Welcome

[Ross Moffett]

Welcome ya'll, it's been wonderful to speak with other ZunZun enthusiasts as we worked to get the site back online and functioning as one of the best, and few free-to-use curve fitting websites, now at http://www.findcurves.com!   I will be linking often to http://www.findcurves.com so that it might get indexed and become easy to find for others, as right now the first page of Google is crowded almost entirely with commercial curve-fitting products.  Spread the word on your blogs and social media and it will help get the site back on the map for the students, scientists and engineers who benefit from it.

I was excited to show ZunZun to a fellow engineer about a month ago and was devastated to read that James Phillips has been unresponsive and is presumed to be severely ill, with his great work having fallen off of the web.  Send your good vibes James' way, that he may get well and return to health.

In the meantime, I have a couple months of free Google Cloud services.  I will put up a donation link soon as James has generously funded what looks to be about $1200 a year in site fees which I don't entirely want to carry.  In worst case I can keep the site up, but running slower than we're accustomed to.  At the request of donors I may boost the CPU to speed what can be some fairly long running calculations - ZunZun is designed to multi-thread and will likely take whatever we feed it to speed up calculations.  I can do that at least until funding runs out.

If you find anything broken or see a dead link, please report it here.  

I will track feature requests, if there are any, in Atlassian and work on them as time allows.  

I'll also try to document what I needed to do to get this site online to make it easier for others to spool up their own ZunZun on their own machines or virtual servers and contribute to the code.

I'll end this introductory message here, reminding you again to please send your well-wishes to James that he might return to us healthy and with a verse that appears often in his site.

Ephesians 4:28
Let him that stole steal no more: but rather let him labour, working with his hands the thing which is good, that he may have to give to him that needeth.  

Thanks for your labor that has benefitted us all greatly in our studies and our careers, James.  It's a rare thing for a person to give so much, so freely and generously.  I'm happy to be a part of getting your fantastic work back into the world generating science that benefits everyone.

 - Ross Moffett

webmaster, http://www.findcurves.com / ZunZun mirror

[Ross Moffett]

Hey, Daniel reached out to say he also mirrored the site and also could not post on the original group to tell everyone.

http://zunzun-clone.com/

Curious how much you had to modify the code, if at all?

[Daniel Mulkey]

Hi Ross,

Thanks for putting together the new group and new site.

I had to make some small modifications to the site (e.g. change render_to_response(...) to render(request, ...) and modify things in settings.py). Really, I had to try the whole process 2 or 3 times until I figured out what to change and what not to change. Then there's the extra work of figuring out the domain, services, setting up firewall, LetsEncrypt, etc. All new stuff for me.

It's running with Gunicorn and Nginx on the cheapest Linode tier available, so I don't expect performance to be great. If I upgrade the VM tier then it should improve. Right now it's $5 / month and I have a $100 free credit to burn through.

I haven't changed any details like the contact info or set up an email account yet. It's essentially a complete clone of the original site.

Should we consolidate? It seems silly to run two identical websites. My goal was to continue James' contribution to the community, so I don't really care whether that's my version or someone else's. How much time are you planning to put into this regularly?

Cheers,

[Ross Moffett]

Hey Daniel,

That all sounds very familiar, exactly what I ended up with. 

I don't anticipate putting tons of time into development, I have lots of code to maintain professionally already.  I can keep it online though. At some point I may have professional reasons to explore adding n-dimensional solving and see if I can split the load into a GPU to make it faster. I'm also interested in exploring neural solves, this is a genetic approach. 

I've been looking at ways to reduce the bill and one is to reserve a virtual instance of an older server model for a year. I'm currently on pay-as-you-go Google Compute Engine - just because it was what James used and cheaper than Azure which I have a substantial experience with. I got the cost down to $50/mo for four cores or $100/mo for 8 cores if I commit to a year - which would unfortunately keep me from spooling up extra cores on demand.  With donations we could speed things up, at $600/year I can indefinitely self fund it like James did. 

