They recently released a “Blog Census” which you can take a crack at below.
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I wonder why these words haven’t come back to haunt Google. There is much speculation on the “Google Phone” pricing, but nobody has brought up this three year old quote:
Schmidt said on Saturday that as mobile phones become more like handheld computers and consumers spend as much as eight to 10 hours a day talking, texting and using the Web on these devices, advertising becomes a viable form of subsidy.
“Your mobile phone should be free,” Schmidt told Reuters. “It just makes sense that subsidies should increase” as advertising rises on mobile phones.
[via Reuters 11/11/2006]
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Seeing that it’s Worlds AIDS day, I wanted to mention the new social networking site from the UNAIDS Commission – AIDSspace.org. This is a new initiative to increase the level of communication between the siloed agencies and programs around the world working to battle this pandemic.
I also want to mention that I was part of the team working on this site. It was a huge effort requiring 100+ hour work weeks, but in the end it was well worth it. I’m able to look at the site and be proud, and hope that it makes at least a small difference in the world.
The site was “soft” launched last month in Geneva and is now being ramped up for a larger, formal launch. If you are in this field of work, sign up on the site and get in touch with others.
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Update: 12/07 – I’m out of invites. Sorry, if you didn’t get one.
Somehow I stumbled into almost 40 invites. I’m going to give away 30 (have about 20 left).
For those that don’t know what this is, check out the Google Wave site for thrilling and exciting content. You can also watch the Developer Preview and shake your laptop in the air when it’s over.
Ok, the giveaway.. erm.. the Great Google Wave Invite Giveaway. The rules are:
- There are no rules.
Seriously. I don’t feel like making people jump through hoops, promote my site, promote my Twitter account, or any other degrading thing (but watch me contradict myself below). - Winners must follow me on Twitter.
I’ll follow you back. This is necessary so we can DM account info. - I’ll give a couple invites away each day.
Yeah, yeah. So I’m milking it a little, so what. - The Golden Rule: Leave a comment.
You must use your real email address, this is where I’ll send the Wave invite. Your email will not be publicly displayed.
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I love Terminal.app. Especially with tabs. I spend most my day in it. I don’t want to make you read my ramblings, but the thing that almost drives me to jump out the window is consistently losing connections due to timeouts. I’m usually on three or four servers at a time and when I’m at home, every few minutes, timeout. BLAST! This doesn’t happen at all locations, usually on residential connections. I’ve dealt with it for years. Why?
Smack my head. I should have jumped out that window. This is so easy to fix:
- Open up your sshd config, usually in /etc/ssh/sshd_config
- Uncomment “ClientAliveInterval” and add the number of seconds after. I went with 600.
Problem solved. Kind of makes me question how much misery I just accept because “That’s just the way it is”.
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I’ve been keeping a secret. My friends, family, and stakeholders know, but I’ve been mum on the subject until now. The time is right, and the new team is firing on all cylinders, so I get to spill the beans.
PropertyMaps, a startup I co-founded four years ago and put more blood and sweat into than anything else, has been acquired. I spent a week in Austin, doing a full knowledge dump on the very capable team. I was immediately impressed by their level of understanding and how fast they picked up the code base (I won’t get too technical in this post).
The new CEO, Jeff Chambers, is the former US product director for HomeAway.com. He is a brilliant leader and has more and better ideas for the direction of PropertyMaps than I ever dreamed up. He has a very solid plan in place for the rest of this year and the year ahead. I can’t imagine a better person to run PM than Jeff.
As for me, I’ve taken a consulting role with the company so I can help move those plans forward (and I get to watch my baby grow up).
You can read more about the acquistion in the press release: PropertyMaps Has Been Acquired
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Almost three years ago, I first heard of Twitter. I didn’t get it and quickly dismissed friends that pushed it on me. A waste of time. Idiots! All of them.
Fast forward two years and I finally signed up. Too many people sent the “I want to follow you, join Twitter” email so I just went with it, plus the previous years of subliminal brainwashing got me thinking this might be more than just a flash in the pan. A week later I was addicted and spent all my time learning the ins and outs; the bots, spam, DMs, follow limits, action limits, follow ratios, automation tools, the API, etc.
Twitter is much more than a network, it’s a protocol. A new way of communicating. A guilt-free way of communicating – not as synchronous as chat, but not as asynchronous as email – you can reply when you want to and you don’t have an inbox piling up. For me, that is perfect.
image flickr/Pierre Beteille
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Update: Patch 513747 has been applied.
The real hero of this story is Josh Aas. He got the 64-bit goodness into the codebase a couple weeks ago and committed it about a week later. I haven’t done any benchmarks on this so please check out Josh’s site – Boom Swagger Boom – and more specificly the benchmarks he’s put together. This isn’t a huge jump in performance, but I wasn’t really expecting one anyway. Since this version is using Gecko 1.9.3, there should already be a performance gain and the 64-bit goodness just adds to that.
The other interesting thing I’ve stumbled into is how to incorporate GCD into Firefox. I’m ready to start on that project, but have been bogged down with real world things like work. I’ll try to slip it in over this weekend or next, but no promises. There is an easy route and a hard route for GCD, I’m going to stick to the easy for now. As for OpenCL, that will be hard, very hard. I’ll look into that once my GCD builds are complete.
