At home, I browsed a bit the internet for that song and stumbled upon a version of the song that might be even better than the original. Check out JoeySuki’s remix:

Very nice track!

The site doesn’t contain any i18n, neither I used any PHP framework or other toolkits to built it up. It’s really just some stupid likes of PHP code bound together with the Facebook SDK. Now that’s what I’d call RAD!

It was pretty interesting for me to see, how little effort it takes to “socialize” a site, especially when it’s built from ground up with Facebook-operability in mind.

Yesterday, I additionally implemented an automatic Twitter status update. I’ve registered @likemichde on Twitter, created an Twitter Application, generated access tokens for it and implemented automatic twitter publishing within several lines of code, thanks to Abraham Williams’ twitteroauth for PHP.

It’s very neat how modern media allows us to spread information all over the planet, even with only little knowledge of technology. And if you put in the effort to dig deeper, you use these new technologies to reach even more people and provide connectivity to all kind of different sites.

For example, my photography site mariusmm.com is using Yahoo!’s YQL to query my flickr account for the latest photos and randomly pic a handful of them for displaying as a slideshow. And I’ve implemented everything in 100% JavaScript, there’s no single line PHP or any other server-side language.

First of all: Hell, yeah! iTunes Cloud finally removed the pain and anger brought by Apple’s policy of having an iPod Touch/iPhone only linked with one iTunes Library. For me, it has always been a pain to synchronize my music in a smooth way all over my devices (iMac, MacBook, iPhone), especially when it came to MP3s. The fact that iTunes didn’t consider MP3s when using “transfer purchases” took any chance (except of using “Home Sharing”) to get MP3s synchronized all over. With iTunes content I permanently had to go that way: Buy them on my iPhone, connect the phone to my iMac when I was at home, “transfer purchases”, reconnect the iPhone to my MacBook when I was at work, “transfer purchases”, all done. But with MP3s this didn’t work.

Now thanks to iTunes Match and iTunes Cloud, MP3s are being matched to actual iTunes Store content and, if nothing could be found, the MP3s are being uploaded to the cloud, from where they can be streamed/downloaded to all registered devices. Sounds awesome, huh?

Well, actually, it really is awesome. There are some downsides, for example the *very* slow iTunes Match servers for uploading data. I’m not sure if that’s only because of the instant heavy load that recently hit the servers or if Apple just didn’t spend enough money for the server’s to be the dog’s balls. Anyhow, besides of that everything runs just fine so far. Streaming/downloading works with good speed (no endless seconds of buffering, nor interrupts while playing), artwork yet seems to be a little problem since here it doesn’t seem to get synchronized instantly all over my devices and the iTunes Match recognition works okay (only have/had to upload around 1k songs of nearly 5k).

The only thing that really bothers me is the fact that my iPhone actually gets flooded with music and the only way I found to remove recently “streamed” (or “streamed and automatically downloaded) music is by scrolling through my list with nearly 5k rows and swipe-to-remove each song I’d like not to have on my iPhone anymore, so I can use the 16GB for more than just audio.

It would be really nice if someone could point me a better solution to fix that issue or, if there is none, if Apple could please implement a feature that allows me to “clear the least played songs”.

Oh well.

iTunes Match

I thought, it might be a cool idea to actually proof that something like that should be possible within a few lines of code. No C code, no Objective-C, even more simple: AppleScript (and a little bit of Bash scripting).

However, so I just took about an hour and a half and wrote down this little bad boy:

global used_codes
global code_used

on run
	set used_codes to {}
end run

on idle
	set promocodes to paragraphs of (do shell script "/opt/local/bin/wget --quiet -O - http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/166916511.rss | while read sentence; do for word in $sentence; do echo $word | grep '^[A-Z0-9]\\{12\\}' | sed 's/\\(.\\{12\\}\\).*/\\1/'; done; done | sort | uniq")
	repeat with promocode in promocodes
		set code_used to false
		repeat with used_code in used_codes
			if promocode = used_code then
				set code_used to true
			end if
		end repeat
		if code_used = false then
			tell application "iTunes"
				launch
				activate
				open location "itmss://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZFinance.woa/wa/freeProductCodeWizard?code=" & promocode
				copy promocode to the end of used_codes
				set used_codes to used_codes & promocode
			end tell
		end if
	end repeat
	return 30
end idle

Simply hack it into your AppleScript editor and save it as “Application” with the “Stay Open” option clicked. Now after double-clicking the file that has just been created the script starts fetching a Twitter RSS-feed (in this case @verbsapp’s, heh) every 30 seconds, grabs all iTunes promo-codes it can find and automagically redeems them in the iTunes store. If the could is still valid – lucky you. If not, better luck next time! In any case each code will be added to a temporary “black list” so it won’t be redeemed again.

Feel free to customize and use this script! GNU GPL v2 and stuff. Enjoy.

//update: I’ve just adapted the script a bit more to include promo codes with more than 12 characters length. Besides, I’ve applied John’s “patch” to it – thanks for that one John!

global used_codes
global code_used

on run
	set used_codes to {}
end run

on idle
	set promocodes to paragraphs of (do shell script "for word in `/usr/bin/lwp-download 'http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/166916511.rss' -`; do echo $word | grep '^[A-Z0-9]\\{12,16\\}' | sed 's/\\(.\\{12,16\\}\\).*/\\1/'; done | sort | uniq")
	repeat with promocode in promocodes
		set code_used to "false"
		repeat with used_code in used_codes
			if promocode as string is used_code as string then
				set code_used to "true"
			end if
		end repeat
		if code_used is "false" then
			tell application "iTunes"
				display dialog "Found a new code: " & promocode & " - use it now?"
				launch
				activate
				copy promocode to the end of used_codes
				set used_codes to used_codes & promocode
				open location "itmss://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZFinance.woa/wa/freeProductCodeWizard?code=" & promocode
			end tell
		end if
	end repeat
	return 30
end idle

(just wanted to have that said)

It’s a hardware-unlocked model I bought from a shop on the first of February 2010, it’s in best condition (as the pictures show) and I even ship it within its original packing plus the bill (so you even have warranty left on it). I’m actually only intending to ship it within Germany. For more information, just read the description of the eBay auction.

