Saving Someone

I ran into a very interesting article on Wired today. Article title said “Scientists Want Your MacBook for Earthquake Detection“. when I saw that I was like a oh! not another “Use your computer idle time to search for Extra terrestrial and other global causes“.  As usual it is an interesting thought and great idea, apart from knowing what scientists want I found few neat things about the Mac, after reading following section in the article

Cochran’s system makes use of the accelerometers — tiny motion sensors — built into many modern notebooks, including Apple’s MacBook and Lenovo’s ThinkPad, as well as the iPhone and Nintendo’s Wii. Accelerometers detect movement and translate it into digital signals. In notebooks, they function as safety devices: When the accelerometer detects that the notebook is in free fall, the computer moves the hard drive head to a safe position in order to minimize the risk of damage when it hits the ground. But the accelerometers are also accessible to software, so they can be used for games or other applications.

I did not know that motion sensors are this good to the level that they can be used for sensing vibrations and motion around, not just on the keyboard. So I downloaded SeisMac software which can turn your Macbook into awesome sensor device which can give you a visual of noise around your Macbook. This is how it looks It is an impressive piece of software (less than 600K) with the simple idea of tapping accelerometer signals and turning that into running seismic graph. brilliant!. Think about usage of that into all the above scenarios. I’m sure they have different apps for Windows and Unix OS as well, as all the modern laptops these days comes with decent motion sensors for power saving features.Blogged with MessageDance using Gmail

My brother paged me early this morning around 6:30 am about MessageDance not rendering CSS , I woke up came back to my laptop and I see everything is working OK. My possible suspicion that S3 having issues proved to be true as I read this on TechMeme. It is impressive how S3 can scale the infrastructure right from static content on S3 to dynamic device/application configuration and launch (EC2).

Number of startup companies moving their infrastructure to S3 has grown rapidly over the period of time and it is growing more. Small downtime might create a pinch to all these startups (including us at MessageDance) but peace and scalability you get with Amazon’s infrastructure can not be beaten.

Robert Scoble wrote an interesting post today about his interview with Jeff Barr (Evangelist for Amazon Web services).

In his article Robert mentioned that “Because he’s asking enterprises to do something pretty darn revolutionary: turn off their data centers.” Thats impressive statement to make. Going back to today’s event of S3 downtime and Amazon going full throttle on pushing all these companies towards Amazon web services with bold statements like above, could this downtime be another trick from Amazon to shake people up?.

Google is missing out on big thing here as they are the one of the companies who can do this very well what Amazon is doing for infrastructure scaling.

I saw this notice on my Twitter home page last night.

I can understand how Twitter must be dealing with their ever growing pool of users. It can be extremely challenging to manage infrastructure to support to such a huge capacity.

Going back to the important point; In such situations when active Twitter users who update their status often , what happens to their status when Twitter is going thru downtime?. Not sure how Twitter users handled it so far, but now they have MessageDance. You can send messages to your Twitter without having to worry about their downtime and MessageDance will deliver it to Twitter when it is backup.

It is very simple, log in, Go to social profile tab and setup your Twitter profile and thats it. Now you can send messages(either by sending email directly from your mail client or within MessageDance) and your messages will reach Twitter (depending on which option you selected in social profile). Detail of configuration is documented here

Now you can send hassel free messages to MessageDance , which will reach your Twitter instantly if it is up or whenever it comes back up. As an added bonus your messages goes to Facebook, MySpace, Xanga, LiVEJOURNAL , Blogger, Wordpress , your personal blog if you have confirgured them accordingly.

This long awaiting feature of MessageDance is out. Yes!. MessageDance talks Twitter now :-). We have integrated with Twitter, adding to our existing list of Social media sites and more.

Twitter status update from MessageDance opens up the whole new world for active Twitter users. Details is on MessageDance Blog. In short users can do content rich twittering (video/images/any other forms) that any email can accommodate. Yes that brings up another important point. With this feature users can send status updates from their email itself. Users can do bunch of other things as well. All the options are listed on Sam’s Message.

Let me sum it up. With MessageDance-Twitter combo, You can

• Send twitter status updates right from your email
• Send just more than 140 characters, the details follows on MessageDance site
• Decide to send email subject or body to twitter (more options…it keeps coming
• If you do not want to send all messages from MessageDance to Twitter, you can directly send message to twitter by sending an email to tweet@messagedance.com or do the same within MessageDance dance floor. (We honor user’s wish to message specific twittering)
• Your messages are flagged with twitter icon in your MessageDance widget
• Tweet awareness in your MessageDance message detail (@username feature of Twitter for direct linking Twitter user on the status update)

More Twitter possiblities with MessageDance…

I’m sure lot of people must be having this need to use Prototype and jQuery Ajax libraries at the same time. Just by definition they will not like each other. So you have add following to make both of these are happy and do not conflict with each other.

<script>

jQuery.noConflict();

</script>

Thanks to Benjamin Smith and his blog post. Yes he Saved My Day.

We have been working on MessageDance for couple of months writing prototype , building blocks and testing the basic end to end promise to see how it works within ourselves. It is a very interesting idea and right now we are on our way to execute this for next cycle which would be public beta.

MessageDance is started by 3 founders (including myself) and we all working full time on this.  Work is in full swing from Product Management, Operations, Engineering and Architecture perspective. We recently moved to PlugAndPlayTechCenter. Its a great incubation for emerging technology startups. Energy of this place is very positive and encouraging.

I will have a lot to share here as we progress in our plan but for now we are dancing our way to the next interesting thing in social media.

You can read day to day update on MessageDance Blog and stay tuned to our progress.

You can become one of the first to access MessageDance’s service by signing up with us. Once we are ready for public beta you will be the first one to hear from us.

