Julygustember 2010 DreamHost Newsletter

In celebration of Julygustember, and the Julygustember 2010 DreamHost Newsletter, I am offering a discount code to all of my readers.

The coupon is good for $60 off 1 yr of DreamHost hosting, with a free domain for life!

Dig, that’s less than $60 bucks for a year

of top-notch, full access, best support money can by hosting – WITH a free domain.

Use the DreamHost promo code JAS2010 when you check out to receive the deal.

Only 4.95 for all this! Normally 8.95

That’s only $4.95 per month for:

• Unlimited Bandwidth
• Unlimited Storage
• Unlimited Domains
• Unlimited DBs
• Unlimited users (ftp/shell/root)
• Lots of one click instalss (drupal, wp, joomla, phpbb, etc)

Your welcome.

What is the Julygustember 2010 DreamHost Newsletter? You ask? Well, I am surprised you’re not acting on that lucrative deal, but I’ll explain regardless.

Each month-ish DreamHost sends out a friendly newsletter updating customers on the most recent data center upgrades, one-click installs, or other upgrades and perks.

This months was another multi-month catch-up, hence the name. But as usual, worth the delay.  Good things coking, and plenty of humor:

DreamHost, unlike most hosts, provides technical support for popular
third party applications.  When you contact our talented technical
support team with a WordPress or phpBB question they’ll provide you with
all the links and hand-holding you need to get your problems resolved.

Most of the hosting industry is, unfortunately, not so generous.

It’s not because they don’t like *you* – you’re great, honestly.  I mean
those eyes, those legs…UNNH.  You’ve got it going on.

Click here to read the full newsletter and learn why you need a new host

So along with ringing my work extension and mobile phone, I will get your call in my (always open) gchat window !

Calls to google voice numbers can now also ring your gchat session

So the script below backups the file, tags it with the date, and opens it for edit. Additionally you can set a maximum number of versions to track any given day.
It adds no more effort than calling vi..

calling a file to edit

Example, to edit config.conf, just pass the file as a parameter to the script you save.

$ <thisscript>.sh config.conf

the result (for today ) would be a new file

config.conf.backup.61110.1

and vi would then open with config.conf ready to edit.

Running it again the same day would produce

config.conf.backup.61110.2 # older file from above renamed
config.conf.backup.61110.1 # your earlier work, now backed up in additona to original

This continues as you save and reopen the file until versions are reached, at which point the oldest gets overwritten.

output

version 1 already exists today
version 2 already exists today
version 3 already exists today
version 4 already exists today
version 5 already exists today
version 6 already exists today
version 7 already exists today
version 8 already exists today
version 9 already exists today
version 10 already exists today

The Code: Script to backup and edit a file with version

#!/bin/bash
# Author : Eddie Webb http://edwardawebb.com
#License: GNU GPL v3 - http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0-standalone.html
#
#    backup and edit
# Script to edit a file only after making a backup tagged with date and version. 
# Only <MAX> version will exist for any one day
#
 
 
 
if [ $# -ne 1 ]
then
	printf"\nUsage:\n%s <fileTOEdit>" $0
	exit 1
fi
 
date=$(date +%m%d%y)
echo $date
maxBacks=10
 
file=$1
 
path=$file.backup.$date
 
echo Backup Scheme: $path
 
# check for exsiting backups, and get highest version
for (( i=1;i <= $maxBacks; i=$i+1))
do
version=$i
 
        if [ -f "$path.$i" ]
        then
                echo version $i already exists today
        else
                #file doesnt exist, and will be our new highest version
                break
        fi
done
#now push each copy back one for new (higher version are older, version 1 is the latest..
if [ $version -gt 1 ]
then
 
        for(( j=$version; j>1; j-- ))
        do
                cp $path.$(($j - 1)) $path.${j}
        done
fi
 
 
cp $1 $path.1
 
#you can pick any editor you like ;)
vi $1

But to understand from the source why the details aren’t forthcoming, see this forum post that highlights the details, and links to the hacker’s site.