Good luck bidding!

Enjoy!

However, I could philosophize even more about the pros and cons of this themeable-web-interface-for-YQL but I’m actually not that much into it to do so. The reason for registering was mainly for the hype’s sake and besides, I actually planned to reserve my everywhere used nickname “devilx” – unfortunately it was already taken by an as-it-seems porn addicted guy.
If this guy should coincidentally follow my blog and read this: I would be very thankful, if you could pass me that subdomain name, so I can make use of it for more than just an empty page named “Default” and following porn. Thank you!

Oh well, enough for today. Read (someday) more on http://mariusmm.tumblr.com/. Enjoy!

Hi,

I’m having a bit of a trouble while trying to move my CandyBar’s Library from the regular Application Support directory into my Dropbox directory. I did that move on my iMac and everything worked out pretty good. I’m now having the Library running on my Dropbox, so it’s always being synced up to the cloud.

When I open my MacBook now and change the Library path to the Dropbox directory there (since those two Macs are being kept in sync via Dropbox) I can see all libraries contents, but instead of the actual icons or docks, I only see CandyBar-file-icons in the preview. I can even double-click some item from my list to view it in detail, still, no actual icon-image, only the white paper with CandyBar logo on it.

Could you please help me on this/tell me, what’s left to be done so that my sync works? I’m not expecting both CandyBars to work simultaneously, since it would probably break the Library, but at least when I run one after another (what’s the actual use-case here) I expect everything to be in sync.

Thanks in advance,
Marius.
–
Sent from my iMac.

On Nov 17, 2009, at 3:47 AM, candybar@panic.com wrote:

Hi Marius,

It’s currently not possible with Dropbox because whichever protocol Dropbox uses does not support resource forks, which is the part of the icon file where CandyBar stores icon data.

You’ll have to compress the whole library before putting it on Dropbox to make this work.

–
Les
Panic Inc.

Hm…

Update:

On 11/17/2009 97:22AM, devilx@devilx.net wrote:

Hi,

I’m having trouble in using Dropbox in combination with a popular Mac OS X application named “CandyBar” (http://www.panic.com/candybar/). The application itself provides a way to move its existing Library into a custom location, for example right into Dropbox’s folder, unfortunately the sync over two Macs fails. Please read the appended conversation I’ve already had with one of Panic’s support guys for more information.

I would really appreciate if you could provide a bugfix for this issue, to make Dropbox even more usable than it already is.

Thanks in advance and best regards,
Marius.

On Nov 18, 2009, at 11:51 AM, support@getdropbox.com wrote:

Hi Marius,

Yup, their support person is correct.

You can work around this problem by making an archive ZIP file of the file(s) and putting the archive in the Dropbox folder. Just right-click on the file (or a whole folder of files) and select “Create Archive.” The resulting .zip file is safe to put into the Dropbox folder. You can double click on the .zip file to open it and recreate the file(s).

Are are working on this. Add your voice:

https://www.dropbox.com/votebox/4/mac-resource-fork-support#votebox:0

Best,
Kevin Chu

This means: Vote people! Vote!

CandyBar makes OS X appear even more lickable than it already is. It allows to simply change each application’s icon and provides a cool management of all the available icon-sets. Besides, also the Dock appearance can be tweaked and managed. It would be really nice, if CandyBar would provide a way to sync the collection from one Mac to another, since now, I need to keep my collections on my iMac and my MacBook manually in sync, what’s pretty meh. However,  although it’s pretty pricy, it’s worth to have it.

Colloquy is the most advanced, free IRC client I’ve found yet. Its feature-list is pretty good and there’s a similar iPhone client available, too. I used this client already in 2006, when I still had my PowerBook and have to say, that it’s pretty bloated and slow on older hardware. But on the current generation of MacBooks, iMacs and MacPros it should be running like a charm.

Width Dropbox you can easily keep your files in sync over two or more different devices, regardless if it’s a PC, a Mac, a Linux or even an iPhone – all your data is always up-to-date. Besides, you can share files with friends and receive shared folder invitations yourself. 2GB of space is being provided for free, more is affordable for some cash. Though, I’d never put sensitive data “into the cloud”.

Echofon is probably the best Twitter-suite available on the Mac and the iPhone. Thanks to their Sync- and Push-Notification-Service it’s a pleasure to use Twitter, even with multiple accounts and on multiple devices. Thanks to the intelligent Sync-Service, Echofon notices when you’re not on your desktop anymore, and starts pushing notifications to your iPhone client when you get mentioned by someone else – very cool! Yet, the notifications will be pushed only every 15 minutes, but from what I’ve heard, the Echofon guys are already working on shrinking this interval. If you haven’t tried out yet – be sure to do soon!

Is there much to say about iPhoto? I think you can call it the image-management application on OS X. Since ’09 it also supports Faces & Places, what makes everything even more sexy. In combination with the photos shot on a GPS-able camera (like the iPhone) it even detects automatically, what place you’ve taken the photo. Although, yet the face-recognition doesn’t work as I would expect it to. You need high quality pictures with much contrast to get iPhoto recognize the people.

I used to be registered on Last.fm since I was using Linux with its Media-Players with Audioscrobbler plugin, so I’ve just continued using this pretty cool service. It let’s me tag the music I listen and discover new tracks I might like. I never tried out Pandora or similar services, so I can’t say whether Last.fm is better or not – I’m just used to it.

After discovering and trying out LaunchBar there was no way around it anymore – not even by using QuickSilver, what I did quite some time. LaunchBar is extremely fast, supports a ton of different Applications and even provides an easy way to write and include your own plugins. I wouldn’t want to miss it again in my daily work.

LittleSnapper in combination with its web-service (former QuickSnapper, now Ember) is a very nice enhancement to the OS X desktop, since it provides a very quick and easy way to share screenshots with others, without having to use “Grab” and manually upload the images to some service like ImageShack. In addition to the Desktop client, I also use the iPhone app to share camera-snapshots with others.

