frankly at a glance.

Many iPhone, Windows Mobile, and S60 users are enjoying the free Exchange sync service Google is providing. It is basically an Exchange layer for Google Mail, Contacts and Calendar. Sounds sweet right?

Think again,

Google Sync has been having a lot of technical problems lately. Just today, the service was complete offline for hours. The only thing Google said was they were having issues with a datacenter and no ETA on fixing the problem. see this support post here: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Google+Mobile/thread?tid=35f2df27a467e56c&hl=en

Now here is the double edged sword… Microsoft Exchange… or more accurately its implementation on these “smart” phones. When the service was down today… users (including myself) noticed that our contacts, calendar events, and emails were wiped out! Completely gone! I didn’t even know who was texting me anymore… because my iPhone could only show the caller ID.

Shouldn’t the iPhone be smart enough to say… “ok, the Google server is down…” or “what I’m about to do will wipe out 100% of the phone’s contacts… maybe I should ask the user before I do this…”

The server went dark… doesn’t mean the data on the phone needs to as well. Even if data on one end is wiped out… the user should be consulted in order to make an intelligent decision.

So guys… Google isn’t perfect… free services like Sync are even less perfect… However, if Google is serious about making Sync into a business oriented service they could at least be more transparent and responsible about technical issues. For example, adding Sync to the App status dashboard. http://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en

Lastly, since Android and Blackberries have their own layer of protocol for sync, they were not affected by the Google Sync downtime today.

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Popularity: 10% [?]

Posted in: Gadgets, Other.
Tagged: cloud · downtime · email · Google · google sync · iPhone · service

After migrating all of my sites to the VPS, I noticed WP auto upgrade asks me for FTP login every time I upgrade a plugin.

I was a bit puzzled at first because I have never seen that before, and the upgrade process is dramatically slower this way.

After googling, I realized that all the WP files are now owned by my webroot account and apache no longer has exclusive access to them.

the simple fix was to give apache ownership of the WordPress directory.

#: chown -R   apache-user: wordpressRoot

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Popularity: 6% [?]

Posted in: Development, Other.
Tagged: linux · VPS · wordpress

I have a 2nd generation Drobo with 4TB worth of drives and 2.6TB of usable space. I loved the drobo’s ability to use drives with different sizes, however it is quite useless without any NAS capability.

The droboshare adds NAS capability to the drobo for $199 USD, which is an insane price tag for what it is. I looked around the web and found two worthy alternatives – pogoplug and tonidoplug. Both are based on the same architecture – the Sheevaplug from Marvell.  (1GZ ARM cpu with 512MB RAM and 512MB Flash).

The Pogoplug is a widely popular product with their own backend service that will allows user to share data on the Internet directly from the NAS. However, I’m not a big fan of pogoplug’s closed platform, and the fact that all my data are routed by the pogoplug server. Eventually I ordered the tonidoplug which is cheaper and did exactly what I needed it to do.

The guys over at Tonido really tried to simply the setup process for the average user. There are still flaws and bugs, but the community is growing quickly and your questions do get answered.

The only problem with the Tonidoplug is that it cannot detect multiple LUNs on a single device. This means if you have multiple partition on your drive, the 2nd partition will not be recognized. Secondly, the maximum supported volume size is only 2TB.  These problems eventually killed the dream of using it as a droboshare…

However, these should be easy things to fix as long as the Linux kernel on the plug are recompiled to support these features… I have already made contact with one of the users on the forum who is looking into writing a system module to address these limitation temporarily.  I hope tonidoplug will come up with an official update soon.

They have huge potential to capture the droboshare’s marketshare.

Update: With help from the guys over the Tonido support forum we found  a temp solution. It’s not pretty but It sure does work! Read on…

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Popularity: 31% [?]

Posted in: Gadgets, Me.
Tagged: drobo · NAS · tonido

I have been having this annoying problem with my DVD burner… the tray won’t eject unless I use the pinhole release. After Googling, I noticed there are a lot of DW1640 and rebranded Sony drives having the same problem. However, no solution was found.

So today I decided to take a crack at it and see if I can figure out the problem. The drive is out of warranty anyway… and it still burns fast and solid.

After some testing, I realized the cause of the problem was the little rubber belt connecting two spin wheels that controlled the ejection and retraction of the tray.

