Geeky Peek

I need a developer who can make a quick and dirty VB/install shield type app.  Its only a few days of work.  Email me if you have time and can do something quick.

Ok, this one is for the developers out there, I’m a geek so I like to talk about this stuff from time to time.

Our software stack on all of our server side stuff -

1.  Linux (Ubuntu)

2.  Apache

3.  MySQL

4.  JBOSS

All opensource.  Obviously nobody is shocked about Linux & Apache.  I think MySQL is the only one that people hesitate choosing for a major commercial service.  I’m not sure why though.  We’re a startup, we can’t afford $40-$80k for db licenses.  Do you know how much inventory that builds?  Frankly, I just don’t think Oracle offers anything on top of MySQL that isn’t obscure deployment tool related.

If there are any die-hard MySQL experts out there feel free to reach out to us.  We’d love to get some outside eyes on our db architecture and performance.

BTW – we use a local NY-based small dev shop called WebAlgorithm for a lot of our development.  This is my shoutout to them, they are fantastic.  Need dev help, let me know and I can introduce you (or go to their website).

We need some deep insight on compression.  Deep enough to answer questions like:

1.  Do we have enough RAM (<500kbs) to do WRT or some other dictionary compression?

2.  What kind of compression should a low memory, speed sensitive device look at using?

3.  BWT + what + what?  Is that the better solution?

4.  Should we just continue to use gzip?

Please send me an email at dan around get peek doot com

There has been some consistent feedback around calendars from many of you.  Some of you call out specifically “google calendar integration”, some call out “calendar”, some “outlook calendar integration”, etc.

We have not yet developed a solution but we found an interesting free, email-based, calendaring service – iwantsandy.com.  It integrates to your google calendar and you can email reminders to your own ‘personal assistant’, and get it to remind you about upcoming events, tasks, due dates, etc.

If any of you get a chance, please try it out and give us some feedback on usability.  Would you like to see us go in this direction and build something similar or partner with an iwantsandy type provider?  Or do you think a classic calendar integration would be best?

*EDIT – 11/24 * Twitter just bought iwantsandy and is shutting them down.  Funny timing.

-Dan

Wow!  Go pick up Wired’s December edition.  They just named us their favourite product for 2008!!!

Me and my fellow tech cohorts got a callout “Peek has an army of techies behind the curtains to handle the digital diplomacy that makes their device work flawlessly with every major email purveyor”.

We need to help Wired with the word “army” – we have four people on the software team, three hardware engineers, oh yeah… and two interns.

You have no idea how much this means to us, we have all worked an insane amount over the past year getting everything ready, and to have Wired place us over some of the major tech gadgets that have come out this year (iPhone 3G, Google phone, etc).  Thank you to everybody who helped be part of this, especially all of you on this site!!!

So we just finished the big upgrade, apologies again for the outage.  The biggest feature outside of texting is that we now support almost all image types.

There has been a bit of confusion about attachments.  You can view images on your Peek.  Previously you could just view jpegs, but as of today you can view almost anything related to images (bmp, png, gif, etc).  As a note this does not require new software on the client, it should work “as is”.

Also, if you forward emails from your Peek we will re-attach any attachments.  So lets say you received an email with a ppt.  You can’t view the ppt on your Peek, but if you forward it the recipient will receive the attachment.

One of our next “to do’s” is supporting other attachments.  The idea we had is similar to a few of the suggestions you all gave.  For pdf/word we’d rip out the text and send it as an email, with any images as attachments.  For excel we were going to do a fixed width view and squeeze in as many columns as possible.  And then as you scroll down the email you’d either retrieve more horizontally or vertically depending on where more data exists.

Any thoughts on this approach?  Would it be useful, or should we just wait and put proper viewers on the device itself?  The excel approach is definitely the riskiest, we’ve debated holding out until we had a horizontal scroll.

A few other things you will notice from the upgrade:

1.  Formatting should look cleaner.  We’ve fixed some new line issues.

2.  Our email domain guessing has more improvements, we should be up to 80% accuracy (if not more)!

3.  The AOL experience should feel a wee bit faster.  We also are better handling read/unread for some older versions of AOL now.

There are two to three more upgrades coming in the next couple weeks and then we will be silent until the New Year.  Stay tuned!

-Dan

Texting officially went live this morning!

You can now text by typing a 10 digit number in the to:, cc:, or bcc: field.

Some known issues:

1.  Sprint-based MVNOs generally don’t work.  So you can’t text Virgin Mobile.

2.  Some prepaid services, T-Mobile and AT&T, do not let you respond to the SMSs you receive from Peeks.

If you have any issues please feel free to report them.

Many of you have been asking for this feature.  So my colleague Gabe has been working with a company to figure it out!  It turns out exchange comes with a built-in POP3 server that is pretty easy to setup.  You can then integrate your Peek to your exchange server.

http://blog.getpeek.com/2008/11/microsoft-exchange-and-peek-it-can-be-done/

If you have any questions post to the boards (boards.getpeek.com) or email Gabe (gabe at getpeek).

Generally we keep our upgrade-related outages to minutes, but tonight we are doing a very big and special ugprade, so we will be shutting down service from midnight to 6am EST.  Extreme apologies in advance from all of us here.  We do strive for the highest level of service.

There are a few new features to tell you about (you might be able to guess one of them), so if all goes well I’ll post the updates tomorrow morning.

I know most of you here have been using the phonenumber@cell.getpeek.net feature. Thank you so much for helping with beta testing.

We are days away from having it work with just the phone number in the to: field!

We also had to put in some truncation features, the carriers were losing texts that were > 160 characters.  Annoyingly we thought they would concatenate the texts together themselves but almost universally they just threw the text into a blackhole.

You don’t need a software upgrade for this one, it’ll just work when we cut it over into our live server environment.  Stay tuned!

Oh yeah, and my own special thank you to those of you who took the time to leave us some feedback, I’ve built a special promotion to take the price down to $69.95 for you!  The coupon code is DKPEXPMVEI.  You can enter it in the online shopping cart and you should see “Dan’s GeekyPeek Promo”.  If it doesn’t work email me (dan at get peek period com).