Zimbra uses MySql database and when you try to connect to mysql under zimbra user with following details, it might throw access errors.

user : zimbra

password : [no password]

host: localhost ( or wherever you have installed the zimbra)

Also , if you already have your own mysql installed before , it might conflict for the mysql clients like CocoaMySQL. To make it work you need to specify the right socket path. Specify

/opt/zimbra/db/mysql.sock.

Once you specify above socket it exactly knows what mysql db to connect to. You can make this work for phpMyAdmin or any other MySQL clients.

This was a fun exercise to get Zimbra setup on my laptop to receive emails for some domain that I have registered. Fun came in different shape and size (what I really mean is highs and lows of frustration point). So here it goes.
I have a domain e.g. www.mydomain.com and I wanted to route all the emails sent for this domain to my laptop where I have setup Zimbra. Before you do this few points to remember and work on

• You need static IP address or publicly available domain so that MX server can point to your static IP or domain.
• If you have firewall setup at your home, you will have to open couple of ports to make it work.

(You can skip this step if you have static IP address)

I have DSL at home, so the Dynamic IP address and I have to get a static IP so that mails can be routed consistently to the same IP or domain. So find your outside world IP address first , best way to get this go to http://whatismyip.com/ and it will tell you your IP address seen by the world. Next thing to do is, map your dynamic IP to some static domain. DynDns provides this kind of support for free. Go ahead and signup and get the free service where you can pick DynDNS domain to map to your dynamic IP address. Let’s say you picked yourdomain.webhop.net from the list.

(Note: Make sure you choose “Specific mailserver will route all mail for my DynDNS host” option in mail routing section and specify your actual domain hosting providers mailserver hostname)

Next step is go your hosting provider where you have your domain hosted (www.mydomain.com) . Go to your domain’s DNS settings and change your Mail server (MX record) to Other mail server option and set

MX 1 / Prio -> yourdomain.webhop.net 1

Now to your home network firewall setting and open port 80 (http) and 25 ( SMTP) for incoming connections, so that outside world can access your machine on above ports (80 for http connection and 25 for SMTP mail relay). Some firewalls might have port forwarding option also.

Now lets start cranking with Zimbra. Download and install Zimbra as per your operating system specifications. Follow the Zimbra quick start guide for installation . In short

• Stop anything running on port 80 before you start the install
• When installation starts it will ask you for domain name and say localhost (do not say 127.0.0.1) , ignore the message installation script message about not finding MX record mapped to localhost.

Once installation is complete , script will try to start the zimbra server. Hopefully server started properly go to https://localhost:7071/zimbraAdmin/ login with the admin username/password you created while installation. You will see localhost already under domains. Now you will have to go create new domain with mydomain.com. (your actual domain name) and user for that domain. e.g imsam@mydomain.com by going to accounts option.

That should do it. Now you can go to any of your email clients and send an email to imsam@mydomain.com and you will see email coming right to your zimbra server. To check email click on imsam@mydomain.com in accounts option and click on “View Mail” option on right hand top pane.

I was just wondering how come IBM did not start building tools around web 2.0 productivity yet. There you go, now they are. IBM providing tools for mashup building and collaboration. How should all these online Web 2.0 companies who do the same thing and their bread and butter is dependent on that.
It should be interesting to see how IBM’s push for this piece works out. Only thing that is making me worry is that they are bringing Lotus name back in the limelight. I hated Lotus applications, including their email client, lamest email client I have ever seen including the user interface. Their Lotus domino server did not go anywhere. Not sure their intention of pushing Lotus name with Web2.0 wares they are coming up with.
One interesting thing that these big players will do is to bring enterprise applications together with slick Web 2.0 applications, which will drive towards Enterprise 2.0.

When you use Apache Axis for your web services implementation , its a wise move but you got to remember its few one off situations, like this one that I’m going to explain.
Apache axis generates namespaces in every single element of the response , which can be very painful for the client if client is going parse and moreover its additional overhead in your SOAP response back to client, you are pushing more data over the wire where it can be avoided. sample looks something like this

<SOAP ENV..>
<SOAP Header..>
</SOAP Header..>
<SOAP body>
<ns1:elemenntname xsi:type=”xsd:string”
xmlns:ns1=”http://a.b.c/….” >
<ns2:elemenntname xsi:type=”xsd:string”
xmlns:ns2=”http://a.b.c/….” >

<ns3:elemenntname xsi:type=”xsd:string”
xmlns:ns3=”http://x.y.z/….” >

</SOAP body>
</SOAP Env…>

So above if you see , its unnecessary data getting duplicated in each element, where as ideally axis should be doing this internally by aggregating namespaces. So what you have to do is add following code in the your services code

org.apache.axis.utils.NSStack namespaceList = new org.apache.axis.utils.NSStack();
namespaceList .add(”http://a.b.c./…”, “ns1″);
namespaceList .add(”http://x.y.z./…”, “ns2″);
soapRespEnv.setNSMappings(namespaceList .cloneFrame());

Where as soapRespEnv is SOAP response envelope fetched from MessageContext. So what will above code do is, it will notify Axis engine to aggregate SOAP response namespaces in the SOAP envelope root. your response would look like below after above change

<SOAP ENV. xmlns:ns1=”http://a.b.c/….” xmlns:ns2=”http://x.y.z/….”>
<SOAP Header..>
</SOAP Header..>
<SOAP body>
<ns1:elemenntname xsi:type=”xsd:string”>
<ns1:elemenntname xsi:type=”xsd:string”>

<ns2:elemenntname xsi:type=”xsd:string”>

</SOAP body>
</SOAP Env…>

benefitof above approach is

* Sheer data size reduction, that goes over the wire
* SOAP response looks like very clean.