With Money managing finances became as easy as a finger-snip. I bought my license on a MacUpdate Promo for 20% less and have to say that it’s worth every penny, especially when there’s such a friendly and helpful company like Jumsoft behind. Money supports backing up the whole database to MobileMe and by that even synchronization of two Macs with each other. The iPhone client yet only supports sync over WiFi from what I’ve seen, but hopefully there will be MobileMe support in future, too.

Let me just call it “Poor man’s Photoshop” – in an excellent way! Pixelmator is, what GIMP is to the GNOME Desktop. It let’s me create/edit images in an easy and smooth way, without much knowledge of the actual application itself. Pixelmator provides me a light and intuitive application with a feature-list that fits my needs perfectly without being over-bloated.

As the name already says, Quiet Read provides you a way to temporary bookmark for example web-pages and read it later, when there’s more time for it. It’s actually the similar concept Instapaper follows, although it doesn’t really extract your site’s content for any mobile platform, nor does it have any web-service in the background to which you can sync multiple installations. MobileMe support would be a great feature, maybe Bamboo Apps will implement it some day.

Shovebox is a great companion for Things and Quiet Read which also provides a pretty cool iPhone client that’s for free. I got the App itself from within a MacHeist Bundle, where I didn’t need to pay anything for it – and maybe that’s the reason I’m actually using it. Yet, I would not really pay money on this App, since its yet pretty “small” (regarding its features) and I have most things already managed by Things and Quiet Read/Instapaper (free).

Yes, it’s Telephone! And yes! It’s OpenSource! This application allows you to use your VoIP account provided by your ISP directly on your Mac. At the moment, several ISP are supported and the list gets longer and longer. Telephone makes it easy to dial and receive calls on a VoIP account without much hassle.

TextMate – THE Editor. I think, there’s nothing better for writing any kind of code under OS X. This editor is light, fast and provides hell of a feature-set you’ll probably never finish to explore. MacroMates did an excellent job with this application and I know of many tries (especially on Linux) to re-create something similar, but yet no other (GUI-)editor reached TextMate.

Things is probably one of the most amazing task management applications for OS X available today. It provides all you need for successfully managing all your ToDos and even syncs them up to your iPhone client. Two big cons of Things are the yet still not available MobileMe sync (today, it does sync only over WiFi, without even using an encrypted connection) and the pricing on both, the desktop and the iPhone app. Still, the App is just lo-ve-ly and a must of everyone who’s really into task management.

A very nice newsfeed reader with excellent graphical user interface. Times provides you all basic-features you would expect form an RSS-reader plus the possibility to read the whole articles within the application itself. Very nice idea, and pretty cool implementation, though I’d wish it to be faster and not that bloated.

Versions – and you’ll never need to look up svn –help again. Since the last version of Version (ough, what a sentence) it even supports the latest SVN 1.6.x and provides you to work with several different SVN repositories at a time without much practice. Although, with $39 it this application is very pricy.

Viscosity is yet the best user interface for OpenVPN available on OS X, in my opinion. It lets you import your OpenVPN config-files and edit them within a very nice preference-window. Also, it shows you statistics about your running connections and makes OpenVPN easier than it already is – and with $9 it’s quite a fair deal.

Storing passwords, credit-card information and other sensitive data. Wallet allows me to manage all my logins and other passwords in a very nice and fast way, it provides me an add-on for Safari and Firefox and it allows me to sync my Wallet-database via MobileMe and even browse it on my iPhone with its iPhone app – although it took years until the iPhone pendant was available here in germany.

I think, that’s it so far. Besides those application, of course I use the regular tools like Mail.app, iCal, the Address Book, iTunes, the Terminal and all the other not-worth-mentioning programs that come with OS X.

So, what’s new in 0.3? Well, just about everything. I’ve renamed the bundle (at least its metadata), since webOS is not just limited to the Pre and I’ve modified the shortcuts of existing features to fit TextMate’s styling guidelines a bit better. I’ve also created some snippets which can be used for faster code-writing now and in addition to that, I’ve implemented a very own language for the bundle, which can’t be found in the document type picker named as “Mojo”. “Yeah baby!”, as Austin would say now. Actually, yet it’s just a copy & paste of the JavaScript-language implementation in TextMate, but I’m planning to extend it to fit the Mojo-framework even better.

The TextMate bundle is now also available on GitHub, for everyone who can’t wait for me packaging the releases and releasing them here. If you have any ideas for improvement, feel free to contact me by mail or just leave some lines here on my blog.

Enjoy!

Download: Palm_webOS-Bundle-0.3

Download: Palm_webOS-Bundle-0.3

Palm Pre Development Bundle 0.2

Yes, after not even four hours I’ve already finished building the 0.2-release of my Palm Pre Development Bundle for TextMate. In case you’re wondering what weird stuff I’m talking about, please read my previous post first.

However, this second release includes a lot more features than it had before, plus I’ve made use of the CocoaDialog now. Let me describe the new features from the top to the bottom of the screenshot on the left site.

First of all, there’s “Generate New Project”. This lets you execute a palm-generate with all important attributes and opens the created project afterwards using the “mate” terminal-command, which needs to be available for this to work. All you have to do then is simply to save the TextMate project right into your generated project-directory.

Next, we still have “Generate New Scene”. I’ve enhanced the feature now, so that you’ll get a cocoa dialog asking for the scene’s name. Beware: The generation usually works as it should, the only problem is the TextMate project-drawer, which doesn’t seem to refresh by itself. A workaround: Cmd+H to hide TextMate and then click on its Dock-icon to make it appear again. Then all newly generated files should be visible in its drawer.

The next three features work just as before, no enhancements at all. On the fourth, the “Launch Project in Debugging-Mode” feature, I’ve implemented a palm-launch with debugging options, that can be run on an existing, packaged and installed project.

