This article briefly describes how you can setup the Giganews VPN (PPTP) on Ubuntu. I’m gonna assume 10.04 (that’s what I tested with) and the gnome desktop. Does this sound familiar: The VPN connection ‘xxxxx’ failed because there were no valid VPN secrets. If so then I’m hoping this article will help you. What is a VPN for? The use-case for a VPN — and this is for basically any VPN (not just Giganews’ service) — is security....
One of the more frequent questions I see on the mailing lists and IRC is, “How do I take over a package?”. Very often people start to use a PEAR package and then at some point encounter either a bug or they miss a certain feature. The package’s state however is inactive or flat unmaintained. Offer help The first step is to offer your help. And the easiest way to help is to report bugs or open feature requests....
In my last blog entry, I shared some nodejs-code to read CouchDB’s _changes feed and publish the data to a website. In order to update the page in a continous fashion, I used socket.io which provides a nifty abstraction across server- to client-side transports — for example, websockets and ajax longpoll. Full-throttle When we tested the code for a few days over the weekend, the largest issue we ran into was that the stream moved too fast....
I recently had the extreme pleasure to use node.js and socket.io on a project. Here are some insights. Objective So the objective of the project was to read data from the _changes feed of our CouchDB cluster (hosted by Cloudant) and publish the data to a widget which we can use to display a constant stream of “what are people doing right now”. The core of the problem we faced was not just taking this stream of data and feeding it on to a page, but since we’ll deploy this widget to our homepage we needed to make sure that no matter how many clients see it, the impact on the database cluster is minimal; for example, it would be a single client (or down the road up to three for failover) who actually read data from the cluster....
In 2010, operations became an even more central part of my life. As I write this blog post (in early January, 2011), we have been running on Amazon AWS — and EC2 in particular — for over a year. Previously we had used a service called RightScale but in Q3 of 2010, we moved on/away from RightScale and started using chef and a service called Scalarium. Because Opscode’s chef became such a big part of my work life, I gave a talk about chef, and chef-solo in particular, at last December’s PHP Usergroup meeting in Berlin....