iphone mail - Fail

Wrote my longest ever email on the iphone mail program last night. It went into power save mode a couple times while composing it, and then I sent it. The message is gone. Not in Inbox, Drafts or Sent items. No error message either. Awesome. That sucked, Apple!

Rule Number Fucking 1: Don’t lose the user’s data!

Rule Number  2: Don’t lose the user’s data!

Rule Number 3: Find a text editor iphone app that can integrate with mail when it’s time to send. (Since there’s no cut and paste still…<sigh>)

Jmeter

I have to load test only survey software for a client. Ran into some bugs w/ Jmeter Proxy feature, but once I got it going…well, I love this tool! It’s been around long enough that most features and statistics I need have already been implemented.

One note of caution, It fails playback w/ SocketConnection exceptions when run under jre 1.6_10. I downgraded to 1.5.0_16 and it played fine. Running it on an ec2 instance so that bandwidth can match the T1. EC2 only give 1.5Mbps upstream from the instance, but that’s fine in my  case. If I needed more there are Jmeter EC2 slaves already setup in the EC2 repository. And at 2-3$ a day for running a small instance, this is a great solution.

Selenium Grid on EC2

I configured the demo for Selenium Grid on EC2. It ran fine as a grid on my local box, but had some issues running over EC2. Mainly the browsers were just hanging instead of executing their scripts. I got quick feedback from Philippe Hanrigou, who is managing the grid project. Unfortunately, I don’t need to use this tool more now, but great to know it’s there in the future.

I’d really like to see a preconfigured windows selenium grid ec2 instance in the repository since IE is the most used browser still. Currently, only linux is available.

Amazon EC2

Got going w/ Amazon EC2 instances last week. ElasticFox certainly made for a nice gui admin tool. Few bugs, but overall good. The only thing that kills me is Amazon’s decision to not offer a 64bit small instance (or a medium  32 bit instance w/ 4GB of ram.). I know they are doing it to get people to pay more money for the more expensive 64 bit instances. The 32 bit are supposed to be there to test out your work first. However, if I customize my bundle a lot in 32bit mode and then need more performance offered in the 64 bit instances, I am screwed. I have to do all the effort of setting up a brand new 64bit instance, including installing and configuring all the necessary software. This really defeats the purpose of being able to test ideas cheaply in 32bit small instances.

Small instance: $90/month for purely ec2 payment. (not storage, bandwith, io, etc)

Medium instance: $360/month

That’s a factor of 4. Not much for a business, but a lot of money for a solo programmer experimenting. Also, it can turn into a lot for a small business if the solution involves clustering.

Overall, a good experience getting started.

Dead body found in Google Maps!

Click here to check it out live on Google Maps! (No this isn’t a Rick Roll )

Can’t believe someone managed to sneak this in the production version…

Google maps hit and run

Building a better nextbus iphone site

Nextbus sends my shiny new 3g iphone to their lame mobile site. The iphone can handle the superior ajax interface, so why redirect me and  impede my experience?

So, like I any code dev, I started monkeying with fixing it. So far, I’ve just proxied it using ruby’s hpricot gem on dreamhost. Have plans to generate Nextbus’ sms alert’s for your right on the page for each stop, so you can enjoy a latte without constantly checking to see how many minutes away your bus is.

Unfortunately for this project, I started riding my bicycle 5 days a week to work, and my displeasure with nextbus on the iphone has waned for now. (Plus, I’m pretty sure they aren’t stoked that I’m scraping their site

You can check out the alpha here:

http://edwardotis.net/projects/nbmobile/

Is Linux ready to be your desktop OS in 2008?

No.

Not for lack of trying, but I’m looking into installing XenServer Express (as soon as I upgrade to a VT supported cpu), and running Ubuntu side by side with Windows while sharing data between the two with NFS. I had vmware 2 RC1 running under Ubuntu. Put XP on there, but sound won’t work. Our house is musically networked with Itunes and it’s kind of a bitch not to be able to tap into that in my room. Plus Vmware 2.0 won’t share a drive directly into the virtual box, so Itunes is trying to pull all the music off over the wifi network. This just crushes out internal network. When you consider all the time I’ve spent getting the janky pre-release of vmware running, it’s just not worth it anymore. And yes, It’s a little crazy to install a new cpu just to run xenserver.

For now, I think I’ll just enjoy my macbook pro and iphone.

Akismet Spam Detection

I don’t know what happened, but the Akismet Spam plugin I put on my Wordpress months ago finally kicked in. It cleared out over 2000 spam comments at once, and I revelaed some real comments in moderation that would have been completely lost to me otherwise. I just hope that this service keeps working in the future. Previously, it seemed to max out at tagging 100 spam comments a day, and I had thousands awaiting detection.

Ebay Motors fails a top use case

I went to ebay motors. I wanted to see how much it costs to buy a car right now. That means  ‘buy it now’ in ebay language. But ‘buy it now’ is not an option you can use with their car search! I clicked ‘Help’ and got a ‘Page not found’ error. So I clicked the main help link and looked for a way to contact support.  Contacting support is not an option either.

Great user experience, Ebay Motors!

Can’t install Visual Studio 2008 trial

Nice, MS, nice.

Vista Business. Get a license registry permissions error that can’t be fixed.

Reinstall doesn’t work.

–

ok, this is running under Parallels. So, I reverted to a prior snapshot before I ever installed VS STudio express or the trial. Removed all software traces through add/remove panel. Then reinstalled the trial. Still got the license error.

Going to try this workaround:

http://blogs.msdn.com/astebner/archive/2008/03/14/8208405.aspx

–

ok, that didn’t work either. The registry data didn’t exist on my system after uninstalling VS 2k8 trial.

<sigh>

–

ok, tried setting the permissions directly on those license keys. Windows won’t allow me to change the permissions, even though I’m logged in as the owner of the keys. wtf? Is this a core breakdown in registry permissions propagation in Vista? screw it. What a waste of time.

—

OK, update 9/18/2008

It turned out to be a problem w/ Parallels running on OSX. The disk sharing feature of Parallels was buggy and it messed up the install location for some of the files of VS Studio.  I turned off this feature and was able to install successfully.