Here’s the short - we will be waiting until at least the public release of Froyo (Android 2.2) on the EVO before the root hack goes public.

This feature allows you to share your mobile phone’s connection with any nearby computer – and its completely legit
Phone carriers can be none to pleased, as makers like Sprint already include a hotspot option on their latest EVO, but charge extra for the feature.

Since I was fortunate enough to attend Google IO i received the new EVO along with its 30 day trial of Sprint’s service.  I must say that I am in love, but paying ~$80 a month for one phone and data is just too much..

Maybe I will share the phone with a loyal reader after my plan expires next month..

What none but a few “power users” know is that I am feverishly working to entirely refactor QueueMan in order to introduce long awaited features.  The newer version will still be wicked cute, and simple to use, but there are some critical features lacking in the current version I need to address.
Like what? Keep reading…

Bug Fixes

A bug?! In my code? … Impossible.

Er wait, I mean, of course! I wrote the app expecting 30 people would use it.  Since it has been downloaded 30,000 times now I guess I need to make the little guy much more stable .  So My refactoring effort cleans up much of the code in order to mitigate:

• Failed move or add actions (502 and 200)
• Failed rating action
• Confusion around “saved”, “available” and “short-wait” titles

Queue Types

I only use DVD and Instant queues, so QueueMan only cared about those two. Turns out that you, the public QueueMan adores so much, uses crazy new technology like Blu-Ray.

I won’t pretend to understand the new fangled discs, but I will support them.  So Queueman will soon be sporting a second delivery queue for Blu-Ray movies. ( I will need some volunteers who actually have Blu-Ray to test this out for me in the pre-release) Just drop me a line.

Search Enhancements

Ohhh so a simple search focused on titles only doesn’t cut it for you?!   Me neither…
SO QueueMan will soon be able to search based on Genre, Actors, Format and more!

Performance Enhancements

The way Queues are handled currently sucks. Its a sharp trade off between seeing all movies, and waiting all day.  To compensate I added the option to choose how many titles you want to see. (5,10,25, 50 and ALL)

This makes viewing your first 10 movies much faster, but leaves you cluesless as to #11.

QueueMan wil now support pagination in every queue type (dvd, blu-ray, instant, recommendations and even searches)

Whats that mean? Take a look..

Rather than limiting max results, you now specify the results per page., and can grab more titles as needed.

You can now start with ten titles (in a second or two) and then view the next 10, and the next 10, and continue through the result pages until you reach the upper limit. (The results per page = former Max Results, so you can makes pages any length that suits you!)

Identity Management

A number of households share Netflix queues and create “User Profiles” or “Sub-Accounts” to add many queues to one primary account.  The Netflix website allows primary baccount users to fully manage sub-accounts, but their API does not expose such abilities, hence queueman lacks said features.

However as a work around, QueueMan will support the ability to maintain multiple accounts, and choose which account to use.

Where The Requests Came From

For a list of outstanding tickets, or to add your own suggestion, please see the Issues section of QueueMan’s hosted site.

http://code.google.com/p/queueman/wiki/Issues

I know G1′s are locked, hence I took the action as a good citizen and called T-Mobile. Turns out if you have the phone for 90 days then they will just give you the Unlock Code. So I naively thought that would allow me to wipe the phone, and run sans sim.  Wrong.  Turns out that you only get the unlock prompt if you have a foreign sim card.  But if I use a bunk sim, I wont have a data connection, and could not get past registration. I ended up with a useless piece of hardware that would do nothing but report the absence of a sim card.

Let me share a few other highlights:

• ADP “Dream” images can not be flashed to G1s due to signature issues of boot loader UNLESS
• You can root your phone and use sqlite to modify some system settings to bypass the protection HOWEVER
• Only RC29 or earlier OS releases have the vulnerability allowing this, mine did not BUT
• You can supposedly downgrade the image to RC29, root the phone and  flash thereafter UNFORTUNATELY
• This just seems like a ridiculous way to get any functionality of a device I paid for and T-Mobile is willing to let me unlock anyhow

So I took a simpler approach.