Whether to consolidate is up to you - it never hurts to have more mirrors up and $5/mo sounds like a great deal despite the performance hit.  What does Linode pricing look like at 4 and 8 cores?  Is it affordable at 16 or more cores?

[Daniel Mulkey]

Hi Ross,

You sound like more of a software engineer than I, so I'd err on the side of taking mine down in favor of yours. I've already gotten a good learning experience out of it, so I'm happy to do whatever's the right solution for the community.

Shared CPU on Linode is:

* 4 cores - $40 / mo

* 6 cores - $80 / mo

*.8 cores - $160 / mo

* 16 cores - $320 / mo

Dedicated CPU is:

* 4 cores - $60 / mo

*.8 cores - $120 / mo

* 16 cores - $240 / mo

More details here.

I think the pricing difference comes from different RAM and SSD values for the dedicated CPU versions.

Are there any companies that rely on this enough to fund it? I don't know what business models are successful for this sort of thing. Perhaps NumFOCUS would help?

[Ross Moffett]

Those more expensive instances probably do come packaged with SSDs and more memory. I got the pricing down by using old generation servers and dropping memory to 8gb or below with conventional storage.  Google has some pretty diverse options for reserved instances. 

My first concern is leaving ZunZun freely available to the public. There are a bunch of commercial products that do this which are in my view less user friendly and often without the function finder.  A couple of businesses owners offered to pitch in.  If you guys want to chime in publicly or privately as you prefer with how you'd like your donations spent, how much you can contribute and what your expectations are we can zero in on a long term plan.  I'm confident I can fund 4 cores at these reserved prices. We could use donations to bump up performance from there. 

I hadn't heard of NumFocus. They sponsor a lot of ZunZuns core packages and tools I use a lot. Do you know more about them?

[Daniel Mulkey]

I don't know much about NumFOCUS. Their application page is here. Reading through, it looks like there's a chance that zunzun might fall within their guidelines. It might need more of an active developer community though. Your earlier list of ideas might be a good start for continued work.

Previously, pyeq3 and the zunzun site were all run solely by James (correct me if I'm wrong). If this looked more like a community supporting development and infrastructure, then maybe they'd be interested in helping out. Membership might also help spread the word. I at least have never seen anything as helpful as zunzun, so I think the value it provides aligns well with NumFOCUS's goals.

[Julia Potter]

Thank you so much for getting the new site up and running. All the best to you and to James, I hope he is well.

[Michael Colalillo]

Man, it is uncanny finding you guys having this conversation here right now. I was mulling over all week about how zunzun should be back in the world, and figured I'd grab a Linode instance this weekend and spend some time doing... oh, wow, it seems you guys are all over it!

Getting some financial support might be a good idea, but I'm not sure about how the original copyright belonging to James R. Phillips.  If it has to keep that license, can it also be transferred to an open source license?  This is a good question.  Whether or not NumFocus is something that would work out, it might not be a bad idea to organize some group/foundation/organization to have a few folks at the wheel.  I'm thinking long term sustainability.

I was thinking about following the podcast business model, asking for donations that get converted into server resources, perhaps even setting up a Patreon account for it.  So many folks found the site useful, but not everyone is up to the task of putting the site up on a web server.  I can see how some folks might donate a little.

What do you guys think about the importance of the name?  Will a lot of past users be looking for zunzun.com and not finding your "mirrors"? Have either of you looked into getting the domain?

[Ross Moffett]

Hey Michael,

Here is more information about the open source BSD license that this site is released under.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_licenses#2-clause_license_(%22Simplified_BSD_License%22_or_%22FreeBSD_License%22)

https://bitbucket.org/zunzuncode/zunzunsite3/src/master/LICENSE.txt

This license comes free of restrictions for use except for the inclusion of the license terms in the source code.

To get the name, the zunzun domain needs to expire or handed off by the owner and that hasn't happened yet.

