Geeky Peek

Sorry folks, you can’t register for a PeekSocial account for the next few days. If you have one existing, it’ll work just fine. It’ll be back up in a day or two. We’re changing it to use all the new Graph APIs, Javascript SDK so it’ll work again. Super sorry for the inconvenience, but if you follow the facebook world at all the APIs have been murky water for the past few months and things are getting turned on and off. We’ll have it fixed in a jiffy.

I saw this comment from Digg’s CEO, Kevin Rose, – “(re: HP buying Palm today) HP should convert all palm phones to android, it’s too late HP, give up on WebOS”

Ugggggh, I hate the Apple/Google-centric view of life that exists in the US. I’m sure the HP/Palm guys get the same thing we get all the time “How you guys going to compete with Apple and Google?” Fuck Apple and Google.

1. Very few folks globally have smartphones, the battle is definitely NOT decided on OSs & phones. The Palm Pixi for instance provides a nice low cost alternative to the line-up of crappy HTC phones (I love the software, hate the hardware).

2. Big companies like Dell, Nokia, Sony Ericsson, HP et all will have a say in how the market forms. They will participate and take some share of the market. They won’t make the same ole Windows Mobile mistake they made for years and years that let BlackBerry takeover the smartphone market. There will be other OSs that aren’t Android on their systems.

3. You only need a share, you don’t have to be dominant.

I like the HP-Palm deal. HP has made nothing but bad phones/smartphones for years. Palm has made great phones. They need more money to keep making more phones & OS software. It seems like a good fit to me.

Don’t get me wrong, I love everything that Android represents. The idea of opening up the mobile OS was so mindblowingly game changing in the handset world. People don’t realize how stuck folks were with ODM and chipset manufacturers software. TI OMAP, Qualcomm Brew, the list of painfully poor proprietary embedded software systems is long. But Android won’t be the only answer here, others like webOS can make an impact globally.

The latest release of the Pronto release is now available. Lots of blood, sweat and tears put into this one.

The big new features:
-a new lock screen that has the date/time on it and # of new emails and # of new texts.
-better inbox cleanup to keep your device snappy and fast
-better texting experience, for instance texting has its very own snappy compose text screen
-faster, more stable, etc

Go here for the upgrade – http://upgrade.getpeek.com

Lastly if you need a Peek we have 4 days left in our Spring Fever sale. $9.95/month if you enter SPRINGFVR when you buy it at GetPeek at http://www.getpeek.com/cart.htm

Some people want to know the secret behind my productivity – well here it is, I’ve got a little helper.

We thought we’d throw you customers a bone (we try to do that every once in a while). Previously we used to send email bodies in 2k chunks with a max of 8k.

So lets say you want to download something that is really long and >8k. You’d scroll down and read the first 2k, and then when you got to the bottom of that 2k, you’d fetch the next 2k.

Well, we changed that. Its now 8k the very first time you get an email, with a max limit of 16k. So you won’t have much fetching to do.

I think there is a conspiracy in the land of developers. I believe all developers are trying to make Exchange 2007 and above go away. Simply put, it seems that nobody really, truly develops mobile applications, or for that matter even desktop applications away for it. The list of systems that don’t support Exchange 2007 and above is long:

-Entourage, the Mac email client
-Evolution, the Linux email client
-Android, it partially supports it but there is a long, long, long list of complaints about it
-K9Mail, the leading non-Google email client on Android
-Funambol, the open source email client
-Davmail, the Exchange => IMAP/POP gateway

Technically there are three ways to connect to Exchange Servers if you are outside of the corporate firewall.

1. webDAV, de-emphasized and not really useable in 2007 and up
2. Exchange Web Services, never really deployed in 2007
3. ActiveSync, you have to pay Microsoft a pile of cash to use it

So, all of the solutions I listed above support webDAV only. and as part of Microsoft’s de-emphasizing of webDAV, they turn it off by default in Exchange 2007.

So, we are working on ActiveSync to try and make a better Exchange experience for our customers. We found an exciting opensource ActiveSync project called Synku4j. Frankly though, we won’t have the money to pay Microsoft’s licensing fees. Look at the list of ActiveSync licensees, they are big companies that can fork over $100k+ for something like ActiveSync. So whats a startup to do to meet its booming demand for Exchange 2007 integration?

As you know we run our servers on Amazon’s AWS.

When we needed to create a new server in the past, we bundled all of our packages, applications and magic into an Amazon AMI. Put that together with some home-cooked deploy scripts that read from an svn server + a glusterfs server with some common config files, this was our server setup + config mgmt system.

This system started to quickly fall apart when we either changed our technology or upgraded servers. Recently two things killed us – upgrading JBOSS and switching monitoring systems. Both cases we had to rebuild AMIs, and if we wanted to be clean we would have had to relaunch the whole production network from scratch. Ugggh.

So we wanted to use a strategy where we had really raw AMIs, basically with just the OS running on it. And then we’d use “something” to add all of our packages and do everything we needed to turn a raw server into something useful.

My eyes got turned on to Chef a while back. So I decided to try it out. Well, 3 days later, Chef has delivered everything I hoped for… and even a bit more. We can now launch an EC2 image that only runs Ubuntu + Chef. Chef then installs everything we need:
-jboss
-java
-glusterfs
-users, groups, sshkeys
-snmp and all our crazy snmp scripts for monitoring
-and so on….

Its pretty amazing in its power now that its running. I can launch a new node in a few minutes, and I can easily upgrade it along the way (as I learned by making many mistakes in the first server I launched!)

The one annoyance I had is that our tech stack seemed to be a bit different than the shared cookbooks from opscode, 37Signals and others. We run jboss for instance and there was nothing available publicly. I’d love to see how folks are handling cluster.xml config, log4j config and so on in their cookbooks. I’ll put mine up on github for yawl to see what we’ve done. Also all the monitoring cookbooks were nagios/ganglia. We use zenoss running on snmp agents, and again, there wasn’t much available to help us.

It took me a good three days straight to set this up. Part of it was learning Chef as a tool. But a big part of it was forgetting how we originally setup certain things. I lost a ton of time re-figuring out our glusterfs config that we hadn’t touched in months so I could bring it under Chef.

Any of you folks running lean & agile production networks, I definitely suggest looking at this tool.

Anybody got one?

Note that this was our April Fool’s Day Joke

Check this out, the new Peek is finally here. The world’s first dedicated Google Buzz device – http://www.getpeek.com/buzzpeek

Its officially the slimmest device on the market. We were able to remove about half the width by getting rid of the keys, you certainly won’t be updating your Buzz account – so why have keys!

The other great part is the battery life. Since you’ll never get any Google Buzz messages, we never have to do anything and the battery is near infinite!