SInce I am still a t-mobile customer with a data plan I just pulled my sim from the Nexus ONe, back into my G1, and registered a new bogus user. After the user is registered I turned on wifi, and usb debug, then restarted. After the restart I turned off the phone to remove the sim. (my first attempt of removing sim without a clean reboot resulted in a no sim card lockout)  This way I can still lend the device to a co-worker as a dev phone, without worrying about my info.
So if any of you happen to have a legit way to bypass the sim card lockout and enter the htc/t-mobile provided unlock code to permanently eliminate the need for a sim card, please share.

'heres yer phone, thanks for rockin'

So if you did not infer from the text of the letter, or just can;t read it in that tiny photo, here’s the background.

I released QueueMan through the Android Market back in October, about 4 months ago. SInce then, thanks to lots of feedback I have grown from 46 users to 12,000 active users, and ~20,000 downloads.  Awesome!

So that was reward enough, but Google wanted to call out some developers in an attempt to seed the market with high-end android devices, smart.

But the initial email came from an address I was unable to reply to, and led me to a generic Google ‘Sites’ page.  Anyone can make a page on Google Sites, and the tricky could likely spoof an email address.

So there was my dilemma, do I give my name and address to a random web page that claims to be Google, or do I miss out on the sweetest phone ever~!?

I did neither, I tapped an engineer I had corresponded with at Google. His email came back:

“rest assured the offer is legit. Congratulations on your free developer phone”

I’m sure, based on the criteria in the email, and the fact this is Google – this offer likely went to hundreds or possibly thousands of other developers. SO I rushed back to the site to make sure I got in on time, trusting now that the offer was sincere.  It was a few weeks before I got a confirmation. “Your new phone should arrive in 2-4 weeks.”  And here we are, just under 2 weeks later, staring at a brand new 1Ghz Nexus One powered by Android.
I F***** LOVE Google.

The phone is seriously snappy.  All the apps I had on my G1 now perform at hyper-speed. Smooth screen transition effects too!. I’ll admit that even QueueMan performs better on the Nexus One from Google.

[...] iPady? absurd, ipad ipad ipad ipad”

Update- This just ipad

ipadind ipad is the new ipad for everyone who never needed an ipad.  Plus the new ipad doubles as an ipad, Ipad right? Ipad the ipad striclty for ipadding, and it can ipad at 3 frequencies! ipad!

The trouble was that I have lots of site (like this one!) that rely on a myriad of rewrite rules and logic to direct users properly.  Because we lose the mod_rewrite provided by apache, we need to tell nginx about our rewrite rules.

Luckily the logic is very similar, and all expression based as before…

create domain specific configuration

The first step is creating directories for each site you want to customize.  Any file within this directory will be read into configuration when nginx starts or reloads.

/home/my_user/nginx/edwardawebb.com/wordpress.conf

Harvest those .htaccess files

next we turn to our existing rules as a launch pad for our new rewrite logic.

your apache rule (from .htaccess)

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?url=$1 [QSA,L]

your new nginx config (into wordpress.conf)

if (!-e $request_filename) {
rewrite ^(.*)$ /index.php?url=$1 last;
}

Note the similarity!

” if the path they are looking for does not exist, give them this path instead. ”

The differences are subtle but important.  Apache assumed absolute paths in the created path, so index.php would be /index.php – but nginx does not make that assumption, so we need to explicitly include the root /.

Got more rules to rewrite?

I am actually finding nginx’s logic based syntax much easier to master than Apache’s.  You can specify rules for specific domains or servers, and use many variables including the user agent and

http://nginx.org/en/docs/http/converting_rewrite_rules.html

http://wiki.nginx.org/NginxConfiguration

Reload nginx

For any changes to take affect you will need to force nginx to reload.

sudo /etc/init.d/nginx reload

If you still have questions maybe it is because you have not read the page here – but please post your thoughts!