Automation Adventures

Christmas weekend Foursquare started with the private beta for their Blackberry client. There are about a 1000 beta testers at this time, according to Foursquare.

The current beta is geared towards trackball Blackberries – the Storm is working, but the app is not using all of the options a Storm has (touchscreen, tilt functionality, etc). The final version will be using the full Storm functionality according to Foursquare.

There are several enormous benefits for Blackberry users. I found the mobile site at times very frustrating:

• I kept moving around between cities, even while I was checking in.
• The login itself failed sometimes even though I was typing in correct username and password (I think it was related to which login I used – the normal one on the main page or the mobile one)
• If the app knows what city I’m nearest, and it can show the location of my venue on a map, why can’t it determine the location of where I am automatically?

The mobile app will show you on check-in what venues are closest. If none match, you can search for a venue by name. I don’t think the beta has the option to add a venue yet.

When one of your friends checks in, you get an alert from the Foursquare app (provided it’s running in the background). It shows the venue name, friend and any shout, and allows you to pull up more info or close the alert.

The new app looks like it’s taking care of some of the problems (logging in!) and adds new functionality (the alert), but still needs to address some of the location check-in hassles. I’m looking forward to the final version, especially if that version has specific Storm support.

Tags: blackberry, foursquare, location, social, Telecom

At our company we’re using Symantec Backup Exec to back up all our servers, including some Linux machines. I set up a newer Ubuntu install (9.04) on VMWare, and was pretty confident I would be able to get the backup working (using the Legacy agent). Well, that was not as easy as it seemed…

I followed the instructions on installing the legacy agent. After some tweaking here and there, the server was now showing up in the list of legacy agents on the Backup Exec server. However, every time I tried to pull up information on the server, Backup Exec returned an error, saying the server refused connections and may be running out of available network connections. Nonsense. But something was not right apparently.

Googling around for instructions, and suspecting a firewall or security setting, I tried tweaking access to the ports Backup Exec is using. No effect. Then I hit upon something: luckily I had an older Ubuntu server running with the legacy Backup Exec client, and could compare settings. It turns out that Ubuntu installs a host file with the following content:

127.0.0.1 localhost
127.0.1.1 fqdn.domain.com fqdn

Why is there a difference in the third tuple? On the older server, both lines referred to 127.0.0.1. I decided to change the 2nd line on the newer server to 127.0.0.1 and reboot. After giving everything some time to publicize itself on the network, it appeared and asked for the credentials to use for the new server. I selected the correct user, and to my astonishment, the complete directory structure appeared.

I don’t know why there are two different entries for the local machine, but it definitely broke the legacy Backup Exec client. Now I can only hope I never have use our backups…!

Tags: backup, backup exec, localhost, symantec, ubuntu

… and were mildly impressed.

We set up an agenda before the call started, and used that as our base document. It was then filled out as we discussed the various points, and comments were posted to capture remarks, questions and clarifications.

A couple of observations:

• If your participants don’t have a Google account, you can’t add them with their regular Email address (even though that is somehow linked to their googlewave.com account), but you have to use their googlewave.com address.
• The Ribbit plugin didn’t work.
• There is a reluctance to edit other people’s blips. It seems to be more “polite” to comment on the blip and say that something isn’t correct than to go in and just edit the blip to correct it. Cultural thing – I’m sure it will change once more people have used Google Wave or even a Wiki.
• It’s hard to make a comment in the conference call, and record it in the wave at the same time. However, a conference call is far superior in hammering out a discussion quickly. Maybe a designated typer would be an idea in a conference call?

We didn’t run into any software problems. There were 5 people on the call and the wave, and we never saw a slow-down or a crash. The only disappointment was the Reddit plugin, but that was easily overcome.

I think Wave is still looking for a good application. Minutes and collaborative documents seem the most obvious application, but I have the feeling there are more exciting applications for the Wave technique in the future.

Tags: conference, google, minutes, wave, wiki

Amit Agarwal was recently the victim of a hacked Gmail account. He describes how he found out it was hacked, the steps he took to recover it, and advice on how to prepare (not prevent!) for when your account gets hacked.

Tags: gmail, google, google apps, hacked

I haven’t written anything specific to the blog in about a month. That doesn’t mean nothing interesting happened – far from it.

One of the interesting things was a speech by Vinton Cerf at Virginia Tech. Apart from being an entertaining speaker, you may also know him as one of the inventors of TCP/IP (together with Bob Khan). He touched on a large variety of subjects, some of which I’d like to highlight here:

There are 4 billion mobile phones, and 1 million PCs

Of all these devices, about 25% are internet connected. And the mobile phone market is still growing. Basically, if you don’t take mobile phones into account when developing software, you’re missing out on a large portion of the internet connected public.

Growing Internet penetration will radically change the landscape

Internet penetration is the percentage of a country’s population that can use the internet. The current top users of the internet are:

(All user totals are in millions. Data as of Q2 2009. Source: Internet World Stats)

So, currently China has the most users, followed closely by the US. If we’d get a 90% penetration rate in every country (and combine that with mobile phones – not all users have to use PCs!), we get a completely different picture: 1.1 billion Chinese, 1 billion Indians, followed by about 300 million Americans…

Even if you include all of Western Europe, you won’t get half of the users that China has by itself. It would be wise to account for non-Western alphabets in any new products.

IPv4 will run out of address space

IPv4 will run out of available addresses somewhere in 2011, by the latest estimates. So it would be wise to adopt IPv6 in any new deployments.

Inter-cloud communication is the new frontier

Computing is moving more and more towards the “Cloud”. However, we currently have several different clouds: Amazon, Google, IBM, etc. None of the clouds are interchangeable, and can’t communicate with each other.

The next big step in computing would be to develop a method to let information from one cloud move to another, to reach its destination. Vinton Cerf likened the current situation to the computer networks before the invention of TCP/IP and the Internet: several different islands, that required conversion stations or gateways to communicate.

Various info

• Mr. Cerf has wired his house with numerous sensors, measuring light, temperature, etc. He can use this data to optimize energy usage – turn heating off in certain areas before they reach their target temperature, etc.
• He raised the question of persistance of information. Currently we’re able to examine papyrus scrolls thousands of years old. However, it has become very difficult to read electronic data more than 20-30 years old. Humanity needs to find a way to preserve data in a format that is readable longer than half a generation.
• His latest work concerns an Interplanetary Internet. This addresses the enormous lag times involved in communications between the planets. As to why we would need this, he describes how the Mars Rovers were sending data to Earth initially: through a slow, overheating long-range radio. By switching to a shorter range radio the Rovers were able to increase throughput, however, they couldn’t communicate with Earth directly. The solution was to use the Mars Orbiters as relays, using a store-and-forward model. This resulted in a new Bundle Protocol, described in RFC 5050.

The speech was scheduled for about 45 minutes, with 15 minutes for questions. The speech lasted much longer… but there was still time for a few questions. It was really interesting to see how Mr. Cerf, 66 years old, still keeps up with the latest developments, and can think on his feet faster than a lot of people I know.

Tags: cellphone, cloud, Network, tcp/ip, vint cerf