Older blog entries for dyork (starting at number 461)

Code.DanYork.com Now Running WordPress 3.2.1

In addition to being where I write about programming and other developer topics, this site is also where I test out new WordPress releases before installing them on other sites like the Voxeo blog portal or the Voice of VOIPSA site.  This site runs on a WordPress Multi-Site installation, although there aren’t many sites here (another one is my new IPv6 book).

This past week I installed WordPress 3.2 (followed by the 3.2.1 bug fix) and I have to say I am quite impressed with the back-end changes described in the announcement.  Some of them are just minor little nuances… the changes in the typography, even…   it just feels snappier and faster.  If you run a blog on top of WordPress, I have to say that 3.2 is definitely worth a look… I’m loving it!

Syndicated 2011-07-19 23:45:47 from Code.DanYork.Com

The FCC … on Github??? and releasing a WordPress plugin???

I love being surprised… did you know that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is making code available as open source over on Github? And that FCC staffers have released a WordPress plugin?

I discovered this via a tweet from someone that brought me to the “Official FCC Blog” and the July 6th post, “Contributing Code Back: FCC.gov’s Open-Source Feedback Loop,” that outlines many of the contributions they have been making.

As a long-time open source advocate, I’m thrilled to see the FCC doing this. It’s great to see them on Github – and it’s great to see them giving back to the WordPress ecosystem.

And I love that they end the post asking readers to fork their code and contribute changes back!

Great to see – and kudos to the FCC “new media” team for getting involved in this way.

Syndicated 2011-07-14 03:25:03 from Code.DanYork.Com

Calipso – A Content Management System (CMS) Written in Node.js

As a writer of online content, I’m always looking at what is new in the world of content management systems (CMSs), and I was intrigued to see that there is a new CMS out based on Node.js called Calipso (and with the brilliantly simple url calip.so). Here’s the description:

Calipso is a content management system (CMS), based on the NodeJS server.

Due to the asynchronous nature of NodeJS, it seemed like a good idea to try to build a CMS made up of modules that could execute asynchronously in a non-blocking way.

This is the start of that journey, we are in the early days, so be patient, but feedback is always appreciated!

The site itself is of course built using Calipso and demonstrates some of the capabilities. Alex Young over at the DailyJS JavaScript blog also wrote a detailed code review of Calipso that gives a good sense of its capabilities. The code itself can naturally be found on Github for those wanting to dive into the source code itself.

While right now I will stick with WordPress as my CMS for this site (primarily because I barely have enough time to write, let alone work on the backend of the site), it’s good to see someone working on a Node.js-driven CMS and I’ll definitely keep watching its evolution. Cool to see!

Syndicated 2011-06-17 13:18:27 from Code.DanYork.Com

Code.DanYork.com Now Available Over IPv6 as of World IPv6 Day

Just in time for World IPv6 Day, I’m pleased to note that Code.DanYork.com is now available over IPv6!

This site runs on WordPress and while WordPress itself works fine with IPv6, the trick was to find a web hosting provider that provided solid IPv6 connectivity.

After much investigation, I finally set up a basic web hosting account with Hurricane Electric. They’ve been in a leader in IPv6 deployment and have great interconnections to other IPv6 networks. They are also the folks behind Tunnelbroker.net, the free service I use to get IPv6 connectivity into my home office (using a setup for IPv6 with an Apple TimeCapsule that I described in another blog post).

I had this site hosted at another webhost, but through the sheer beauty of WordPress’s export and import features I was able to move the entire contents of the site over to Hurricane Electric without any problem.

For those curious, I’m running the site in WordPress’ Multisite mode as I’m planning to move more of my sites over to HE’s hosting. I’m using the Domain Mapping plugin to let me map different domains to different blogs. It’s all working wonderfully.

Now, unlike Google and Facebook, I’m not removing the IPv6 connectivity for this site after the 24 hours of World IPv6 Day are up. This site is live with IPv6 and will stay set up with IPv6 for the foreseeable future. (But having said that, I have nowhere even remotely near the visitors of the larger sites… and I have the luxury of not having to deal with large numbers of people who may have challenges connecting to my site.)

Welcome to the new IPv6 Internet!

P.S. If you want to learn more about IPv6, and in particular IPv6 and VoIP/SIP, you can visit the IPv6 Resource Page I put together over on Voxeo’s site. I’ve got some HOWTOs, tutorials, videos, links and more…

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As an aside, over on the right navigation bar you’ll see a little “IPv6 detector” box that will show you either your IPv6 address or your IPv4 address (and yes, I blacked my actual address out in the screenshot because I’m just naturally paranoid):

I’m using the “IPv6 detector” plugin for WordPress by Andres Altamirano, although I did alter it a bit. I shortened the text that was printed for an IPv6 address so that it would fit in my theme’s sidebar. I also removed the URL link and removed the extra links about IPv4 exhaustion.

Installation was a snap, though… I just installed it into WordPress and then went to the Widgets area of my theme and dragged it into the location where I wanted it.

Syndicated 2011-06-08 03:19:24 from Code.DanYork.Com

My Github repo of SMSified experiments

Earlier in the week I mentioned a quick python app I wrote to send SMS messages using SMSified. I’m storing that code and some other experiments up in a Github repo at:

https://github.com/danyork/smsified-experiments/

If you are a Github user and also interested in building SMS apps, please feel free to “watch” that repo and follow along with my own experiments. Code will probably be a mixture of python and Node.js, with occasional other languages thrown in.

Syndicated 2011-05-20 11:50:32 from Code.DanYork.com

Skulpt – a JavaScript-based way to run Python inside your web browser

In the process of writing about the site that lets you run Linux in your web browser, I learned about Skulpt.org that is essentially the same idea only for a python command line.

