john.parnefjord.se Reflections & findings

I've played a bit with Google App Engine lately and I must say that the service is really nice.

Anyway, today I ran into a problem that I couldn't pinpoint straight away. I had done some changes to my toy application http://x-libris.appspot.com/ and deployed it as usual as everything worked just fine locally. But in production environment some pages just crashed with Server Error 500.

I had a need for a favicon for a new prototype search site that I've developed and ended up on the excellent site http://favicon.cc/. As I searched for favicons I found a game, Defender of the Favicon, that is played in a favicon. Amazing! Check out the game here:

http://www.p01.org/releases/DEFENDER_of_the_favicon/

Häromdagen sjösatte jag ett litet hobbyprojekt som jag pysslat med under december och januari, X-Libris. Upprinnelsen till tjänsten var att jag ville bekanta mig mer med JQuery, BluePrint CSS Framework och Google App Engine. När det visade sig att Libris tillhandahåller ett API för sökning där resultatet kan levereras i lite olika format, såsom MarcXML, MODS, JSON m fl, så besämde jag mig för att bygga en AJAX-baserad söktjänst.

I found out about the Blueprint CSS framework the other day and it seems really cool. The framework uses a grid layout as its base with 24 columns and as many rows as needed. Columns and rows can overlap, much like ordinary tables in HTML. Just like the YUI CSS, Blueprint CSS resets the browsers stylesheet rendering so that different browsers will render the layout the same.

I have to say that Apache Solr is an amazing product. If you reached this post you probably run or heard about it before, if not head to http://lucene.apache.org/solr/ to read more about it. It's just wonderful to see what the open source community can achieve. 

For production systems it's often best to deploy code automatically from a source code versioning system, like Subversion or CVS, using Ant, Nant or whatever. But sometimes it's handy for a group of users to be able to upload files straight to a server from their own machines. This story is about how one can setup the appropriate permissions for a team who wants to upload files to an Ubuntu/Debian server using SFTP. This is tested on Ubuntu 8.0.4 LTS and using WinSCP as SFTP-client from a Windows XP.

Using the web standard compliance tests at acidtests.org one can check the how well different browser adhere to web standards.When running the Acid3 test the browser should render according to this reference. 

By using a program called rtmpdump it is possible to save a copy of streaming media that is using the rtmp protocol. rtmpdump was previously hosted at sourceforge, but after a removal request from Adobe it was removed. Instead you will find the source code at this place http://lkcl.net/rtmp/. This site contains the source code and links to mirror and torrent sites that host the code.

Download the latest version of rtmpdump, at this time of writing it is version 1.6 that is out.

I've got an old Dell Inspiron 1300 that is equipped with a Broadcom wifi that worked fine until I made an upgrade of the kernel recently. I believe it was when I switched to kernel 2.6.28-14 that something was messed up. The card worked alright but I could not authenticate against my wireless router anymore after the kernel upgrade. The thing is that all traffic between the client and the router is encrypted using WPA-PSK (Wi-Fi Protected Access Pre-Shared Key) and I suspect that it was here something failed, but I may be mistaken. Anyway this how I solved the problem. 

So finally, Google has officially announced that they will release their own OS. Not unexpected, but none the less very interesting.