Next, there are ways to close and remove installed Projects. “Close running project” of course only works, when the App is actually running and “Remove installed Project” removes the App from the device. As device for all those commands the first device found by the Palm toolset will be taken – so if you would like to use the Emulator, better disconnect your real device and vice versa.

I’ve also built-in two features that let you simulate test calls and SMS on your Emulator, if you changed from password authentication to SSH public key authentication. You can do this either manually or try to use the feature at the menu’s bottom named “Auto-install SSH-Pubkey on Emulator”. Depending on your SSH-key-setup it works out or… not.

The other seven features allow you to simulate GPS drives on the Emulator – again only if you’ve set-up SSH-Pubkey authentication.

I hope you enjoy this release of the Palm Pre Development Bundle for TextMate!

Download: Palm-Pre-Bundle-0.2

UPDATE: There’s a newer version available! Get it here. Or use GitHub.

However, after I bought Money, I exported my whole transaction info from my ING-DiBa account as CSV (since they do not provide me anything else) and tried to import it into Money – and it failed. I was using the latest version (3.4.4 v1938) and had quite a few problems with the CSV import. First of all, the columns haven’t been recognized automatically. Also, I didn’t really knew how to import the transaction-value, since I only had one column containing a positive (income) or a negative (outgoing) number, where Money expected “Withdrawal” and “Deposit”. Also, Money seemed to have problems with the punctuation of the numbers, what cause 1000€ to become 100€. And in general, the software didn’t work well with the CSV my bank provided me. I had to manually cut out the first few lines (which were just some additional information but not party of the transactions) and stuff line that. I was wondering, why this is so, since Squirrel automatically recognized the CSV and imported it just perfectly into my virtual account.

I wrote an e-mail to Jumsoft and explained the problems I have with my freshly purchased Money and of course asked for help. After some more mailing, I got a patched version of Money one day later. I tried it out and: Bam! It worked! The CSV imports work just as they should now, even if there’s still no automatic column recognition. Still, I’m very happy that Jumsoft helped my out that fast and in such an uncomplicated way – I’m not used to this from Apple-related companies anymore.

After I had all my data imported into Money and got everything categorized, synced the info up to my iPhone, what also worked out as smooth as I’d expect it.

The one thing I did not check yet are the possibilities to sync Money over two different Macs. I’m sure it’s possible by using the Dropbox-way, although I would not like to upload such sensitive information to my Dropbox. Maybe it’s possible to sync via W-LAN, dunno.

It seems to be possible to sync different Macs via MobileMe! Hurray! I’ll test it out and give some feedback as soon as possible.

export EZMWLUCENE_HOME=/opt/lucene/server
/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun-1.6.0.12/jre/bin/java -Dezmwlucene.home=$EZMWLUCENE_HOME -Djava.io.tmpdir=$TMP -cp $EZMWLUCENE_HOME/ezmwlucene.jar:$EZMWLUCENE_HOME/lib/jetty-6.1.14.jar:$EZMWLUCENE_HOME/lib/jetty-util-6.1.14.jar:$EZMWLUCENE_HOME/lib/servlet-api-2.5-6.1.14.jar:$EZMWLUCENE_HOME/lib/commons-codec-1.3.jar:$EZMWLUCENE_HOME/lib/commons-httpclient-3.1.jar:$EZMWLUCENE_HOME/lib/commons-logging.jar:$EZMWLUCENE_HOME/lib/FontBox-0.1.0-dev.jar:$EZMWLUCENE_HOME/lib/lucene-core-2.4.0.jar:$EZMWLUCENE_HOME/lib/lucene-highlighter-2.4.0.jar:$EZMWLUCENE_HOME/lib/PDFBox-0.7.3.jar:$EZMWLUCENE_HOME/lib/poi-3.5-beta3-20080926.jar:$EZMWLUCENE_HOME/lib/poi-scratchpad-3.5-beta3-20080926.jar net.sourceforge.ezmwlucene.service.EzMwLuceneService

Those two lines can be packed-up within a shell-script, which then gets ran by a proper /etc/init.d-script. For me, it now just works perfectly.

Enjoy!

The first thing needed is a client computer running any kind of the supported OSs by the Amazon API tools and of course the tools themselves. After you’ve installed those and configured all credentials the right way, we can create a new pair of SSH keys for our new project. Due to the location I’m currently in, I’ve chosen to use Amazon Instances in the western EU. Execute the following line on your command-line:

ec2-add-keypair –region eu-west-1 test-keypair

The result should look something like this:

[Deprecated] Xalan: org.apache.xml.res.XMLErrorResources_en_US
KEYPAIR test-keypair e1:1a:d1:a1:a1:1c:10:a1:b1:d1:cb:11:11:1a:11:11:f1:11:ae:fe
—–BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY—–
XXX
—–END RSA PRIVATE KEY—–

You can now copy the lines from BEGIN… until END… (including those two) into a file which you’ll be using as SSH-key for connecting to your instance. Don’t forget to chmod 600 it!

Next, let’s see what base-images for creating our instance we could you – first, provided by Amazon themselves:

ec2-describe-images –region eu-west-1 -o ‘amazon’

The list is contained of several different OSs and versions, although in our current project we can’t make use of any of those. Therefor, we’re now searching for a perfectly fitting, really good operating system:

ec2-describe-images –region eu-west-1 -a | grep -i debian

And yet, we receive another list with several different versions of the Debian Linux distribution. After we’ve picked the one we’d like to run, we should check what instances are currently up and running:

ec2-describe-instances –region eu-west-1

If you’re using Amazon’s EC2 for the first time, there shouldn’t be any items listed. We can now start our very first instance, by copying the instance’s identifier (in the second column, a string starting with ami-) and pasting it into our command:

ec2-run-instances –region eu-west-1 -k test-keypair -g ‘http/s’ -g ‘ssh’ ami-b8446fcc

In this command, we tell Amazon to start up a new instance that’s built on top of the ami-b8446fcc-image, using the key-pair we just created before and using some custom built firewall-rules named “http/s” (which allows us to connect to port 80 and 443) and “ssh” (port 22).

