Category: internet

Amazon S3 Storage in Europe

Logo of Amazon.com Web Services (tm)Amazon announced that they are going to offer S3 storage service inside Europe.

This for sure will provide a great boost in speed for my JungleDisk backup. I am now checking out what I have to do to get my data moved to the European data centers. I suppose I have to re-upload everything because you have to specify for each bucket if it is located in the USA or in Europe. JungleDisk at the moment does not provide support for this. I opened a topic regarding asking if they’ll support this in the near future (article1, article2).

It’s also interesting to notice that storing data in Europe is more expensive. It costs $0.18/GB/month as compared to $0.15 in the US. Bandwidth at the moment do not differ based on location. So I’d only switch if the upload/download speed is significantly higher than to/from the USA.

Writing articles using BlogDesk

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I am currently evaluating BlogDesk, a Windows-only software for offline blog editing, supporting a wide range of different blogging systems, including WordPress (the system this blog is running on).

The main reason, why I am trying to switch from using the integrated online-editor of WordPress to a dedicated software, is speed and offline availablity. Lately I tend to work offline again, because I got a nice little notebook which is able to run on battery for quite some time. I now tend to use the time I’ve got for instance when riding a train. And I want to be able to use this time and publish some posts. BlogDesk online editor is very speedy, it is more responsive than using the online editor. One also tends to concentrate more on the content and less on the layout, because there is no preview possibility.

Additionally, BlogDesk encourages using images in your blog posts, because it makes it easy to incorparte them. It warns you if your images are going to be too big and it provides some ncie effects like the drop shadow used in the screenshot above. Images can be inserted from an URL, a file or the clipboard. They will be uploaded when publishing your article.

Unfortunately, BlogDesk does not support tags in WordPress 2.3+ yet. But I am sure they will come.

BlogDesk is free, but the source code is not available. As mentioned, it is Windows only, but it works very well. I’d recommend you to give it a try it if you are using Windows and are contributing to a blog.

Online Backup using JungleDisk and Amazon S3

Recently I featured Mozy, a tool for automated online backup on Windows and Mac. I finally got round to using a different solution: JungleDisk, a WebDAV frontend for Amazon Simple Storage Services (S3).

What I really like about the software and the company is that they don’t claim that their data will be safe forever at their location. They confess it is possible for a company to vanish. In order to prevent you from being locked out they have outsourced the storage to Amazon, which provides cheap storage on a “pay what you need” basis.

JungleDisk provides encryption of the documents using AES and only you can decrypt them. To be on the safe side you’ll always be able to retrieve your data, they have released parts of the code covering filename-mangling and encryption under GPL.

JungleDisk is available for Windows, Linux and Mac. As said, they provide a WebDAV frontend so any WebDAV client can interact with it. It also features a local cache to prevent needing to download a file on every access. There is also an automated backup routine.

Costs are reasonably. At the time of writing, JungleDisk costs 20 US-$ once, with promised life-long updates and patches. All you need to pay for is Amazon fees for your usage, which are at 0.15$/GB/month, 0.10$/GB inbound traffic, and 0.18$/GB outbound traffic. You see, you can store lots of data for around 10$ per month.

One big minus-side of this is that Amazon’s data-centers are very slow from Europe, I was able to achieve around 700-800kbit/s (90-100kB/s) from our office connection. On the pro-side, due to the caching and background transfer, you don’t notice that the transfers are so slow, unless you need to download something. As I am using it for automated backup, I hope to never have to download anything.

So if you are searching for an offsite backup solution, you should definitely consider JungleDisk.

Syncing your Firefox: Google Browser Sync

How could I miss this so long? Google Browser Sync keeps Firefox‘ bookmarks, sessions, cookies, tabs and even passwords (if you really want to) in sync. As I constantly switch between multiple computers, this is really a nice thing to have. You need to have a Google account, but as I already use Google Reader and Calendar, I already have one. In order to hide your data from Google (as if this mattered due the amount they are already collecting about us) you can protect the information by a password (PIN).

