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.

It's odd that no one has created a decent gallery application in Catalyst yet. I'm torn now between just moving to Flickr and paying the money, or writing something that I can use. I have the server space, what's stopping me?

Oh, right, time.

The new site still doesn't have much for content, and much of it is recycled from a failed attempt at caring in 2003, but there are some changes in the works that required me to at least make a site framework. I'm still downloading IE6 to test it, but it naturally works fine in Safari/Firefox/Chrome.

I gave in and used tables, since IE6 CSS is so odd when doing absolute positioning. If anyone checked out Things I Hate About You recently, you'll notice that it works fine in IE6, but that's only because of some major changes in CSS. I wish there was more of an effort to rid the world of IE6. IE7 is still bad, but it's at least manageable.

I registered the domain name back in March, thinking of something completely different, but decided to make it a little more community driven and fun. That, and I wanted to see how long it would take. Part of my continuing experimentation with cute elements and jQuery, this adds a few effects, some stateless connections, and was also written completely with Catalyst. It took four days of an hour or two a night, with posts, votes, authentication, and RSS feeds.

Not bad.

I'll probably be adding things to this site slowly, to see how well it extends. It was kinda fun to create this without having to worry about eight years of legacy, like the rewrite of whatthefuck.com into Catalyst. This was just doing-it-as-I-want. I may use this as a test bed for a Facebook application as well.

It's still pretty broken in IE6, but it's low on my priority list. I may just redirect people to a browser download page. :P

Let's see what breaks. :)

I've been involved with the development, support, and administration of running various web sites for the last ten years or so, and yet, I've never been a part of a site that has run any kind of advertising campaign. Doing things for yourself changes some of your views on internet advertising, as it's one of the few ways you can reliably generate any income. People, for the most part, do not want to pay for anything they do online.

Most of you know that I run www.whatthefuck.com, a free content and networking site that was content and networking before it was cool. I had two major issues during the life of this site: first, a lack of time to properly maintain it, and second, a lack of ability to monetize the domain properly. I created the site with a friend when we were both just out of high school, and it was created in the same line of thinking as the old school BBSes that we used to run and sign into daily. Because of that, it never really occurred to use to try to make money off of it, and when it finally did, the economy was running down the drain.

Over the last year, I've been rebuilding the site piece by piece on top of the fantastic platform of Perl, PostgreSQL, Catalyst, and DBIx::Class. It "relaunched" last November, very quietly, to see who would notice. Those who were still sticking around noticed immediately, as the site worked, worked well, and was still speedy. The first mission was accomplished, and the last year has been me working on it in my spare time to restore the feature set that was original envisioned back in 1999.

The difference between 1999 and 2008 in terms of the web is like comparing video games from around 1994 to now. In 1990, a sole shareware developer could crank out fun, easy to play games as shareware for $20 and make a killing. Now, you need a few million in the bank, and a team of artists, designers, modelers, and marketers to publish a video game.. and there's no guarantee that it'll be a hit. You can't throw together some basic HTML, add a few tables and server side form processing, and call it a success anymore. You need transitions, glass effects, AJAX, Web 2.0, blah, blah, blah.

(Sometimes, this goes overboard, like in the case of Ruby on Rails developers. This is why a simple service like Twitter is still having issues -- overdoing something simple, creating a platform you just can't extend.)

To bring this long story back to the ground, the next big push out from wtf is the free e-mail support that users enjoyed back when whatthefuck.com launched. Back then, it was essentially three things: a mailbox viewer, a simple mail viewer (no MIME! wtf?!), and a message composer. Yeah, there were mail folders. Sure, later on, we added an address book, but that's as fancy as it got. Eventually, the whole system collapsed under failed hardware and too little space. Now, no one is going to care about a mail service unless it -- at the very least -- does real time folder management, tagging, dynamic resizing, MIME decoding, spam filtering, and live updates. That, and 20mb per user doesn't cut it anymore, but there's no way we're going to give out 5gb at this point. Even with a minor increase in allowed space, I have to buy a lot of hardware to support this endeavor, so I have to come up with a revenue source.

Enter advertising networks, and this morning's research.