We need to wait a few seconds, until the instance comes up. We can use the describe-instances command from above to check the instance’s status:

ec2-describe-instances –region eu-west-1

As soon as it’s up and running, the “pending” column should have been replaced by a dynamically allocated hostname and the status “running”. Keep in mind, that this hostname/ip is dynamically allocated! If you want a fixed IP, you need to allocate and assign an Elastic IP – I’ll show you later how to do so.
If our firewall rules worked out, we can now connect using SSH:

ssh -i ~/Library/EC2/id_rsa-test-keypair root@ec2-11-111-11-111.eu-west-1.compute.amazonaws.com

By default, Amazon sets up a Small Instance, that provides around 10 GB of hard drive, an Dual-Core AMD Opteron 2218 with 2600 MHz and around 1.7 GB of RAM. Small instances, in comparison to the bigger ones, also still provide a real swap-partition which is limited to 895 MB. Here, you could run into problems when installing some Oracle for example, since the DB would like to have 1 GB or more Swap-space. If 895 MB should not be enough, the only way to enlarge it seems to be to use a file within your file-system for that. Either, by placing it somewhere into / or by using /mnt for that. /mnt is a special mount in Amazon instances which provides you 147 GB of additional volatile storage. Amazon doesn’t guarantee in any way the storage to be stable/solid or even backed up – and usually /mnt is only used for bundling your instance. You might now think “so, where could I place my data, if / is only providing me 10 GB of space and /mnt should not be used for storing sensitive data?” – well, there’s a third possibility named Elastic Block Storage. An EBS is being displayed to your instance as regular block-device (/dev/sdb, …) that’s format- and mountable. There, sensitive data could be stored, by bind-mounting the directories you’d like to have your data in. I’m not going to explain how this works, else I’ll never finish writing this brief documentation.

However, since we’re connected to the instance now, we can set it up the way we want it, with whatever software we need on it. I’ve assumed, that most people would set it up as regular LAMP-instance, therefor I’ve also added the firewall-rule for HTTP/HTTPS. After we finished installing the software we need, there’s one more package that should be plugged into the system: The Amazon AMI Tools. Simply wget them from http://s3.amazonaws.com/ec2-downloads/ec2-ami-tools.zip and unzip the package. Those tools make use of Ruby, so ensure having it installed on your instance. Also, you need to have the private key (pk-.pem) and the certificate (cert-.pem) you created the instance with somewhere within your instance’s filesystem, for later use.

Before we bundle up our system now, let’s come back to the topic we had before: The hostname/IP. Amazon allocates some dynamic address, unless you tell them to give you a fixed (called Elastic) IP. You can do that by simply executing:

ec2-allocate-address –region eu-west-1

… within your client’s command-line (where the Amazon API Tools have been installed – not on the instance!). As result you’ll get some IP address that has now being allocated by Amazon for you. The IP isn’t bound to any instance yet – it’s just allocated for you to be able to use it. ATTENTION: You pay for Elastic IPs as long as you do not assign them to an instance. Yes, that’s right. Amazon charges you for every allocated but unused IP hourly. By that, they want to prevent people “collecting” addresses, I guess. To assign the address you just received to your instance, simply run:

ec2-associate-address –region eu-west-1 -i i-11e11b1e 79.125.11.11

The i- is your actual instance’s ID, where the last, dot-separated number is the IP you’ve received. And yes, those are fake numbers – so don’t even try.

Now it could take a bit for Amazon to reconfigure the instance, but as soon as it finished, you should be able to re-connect to the instance using the IP you just assigned to it.

As last task for today, let’s bundle up the image the way we have it now. Bundling an image allows you more than just eating up your credit card’s limit by dumping your S3 buckets. On the one hand, with bundles you can recover machines that crashed or lost data within a few blinks and on the other, you can created new instances out of a bundle (talking about “scalability”).

For bundling, we use the AMI tools we installed. First of all, let’s create a directory for the bundle:

mkdir /mnt/myimage

After that, run the bundle-vol-tool:

ec2-bundle-vol -k pk-.pem -c cert-.pem -s -u -d /mnt/myimage/

This command takes several parameters for the private key, the certificate, the size of the resulting bundle in MB and your User-ID (without dashes). The User-ID can be found within your Account Information on Amazon’s EC2 site. The command should ask you, what architecture you’d like to bundle the system for – i386 should work out perfectly for what we’re doing. The following procedure could take some time, since the tool collections every peace of the system and builds a bundle into the directory we specified. As soon as the tool finished, we can upload our bundle to our S3-bucket:

ec2-upload-bundle –location EU -b -m /mnt/myimage/image.manifest.xml -a -s

Again, we need to specify some credentials (our access-key and the secret-key) for the upload to work. Also, we need to pick a globally unique bucket-name for uploading the bundle, what shouldn’t be that hard as long as you don’t try stuff like “linux” or other common words. The bundle will then be uploaded to your (private) bucket, so you have it for later use.

From within the web-interface you could now simply create new instances out of the uploaded bundle, without even knowing how the actual system was set up or having the Amazon API tools installed on your client.

Cool stuff, enjoy!

Facepalm

For the past months now already I’m searching for a new desktop table, since my actual one is now already eleven years old and getting more and more ramshackly by each day passing. I’ve been at several furniture stores around me, including (of course) IKEA, Möbel Gamerdinger, Heyne Büromarkt, any some more. Also, I’ve been searching for tables on the internet at several different online-stores and even found quite a few tables that really fit my needs. The only thing that didn’t fit on any of the desks I liked was their pricing – and I really can’t understand how this could be.

What’s a desk typically contained of? Well, mostly, one big plate – in my case some rectangle one with for example 180cm x 80cm and legs, usually four in number. And actually this is essentially everything I want and need. If you would now stumble through the different (online-)stores and search for exactly such a table, you would probably be shockingly disturbed by the prices furniture stores charge for one piece of wood with four legs. Let’s take IKEA as example: They charge 179,00€ for a Galant Desktop-Table (160cm x 80cm), which is essentially only four table-legs, mounted beneath a frame which holds a plate made of pressboard – sold as a mass-production article, where the costs for fabrication probably are way under a quarter of the price they charge. Besides, at least the demonstration desks within the IKEA store were so shaky, because of their cheap built-up, that I wouldn’t want to have my iMac placed onto one of those, until I’d like to buy new hard drives every few weeks. And at last but not least: The way the table looks can hardly be called “design”.