I guess the elasticity of the rubber must have worn out over the years, and the wheels were left to spin freely.

The simple solution was to replaced the worn out belt with an elastic band.

I found an elastic band with slightly shorter circumference than the original, so it was a bit tricky to put on. I hooked up the small wheel first, then used two tweezers and pull the band around the bigger wheel.

Problem solved! and gave the old drive a few more years to live.

Popularity: 19% [?]

Posted in: DIY.

I switched my Snow Leopard kernel to 64bit after reading an article online about the performance advantage in Lightroom, and a few other apps.

However, lately I realized my iPhone tethering is no longer working. The Macbook cannot see the phone in Network Preferences, and iTunes spits out an unknown error (0xE800006B). I did everything from resetting my settings on the phone, and deleting iTunes’ plist file. Nothing worked! Every time I plug my phone in, the same error message pops out… didn’t know what to do.

I eventually realized the problem was caused by the 64bit kernel and the lack of proper driver support for it… and apparently iTunes (as of 9.0.2) was not rewritten like most other apps for Snow Leopard.

That made me wonder… Apple has a Windows 64bit version of iTunes but not a Mac version?  What is going on here?

Anyway, I thought I’d let the world know since this problem isn’t documented by Apple.

Popularity: 21% [?]

Posted in: Apple Inc., Macintosh, iPhone.
Tagged: iTunes · Operating System · Snow Leopard

As many of you know, Google Chrome OS is now available as a VMware VM. You can download from gdgt
http://gdgt.com/google/chrome-os/download/

I think the guys from gdgt just compiled the source from the Chromium OS project… and using this as bait to increase traffic to their site. Anyway, they did an ok job and you do have to register on gdgt to download it.

Here are some screenshots of Chrome OS.

The OS looks extremely similar to the Chrome browser, and it is basically a complete standalone version of Google Chrome. This early developer build has very little configurable options… actually apart from those security and web related options you get from the Chrome browser there are only options to enable Tap to Click, and some mouse/touchpad sensitivity settings.

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Popularity: 37% [?]

Posted in: Reviews.
Tagged: Chome OS · Google · Operating System · review

I get this question all the time… Should I do an update or a fresh install of my operating system?

Short answer… Fresh Install > Upgrading

Long answer… it depends on how the upgrade went and what you are looking for. I recently did an upgrade from Leopard to Snow Leopard and noticed very little problems. the most noticeable problem was the long bootup time… and I know that Snow Leopard had specific optimizations to decrease boot time. Furthermore, I had some apps that were incompatible with Snow Leopard… so I finally decided to give the system a good wipe and install from scratch. and since then… all the problems have been solved… especially after installing the 10.6.2 update. Just always remember to backup your data and apps before wiping things out. Time Machine is very useful in this respect.

On the Windows side, I successfully upgrade from Windows Vista to Windows 7 without a glitch. The two systems are extremely similar under the hood, and I did not notice any problem after upgrading. I even did a clean install of Windows 7 and noticed no improvements. To be fair, I didn’t have anything installed in Vista anyway… just Office and Adobe CS.

Popularity: 21% [?]

Posted in: Macintosh, Other.
Tagged: Operating System · Windows 7

Here we go again… I don’t mean to revisit this ancient old debate of which system is better… but I JUST CAN’T HELP IT! =)

Since now I own both systems… I think I can bring some new perspectives and observations to the table.

First of all… I’ve been a loyal Windows user since the 3.0 days. and I guess that’s how long this endless debate has been going on for… However, we are looking at a completely different landscape than those old days.

The common myth that Apple made “better” hardware than your average PC is dead now that everyone is on the Intel train… and we have normal PCs running hacked versions of MacOS… and Intel Macs booting Windows XP and Vista. (official Win 7 support is also coming.) So if you really look at what Apple is offering and charging for… is basically your average hardware stuffed in a fancy chassis. Surprisingly enough… according to official stats there are now more people who are willing to pay the premium for Apple’s fancy design.

But here is my story… I’ve been a Windows user for quite a while… and the ONLY reason why I now own a Macbook Pro is because I needed to run the iPhone SDK. It may not have been the wisest 2 grands spent… but the new Macbook Pros are amazing looking machines! I have to say… cosmetically I have nothing to complain about the machine! The fact that I can get a Dell with similar specs doesn’t bother me at all.

