October 2008 Archives

This morning, I uploaded my first application to the Android Market. As a quick background, Android is Google's new mobile operating system, designed for smartphones and similar mobile internet devices, and similar in theory to the iPhone operating system. The Android Market allows third party developers to distribute their software through a centralized location for a small fee. As of right now, all software on the market is free, so you don't make any money on the process.

I decided, for some reason, that my first application was going to be a LiveJournal client, that is, an application that enables easy posting to a LiveJournal blog. I would be able to work with simple HTTP requests, design a simple but effective user interface, play with threads a little bit, and touch the Location Manager (GPS/Tracking) if I was lucky.

I was.

I'm happy with the final product, and it's modular enough that I can add to it later if I wanted to, or fork it to a generic blog posting tool if I felt crazy enough. You can log into your LJ account, select user pictures from a live gallery of all of your user icons, dynamically retrieve your location from GPS or fuzzy tracking, add moods or your current music. It's remarkably complete for a few days of work, and I think I want to add the ability to attach photos later on, as well as limit to certain friend groups or post to other communities. Trivial tasks in the long run, but I wanted to get it out there as soon as possible.

Click through if you want to see what it looks like.

Since I do a lot of sales and purchasing on Craigslist, I figured I'd start assembling a list of scammers, pranksters, and fakesters either trying to buy or trying to sell something fraudulent. It won't matter much to anyone right now, but this provides a link so Google can index it.

When I can, I will put in the names, email addresses in the to, reply to, and cc headers, and the source IP address, if available. Unfortunately, most of the source IPs are invalid.

A developer release of Catalyst::Runtime 5.8 was thrown onto CPAN tonight. It's not on all of the mirrors yet, but it will be soon. This is the result of the "Catamoose" project, or the redo of Catalyst using Moose, the modern OO framework for Perl.

I'm installing it now to see how well wtf runs. I'm very interested to see how well it works.

I'm excited. :)

Today, in the work IRC channel, we started on a discussion of Ruby on Rails, which slowly filtered into a discussion about poop.

I would say it's a natural progression.

At some point, I really have to write about the new whatthefuck.com mail architecture. It is made up of some pretty epic hacks, but the new system is one hundred times more reliable and versatile than the old system.

Okay, I suppose that isn't saying much.

I do have to say this. I started out building on top of a courier/postfix based system, and ended up rolling my own on top of qpsmtpd, and will be writing a custom IMAP daemon for the newly-created system. The first version is very basic, but there are so many neat things I can do with it.

The new server with a terabyte and a half of space is heading to the data center this week, but if this works how I hope, there may be a few more servers heading over there soon enough. FreeBSD and ZFS is pretty much admin-heaven. PostgreSQL is a wonderful thing as well.