web development. 

In addition to the powerfull design tools the system features a community aggregation network with incredible SEO possibilities.  Every media item, blog post, video, photo, article or real estate property posted in the system is indexed and immediately linked to and from already established media items in the network.

The product is designed to scale from individual bloggers or small businesses, to large newspapers or companies requiring community building websites. 

Signing up and creating a website with geographical media takes seconds and is fully hosted.  The system is entirely free, with inexpensive upgrades to use your own domain name or purchase more space. 

Oh, and advertisments will never be put on your website (unless you put them there).   

Thank you very much to my friends and family who have supported me over this time and I'd like to particularly say thank you to our small team here in The Gambia.  Thank you Mela, Lamin, Anna. 

If you want a website come try it out! 

http://geographicalmedia.org

Yes, Ultimate Frisbee is played in The Gambia.  For anyone who may be travelling to The Gambia, or passing through there is a regular pickup game which occurs on Mondays and Thursdays at 5:45 pm at The Medical Research Center (MRC), ask any taxi for directions.  If you are interested to play feel free to just drop by, or if you want to confirm feel free to drop me a note by posting a comment on this post or send me a mail through my contact box.

The game has been running since Spring 2007 for over a year now.  If there are is any other Frisbee going on in West Africa I would love to hear about it as I'm planning on doing some travelling beginning next month (May 2008). 

Anyone is welcome!

This is a screenshot from my desktop...

Sorry guys, but maybe this will solve that beetle problem you have going.

BTW, my desktop background is from http://www.webdesignerwall.com .  I am a big fan of his work.

I recently converted our web application .geographical media to use SQLite as its primary database (relegating SqlExpress to the backup position).  This posed some interesting challenges but overall I was very pleased with the result.  As they say on their website sqlite  is small, fast and reliable.  For us, the major reason for change was to reduce load on our hosting servers enabling us to put many more websites on a single server. 

Our product is built with .NET and we used the System.Data.SQLite library built by Robert Simpson which seems to be extremely well written and was super easy to use.  Great job by Robert and thank you. 

One of the most interesting things I faced during the conversion was the experience I had with one of our more common queries.  We use a LIKE query with a wildcard at the end to enable us to search a hierarchical structure for inclusive location information.  We have a path column which contains data like the following:

geo-Africa-Gambia-

geo-Africa-Egypt-

geo-Africa-Egypt-Cairo

geo-Africa-Senegal

Now to query this table for all records in Egypt we use the query:

    SELECT * FROM Table WHERE Path LIKE 'geo-Africa-Egypt-%'

This has always been fine in our SqlExpress days as even when we have had to do complex queries against 10s of thousands of records the response time was always under 100ms.  So it was with shock and concern that after converting to SQLite I suddently found the same queries taking as much as 16 seconds to run on the same machine! 

Fortunately for me a man name Jim Lyon, way back in september of 2003, wrote a document which both explained and solved my dilemma.  His document can be found here  as is an invaluable document about optimizing your SQLite databases and queries.  The crux of the problem is this

 The GLOB and LIKE operators are expensive in SQLite because they can't make use of an index.

There is some reason for this but fortunately for me our LIKE query just has a wildcard at the end.  Jim explains all the details, but in the end it is possible to optimize this query to look like the following:

    SELECT * FROM Table WHERE Path >= 'geo-Africa-Egypt-' AND Path < 'geo-Africa-Egypt-zzz'

There MUST be an index on the Path column for this to work.  By adding the 'zzz' at the end the query will naturally select everything in the alphabetic sort order between the first and second query parameters. 

The end result was spectacular, my newly optimized queries were now running super fast, on both SQLite (~50ms) and even improved on SqlExpress (~60ms).  I have to give credit to Microsoft, as they must have some optimizations already built in for this type of query and its been making my life easy up until this point.     

I think making the switch to SQLite is a good on and can be extremely rewarding for most applications.  Overall, to get the performance I was looking for it made me a bit more honest of a programmer, I had to ensure all my queries were in proper transactions and indexes were explicitly stated.  Sometimes I found the documentation on the SQLite website a bit lacking. 

Today I encountered a problem where in IE7 and IE6 it appeared as if some parts of my CSS style was not loading.  I tracked the problem down to what appears to be a file size limit of ~288kb for .css files.  In IE only the first 288kb in a file will be read and processed.  Any CSS after 288kb will be ignored. 

In this particular case I was loaded a CSS file of 347kb. 

Firefox does not seem to have a limit. 

The limit appears to be a "per file" limit.  You can split the CSS into two files and it will work fine. 

You may be asking yourself, why would you ever have a CSS file which is 347kb?  Good question... but we use a large file size in our site design application at http://rhythmwebdesign.com   The CSS ends up being gzipped and is only 35kb when you download it when loading the designer. 

Here are some samples of some basic javascript transition effects.  We are thinking about putting some of these nifty effects into certain areas of .geographical media.  It seems to be rather trendy these days to do so. 

I have created the following effects: Fade In, Fade Out, Fly Out and Drop Out, Drop Back

The effects are all very easy to do with Javascript adjusting the style properties of the object you wish to have the effect on.  I found the opacity properties here at quirksmode  http://www.quirksmode.org/js/opacity.html .  I consider quirksmode to be the best source of well tested solutions to some of the more complex aspects of javascript programming.  I've used his work often and would recommend his site to anyone.

Here are the sample effects:

http://joshua.perina.com/transition-effects

I'll write more and explain the code once I've cleaned it up a bit.  At the moment it's just 1/2 hour quick prototype.

So if you have been wondering what I have been up to the past couple of years, here's a quick update.  Basically, I've been living in The Gambia, West Africa, where I started a company building web publishing software.  Thus all the postings about "new version released" and so on.  The Gambia  is a warm little country and I live with my girl friend/business partner Melanie Radtke. She's a gem and one of the main reasons I am here.  We've been working at our little company with the help of some good staff we've managed to find here.   We live just a few minutes walk from the Atlantic ocean, in fact, I can hear the surf crashing as I write this and this evening I took our two dogs down to the beach to watch the sunset and drink a beer.  Did I mention we have 2 dogs?  Mela is not here at the moment.  She's off visiting her family and friends in Germany. 

Life is very simple right now.  I spend many, many hours being very productive on the computer, trying to build our product.  I'll be posting more information here about that later.  Suffice it to say though, this website runs on it, which is why you may find I change the design a lot.  (Our product makes changing the design very easy) 

I'm planning to post a few different blogs channels here on the site.  One on web design and technology since thats what I spend a lot of time on these days.  Maybe I can help some one out with something I've learned.  I've learned countless things from the people online.  Second, I am planning to organize some thoughts on Theology.  Which I spend a lot time thinking about as well.  Third, more postings just like this, about whats happening in my life, where I'm at and whats going on so all my friends and family can keep up with me. 

Today we released version 1.24 of our new web publishing software .geographical media.  If you are wondering what it is all about you'll have to wait but the documentation will be coming soon! 

http://geographicalmedia.org