A HTML5 mobile app that I was working needed to get the city and province (ie state for you non-Canadians) that the user was in. Using the HTML5 geolocation method made it easy to get the latitude and longitude. But the missing piece was how to translate that into city, county (if applicable) and province/state. [...]
Ubuntu has had a great way to automate the building of your Amazon EC2 server through something called ClouldInit. What this allows for is that during the creation of a new instance, you can also pass in a variety of data needed to setup your server & application. Normally what is passed is a script but there are several other options. The script can be created in bash, perl, python or awk. The script normally installed any packages needed by your app, configures the various services, loads any startup data and finally installs your application. By scripting the setup, you are ensured that your server is 100% built the same way each time you create a new server. As of yesterday, CloudInit can be used by those of you more comfortable with Redhat/Centos as Amazon has announced their own CentOS-based linux AMI image that includes CloudInit. So now, there is a standard way to automate the building of your server, no matter what flavour of Linux you use.
Amazon is clearly the right answer for most people’s cloud services. But when you are developing software and just need a small server to do some testing, their smallest instances was about 6 times more expensive than competitive offerings. As a result, a lot of developers also had a rackspace or slicehost account. Now that [...]
Today I was investigating the LinkedIn API. Most developers who want to create a social app have tended to use the Facebook API but I was looking at an idea that was business focused so LinkedIn would be a better fit. While the API is fairly full featured, there are some big differences compared to [...]
On the weekend, a new version of jQuery was relesed (1.4.2). What was already a good library has been optimized and runs even faster. Those that make heavy use of the library might want to try and upgrade. And obviously, any new projects should start with the latest version.
A lot of people are excited about cloud computing these days. But as with most new technologies, there aren’t a lot of standards defined yet. So vendors are adding new features using their own proprietary approaches. What this means is that once you have moved a site to a given cloud, you are partially locked [...]
The more I play with Mac OS X, the more I love it. This is a surprising new adventure for me as I’ve never really given the Mac OS much thought until recently. I’ve long been a Windows / Linux guy. It’s been over 20 years that I’ve been creating solutions for Windows and once [...]
The last couple of months I’ve been playing with a new hosting company called slicehost. For those of us that are constantly in need for a server to just a few hours or a few days, slicehost is a god send. While I have been using various virtual hosting companies for things like our website, [...]
We’ve been hosting our svn repository in the Toronto office. We did it because we thought it was the safest place to keep our important source code. Yet, over the years, our office DSL connection has been out at least once ever couple of months. That ends up being a real hassle for the team [...]
One of the big challenges with outsourcing work is that the development team is very removed from the business people. Sometimes when the businses staff are worked up about something, it’s hard for the techncial staff on the other side of the planet to really understand the issue. Most of them have never met a [...]