The demo at www.skulpt.org is pretty cool… just modify the python code in the screen and press Ctrl+Enter to execute the code and have the output appear in the box below.

To play with it yourself, you can get the code at http://code.google.com/p/skulpt/ or as author Scott Graham shows on the Skulpt.org page you can just use mercurial to clone the repo.

I haven’t installed it myself… again, like the “Linux in your browser” experiment, I think this is very cool but I’m not entirely sure where I’d personally ever use. Still, I’m very glad people build projects like this – if for no other reason than showing that this could be done!

Cool stuff…

Syndicated 2011-05-19 12:07:50 from Code.DanYork.com

Greg Bayer: How to Move Files From One Git Repo To Another While Preserving History

By way of a Hacker News post, I learned of this great post by Greg Bayer:

Moving Files from one Git Repository to Another, Preserving History

I’ve actually had a couple of cases where I’ve wanted to move some files and keep the history. I couldn’t easily figure it out and opted to just copy the files into the new repo and lose the history. This looks like a workable solution instead. Thanks to Greg Bayer for writing it up.

P.S. a comment to the HN post also mentions this “git-subtree” tool, which does look interesting.

Syndicated 2011-05-18 12:09:22 from Code.DanYork.com

A Quick Python App to Send SMS via SMSified’s REST API

Today Voxeo[1] launched SMSified a new service that lets you use a really simple RESTful API to send text messages within the US for only 1 cent per message. I and other colleagues have been writing about SMSified on the SMSified blog and after writing a tutorial about using SMSified with curl, I figured I’d play around with python a bit and code up an example of sending a SMS via python.

So here it is… stored up in my Github account, but also here:

#!/usr/bin/env python

# Really simple python app for playing with sending SMS messages
# via SMSified - http://www.smsified.com/
# Created by Dan York - May 2011

import json
import urllib

senderid = "dandemo"   #SMSified account
password = "notmyrealpassword" #SMSified password
sendernum = "5853260800"       #SMSified phone number

apiurl = "https://"+senderid+":"+password+"@api.smsified.com/v1/
smsmessaging/outbound/"+sendernum+"/requests"

address = "14079678424"        # Phone num to which you want to send
message = "Hello there"        # Whatever msg you want to send

data = urllib.urlencode((('address',address),('message',message)))

f = urllib.urlopen(apiurl,data)

print json.loads(f.read())['resourceReference']['resourceURL']

As you can see in the code, there are really only three lines of importance: the one building “apiurl”; the one urlencoding the data; and the one opening the URL. The rest are really just for the convenience of using variables.

The final line simply prints out the info included in the result JSON. I was going to (and still may) make that print out prettier or say something more… and if you are reading this sometime in the future, the version on Github may have already morphed and evolved into something different. The point is that now that you get JSON back, you can parse it and start to take action on it.

Anyway, this was just a quick sample app to experiment with SMSified. If you have checked out the new service, it’s free to set up a developer account and currently is free entirely during the beta period.

[1] In full disclosure, Voxeo is my employer.

Syndicated 2011-05-17 20:38:43 from Code.DanYork.com

Fun Tool to Run a Linux Computer IN Your Browser Using JavaScript

Here’s a fun little JavaScript experiment… go to:

http://bellard.org/jslinux/

Watch the boot sequence… and… ta da… you’ve got a Linux root prompt! Use basic Linux commands, edit files with vi, compile apps in C using “tcc”.

Fabrice Bellard explains why he wrote this JavaScript PC emulator.

My immediate thought was how this could be used for teaching people Linux. Regardless of what it is used for or whether it’s just a fun experiment, it’s very cool to see that JavaScript engines in the latest browsers can support this type of more complex activity. Kudos to Fabrice Bellard for writing this!

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Also check out:

• Hacker News discussion about this tool
• Fabrice Bellard’s home page showing his other tools
• Article about him: “Fabrice Bellard: Portrait of a Superproductive Programmer”

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Syndicated 2011-05-17 15:23:18 from Code.DanYork.com

Deep Tech Dives Into Cloud Availability In Light Of Amazon’s EC2/EBS Problems From Joyent and enStratus

With Amazon’s ongoing struggles with part of their cloud, I’ve obviously been watching closely, given that I work for a company that provides a cloud for communication applications (hosted almost entirely on our own global carrier-grade infrastructure). Watching Amazon’s status site, they continue to not be entirely back in action a couple of days later.

There have been a lot of great technical posts out there related to what’s happening with AWS. Two that caught my eye are admittedly by an Amazon competitor, Joyent, but are definitely worth a read:

• On Cascading Failures and Amazon’s Elastic Block Store
• Magical Block Store: When Abstractions Fail Us

The latter post about abstraction layers hits a few major points with me, particularly around the need for abstraction layers to allow some type of control… and some type of transparency into what is going on.

Black boxes are great… until they break.

Another great post was by George Reese over in the O’Reilly Community (he is CTO of enStratus, a company making equipment to assist in infrastructure automation):

• The AWS Outage: The Cloud’s Shining Moment

Reese argues that it is the application developer’s responsibility to design apps in such a way that they aren’t dependent at all on the underlying infrastructure.

This all takes me back to my post I wrote in 2009 about the need for services to be distributed and decentralized. Now I was talking in there about Twitter and Facebook… but the same argument can be made for apps in general…

It’s a fascinating time… I hope for Amazon’s sake that they can get everything back in action soon… and it will be interesting to see what questions this all makes developers ask with regard to cloud providers. Meanwhile, I’m enjoying many of these deep technical posts… I expect to see more coming in the days and weeks ahead.

Syndicated 2011-04-25 02:32:02 from Code.DanYork.com