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Check out this quick video demo of Google Street View app running on a prototype Google Android mobile phone. Compass mode: nice.
Was up in Maine for the weekend with only sporadic connection to the internet. So of course the server started acting up. Luckily just the mail server, and at least it never went down completely. Made in back to NYC late last night and have been working away this morning. I think I have it sorted out now but we'll see if that holds up.
I'm going to move mail services to the new server this week and then start migrating people over. The new Qmail Toaster Plus packages should be much easier to manage, should do a *much* better job against spam (which has been a real issue,) and should be easier to maintain and upgrade, hopefully making worrisome weekends like this one a thing of the past. We'll see.
Well I missed my April 1st launch by a little bit. I am the worst estimator of time ever. I really got psychologically stuck. It's the same point I always get stuck at. I just don't want to finish it. I start to get cold sweats and then the next thing I know I'm day dreaming about how to start all over again and build it even better. But I will not let that happen again. I am going to finish this one no matter what. And now finally in the last week I've made some good progress.
The new server was necessary, and everything is going well on that front. But in some ways it was just a giant procrastination. Like, "I really don't want to finish this software so let's buy some hardware and get wrapped up in learning new stuff on that front." But still, like I said, it did need to be done, just maybe not in the order I did it.
Anyway, I'm going to try to get back to some blogging. I just haven't been able to find my focus. I know what this page is about, but I doubt it's clear to anyone else. So I'm still working on that. And to restart things off in a totally lame way here's two computer security links that probably won't interest anyone and that, further, I won't even offer any comment on.
Exploiting Network Cards, and a post about the impact of the major Debian OpenSSL vulnerability on other *nix distributions. Yikes. Scary world out there.
The new server, cedar.datamantic.com, should go online tomorrow. Won't make much of a difference to anyone on the outside, but it will add a large measure of redundancy to my setup giving me a little more peace of mind.
In the past I've used a couple different web tools, like dnsreport.com, to check on my domain DNS settings. But now these have gone for pay and I definitely don't feel like paying. Luckily I just found intodns.com which is free and much nicer / cleaner looking to boot. Thanks to whoever set that up!
Piwik open source web analytics. Still alpha, but I've got my eyes on this one. Will definitely be trying this out.
VOIP over WiFi on the iPhone. This is on a jailbroken iPhone (hacked to allow 3rd party apps.) Definitely not ready for prime time, but at least it's a start. They got Skype working well although with a little delay (~2 seconds.) SkypeOut was even more flakey, but with a few successes. So at least it seems like the feasibility has been established.
After June, when 3rd party apps are officially allowed development of stuff like this should be much easier. I predict it will be usable pretty soon after that. But the deal breaker might be the "no background apps" rule from Apple. If you can't leave Skype running in the background then it's not as useful. If someone wanted to call you they'd have to text or email you to turn on the app so you could receive the call! Still, even having just outgoing calls would be useful.
I complain here a lot about running a mail server. There's a new package out based on Qmail (which is what I presently run, but in a slightly out of date manner,) called Qmail Toaster Plus. I'm very excited about it. It's just the basic Qmail package, but with a whole bunch of patches and add-ons selected and bundled together for you. Or, in other words, it looks like it will take a lot of pain out of installing, and more importantly, staying up to date, as it's now available as a yum repository. Probably the coolest tool that QTP includes is qtp-newmodel which will upgrade a Qmail Toaster installation automatically, but it does it by building the new installation in a sandbox - without touching your current installation. At that point you can do some testing to make sure everything works before you take your still running older installation down and replace it with the new one. That just feels so much safer to me. Why doesn't everything work like that?
Great script for analyzing MySQL my.cnf values: tuning-primer.sh
cd /usr/local/sbin wget http://www.day32.com/MySQL/tuning-primer.sh chmod 700 tuning-primer.sh tuning-primer.sh
Google's new App Engine was the big story yesterday. Developers can now build web services and run them on Google's computers. Amazon's combinded offerings of S3, EC2, and SimpleDB is probably the closest competitor. But here is an intriguing theory about their plans which even goes beyond what Amazon is doing:
App Engine comes with its own development setup that runs off your computer (available for Windows, OSX, and Linux). You develop the application on your computer, run it, test it, add features, and then upload it to Google's computers. My question is this: What's stopping Google from turning the local development code into a full desktop-based runtime for web applications?In this version of things Google is taking on not just Amazon, but Adobe AIR and Microsoft's Silverlight.