Bitwise Gamgee

Now Google has strengthened his hand with Google+ and switching the looks of all products it offers to new slick design, it also affected how Gmail looks. There are 2 new themes that make your Gmail be in conform with other Google products, but whether you use these new themes or not, there is a change in the interface which will make Adwords advertiser’s money go down the hole, at least for some time. The old classic “Back to inbox’ link is replaced with a back button with an arrow on it. It looks cool and it suits the whole other button set but there is a problem with it. After years of clicking on a link to go back to inbox, now it will take some time to adjust to the new back button, as I keep clicking on the Adwords ad above the back button at least twice a day. Here I send my apologies to that Tango studio in Amsterdam, Forbes, VectoneMobile, and many others…

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Internet adwords, back button, gmail

Dropbox allows you to sync your files online and across your computers automatically. You can reach and change your files anywhere with an Internet connection. It also offers a free application for Iphone, Ipad, Blackberry and Android users to access their files, so you are covered while you are on the move. I am using it to keep all my stuff which are on a USB stick previously and with evergrowing Internet connection speeds, now I can access my files faster than before.

It comes with a 2GB free storage but you can upgrade to a 50GB plan for 10$ a month and a 100GB plan for 20$ a month.

You can also get expand your free storage space to 8GB by inviting friends. Here is my referral link, so if you would like to sign up you can use it to let me have a few MBs extra space.

Free DropBox Subscription

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Being quite busy with implementing a video sharing feature on Sheet Music Trade, I have found that On2 had done a good job with Flix Cloud. Its REST based API makes video processing a real simple job and with Amazon S3 storage and Flow Player it seems that anyone with some level of programming can create a video sharing community nowadays. The days of struggling with FFMpeg (and php-ffmpeg for image extraction) are not very far away (still using this setup for one of the largest video sharing communities in Turkey), I feel that I won’t think about using Flix Cloud twice from now on.

Flix Cloud PHP is a great PHP sample library for encoding videos on Flix Cloud and Amazon S3 PHP Class is also a great source for managing files programmatically on S3.

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Internet, PHP, Programming amazon s3, flix, flv, mp4, on2 vp6, video sharing

Google launched its experimental Public DNS service, acclaiming that it is faster, more secure and powerful than most of other DNS services available in most cases. To me, as it is a good alternative, it is just another way of tracking site usage, and publishing directed ads more precisely. It is ironic that I feel the hands of Google more everyday, and like the services they offer. Anyway, I think I will use this experimental service, as unfortunately the people managing communications related stuff in my country are banning sites for simple reasons everyday. Shame on you!

Google Public DNS

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Here is the command that you can use to find files larger than 2G (quite usefult for application with 2G filesize limit, like INN2 compiled without large file support.)

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find / -type f -size +2G -exec ls -lh {} \; | awk '{ print $8 ": " $5 }'

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If your INN distribution is not compiled with large file support (and your file system does not support files over 2GB) innd can die unexpectedly whenever your history file gets over 2GB. You can locate your history file under pathdb (/var/lib/news for me). If it is over 2GB you can change remember settings to a lower value to decrease the size of the history file.

To do so, edit your expire.ctl and change the remember setting to a lower value (5 days for me) and run makehistory and makedbz to rebuilt the files. Now, check your history file size and verify that it is below 2GB. You can run your innd properly now.

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Internet innd, nntp

Been busy configuring an INN 2.5 setup to get header feeds for Newzbox.com, I have a small list of tips to configure INN.

It seems that CNFS is ideal for storing large numbers of posts. Looking at the man page, it can be configured by editing cycbuff.conf file in /etc/news. You need to add lines to configure CNFS files and metadata like this.

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cycbuff:CYC01:/home/news/cycbuff1:2097151
metacycbuff:HEADERS:CYC01

This enables using a file at /home/news/cycbuff1, sized 2097151 Kbytes (2GB is the limit on some systems, and 2GB would be quite sufficient for me now). And by creating a metadata definition named HEADERS, we enable this CNFS file (CYC01) to be used in storage.conf.

We should now edit the storage.conf file to use this HEADERS CNFS files. The lines below tells INN to use it for binaries groups. For all other groups you should add another CNFS file,or maybe a timehash file to store that groups.

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method cnfs {
    class: 1
    newsgroups: *.binaries.*
    options: HEADERS
}

After finishing all configuring stuff, you can reload the server via;

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/usr/lib/news/bin/ctlinnd reload all reason

But after editing inn.conf and storage.conf files you need to restart innd by the command below.

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/usr/lib/news/bin/ctlinnd xexec innd

To configure the feed host you need to edit incoming.conf file, and add the lines below.

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peer <myfeed> {
  hostname: feedhost.com
  streaming: true
  max-connections: 10
}

And to add groups to capture, you need to first throttle the server, add the group and start the server again.

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/usr/lib/news/bin/ctlinnd throttle reason
/usr/lib/news/bin/ctlinnd newgroup alt.binaries.boneless
/usr/lib/news/bin/ctlinnd go reason

You can use the command below to get the status of CNFS files.

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/usr/lib/news/bin/cnfsstat

And the command below to get an overall status of the INN.

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/usr/lib/news/bin/innstat

For more information you can read man pages.

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Internet configuration, inn, nntp, ubuntu

In a few days Microsoft will make Bing online, which they call a decision engine. It looks good and I hope that it will give precise results to make you decide on which thousand dollar camera to buy. I am very comfortable with Google and though I use it everyday and find the right thing in a few clicks it is great to see some other people looking at different points of view. I believe that there is still much to be done about search engine tech, let’s see what happens next.

http://www.bing.com

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