collected
I realized that my about:michael page lists my old old old gmail address that I almost never check any more. So I’ve updated it to my current email address that I actually do read. Let the spam begin. Or, better yet, not.
I recently set up Nagois to monitor our Dreamhost sites in support of Communications Tool & Die. I ran into a mysterious problem, however. When I would set the nagios check_http to point to the blog URL it would always return a status of 301 (permanent redirect) and say everything was OK. When I updated the check options to include -f follow it would complain about reaching the maximum number of redirects and bailing out.
After looking into the problem I realized that the issue is that the Apache server is listing the port in the virtual host address in the HTTP header. For whatever reason, the version of check_http that is bundled in the nagios plugins 1.4.12 release can’t handle that and bombs out. A bug has already been filed and the version in the subversion repository trunk/ has the patch to fix it. So the solution was to check out the subversion copy and build my own version of check_http. This should be fixed in the next bundled release of the nagios plugins package, but if you can’t wait that long all you have to do is recompile from source.
I’ve been using this theme on my site for ages and ages. But when we set up the company blog at Communications Tool & Die it was clear that any kind of standard theme would not be acceptable. We needed something that integrated into the rest of the site layout. So I took our existing CSS and modified it to fit the needs of a Wordpress theme.
But now that makes me unsatisfied with this site’s theme. Alas I’m so busy with Communications Tool & Die that I really don’t have any time to change this site out. Plus my focus here has always been on content rather than on design. But we’ll see…it may be time for a change soon.
I’m still really enjoying my iPhone after having had it for a week. I upgraded the software to 2.0.2 and despite the mixed reviews I’ve seen on the Internet, I haven’t had any problems with it.
There is a feature I’d like to see in the iPhone software. I’ve been running around taking pictures of my contacts so that I can have a pretty image pop up when they call. But what I’d really like to be able to do is turn the phone sideways and get a “coverflow” view of my contacts with images, as I can do with albums in the iPod interface.
While I doubt Apple reads this site, I figured I’d put it out there.
I bought my iPhone as much as anything because I was sick of having RAZRs die on me, and I missed having a smart phone that let me easily access my e-mail on the go. I’m finding that I actually enjoy my iPhone a lot more than I thought I expected. It really is a very useful piece of communications equipment, aside from just the phone and e-mail capabilities.
The iTunes App Store really takes the phone to a whole other level. In fact, part of the reason that I decided to get the iPhone was seeing David Pogue’s review (video) of the iPhone and App Store. While I think that some of the most useful iPhone applications have yet to be written, there are already several killer apps available. And they’re free which is even better.
Pandora Radio has an iPhone application that lets you listen to Pandora streaming stations on the iPhone. The sound quality is good and when you are connected via wifi it upgrades to stereo.
There is also a free Shazam application. The Shazam service has been around for some time, but I can’t say that I’ve ever used it prior to having an iPhone. Their free application is wonderful and easy to use. It allows you to “tag” music that is playing. You press the “tag now” button and it listens for a few seconds, uploads the sample to their service, and then tells you what song you’re listening to as well as linking to the iTunes Music Store to purchase it and a video of the song on YouTube if one exists. It saves the tag history which is great because there are so many times where I’ll hear a song on the radio while I’m driving and not be able to remember what it was later. Now I don’t have to worry about that any more.
Although I am not as active in the social networking scene as I once was, Facebook has a great application for the iPhone. It presents the information feed from the service in a format that is perfect for consumption on the iPhone. It also includes a wonderful interface to viewing photos from the site that is very similar to the photo viewer that’s built into the device for viewing local photos. Overall the application has a great interface design.
I’ve been through a number of cell phones in the past few months, and when my most recent Motorola RAZR gave up the ghost earlier this week, I decided it was time to move on to something different. That something different is the iPhone 3G.
There’s a lot to say about the iPhone. It really is a fantastic piece of communications equipment. I’ve had Blackberrys, I’ve used Windows Mobile phones. But the iPhone really is something else entirely. It’s in a class of its own.
However, I was having problems getting my Google Contacts to sync properly. After much fruitless searching online and bashing my head against the wall, I’ve solved the problem so I thought I would share it publicly in case others have similar issues.
With the latest release of iTunes, it’s possible to sync the iPhone with Google Contacts. As many others have noted, you cannot specify a specific set of contacts - it’s all or nothing. But that didn’t bother me. I have not used Google contacts before, so I set about cleaning up and organizing all of the contacts in my Google account and adding in entries for everyone I had on my previous cell phone. Luckily I had made a back up in Mobile Phone Tools, but it was a bit of tedious copying and pasting into Google.
