Doc Searls on the conflict between content creators and consumers in the digital era
Data wants to be free but value wants to be paid for
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Overheard : Comment about Internet
Tom Merritt on the Internet
The internet never forgets anything until you want to keep it, (and) then it forgets it
Overheard : Comment about politics
Milwaukee mayor, Tom Barrett commenting about his political goal while speaking with Robert Siegel on all things considered
I will never be the rock star of the far right and I’ll never be the rock star of the far left. What I want to be is rock solid and create jobs in the state.
Entire interview can be found hereĀ http://www.npr.org/2012/05/31/154093267/political-battle-heats-up-as-wis-recall-election-nears
HOW TO : Use iostat to check network share performance
Use the following option to check out how network (NFS) shares are performing on your sever
[code]iostat -n 2[/code]
The -n option tells iostat to just show the network shares
2 tells iostat to refresh the stats every 2 seconds
HOW TO : Use screen to multitask
Want your terminal to look like this?Ā 
In addition to the coolness, factor it also helps you do (monitor) multiple things at Ā a time. In this screenshot
- I am checking the resource utilization on my web server
- Tailing the web server logs to look for errors
- have a small console for me to run any commands
You can achieve this by using the nifty screen utility. Screen allows you to multiplex between multiple consoles. Ā So you can open one terminal and have multiple consoles on it. The commands for using screen are a bit hard to get used to. Here are the shortcuts I used to achieve the screen above
- Install the screen package
- Create a new screen session by running[code] screen [/code]
- Add a new screen console by executing[code] ctrl + a [/code]
[code]c[/code]
- Split the screen by executing[code]ctrl + a [/code]
[code] Shift + s [/code]
- Name the different consoled by executing[code]ctrl + a[/code]
[code]Shift + a[/code]
As you might have figured out by now, “ctrl + a” puts you into screen command mode. You can get a list of all available options by executing
[code]ctrl +a[/code]
[code]?[/code]
Here’s a quick reference guide that has more details http://aperiodic.net/screen/quick_referenceĀ
Have fun multitasking š
Brilliant use of DNS
I was listening to this week’s edition of Steve Gibson’s Security Now podcast and Steve talked about a unique way of using DNS. His spintrite application uses DNS to check for the latest version of the application. Most applications use http to check version information. This might pose a problem in environments with proxy servers. DNS traffic on the other hand is generally allowed in most environments. He says his application does a DNS lookup for something like application.version.grc.com and the “IP” address that is returned denotes the major and minor versions of the code. And depending on the response, the application will prompt with a “need to update” message.
Brilliant!!!
Here’s a more technical post way back from 2006 by Jan-Piet Mens on the same subject
http://jpmens.net/pages/checking-current-application-or-data-versions-using-dns/
Project PaaS : Day 2 on Google App Engine
It looks like I was able to accomplish writing the application that I wanted to on the App Engine in 2 days!! Ā at least in it’s basic form. Ā After some help from Google, I updated the application I created yesterday (http://samurai-apps.appspot.com/) to display the User Agent string being sent by the client.
The code has been updated to github at https://github.com/kudithipudi/google-app-engine/
Lessons from day 2?
- Python doesn’t like tabs :). Always use spaces to ident. I was using Notepad++ as the editor and it automatically puts tabs when you hit enter. Why? Looks like that is the best practice according to this style guide (http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/)
- The “Logs” console in the SDK toolkit should be your best friend. It let’s you know if there is any error in your code and what line it believes the error is at.
Next, I will try to pretty it up a bit.
Isn’t it amazing that I was able to create a simple app in a matter of 2 days and host it on an “infinitely”Ā scalableĀ Ā platform without even taking our my credit card.