“Here Comes Another Bubble”

I normally try to avoid the “me too” blog posts, but this video is simply hilarious, especially if you or your job are somehow related to the “Web 2.0” hype. Have fun!

Update 2007-12-16: as of today, the video has been taken down due to a copyright sue. What a pity! Read more on TechCrunch.

Update 2007-12-20: a new version without the pictures in question has been published. I changed the video link below to point to the new version, called “Here Comes Another Bubble 1.1”. (via TechCrunch)

[youtube I6IQ_FOCE6I]

(via Scobleizer and TechCrunch)

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.

JungleDisk: Estimation of monthly costs for online backup

After using JungleDisk for my backup for about 12 days now (see also my previous article ), I can give you a short overview of my current costs:

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As you can see, I currently owe Amazon 1.04 US-$, which can be extrapolated to around 2.60 US-$ per month. I have backed up 3.3GB of data so far, plus several hundred MB of archived data I deleted from my HDD afterwards. My daily change volume is below 3MB (well, I was surprised for myself!).

I am looking forward to seeing how this is going to develop once I use it for major archiving purposes. Still, what I can say right now, is, that the costs are extremely reasonable. Up to now, I am still very determined to purchasing jungle disk once my 30-day evaluation period is over.

git-svn fails with fatal error: unable to remap

Git‘s nice Subversion (SVN) integration is one of the reasons I switched to using it within our company for my own revision control besides our official repository. Unfortunately, upgrading cygwin broke my system once again:

$ git svn dcommit
6 [main] perl 4760 C:\cygwin\bin\perl.exe: *** fatal error - unable to remap C:\cygwin\lib\perl5\site_perl\5.8\cygwin\auto\SVN\_Core\_ Core.dll to same address as parent(0x260000) != 0x990000 84 [main] perl 3224 fork: child 4760 - died waiting for dll loading, errno 11 panic: MUTEX_LOCK (45) [util.c:2331] at /usr/bin/git-svn line 787. panic: MUTEX_LOCK (45) [op.c:352].

The reason behind this behavior is a huge difference in the way processes and threads and libraries are created/handled on Windows and Linux. git-svn relies on perl within cygwin and several perl libraries that use the same base-address for libraries internally. Of course, no two libraries can be loaded to the same base-address at the same time.

Long explanation, short way to fix the problem:

  1. Quit all cygwin processes
  2. Start ash (<cygroot>\bin\ash.exe) (<edit>Use “Run as Administrator…”</edit>)
  3. Execute /usr/bin/rebaseall

Voilla, that’s all. git-svn should work again.

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?

Collaborative document editing

A quick side note: during a research for collaborative tools I came around two promising-looking tools: Gobby and CoWord.

Gobby is a dedicated editor for allowing multiple users to edit a set of text-documents (like source-code, etc.) simultaniously. Everyone sees what the others are doing in the current document.

CoWord promises the same but uses Microsoft Word as underlaying editor. This basically means a group of users can edit a document simultaniously.

Up to now I have not had time to try any of these tools, but I am planing to do so soon. Of course there are lots more tools for collaborative editing. A very comprehensive list of collaborative editors is available on Wikpedia.

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.