I did my first sync and everything seemed to work as expected. I tried updating some contacts in Google and sure enough, they synched to the iPhone. However, when I would edit certain contacts on the iPhone the changes would not sync back to Google. I searched all of the iPhone forums, the Apple support site, reviewed the Apple Knowledge Base, but all to no avail. My contacts seemed to be syncing in only one direction.
It turns out that the reason for this is that Google uses the e-mail address as the primary key for its database. So it determines that a contact has changed based upon the e-mail address. Unfortunately I didn’t have e-mail addresses entered for many of my previous cell phone contacts. Either I didn’t have their e-mail address, or in many cases I did have it but I had neglected to enter it into the Google Contacts system.
For those contacts where I did have their e-mail address, I went back into Google and updated the contacts to include an e-mail address. After doing this, my sync is working as expected bidirectionally. For those contacts who do not have e-mail addresses, I’ll just have to keep on top of the changes manually and review my Google Contacts list to ensure that changes are updating appropriately and that I am not creating duplicate entries in my syncing. Since the number of people who I know without e-mail addresses is fairly low, that does not pose a major inconvenience for me.
The moral of the story is: whatever other information you enter into Google Contacts about a person, don’t leave out their e-mail address!
After a lot of behind the scenes work, Communications Tool & Die is now up and running. We’ve launched our web site and are taking our first clients. Exciting times, but also a ton of work. I’ve never been one to mind a ton of work though.
I think there’s a great opportunity to differentiate ourselves in the greater pantheon of web development service providers, as we are positioned to provide custom web applications work for small to medium sized businesses at a price that is affordable but with a quality that has previously been reserved for very large companies and dot-com startups.
Of course we don’t mind doing traditional static sites, business graphics work, logos, business cards, and other traditional design and development work as well. So if you’re in the market to re-evaluate your corporate communications needs, check us out!
There’s a fun television show on the Fine Living television network. It’s called I Want That! and it’s probably not a TiVo season pass pick for anti-consumerism activists. The show is pretty much explained by its title - they showcase a lot of “cool stuff”. I thought I’d post some recent items I saw on the show that appealed to me. Enjoy.
GeoChron is a wall map of the world that actually functions as a clock. It updates the view of the world showing current daylight and takes into account the rotation of the Earth on its axis and other factors that impact the “terminator” on the globe. At the top of the map it shows the current time in each time zone across the world. It’s quite pricey and there are free software programs that provide equivalent functionality. But I like the idea of having a “wall map” clock that doesn’t take up screen real estate. I do work and interact with people all over the world and keeping track of global timezones in my head can be a pain, especially with daylight savings time in the Northern and Southern hemispheres being opposite. I don’t see myself buying one any time soon, but if I had an extra $1800 that I had to spend, I’d consider it.
Reversica makes a hardware mount for cabinetry that allows you to have a cabinet rotate 180 degrees on its axis so that you can hide, for example, a plasma television with bookshelves on the opposite side. When I build my super hero hideout I’ll be sure to get one. But since I currently rent I don’t think I’m investing $3,000 in custom cabinetry hardware to hide a plasma TV I don’t have. But once I do finally buy a place I may re-evaluate.
Several months ago I wrote about using my personal Mediawiki as a Document Management System. I am writing to follow up on my experience with that. It’s actually working out wonderfully. I am always tempted to make things more complicated than they need to be, but for my needs using a wiki for document management works perfectly.
I have uploaded various documents of personal interest, such as time sheets, offer letters, tax information, etc. and I have access to these bits of information from any web browser. Much more efficient than trying to look through my filing system at home, consisting of an underused file drawer and a highly used system of “piles of mail spread around”.
When I started at my current place of employment, we were just transitioning support of a medium sized UNIX environment from another company which had been supporting the installation previously. Unfortunately there was no system automation in place and all changes and updates had to be done manually.
Having been a UNIX systems engineer for a long time, I’m not a fan of manual configuration. It’s time intensive and error prone. So I set about configuring a cfengine installation using Subversion for revision control of the configuration files. My team mates were not familiar with cfengine or Subversion, so I documented their use on our internal wiki.
I’ve had occaision to set up fresh cfengine configurations at several contracting clients now, and it occurs to me that while cfengine is incredibly powerful and useful it can be a bit overwhelming for new users even if they are experienced UNIX administrators.
In my copious free time (yeah, right!) I should start a consulting business around system process automation using cfengine with revision control for more managable and scalable infrastructures.