The name is important.. this site http://www.findcurves.com doesn't even appear in google yet for most relevant search terms.  You'd have to know its name already, as well as what it does.  In time, if people link to the site and talk about it online, it will index better.

[Michael Colalillo]

Ah, OK.  Good deal on the license; I didn't realize that.

If James were available, we could ask to purchase the domain from him. I think it's at GoDaddy.  It doesn't expire until November 2021. I don't know what it might cost to try purchasing it with their "Domain Broker Service."  Or if that would even work before November if James isn't available.

There are some search engine optimization stuff that could be done to help folks find it.  It also doesn't hurt to have an SSL cert these days, which also improves your search standings.  Daniel definitely has the right idea with setting up the Let's Encrypt cert.  If y'all decide to ditch his and go with findcurves.com, you'd want to add that, for sure.

I'm a little busy at the moment with a new work project I've taken on, so I probably couldn't contribute too much for a few months.  What I'd love to do is a bit of modernization of the front end, with a more graphically intuitive series of spaces for entering things, and going through the workflow, rather than those dropdowns.  I mean, I know how to use them from long experience, but they're not obvious in a modern web app.  All that would be just front end UI stuff, leaving the back-end of calculating and finding results untouched.

In doing so, it might be my inclination to not have the site peppered with Bible quotes, James' faith notwithstanding.

[Ross Moffett]

On the domain - I saw that info.  It's weird because the site has been down since April but the domain was renewed in November 2020, or maybe prepaid before that, I don't know.  In any case, domain auction is probably the only option and I wasn't going to mention it to avoid competition.  It's a long way off also.

I looked into user experience improvements, Django is apparently the back-end for a lot of what I would describe as better user experiences.  As an engineer's engineer though, I don't give a crap about the user experience if it's functional so I was planning to spend more time on extending functionality and/or performance.  I would enjoy a user experience overhaul, but not enough to do it myself this year.

I can share my code whenever anyone expresses interest in working on it - I just have to take out some private details in the config file.  As Daniel mentioned there was some light editing required to deal with some deprecated packages.

I haven't figured out how to apply https yet, embarrassed to say.  On the other site I maintain, Azure takes the certs and handles that.  Google Compute Engine seems to have some front end for that as well but it's not working as described in their support page and I haven't read into applying them with NGINX.  Anyone have pointers for that?

The help page for understanding curve fitting is a dead link too, I'm not sure where to put that code or how to link it in.

[derek ward]

Well so very glad to see this return! One issue though - the curve fits all run fine but when you go to examine individual equations the link takes you back to the start menu ....no way to examine the solutions. This was in both chrome and edge. 

[Ross Moffett]

Can you explain more the steps you took to get that result?  Which equations were you examining, and were you using the function finder?

[derek ward]

Wait for solutions to compute - look at the rank order list...everyone has a 'go to this equation' link for coefficients etc - all link back to main page rather than the solution html page usually generated, 

[Ross Moffett]

It sounds like you are using the function finder, can you explain what your setup was like there please and attach the data?  "Wait for solutions to compute" is skipping a lot of steps and will make it hard to reproduce the issue.

[derek ward]

Yes it is with function finder - try this in three rows - then when its done try to open any solution and you are back at home menu - no way to get coefficients etc

3.70E+01
4.00E+01
5.70E+01
7.50E+01
7.50E+01
7.60E+01
7.70E+01
8.76E+01
9.00E+01
1.05E+02
1.55E+02
1.55E+02
2.03E+02
0.00E+00

5.35E+01
5.00E+01
5.30E+01
4.00E+01
5.00E+01
5.20E+01
5.50E+01
2.80E+01
5.50E+01
2.20E+01
3.82E+01
4.50E+01
5.00E+01
0.00E+00

8.62E+01
1.31E+02
3.45E+02
4.13E+02
9.03E+02
5.46E+02
9.22E+02
5.10E+02
1.03E+03
4.90E+02
3.95E+03
4.35E+03
4.64E+03
0.00E+00

[derek ward]

columns not rows - my bad