Gmail released a new feature - multiple file upload for attachments. Multi-file uploading has almost become a standard feature on most modern web platforms such as WordPress.
Finally this highly demanded feature arrived at Gmail… And apparently Flash is behind it as well.
While some people prefer a public social networking sites like Facebook or MySpace, others prefer a private ones, or private-label sites.
There are many decisions to make when deciding to go with privates social networking sites. If you hate the administrative overhead, there are some “freemium” type of hosting services such as Ning and CollectiveX. Basically you can either a “free” private social networking site with a vender host name like yournetwork.ning.com or yourname.collectivex.com, or you can cough out some monthly subscription fee to use your own domain and some advanced features. And apparently these hosting providers put ads on the free sites to cover their cost (and sometimes to make a profit).
If you want DIY, there are options, too. Some open source packages exist there. Ellg is a PHP based open source social networking framework, and Community Engine is a Rails based one. If you want to stick to OpenSocial standards, Apache’s Shindig is worth looking into. In addition, Shindig has implementations in both Java and PHP. Partuza is an example open source social networking that uses Shindig implementation of PHP.
There is another PHP based open source social networking project called U Center Home. It looks nice. However, I am confused by its license. On their sourceforge page, the license is GPL, while on their corporate site, the license says – “free for personal/non-profit use”.
In a previous post, I described my experience with Windows 7 on E6400. Almost a month passed by, and I have some new findings.
This time I did a fresh install instead of upgrading from Vista. The system was pretty stable until I got numerous BSOD yesterday. On the BSOD, it said tdx.sys is the one to blame. I installed windbg to figure out what went wrong in the memory dump file but for some reason windbg could not run in Windows 7. Finally I did another fresh install. This time, I got BSOD from nwifi.sys and kl1.sys. nwifi.sys BSOD went away after I replaced the Windows 7 wifi driver with the one from Dell website. kl1.sys BSOD went away after I replaced Kaspersky with AVG.
Hope that helps.
To every ruby developer’s surprise, the built-in Net::HTTP does not support Multipart natively. There are a couple of solutions: write multipart function by yourself, use a third part plugin such as curb or RestClient.
Be aware though. Curb can easily crash your rails if the parameter is not a String. For example, if you have an integer stored in the session, and you pass that to curb directly, then your ruby server will crash. It took me a couple of hours to figure that out…
I have been using nginx and mongrel for my rails application on my 256 slice. It has been nice, except administration is becoming a big overhead when considering all the stuff I had to deal with fastcgi scripts for my other PHP applications/domains.
I liked nginx because of its small footprint, and high performance. However when the administrative cost is getting higher, I start to look for alternatives.
Passenger is nice because of its low administrative overhead. But it does not come cheap – it is a module for apache, meaning I will need to run Apache as my web server. Considering the fact the slice has only 256M memory, it is a hard decision to get rid of nginx and bring back Apache.
Things I had to work on is the MPM portion of Apache configuration. My stock Apache from CentOS uses prefork MPM as the default MPM. When using the default configuration, Apache started too many spare servers which uses substantial amount of memory. As a result, the system was put into swap whenever there is a HTTP request. After lowering MaxSpareServers to 6, Apache and Passenger are doing fine. Swap is never used again and the applications are more responsive.
Now I am happy.
Google Chrome 2.0 has been in the developer channel for a couple of days, with some interesting updates. Today I downloaded 2.0.156.1 and gave it a shot.
Everything seems to be fine, except Space bar no longer scrolls the page. Finally I found some relevant information here. Apparently they are going to fix it in the next dev channel release. That will be nice…
Today Amazon Web Service released their management console. Although Amazon is kind of late in its own game, this management console is nice for those who have been wanting a console from Amazon directly.
Running Amazon AWS is an interesting task. However using the web service interface alone is not fun at all, especially when you need to manage a great number of instances. Other companies such as RightScale have come up with the idea of providing a nice web GUI to improve the user experience. It is clear some customers from those company will move back to Amazon management console because of its pricing (free) and direct relationship with Amazon.
One of the news for today is Windows 7. The beta version was released to MSDN. People in the business IT world have been arguing whether they should skip Vista and upgrade directly from Windows XP.
Nevertheless, I jumped the boat. DVD ISO download from MSDN subscription is close to 3G, a little bit smaller than Windows Vista . The Guinea pig is my Dell Latitude E6400.
The upgrade process is rather painless. After popping the DVD into the Latitude, I was prompted about a couple of different options – update or clean install. As planned, I chose to upgrade from Vista. It took about 30 minutes to complete the whole process.
The startup screen is a little bit fancier than Vista’s. Performance wise, I feel it is getting better (very subjective though). I like the new taskbar, which feels like Mac OS X. You can “pin” an application and its instances on the taskbar, which eliminated the need for lauch bar from Vista/XP. However, I was disappointed at the desktop composition feature (the new name for Aero). When I enabled it, my screen display literally went corrupted. I am not sure whether it is with my video card (Intel GMA 4500) or not. Other than that, everything seems to be fine.
What’s your experience?