I've hit a bit of a breaking point, though. I tried to put Google SiteSearch on wtf a few months ago, but Google blocks wtf from making any requests. Apparently, we're on their blocked/forbidden list for a violation of their policy. The only thing I see in there that could potentially be a policy violation is 'excessive swearing' due to the domain name, but that kinda sucks. I've seen sites with Google ads that were doing far more subversive things than our forum.

I just wanted to see if I could get an ad up anywhere else. Turns out, I can. Now, I go look for another advertising network that doesn't have adult ads, while still allowing a domain like whatthefuck.com.

Now that I know I need to move forward, the next question is 'How?'.

Huh.

Right now, I use a Lenovo/IBM ThinkPad T61 14" Widescreen edition, with a Core 2 Duo at 2.2GHz, 2gb RAM, a 100gb drive, and DVD-RW DL drive. The screen resolution is a comfortable 1440x900, I have some wireless, and life is good. I'm also running OS X 10.5, licensed but violating EULA, because it's one of the greatest operating systems we currently have available. There are a few little issues with running Leopard on this machine. Most things work, but I don't currently have a driver for the built in ethernet, the machine won't sleep if I have bluetooth enabled, the machine won't wake up if I enable the PC card slots, I can't control the brightness of the LCD, and when the laptop runs out of battery, it shuts off instead of going to sleep.

There are a few people working on two of the issues, namely the brightness issue with the Intel X3100 graphics controller, and a driver for the Intel 82566M Gigabit Ethernet controller. No sense in duplicating their efforts. The only kext I've ever written was a small driver to enable the tablet serial port on the X61 tablet that I had before this, so people could use TabletMagic and get full tablet functionality in OS X. Ethernet driver creator, I am not.

But, hey, I give you one little turd to make your life easier, and you may even find it useful if you're on a real Mac. This little package, 'sleep_monitor', installs a LaunchDaemon and a binary on your machine to keep track of how much battery you have left and put your machine to sleep at a certain threshold. It's a simple idea, but most Mac authors would charge $20 for the privilege. I give you it for free, but you don't get a GUI. Sorry.

When you install the package, it immediately starts. It will wait until you have 4% of your battery remaining, and puts your machine to sleep. On my T61 with the 4 cell battery, that usually kicks me into sleep when I have about 5 minutes of use left in the menu bar, and that will give me many hours of sleep to find an outlet to charge things up. Want to change the threshold? Edit /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.abstractwankery.sleep_monitor.plist and change the second ProgramArgument to the percentage you'd like to kill out at. Have an 8 cell battery? 2-3% is fine. Have a nearly dead battery? Maybe 15% is more your thing. Leave the % sign out of it, it will only cause problems.

SleepMonitor 0.1
Mac OS X 10.4, 10.5

Granted, a few things have been fixed. The SMS posting service makes it really easy to actually post remotely, as none of the S60 clients are very good, and the Java clients really suck. They don't seem to be down as much, and the speed isn't terrible. Rumor has it, they're getting rid of Ruby on Rails, which just makes me jump with glee.

Since then, for posting, someone put together an AppleScript called Tweet, which allows you to easily post to Twitter through QuickSilver. It works well for me, I just hit Command-Space, hit period, type my tweet, tab, then tweet it. It sounds complicated, but it's really easy to deal with. I like it, and it was easy as hell to do.

Then, there's the feed problem. RSS is too slow, I don't want it cluttering up Google Reader. Twitterrific still isn't working for me, as pretty as it is. There are two Dashboard modules, and neither of them work well, and silently fail at that. What I really wanted was something that would just post tweets to Growl and be done with it. I found something, but it was a Ruby script with manual configuration and little extensibility. I didn't want to screw with it, so off to /dev/null it went.

Hey, there's a point.

In the end, I wrote a perl script called TwitterGrowl to do exactly what I want it to do. To make life easier, it relies on the Twitter login information in your keychain to log in, and prompts you to create one if it doesn't find anything. It reports when there's a login failure, or Twitter goes into Suckfest, or when a system maintenance issue is posted. Better yet, I packaged it up into an easy to use, double clickable application. Pop it into your Applications folder, drag it to your Login Items, and it'll go into the background and sign in when you log in. Easy as pie. All of the required modules are in the application package, and you can feel free to browse the source by viewing the package contents and heading into the Resources folder.