What bugged and is still bugging the hell out of me… is when Mac users… Apple officials and loyalists portray their OS as the best in the world for anything you do!

This is simply UNTRUE! MacOS looks fancy but it is not the ultimate saviour when it comes computing! It is not! Even with the latest Snow Leopard release… it is not even close!!!
Like Mircosoft Windows… it has flaws! If you install too much stuff… it will get slow… if you don’t do regular maintenance… something will go wrong… The number one thing about OS… not one system out there right now will “just work”. If you don’t take care of it… it will not take care of you. Get used to it!

I’ll give you an example… ever since Leopard MacOS had this weird problem where it cannot open files if they were downloaded from the Internet. The only thing that will fix it… REBOOT! That is until Apple released an update a few days ago to address the problem. This is a problem that existed in Leopard and Snow Leopard. As you can imagine I was extremely annoyed by this problem… because even my Windows machine didn’t have to be rebooted this many times to fix a stupid problem like this.

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Popularity: 25% [?]

Posted in: Apple Inc., Macintosh, Me, Other.

I’ve been searching for a cheap VPS for some of the projects I’m working on. I needed an affordable plan… (by that I mean CHEAP! <$20) with great stability and reasonable support.

This sounds almost impossible to pull off… even in today’s world. Most popular shared plans cost more than $20…

But wait, introducing Unmanaged VPS service.

An unmanaged VPS is basically an empty VPS space with a metred uplink. The hosting companies will not install ANY software for you… no Apache, no MySQL… no PHP. You must do all the work yourself. Their job is keeping the physical servers and their uplinks online. (Previously I worked remotely for a web hosting firm… so I know a fair bit about keeping things running.)

Before choosing a hosting company, you must understand some of the terminologies used to value VPS packages.

CPU Speed/Limit: some hosts will give you an estimate of CPU in megahertz; obviously the higher number the faster. However, as a user you do not really have any practical way of measuring performance by looking these numbers… so I wouldn’t worry too much about it. Other hosts will specify if multiple CPU instances are allowed on the VPS to create a virtual multi-core space. These options are probably very expensive. Choose wisely according to your budget.

RAM: like the RAM in your computer, RAM on your VPS will be a great limiting factor of performance. The OS, Apache, MySQL, PHP instances all require quite a bit of RAM to run. I would say that 128MB is the absolute minimum you should have. I would recommend getting at least 256MB… because after I installed everything on my VPS… it was eating up more than 200mb while idling. I seriously would not recommend running production sites on a 128MB VPS.

Burst RAM: since resources on the physical server are still shared among multiple users, each VPS instance will have a guaranteed RAM size and a burst or peak size. The burst RAM specifies the maximum amount of RAM the VPS is allowed to allocate should the resources be available. You will see companies advertise their plans as 512MB RAM/1024MB Burst. This indicates that your VPS will get 512MB in any situation, and it is allowed to go up to 1024MB or 1GB when it is under load and the other VPS spaces on your server can spare you a few MB of RAM.

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Popularity: 100% [?]

Posted in: Development, MySQL, PHP.
Tagged: CentOS · server · VPS · web hosting

First, we need the pecl command so we can download and install APC from the repositories. I use the “remi” repo to give me the latest packages, so use “–enablerepo=remi” if you have it installed.

yum install php-pear
But, this will not run on its own, we need the following package for the phpize command:

yum install php-devel
We also need the apxs command, which is installed via the following package:

yum install httpd-devel
Now we have all the software we need, so we install apc via the pecl command:

pecl install apc

I also recommend installing uploadprogress, because Drupal 6 will ask you to do so.

pecl install uploadprogress

Now we have to enable apc and uploadprogress in php.ini.

Add the following lines to /etc/php.ini or wherever your php config file is located.

extension=apc.so

extension=uploadprogress.so

Then we restart Apache:

/etc/init.d/httpd start
And we are all done. Watch for less execution time per page, and decreased memory usage per Apache process compared to what you had
before.

Popularity: 100% [?]

Posted in: Development, PHP.
Tagged: PHP · server · VPS