You can read the changelog here, but here is a summary ... You can now choose the order of the tabs for the various commenting systems and what ever tab is set as the first one becomes the default. So those that wanted to make the WordPress native comments default but still add-in G+ comments or others can now easily do it. Also the icons now use the official images for the various services and also can optionally be hidden. Along with other various misc js and css cleanups this should cover nearly all feature requests up to this point except the addition of a few more optional commenting systems like Twitter, Livefyre, and IntenseDebate, that are all in the works for a future update. If you would like to see others file a support request and I'll get it on the TODO list.

Here is a nice screenshot of it running on cloudhero.net and of the admin options ...

So take 1.4.0 for a spin and let me know what you think. And be sure to Rate the plugin so others can easily find it :)

Big thanks to Kev Quirk over at RefuGeeks for the Banner at the top of our plugin page.

Cheers!

If your in the Web Development Industry in any way then be sure to check back in the middle of the week once its launched. I hope to make it a great ( free, gratis ) resource for the whole spectrum of people in this field, from a single developer to a team of designers or a department of copyrighters, maybe even some jewels that mgmt can latch onto learning about Agile best practices or other software development methods they havent had the time before to sit down and grok fully.

I'm sure the mission will change and evolve with the community that builds around it like with anything, but thats the initial 2 floor Elevator pitch :)  Get in touch if the idea grabs you'd like to pitch in, I'd be happy for the help.

Cheers!

Image Source: Instagram

[url "ssh://git@github.com/"]
insteadOf = gh:
insteadOf = gh:~

This allows you to “git clone gh:~bholtsclaw/git-bzr” in much the same way. Also if you are a heavy github user I’d highly recommend checking out the “hub” git cli wrapper found here.

By idolising people, I gave up on my opportunity to change the world, learn something exhilaratingly new, call out the wrongs done, and contribute to right some of the wrongs.

And this one, referring to herself:

None of these required any particular skill or talent, they are merely results of taking an action.

Don’t simply do what the rest of us do, do it differently, do it with pride, do it faster.

Take a stance and have an opinion. Don’t be afraid to be wrong. In fact, you should expect to be proved wrong. We learn the most when we take a chance on something and discover our assumptions were incorrect. Taking risks with our own ideas is how we learn to be stay both humble and ambitious. It’s a delicate balance, but one of the most important.

One of the promises of PaaS is productivity. Services like Heroku increase productivity because they abstract from the user the underlying infrastructure.

1: Choose Wisely

The main lesson from this outage is that relying on the provider to carry all your operations isn’t always a safe bet. When we move to a PaaS provider we still need to understand how they run their disaster recovery, high-availability, and scaling procedures. Heroku-like PaaS also forces you to a lowest common denominator approach to deal with continuous availability. In reality, however, there are many trade-offs between scalability, performance, and high availability and deciding between those trade-offs tends to be application specific, so compromising on a lowest common denominator could be not at all what was intended at the end of the day.

PaaS is meant to provide a higher productivity for running our apps on the cloud by abstracting the details of how we run our application (the operation) from the application developer. The black-box approach of many of the public PaaS offerings, such as Heroku, is often an extreme.

There is often a close coupling between what the application does and the way we run it. A new class of platform like juju offer a different open source alternative that gives you more control of your underlying PaaS platform. Juju uses an open model for its Charms that can easily integrate with Puppet, Chef/Chef-Solo, bcfg2, or most any configuration management enabling you to easily customize and control your operations creating your own PaaS and without affecting developer productivity.

2: Database Availability

Most public PaaS offering don’t adequately address is database high-availability, which is obviously a tough area. Specifically, in the event of data center failure or availability zone failure, as in the present case. To deal with database availability, it is necessary to ensure real-time synchronization of the database across sites, or Hot-spare / “Continuous Backup”.

3: Coping with Failure, Avoiding a Single Point of Failure

The general lesson from this and previous failures is actually not new. To be fair, this lesson is not specific to AWS or to any cloud service. Failures are inevitable, and often happen when and where we least expect them to. Instead of trying to prevent failure from happening we should design our systems to cope with failure.
The method of dealing with failures is also not that new – use redundancy, don’t rely on a single point failure (including a data center or even a data center provider). Automate the fail-over process, etc…

Haven’t Learned from Past Lessons?

The question that comes out of this is not necessarily how to deal with failures, but instead – why are we failing to implement the lessons?

Assuming that the people running these systems are among the best in the industry makes this question even more interesting …
We’re giving up responsibility when we move to the cloud: When we move our operations to the cloud, we often assume that we’re out-sourcing our data center operation completely, including our disaster recovery procedures. The truth is that when we move to the cloud we’re only outsourcing the infrastructure, not our operations, and the responsibility of how to use this infrastructure remain ours.

Implementing Past Lessons in the Cloud

We need to assume full responsibility for our applications’ disaster recovery procedures, in the cloud world just as if we were running our own data center.