So, now that I have a steady "works for me", would anyone else like to give it a shot and see if anything breaks? Comment here with any issues or comments you find, and if no one posts, it either works great or I am a total failure. :)

TwitterGrowl 0.1 (Mac OS X 10.4 or 10.5, Universal)

Yet, I never do.

I've been on LiveJournal for seven years, and I bet I have at least four of those a year on there, too.

Sorry about that.

A company called Psystar recently exploded into the news by openly announcing a commercially sold "hackintosh". They're offering what is essentially a white box PC, with off the shelf parts that match or closely match what Apple is offering in their hardware, pre-installed with Mac OS X 10.5. Their sales pitch is that they're effectively selling an expandable Mac, with more power than an iMac, for less than half the cost. They're bundling a legal copy of Leopard, the Netkas EFI v8 emulator, and Apple's bundled software, as a complete package. It's a license violation to do this, as Apple's EULA specifically forbids using Leopard on hardware that is not Apple-branded.

The funny part to this story is that Netkas is all pissed off that Psystar is using his EFI emulator in a commercial product. He has since re-released EFI v8 with a new license forbidding the use of the software for commercial purposes. Now, if anyone just noticed that, Netkas is pissed off that Psystar is violating his license agreement by bundling software that allows people to violate Apple's license agreement.

Right, then.

I really enjoy their phones, they are solid and well built. The Symbian operating system is easily one of the best on the market right now, but Microsoft is working very hard on Windows Mobile, and Apple's iPhone offers an unbeatable user experience. With the iPhone, you get vendor and provider lock in, and with Windows Mobile, you get Windows. Nokia doesn't concentrate very hard on the US market, with delayed US 3G releases, and my provider just doesn't care about Nokia at all.

Who knows what I'm going to get next. Maybe I'll be waiting for a Google Android device.

A random number generator.

You get a certain number of uses per month. We hire three or four people to roll dice, and input the result into the system. Each API call shifts the next value off the top.

I'm going to be rich.

I really love Nokia products, too. I've owned five of their handsets (3390, 3650, 6682, 9300, and E61i), and two of their internet tablets (770, N800). One thing that really drives me nuts about Nokia is their software updates, or their lack of software updates. Back before the 6682, it was impossible to get software updates for your phone unless you managed to find a Nokia Service Center, an impossible task in the United States, or you downloaded a pirated copy of their Phoenix software and managed to find a pirated release of their firmware. Last year, Nokia started offering software updates to consumers via their Nokia Software Updater, supporting all of the S60v3 handsets, N and E series handsets, and the last of the S60v2 series. They've even started including S40 handsets on a limited basis. Mind you, this was last year, and those with Windows Mobile smartphones have been getting major software updates for a few years now.

Since then, Blackberry has entered the consumer market after dominating the US business market, and Apple introduced the iPhone as a consumer smartphone, and when their 2.0 software comes out, will start taking chunks out of the business market as well. Both companies are offering major software updates after the hardware purchase, without requiring a hardware upgrade every time they add a major feature. Nokia continues to only offer bug fixes.

I really appreciate the fact that we get bug fixes and all of that, but with the new competition out there, it would really be nice if we weren't dropping over $400 on new handsets, only to have them obsoleted within a year. Whenever I bring this up on one of Nokia's blogs, it is either ignored, or a Nokia apologist starts talking about how the hardware matches the software or some other nonsense. It's like Apple fanboys, I swear.

I think I'm just ranting. But at least I took the opportunity to rant to Nokia Support. I have a strong feeling I won't get a good answer from them.

In other news, the www.whatthefuck.com relaunch has been going really well. Some old timers have come back, and the site is more stable than it ever has been. The speed is still up to snuff too, even though we're using a platform far more abstracted than the original. The original was self rolled Perl, embedded HTML, no CGI.pm, no templating, self-created cookies, the whole shebang. The new system is using the Catalyst Framework as the core, with DBIx::Class for database abstraction, Template Toolkit for the viewable HTML and XML, and utility processes using the Moose OO Framework for Perl. I'm quite happy with the result, with the manageability and maintainability, and the speed I get through FastCGI on Apache.

I've started doing a call out to users on new features and suggestions. From the latest list I put out, I think that after the first half is complete, I'll be ready to do a full launch of the site and start getting the word out.

Oh, and I fixed commenting on the blog. Sorry about that.