Next store, same issue. Poorly designed desks made of cheap materials, ugly fabrication but prices within the range from two-hundred to five-hundred or even more Euros. And all I was thinking was “What’s the point?!” – there is no relation between the quality of those mass-produced tables and their prices. Don’t get me wrong, of course a lot of costs for crafting, producing, transportation and more come together – and I might not even bitch that loud if at least the materials they would use would have been real wood plates and solid steel-frames and -legs – but especially in those days I can’t see any relation between the price and the quality of those products. In my opinion, furniture stores achieved a status where they can just pull out the customer’s money off their pockets with nobody complaining about it. When some hardware producer prices its products at extremely exaggerated values you hear blogs and news-sites complaining about it. Why don’t they do so with furnitures? Are furniture-stores/-producers now already on the same level with car manufacturers and the music industry? For me, it seems so.

However, since I’m a person which works at his desk a very large amount of time and wants to feel comfortable while doing so, I’ve decided to not buy any of those mass-production-crap-desks for myself. Instead, I’m looking forward at desktops like Sublevel’s iDesk or Holmris’ Milk. Both of those tables are made of qualitatively high materials to assure stability and both look just gorgeous. Of course, those desktops are priced at a totally different level, although there’s one difference that should be kept clearly in mind: Those are no mass-products. Those desktops are custom design work, containing innovative and practical features.

I’ve already received the price listings for the different version of Milk and will yet keep looking around for a bit more, until I’ve found the table I really really really want.

Update: Yesterday I finally got a desktop table, although it was more like a spontaneous buy. I purchased the Galant table I was talking about, with the A-legs and, instead of a crappy wooden-plate, a gorgeous black glass one. For the whole table I paid around two-hundred bucks in total, what now really is a good price. Why I’m thinking so? Well, instead of the cheap and ugly want-to-be-real-wood plate I got a piece of glass which usually costs nearly two-hundred bucks itself, plus a half-way-solid frame with chrome legs that fit together pretty good. I’ve mounted the desk and yet, as I’ve expected, I’m experiencing “shocks” thru vibrations of the objects lying on the table (lamp, iMac, etc), but I’ve already found a way to screw the table’s frame to the wall behind, in an unobvious and clean way, to reduce the vibrations on the table itself. So, as I’ve said before, the table’s frame was not worth one penny, unfortunately there was no other way for me to get the glass-plate lifted to 70cm (or more) – besides building myself an own frame.

Also Still, I hope the furniture stores/industry to suffer from the depression just like the automobile industry has (and will continue to), so maybe the thinking there will change in a way to provide the people prices that fit the actual product’s quality/value someday.

An annoyed and disappointed goodbye for now.

I’ve been working on a web-site that used the jQuery framework to render content on the client side and get information from its back-end, via XmlHttpRequests. The whole built-up worked just fine of every modern, popular browser available in the market – like the Firefox, Internet Explorer or Safari (on the Mac platform). Now, I had to test the site and make it workable on the iPhone-plattform as well. The site itself uses OAuth as authentication method and provides the information within a HTTP-header named “Authorization”. The theory is pretty plain: The back-end receives a request, checks for this header and responses accordingly.

However, iPhone’s Safari didn’t behave like the other browsers did. For whatever reason, the XHR was sent to the back-end, including every header that was set on the JavaScript side – except the “Authorization”-header. First, I though that Safari maybe could not handle the parameters of this header, but when I just renamed the setRequestHeader-argument to “Auth”, it worked. It simply just worked.

This happening made me search for other users experiencing this problem, unfortunately there doesn’t really seem to be many users testing JavaScript-sites on their iPhone – to be more precise, I did not find one result on Google that describes the problem I’m experiencing. I though, “Oh well, why not call Apple’s Technical Support?” – bad mistake. I got connected to a very annoyed and stroppy telephone-support which tried to convince me, that the iPhone’s Safari yet does not support Java. When I repeated myself by saying “It’s about JavaScript“, he didn’t really make the impression to understand the difference. I told him what the actual scenario was and all I got as answer was “Fill out the Feedback form on Apple’s site”. This made me a bit angry, because I more and more got the feeling of him trying to simply get rid of me. I asked for someone who is more technically involved into the whole iPhone stuff and he answered with “You’re already calling the most-advanced technical support – there’s no way to go further!”. At this point total disappointment overcame me and the only thing I thought of saying before I would hang-up the phone was “FAIL!” – luckily I was behaving more polite than the support-guy himself. Eh.

The end of the story is, that I (once again) wrote a report via Apple’s Feedback form (which from my impression is saving the submitted content to /dev/null) and implemented a workaround for myself by renaming the “Authorization”-header to “Auth”. Yet again a scenario in which I’m feeling like talking to a wall of bricks and have no possibility to get any information regarding my problem or maybe even correct this sort of bug. I think, this is the other side of closed-source software.

Google Wave Dev Preview

I can happily announce (or brag :-P) that I’ve just received my Google Wave invitation today and already created my account. I’m really excited of exploring and developing on Google’s Wave, especially with the ideas I already have in mind. Yet, I just clicked around a bit, due to the lack of free time, but as soon as I can I will take a deeper look at the API and try out some stuff I might even publish here. So stay tuned to see read (and maybe see) the latest progress of my Wavealicious ideas/implementations.

Btw, you can contact me on Wave via devilx@wavesandbox.com.

Well, what else can we do then? Oh wait, haven’t we just set-up our Dropbox account recently? So why not use it for poor-man’s-sync?

First of all, move the subfolder of ~/Library/Application Support/Cultured Code/ named “Things” into your Dropbox folder and let it sync up to the cloud. After that, start Things for Mac while pressing the Option (Alt) key and select “Choose Library…” – and choose the Things directory from within your Dropbox-folder.

