Archive for March, 2010

Server fail

Thursday, March 25th, 2010

The beep of a server failure notification is a sysdmin’s most hated sound. What’s worse though is if you don’t get the alert. I won’t go into detail of why I didn’t get the alert (new server, old phone basically) but it meant I didn’t get the SMS alert. As with all server problems they always happen at the worst time. This one was just before I went to bed, just after I’d checked my email for the last time. When I got up this morning I was greeted by an inbox full of notifications from humans and monitoring software. The whole site was returning Not Found errors.

xkcd

It didn’t take too long to find the problem.

xfs_force_shutdown(sdf,0x2) called from line 1043 of file /build/buildd/linux-ec2-2.6.31/fs/xfs/xfs_log.c. Return address = 0xc02ea4e3
Filesystem "sdf": xfs_log_force: error 5 returned.

This means that the filesystem that carries the site had died. The site is hosted on an Amazon EC2 instance, with the site and database on a separate Amazon EBS volume. The latter appears to have let out the magic smoke. Luckily it just took a quick reboot to bring it all back to life and shift it to new hardware. No data seems to have been lost.

All I can do is apologise to everyone who has been inconvenienced by this, and assure everyone that I’ve updated the monitoring procedures to ensure this doesn’t happen again. This includes sending the messages to the phone I just use for alerts, a Samsung B2100 that won’t let me down. It’s basically indestructible and the battery lasts nearly a month. Take a look!

Tags:
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Sneak peek at new feature

Sunday, March 21st, 2010

One of the big features coming for Beetight Pro users will be asset tracking. This will let you keep track of all of your hive components, so you know which hives have got which honey supers and so on, as well as which parts came from where and which need repair. There will be come pretty cool stuff involving the 2D barcodes to keep track of it all. One main part of this will be the hive organiser. This is a little video with a sneak peek of how it is coming along. It will almost certainly change quite a bit before it’s done, but it gives you an idea of how it will work. On the right you have the “shed” which hold all of the components not currently being used. You can drag and drop the parts onto the hive, then drag to rearrange. Obviously things will look a bit different for top bar hives, Beehaus etc.

This is at an early stage, so it may be a little while before it’s fully complete. I do hope to release some bits for preview a bit earlier. Asset tracking will be a Pro-only feature, so upgrade now if you want to be first to try it out!

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments »

Improvements to Beetight mobile

Sunday, March 21st, 2010

It’s 9am on a Sunday and I’m working. I’ve just released an update with a number of improvements to the mobile version of Beetight.

Firstly, it’s now possible to upgrade to Pro from within the mobile version. You still have to go to the normal PayPal site, as they seem to not have a smartphone-optimised one, but that seems to work ok.

I’ve been having reports that the site can’t be accessed from a Blackberry. I don’t have a Blackberry, and I only have Macs and Linux computers, so I can’t run the Blackberry emulation software. This means there’s no way of me realistically developing for it, so I’ve instead set it so that Blackberrys are taken to the full site, rather than the mobile version.

There are some cases where people may want to visit the full site from their phone, so I’ve made it possible to override the mobile-detection. Click the link at the bottom of the mobile front page and you’ll be taken to the full site. You’ll stay on that version until you click the link up on the top of the screen near the login/logout links to return to the mobile version.

The launch is going really well, so I’m very excited and want to push out updates as soon as I can. We’ve had over 200 users sign up in the past couple of days, and a few Pro upgrades which is great. The more people upgrade, the more time I can justify spending working on Beetight! This is not my day job, so at the moment I’ve working on it mornings, evenings and weekends (much to the annoyance of my fiancee).

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Beetight buzz

Friday, March 19th, 2010

It’s been a day since our “launch” and we’ve had some great feedback so far. We’ve got over 200 users now, more than half of those in the past 24 hours. There have also been some very nice blog posts about us. Two of my favourites are this one on Mark’s Bee Haven and this one on This Is Not A Farm. We’re so Star Trek, apparently! There’s been a few positive mentions on Twitter too.

Do keep your feedback coming in, and let me know if you’ve written something about us and I’ll give it a link. Likewise if you see something written about us elsewhere. And yes, I do keep referring to “us” and “we” when it is only me here!

- Matt

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

Buzz buzz tweet tweet

Friday, March 19th, 2010

We’ve now got a Twitter account, so if you use it you can follow @beetightapp for Beetight updates that don’t warrant a full blog post.

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Introducing Beetight Pro

Thursday, March 18th, 2010

Until today, there was a limit of six hives per user. I’m happy to (quietly) announce the pro version of Beetight. How does 1000 hives sound? I reckon that should be enough for most people. I wanted to give it a price that was affordable to everyone. I hope that people find $15 per year to be reasonable for what you get!

At the moment, upgrading to Pro gets you the increased hive limit, but I hope to soon add lots of new features for Pro users. This includes more comprehensive asset tracking, as well as an offline version of the mobile app for those of us with bad phone reception. I’ve a few ideas for harvest tracking that may be interesting.

Let me know what you think. Is the price reasonable? Will you be upgrading? What sort of extra features would you like? As ever, keep your bug reports coming in. They really help.

So, what are you waiting for? Upgrade now!

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Welcome to the Beetight blog

Tuesday, March 16th, 2010

Hi. I’ve started this blog to give updates on the development of Beetight. I expect I will also include some more general beekeeping notes, and thoughts on hive record keeping. We’re starting to have the first signs of spring down here in Cornwall, and my bees are flying, though there’s not a lot of forage out there at the moment. Hopefully soon I’ll be able to start using it for real inspections!

That’s all for now. If you want to keep up to date, subscribe to our RSS feed.

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Uncategorized | 8 Comments »