Success often comes the hard way - Mac OS X Lion, Roaringapps and Wikidot problems

A while ago I have blogged about RoaringApps, the large(st?) online collection of Mac software which tells you which apps work with the new Mac OS X Lion and which don't. The site is awesome and we knew it would be an ultimate success. Which also mean it would have a lot of traffic.

A few days ago, when it was clear that Lion would be released within the next few days, we tuned our servers, double-checked configurations and launched extra application backends to handle the expected extra traffic.

So yesterday was the day Lion was released.

Look around your office. In ours we can see that not every single thing is actually related to the work we are doing. Each and every one of us tries to adapt the work environment and workplace to fit our needs and build a place where we can feel good, relaxed and comfortable.

That's why some of us have photos of wives/girlfriends on their desks or kids' teddies. We also love our couch where we can sit down with a notebook in a bit more comfortable position than at the desk. Or take a nap when working overtime.

July is going to be an important month for all Mac OS X users — the long-awaited new version of Mac OS X 10.7 Lion is about to be released. While the system will probably be a cool improvement over the previous version, there is one more factor that all Mac users should take into account before merrily jumping onto the bleeding edge of Apple products. And this factor is:

APPS COMPATIBILITY

Our daily computer usage relies on various pieces of software: browsers, text editors, instant messengers etc. Now, before we upgrade to Lion it would be cool to know if the apps we rely on would keep working without glitches. Because there is no guarantee that the upgrade will not break the software which was designed for a previous Mac OS X version. Although software developers have early access to the upcoming upgrades, probably not all of them make their apps Lion-ready at the launch day.

Meet RoaringApps.com! Rroarr!

Not only RoaringApps is the coolest site on the web that will keep you informed which apps are Lion-ready and which still have issues, but this site is built on Wikidot and uses a bunch of (pretty advanced) Wikidot features. Honestly, this site is just beautiful. And we are always excited to see sites made that well!

Today Piotr (also known as Gabrys) starts his new job at Allegro.pl, the largest auction website in Poland, with headquarters in Poznań. Unfortunately for us it also means he is leaving Wikidot, which is now official.

Piotr has been working with the Wikidot project almost from its beginning, being our very first part-time employee, and for the last year working full time in our core team, mostly developing software and managing server architecture, but also actively participating in the Wikidot community.

This week has been a time of upgrading software that Wikidot uses to serve its services to the world. We've upgraded PHP (the language that Wikidot is mostly written in) to version 5.3. It doesn't really change anything important, but "new is always better". Well, almost always.

We had an issue with upgrading libxml2 which resulted in a broken Feed module. This was caused by a small change in the library that required an upgrade to PHP 5.3 - but we were still using PHP 5.2, which as it appeared was not fully compatible. To fix the Feed module we downgraded libxml2 back to a version used before, but this was a temporary solution. A few days later, we upgraded both PHP and libxml2. Starting from 15 June, Wikidot servers run on PHP 5.3 without any serious problems. We only located one minor error in our code which was silently ignored before, and now generates a warning in the error log.

Since its early days Wikidot supported LaTeX-style equations in wiki pages. Since I come from academic and university circles, I felt that embedding math within wiki pages is very important for a project like ours. Right now, almost 5,000 Wikidot sites use LaTeX-style math expressions to publish scientific results or enable collaboration between researchers or students.

Today Wikidot was off-line for about 5 minutes due to database operations blocking access to page revision table. We added a column to mark tag changes in page revisions. This took very long time unexpectedly (on the test server it was a quick operation and we do have a full copy of Wikidot database there). Also it caused SELECT operations on that table to block until the ALTER operation finished.

Wikidot service is up again and we don't expect any major problems.

BTW, what we did was a preparation to implementing a wish to store tag changes in revision data rather than relying on revision comments only.

The photo comes from Flickr