Then, install Dropbox on your other Mac and again navigate to the Cultured Code directory named above. Now, you just delete the Things subfolder and yet again you start Things while keeping the Option key pressed – and select “Choose Library…“. Then, you select the Things directory from within your Dropbox-folder and you’re done!

CAUTION: This solution allows you the synchronization of Things between two (or more) Macs, but not the simultaneous running! Your Things database might break if you try to run it on both Macs at the same time!

This is a pretty good solution until Cultured Code implements something better.

First of all, the App Store is great. From its theory to its practice, everything is implemented just the way it has to be. Sure, sometimes it’s a little slow and not that responsible as one would expect, but altogether the browsing experience is really great. Why? Because it has to be. Nobody likes to spend money somewhere he doesn’t enjoy browsing for things – regardless whether we’re talking about the #real-life or in virtual. It’s just fun to look through the Apps, find new ones, share them with your friends and of course buy them. And it’s so easy as well. One click, that’s all! Isn’t that just great?

Oh well, yeah, it would be – if. If Apple would have kept the essential concept of their App Store the way they actually planned and intended it to. I mean, let’s think back, to the time before the Apple App Store was launched (what’s only little over a year ago) – what was the general appearance of existing application stores (of e.g. Nokia or for the Windows Mobile Platform)? Exactly. Ugly, slow, confusing, a lot of useless tra…ehrrr… stuff. And then came Apple – BAM! Brand new App Store for mobile applications. Everything was clean, everything was very well working and simple for the end-user to access. Then ago, the App Store provided a few essential and yet well known applications by third-parties. Great apps, with great functionality that even looked amazingly cool.

But then, after a while, it seems like the whole BAM just BAM-MED even more. And more. And more. Of course, Apple was lucky about this fact – more Apps for sale, more cut-offs for themselves. Why not? And do you know what’s the best? Big numbers. What? Yeah! Just as I said it. Big numbers. From the moment on, from which Apple started literally raping the potential of the App store within every Keynote they presented people could see all those big numbers. Thousands of of Apps. Millions of downloads. Et cetera.

But did this really improve the Store? I’m looking around at this very same moment within the App Store and have to say: No. It didn’t. All it improved was Apple’s pockets and the big numbers on their Keynote presentations. I stumble through the App Store and see hundreds and hundreds of Apps, one more useless than the other – Bikini Babes, Gym Babes, Simple To-Do and of course a huge amount of games. Yeah, games. I’m not saying, that games are “useless” in that way. Sometimes, when waiting for the Bus or for your Girl getting changed you appreciate those little time-consumptions. But come on? I mean, spending more than $2 for a game that won’t last any longer than one hour to be played, thanks to Apple’s gorgeous batteries? Who should play those games? Shall I constantly keep my iPhone attached to the power-cord, so I can play two hours of Need For Speed? Isn’t the whole game stuff, that Apple’s trying to sell as “PSP/NintendoDS Killer” just plain dumb and totally impracticable? I’m not saying, that games on mobile phones are no fun in general, but are you re-charging your iPhone every three hours, just to be able to play some games? I mean, I still don’t understand what market Apple really tries to reach with that. My impression is, that people indeed spend money on games like NFS or Sims 3, but only to be able to show-off at parties or other occasions. I don’t believe anybody really playing (and by playing I mean the very same behavior you hear from 15-years old, Norwegian guys with a World of Warcraft account!) the games on the iPhone. At least not till their end. Also I believe, that 70% of the people buying games use in iPod Touch instead, in addition to their iPhone.

Eh, however. Back to the topic. So, the Apple App Store started providing more and more sh… apps, over the past year. Some, useless ones and also some totally useless ones. Of course, in between of all those crap, you’ll sometimes find a pearl, like for example Shazam, Daylite Touch, Things, LittleSnapper, Colloquy, eBay, Ego, Wallet, Squirrel, Shopper, Deliveries, Weightbot, iStat, Beats, Last.fm, RadAlert and many many more. Apps that really have a use and pay-back for the price you spent on them. Unfortunately, those apps aren’t the majority anymore – and it seems to become worse by each day passing by. So what to do?

Of course Apple could stop selling all those other crappy apps. Just reject when developers submit them – and instead include apps that would be worth including. *cough*GoogleVoice*cough* But to be honest, by that, Apple would shoot into their own feet. Why stop selling crappy apps, when there are enough users to buy them? Why rejecting the cut-off, even if it’s just some pennies per app?

So let’s see, what could be Plan B? Uh yeah. Plan B. Sounds always good. How about.. err.. an “Exclusive App Store”? An App Store exclusively for high-rated and (therefor) pricy apps. Yeah, that sounds good, doesn’t it? But wait… who decides what’s “exclusive”? The developers? The users? Or maybe the price? I don’t know how you think, but I’d probably go with the third option. As long as the price is high enough, I don’t believe Apple caring about the actual application’s quality – not esthetically nor functionally. So, what sense would an exclusive App Store have then? Well, I guess no more than just gather more and more money.

I’m really happy that at least there are Blogs and Sites on the web, which take the enormous job of searching through the App Store, filtering the whole crap away and bringing you the best and most beautiful applications available for your iPhone. Without them, I guess I’d have a hard time to fine *anything* that would fit my needs within the actual App Store – and maybe just switch to Android.

So far.

As I’ve written, moving the application-folders into the cloud seems to be working pretty good on one client. Now I’ve tested, how it is when using two clients and pulled the information contained in the cloud (from client A) down to client B. Each of the three applications worked in general, Pidgin started with the account configured on client A, Evolution started with the Inbox configure in client A but asked me for the password to access the mail-server (what’s clear, because I did not synchronize the key-rings) and Firefox displayed with the preferences configured, but prepended a message box that said:

Could not initialize the application’s security component. The most likely cause is problems with files in your application’s profile directory. Please check that this directory has no read/write restrictions and your hard disk is not full or close to full. It is recommended that you exit the application and fix the problem. If you continue to use this session, you might see incorrect application behaviour when accessing security features.

