Streamlined is a framework, on top of Rails, that allows you to quickly generate interfaces for your ActiveRecord models. It started as a way to generate Administrative backends, but has become more general purpose over time.
Check the screencasts, it seems very functional.
Technorati Tags: rails
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Thanks to José Canelas a link to Puppet which is an interesting new config management system. Plus some videos of the author describing his system.
As a bonus it is ruby based.
Technorati Tags: config, management, sysadmin
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I’ve just signed up with Zenfolio. Flickr is good, but I was interested in finding a site which had 1) a system for organising photos more to my taste, and 2) allow me to create private collections of photos without forcing my viewers to sign up.
I discovered Zenfolio while looking at a review of Smugmug. These two seem to be the best on the market at the moment in the area that I’m interested. Zenfolio has everything a need, plus is cheaper than Smugmug at the moment.
Zenfolio has three concepts for organising pictures: Galleries, Collections and Groups. Galleries provide the basic unit for storing pictures, Collections collect links to photos from your own or other people’s galleries and Groups provide a means for organising with Galleries or Collections into folders or sub-folders.
The second feature that I needed is provided by the means to add a simple password to a picture, gallery, collection or group. This access settings can be inherited by items contained within.
Once the dns change is pushed though, you will be able to access my gallery directly via view.stateless.geek.nz.
I’ve only got a few things up at the moment, I’m still working on organising my photos and I’ve basically started using Zenfolio right now so I can share some private pictures of my new house with the family. In the next couple months I’ll be migrating much of my photo album onto Zenfolio.
In fact one of my planned blog entries is a discussion about how I use Bibble Pro and Picasa (at this stage) to organise my pictures and how I back them up to online storage.
If Zenfolio looks like something you might want to try, please use this referal code: 9SG-PW3-SXZ. Both of us with get $5 off.
3300 spam messages rejected on mail RCPT in the last six days. 550 per day.
That is 550 messages a day I don’t have to bother checking for false positives or manually deleting. I should have added SpamAssassian to Simscan much earlier.
You can see elsewhere on this site of how I installed Simscan with Qmail. Adding spam checking at the mail border with Simscan is was simply a matter of apt-getting SpamAssassian, recompiling Simscan by changing from
./configure --enable-workdir=/var/spool/simscan/ --enable-received=y
to
./configure --enable-workdir=/var/spool/simscan/ --enable-received=y --enable-attach --enable-spam --enable-spam-hits=5
and building a good copus of spam messages. Combined with a centralised bayes token file:
$ cat /etc/spamassassin/local.cf #... bayes_path /var/spool/spamassassin/bayes bayes_file_mode 0666
At the moment I’m added spam messages manually with sa-learn, but I expect I will setup a cron job in due course which checks an IMAP folder. Plus with this method the problem with false positives is much less, as senders of non-spam messages will received a definite non-delivery message. They are more likely to catch this than for me to notice them amongst 550 pieces of spam.
From Think Thin:
Open up the Registry Editor (Start -> Run -> regedit) and navigate to the following key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Terminal Server\WinStations\RDP-Tcp Change color depth to 4. Reboot Windows XP to have the change take effect.
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Very well written and indepth business case analysis of the use of S3.
Outsiders do not realise how deeply technological development, like scientific research, is shaped and driven by emotion. If you have ever looked at an iPod and wished that you needed one, you will have had an inkling of it. The reason that half of us are in computing at all is that we see computers as things that we can make beautiful things out of: and S3 and EC2 arouse the same emotion.
Some people have criticized S3 and EC2 for being bony, but that is the point of them. You cannot go wrong if you have good, strong bones to build on. If the foundation is right, things just go on getting better. A woman with good bones is six times as beautiful at 60 as she is at 20.
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I’ve been looking a little closer at EC2 and it seems like a very clean idea, giving simple building blocks to provide rentable computing. There are a couple howtos that are worth reading:
EC2 is using virtualisation system, providing the equivalent of a 1.7Ghz Xeon, 1.75GB of RAM and 160GB disk. It would be interesting to know exactly what platform they are using,
I suspect some version of Xen. With a decent generic para-virtualised kernel (as provided by EC2) you can support pretty much any Linux distribution.
With a tool like this I start wondering about the potential uses. Reduce the system by at 25%, install pre-configured asterisk, and you can start selling virtual PBX to groups of people on demand. I wonder if it might be possible to run a full Ubuntu desktop with NX. Suspend and resume your desktop on demand as you travel around the world.
I can see how this project is provide great value to Amazon internally as well. EC2 and S3 combined provided them with a scalable mechanism for providing an internal cost mechanism for managing their sizable investment in infrastructure. They “out-source” the cost of infrastructure internally, fixing the cost of computing. This gives a deterministic method for both production and development groups to plan and scale new projects. With a consistent metric to measure
the cost of computing, developers can instead focus on producing content.
On the other side of the coin it also sends pricing signals to competitors, by dictating the cost of computing and managing the ecosphere it runs within they give themselves a lift ahead of others.
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Extensions like this adaptiveblue:
With the blueorganizer Firefox extension, your browser becomes smarter. It helps you personalize your web experience based on what you already like. It harnesses your information to help you discover relevant new information and save time.
and S3Fox Organizer for Amazon:
This firefox extension(browser plugin) provides an user friendly interface for Amazon’s S3 (Simple Storage Service) . Its interface is very much similar to the FTP interface that lists local folders in the left panel and S3 buckets/files/folders in the right panel. Files/folders can be moved from the local computer to Amazon’s storage space and vice versa. Follow the pre-requisites & steps described below to start using S3Fox Organizer.
are just not possible or likely to happen with IE. The Firefox ecosphere of extensions makes the Internet a whole lot more interesting.
Check out this very cool photo software under development Microsoft Labs: photosynth.
Here is a few useful comments by Nick Anderson on the xen-users mailing list.
It depends on your application. Dont forget to look at residual cost of owning a Xeon 5100. I believe that it requires fully buffered dimms each pulling 9 to 14 Watt compared to non-fully buffered dimms for the new Opterons that support DDR2 which I think draw 2-3 watts per dimm. Plus even though the Xeon requires less power for the chip itself they dont take into account the fact that the Opterons have an on die memory controller. The Xeons have a separate memory controller which I believe draws another
2 Watts.Kind of went on a tangent there … but really it does depend on the type of applications you are running. I seem to remember the Xeons whop up on the Opterons in single threaded applications, however I think the reverse is true when you start using threaded applications.
Obviously the figures from the review I mentioned yesterday aren’t so clear cut. However, now Intel are producing solid tech, there is no longer the bad taste from their hiding behind a market position and market power. It will be interesting to see what the Anandtechs and other tech-head reviewers say when they get this equipment. Better choice can only be good.