I’m currently trying it out and up to now I am very pleased with it. One more reason to stick with Firefox 🙂

Open Street Map

Today, German news-site Golem.de covered OpenStreetMap in a rather long article. OpenStreetMap is a project I have been watching for some time now as I think the availability of free maps is very important. I’d like to participate in the project but unfortunately I have got little time and no adequate GPS receiver.

Maybe anyone in the area of Linz, Austria would be interested in a little mapping party one day? The data in this area seems to be rather sparse 🙂 Anyways, I think the project or any similar project is definitely important and should be supported with all means. Anybody knows someone at a Austrian government body which could contribute data to such a project?

The Storm Worm

I want to point out a very interesting article by Bruce Schneier about the Storm worm. If it were not so illegal, the techniques used by this worm are very, very advanced and very interesting from a development and network/load-balancing point-of-view. Anyone interested in development, network administration, and security should read the article.

The worm has grown to a real epidemic by continuously adapting, changing its code, the code signature, etc. It has infected this huge number of computers because the resulting bot-net is hardly ever used, it keeps in a dormant stealth mode. Most users are not aware they are infected with the worm because it tries to avoid detection by not using to much ressources and therefore hardly attracts attention by system administrators. Bruce Schneier points out that maybe we should be worried about what’s coming in “Phase II”, once the gigantic bot-net is brought into action.

To avoid detection, the worm and the bot-net operators apply several advanced load-balancing and stealth techniques, namely a DNS technique called “fast flux” which very effectively blurs the traces to the real operators.

As I said, it is very interesting read. I recommend you also follow several of the outbound links.

Sharing and Synchronizing Data Across Multiple Computers

I have several computers, one at the office (Windows Vista), one at home (Gentoo Linux), and one notebook (Windows XP). On most of them I want to share a common set of files, including letters and other documents, but also Miranda. This time I am going to tell you how I keep my shared data in sync using Unison, PuTTY, and OpenSSH, using a dedicated server as central hub.

(Note: this is a rather advisory level HOWTO, not a step-by-step, command-by-command tutorial. It might give you some ideas nevertheless.)

Continue reading “Sharing and Synchronizing Data Across Multiple Computers”

Google Shared Items

Inspired by erik (once more), I started to share some interesting items from Google Reader. I also included the shared items in the sidebar of this blog (this feature requires JavaScript to be turned on on your browser). As I am reading mixed English and German feeds, there sometimes can be German items too. (In fact, when posting this, there is only one shared item and it is German…)

You can browse the Shared Items Page or even subscribe the RSS feed.

Fighting SPAM in phpBB – Part 2: First Impression

So the mentioned MOD for prevention of posting URLs in phpBB2+ has now been deployed in the tag2find forum for one week. What can I say? ZERO SPAM postings within this period. I had hoped it would reduce it a little bit, I didn’t expect it to eliminate the SPAM problem at all. I just hope it is not preventing “ordinary” users from posting.

Next step in this experiment will be to disable the CAPTCHA image for anonymous posting, just keep it for signing up. I am really looking forward how this works out. The CAPTCHA has kept a lot of posters from posting, so I’d be very happy if I can disable it for posting.

Fighting SPAM in phpBB

At tag2find, we are using phpBB2+ for our forum. This forum unfortunately is continuously being spammed by bots, despite the active CAPTCHA. Even at the strongest setting of the CAPTCHA, SPAM postings were coming through, but the CAPTCHA drove off a lot of potential forum posters which could not get past it.

Therefore I wanted to implement the approach I took for our blog: disable the possibility to submit postings containing links. Unfortunately phpBB out of the box does not permit this. After searching a while I found a promising MOD which I now added to the forum. Its not directly preventing posting links, but is more or less a RegEx-based blacklist of words which must not be used by users who are not registered for a certain number of days and have not yet posted a certain number of posts. The regular expressions supplied aim at preventing posting links, but I had to modify them, as they also contain “.net” which we must allow since our application is written in the Microsoft .NET Framework, so this term is going to turn up legitimately.

Let’s see if this measure will actually change the amount of SPAM being posted to the forum.