This confused me a bit, especially since the actual browser ran without any more problems. However, I’ve been to lazy to track down this permission problem.

After I’ve checked, if “one-after-another” synchronization worked, I tried out the simultaneous usage of both machines, while being connected and synced with the cloud on each of them. As I’ve expected, I ran into some problems: Suddenly, some more folder (thumbnail) appeared within the client B’s Ubuntu One folder, that contained his app-information. The folders remained until the actual Home folder finished receiving the data from within the cloud, then they just disappeared. I don’t know, if those have been merged or just deleted – it just worked afterwards.

Ubuntu One seems to be using “semaphores”, in a similar way token-ring was using: At first, client A is allowed to sync his data with the cloud. When this is finished, client B is allowed to sync. Then, it’s client A’s turn again – and so on. Theoretically, this is good. But in practice, Ubuntu One unfortunately seems to overwrite locale changes when pulling data down from the cloud. In comparison: MobileMe asks the user and merges the data, as good as possible.

In the end, simultaneous usage was unable to sync both machines in a way, so that data was kept consistent. Either one machine lost information, or the other. Especially when adding a new Pidgin account on client B, waiting for the sync, closing Pidgin on client A (which then seems to save a final account-info) and waiting for the sync there, you will be surprised your account not to be available when re-launching Pidgin on client A.

Of course, synchronization always is a tricky feature, but I guess, Ubuntu One lacks of an SVN-like back-end, that keeps track of all changes and makes merging possible. I’m really interested in how Ubuntu One will continue to evolve and I’ll try to keep tack of its development status. This could really kick ass someday, as soon as everything works seamless and simultaneous.

For my tests, I was using a vanilla Ubuntu 9.04 with latest package versions/updates installed. The installation of the PPA was pretty simple, thanks to the DEB provided on the Ubuntu One site, although I could not install the Ubuntu One GNOME-Client using the one-click feature implemented on the official Install-site. This probably could be the first thing a regular user could trap on.

So, after installing the packages manually by using a terminal and aptitude, the client appeared in Ubuntu’s “Internet”-submenu of the panel-main-menu. When a user installs Ubuntu One on a new computer and clicks the client’s icon within the menu to start the service, he will get a browser-window containing an Ubuntu One authorization-page. There, the user needs to click the “Authorize this Computer” button, so the computer will be able to sync with the Ubuntu One cloud. I took a quick look behind the scenes and as far as I’ve seen, Ubuntu One uses regular OAuth to authenticate computers to the cloud. The OAuth-token therefor will be saved within the “Passwords & Keys” thingy, that’s found somewhere in the main-menu.

However, the sync service itself creates a “Ubuntu One” folder within your home-directory, which syncs up into the cloud. Within this folder, there’s also a sym-linked-folder for Public content. The client-daemon doesn’t seem to be using some mechanism like iNotify to sync the folder contents up to the cloud, or if it does, it’s simply broken. At least on my test-machine, the client synchronized periodically – and by periodically I mean cycles with noticeable pauses in between. On one way that’s good, because not every tiny-whiny change that will be made to the folder’s contents will be pushed up to the cloud, what would literally kill your bandwidth, but on the other hand, the actual duration from one sync to another is just too big to be used with multiple devices simultaneously (e.g. an Android implementation or even another client-computer).

Talking about the simultaneousness, I don’t think that Ubuntu One is (yet) planned to be used on multiple computers simultaneous. On my test-setup I’ve created a sub-folder named “Home”, where I moved some dot-starting-folders from within my actual $HOME to and soft-linked them back to their actual location. My setup then looked something like:


devilx@vm-ubuntu:~$ ls -la | grep ^lrw*
lrwxrwxrwx 1 devilx devilx 38 2009-09-12 20:32 .evolution -> /home/devilx/Ubuntu One/Home/evolution
lrwxrwxrwx 1 devilx devilx 36 2009-09-12 20:31 .mozilla -> /home/devilx/Ubuntu One/Home/mozilla
lrwxrwxrwx 1 devilx devilx 35 2009-09-12 20:33 .purple -> /home/devilx/Ubuntu One/Home/purple
devilx@vm-ubuntu:~$


By this, I’ve pushed the preferences and information of my Firefox, my Evolution and my Pidgin into the cloud. A quick test showed me, that none of those three applications complained about their new “home” being a symlink to some directory within the cloud – and neither about any insufficient permissions that could have happened, if the cloud was set-up crappy (+1P for Ubuntu One). Still, this setup seems not that perfect for me, at the moment.

The synchronization of a modified .mozilla and especially of a modified .evolution folder seems to take for years. While I’m writing this text, the client-daemon is still synchronizing the files (it started nearly at the same time I’ve started writing this entry) and says “Updating 6 of 270 files…” – this could become a looooong night. Though, I don’t want to complain about Ubuntu One’s performance, since yet, it’s still in Beta (even if I don’t know, if Beta isn’t just an upcoming trend every company has to stick with -> e.g. Google).

I’ll try to clone this Ubuntu-installation and run them both with Ubuntu One being active – first, one after another (to see, if the applications could be synced without them complaining about parameters, that are incorrect for the secondary host they get synced to -> e.g. hostname information) and then I’ll try to run them simultaneously and hope for the best. If it should work out (what I don’t expect, just from what I’ve seen in similar projects), it would be really cool, because then, most applications could be synced this way without much hassle. I’d be really surprised, if this should be working, because then, the cloud seems to implement some kind of “merge” service, which allows you to upload data from two (or more) clients and seamlessly merge it up in the cloud together to one, consistent state.

Eh, I will see. Altogether, Ubuntu One is yet already working pretty cool, though I’m not quite sure, what a regular user should do with it, if he’s already aware of service like Dropbox or Amazon’s S3 – because at the moment, Ubuntu One unfortunately isn’t any better than those services. It just integrates more seamless into the GNOME-desktop. Hm… oh well.