To download 64-bit Minfield, go to the Downloads page.
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As you’ve probably noticed, I like to compile things. Package management, although useful, just really doesn’t do it for me. Recently, I had to set up a customized install of PHP on CentOS and was forced to use RPM. Well, the experience was funky to say the least. The basic php install had all compile-ins disabled. I had to root around and find the specific package, such as GD, then RPM it into PHP via an ini directive in /etc/php.d/. This sort of drove me nuts.
Anyway, onto Django. Snow Leopard comes with Python 2.6.1 and Apache 2.2.11. Of course I compiled my own version of Apache, resulting in a 2.2.13 version in /usr/local. I left Python alone. Installing Django was a snap and once again I had to go the bleeding edge route and use the Django trunk as my install, symlinking it into /Library/Python/2.6/site-packages/. This worked just great. Now I needed Apache to serve up my Django framework. I had the choice of mod_python or mod_wsgi and seeing the benefits of mod_wsgi, I went with that (also I’ve had horrible experiences with mod_python in the past).
I downloaded mod_wsgi, and did the following:
# tar -xzvf mod_wsgi-2.6.tar.gz # cd mod_wsgi-2.6 # ./configure --with-apxs=/usr/local/apache2/bin/apxs # make # make install
And it blew up with the following error:
Warning! dlname not found in /usr/local/apache2/modules/ mod_wsgi.la.
Assuming installing a .so rather than a libtool archive.
chmod 755 /usr/local/apache2/modules/mod_wsgi.so
chmod: cannot access `/usr/local/apache2/modules/mod_wsgi.so’: No such file or directory
apxs:Error: Command failed with rc=65536
.
make: *** [install] Error 1
Great, mod_python nightmares started returning. I did some research and found many people were having problems with mod_wsgi on Snow Leopard. Graham Dumpleton, the maintainer has been very active in helping people out. His main suggesting was to modify the Makefile to have it point to the correct version of Python by modifying the LDFLAGS and LDLIBS. None of these suggestions worked for me, and even Graham seemed baffled as to why it would work on some Snow Leopard systems and not on others. One of his points was that people with a MacPorts build of Python were corrupting the mod_wsgi process as this build is a bit shaky. Without specifying your version of Python during ./configure, the MacPorts libraries would supersede the default install or other compiled versions. I checked an indeed I had a MacPorts Python in /opt/local/. How did that get there? I hate package managers.
But this wasn’t the problem as I could see the correct version of Python in the Makefile. Most of the people having problems had a customized Python build, but I was on the other side with a customized Apache build. So I looked into the difference between my APXS and the default APXS. The only major difference was on line 199:
($httpd = $0) =~ s:support/apxs$:httpd:;
My version did not have that httpd in there and looked like:
($httpd = $0) =~ s:support/apxs$::;
Making this change solved the problem. I’m not sure what I did to get a funky APXS, so if anyone knows I’d love to hear it.
I had some other issues with permissions, paths, and eggs, but they were fairly simple and if you follow the documentation, you can get everything working. I don’t always RTFM.
Hopefully this saves someone else the time and misery of setting up Django using mod_wsgi under Snow Leopard.
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“Last night I received a Growl notification from Tweetie of an RT on a spam message I sent.”
My wife said “I don’t think I understood a word you said.” Well, that’s what happened and it didn’t dawn on me at first. With the number of followers I have, I get a constant stream of mentions, mostly spam. It finally sunk in that this person was attributing the message to me. First off, I don’t understand why someone would RT such a message, but I’m glad they did. Second, who, wha, huh? Why am I spamming people.
Try logging into my account. Fail. Try retrieving my password. Fail.
Sent a message to Twitter support around 1 AM, then started looking for ways to hack my account back. Using a separate account with API access, I started running through possible traps, DOS attacks, etc. About this time, I got the auto response from Twitter asking if I’m sure I didn’t just forget my password, so I respond to that and check my account again. It’s gone. Good. Better dead than spamming.
At about 6 AM, my account was reverted to my email address and the password was changed (I received no notification of this). I got in, secured the account and all is good again.
Why am I blathering about all this? OAuth.
Twitter has preventative measures against brute force attacks. If you fail logging in a certain amount of times, your account is locked for one hour. Not sure if this is IP based (which would be stupid) or just a general lockdown. There is no way somebody could have brute forced my password.
So how did it happen? Well, I signed up for a twitter stats service from a company I’ve heard positive things of in the past. They weren’t using OAuth so I exposed my credentials. In the early days of the Twitter ecosystem, this would be perfectly acceptable, but now after OAuth has been fully implemented and the exploits/bugs worked out, there is no excuse not to use it. If the developer is too lazy to implement OAuth, the service probably isn’t worth it. The company can be totally reputable (which is why I will not mention them), but if the passwords are stored, someone is gonna get tempted.
My personal feeling is that this ecosystem be FORCED to use OAuth. I even mentioned something of that nature on the dev-list. But the ecosystem is what matters and if a majority aren’t using OAuth or won’t upgrade, they’ll get what they want. Developers, Developers, Developers!
Personally, I’ll no longer use any service that isn’t using OAuth, and you should probably consider doing the same. Of course, there are other possible ways people could have compromised my account, but the timing just says otherwise.
Oh yeah, follow me on twitter!
image / Andrei
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