The hard part in the cloud is that we often have less visibility, control, and knowledge of the infrastructure, which affects our ability to protect our applications – and each sub-component of our application – from failure. On the other hand, the cloud enables us to spawn new instances easily on various data center locations, a.k.a Availability Zones.

And so, most failures can be addressed by moving from the failed system to a completely different system regardless of the root cause of the failure. Therefore, the first lesson is that in the cloud world it is easier to implement disaster recovery plans, by moving our application traffic to a completely different redundant system in a snap, rather than trying to protect every component of our application from a failure.

If we’re willing to tolerate a short window of downtime, we can even use an on-demand backup site rather than pay the consistent cost and overhead of maintaining a hot backup site.

What do we need to build such a solution?

juju

Providing a consistent way to launch, configure, manage, and scale a primary as well as redundant environments that are ready to take over in case of failure.
Specifically, the ability to deploy your application, then orchestrate services and configuration in a consistent way across sites, and on demand.

How to get started ?

In an upcoming post I’ll detail taking a real world webapp from a traditional 1 or 2 VPS “mom and pop” setup that will likely resemble many readers current setups at home or work, then show you how I transform it to apply the above information using juju in detail. Hopefully this will give you a better look into some of the things you may encounter doing the same thing versus setting a new project up from scratch.

Now there is no reason not to try Newrelic to monitor those services. Newrelic just anounced that users of AWS can now signup for a free Premium account at http://www.newrelic.com/aws or for Azure as well http://www.newrelic.com/azure !

Setting it up to monitor your juju services could not be easier either using the newrelic charm in the juju charm store, to monitor an existing service just …

$ juju deploy newrelic
$ juju set newrelic key=YOUR_API_KEY
$ juju add-relation newrelic nginx

And thats all it takes to have newrelic reporting from your app ( nginx in this example but it will be happy to relate to any service ) to your shiney new account.

• Note: you can also deploy newrelic-php charm in the same manner if your application is written in PHP to get some additional metrics that are php specific.
• Disclosure: Although I am the author of the Newrelic juju charms I’m in no other way affiliated with Newrelic nor are the links above Affliate links, just a happy User :)

Amazed by some of the stunning apps that are coming out of the Ubuntu Developer App Showdown I whipped up this cool little widget that you can stick on your blog or other website to let the world know about it. It even has an alternate Image version ( that updates at less frequency ) for those vistors with JS turned off or in RSS readers like http://planet.ubuntu.com! So here it is below ( and if you are reading this from Planet Ubuntu you can visit the project page to see the live version in action, as well as on my blog at www.brandonholtsclaw.com )

Get Yours!

Simple instructions can be found here ( Just Copy & Paste 2 lines of HTML )

http://bholtsclaw.github.com/showdown/

And it should end up looking like this below …

Feel free to leave a comment with suggestions and such :)

The goal is for to have these added to the official Fedora, CentOS, and SuSE repositories as they mature and get the early kinks worked out of the packages.

Cheers!

Just having a little fun … Enjoy!

Behind the Scenes of a OMG!Ubuntu! Health Check & Deployment

Hope you enjoy it and comments or questions more than welcome, if you want to see more details about any part of the process just ask and I’ll get a post about those going.

BTW if you want a blitz.io account like I use in the video signup free at this link and we both get extra concurrent users to Blitz with http://blitz.io/gckdiUC3jDmkZ

Steve leaves behind a company that only he could have built, and his spirit will be forever its foundation.Tim Cook, Steve Jobs sucessor and current CEO of Apple

No matter what you thought of Apples products, it cant be argued that there are very few People on this earth that have created the impact that Steve has, one that will be felt for generations to come. Everyone from all walks of life have expressed their condolences ranging from The Office of the President of the United States Mr. Obama and the first Lady, to a shaken Steve 'Woz' , and even long time Rival, Business Partner, and Friend depending on who you ask and what period of time your referring to Mr. Bill Gates said

The world rarely sees someone who has had the profound impact Steve has had, the effects of which will be felt for many generations to come. For those of us lucky enough to get to work with him, it's been an insanely great honor, I will miss Steve immensely.

And as far as I'm concerned it could not have been put better, or had as much meaning if it had come from anyone else than him.

Steve

Mark Shuttleworth just kicked off UDS with the Keynote. I have the Audio at just under one hour in length for everyone to enjoy that could not attend the Ubuntu Developer Summit this time.

Keynote in MP3 ( Direct )

He Announces the next radical changes to the desktop, along with Ubuntu "Lite" being installed Dual Boot by Dell and other OEM's that boots to a USABLE web browser in 7 seconds, and we're not talking about something coming up, this is available today by installing "Unity".

“The Perfect 10″ as Mark describes it will consist of UNE, new icons, the new font and many other desktop improvements. And he is pushing for a Release on 10 Oct, 2010 or 10.10.10 , for those of you geeks out there ( like me ) binary 101010 = decimal 42 ( HHGTTG Reference )

This is going to be an exciting cycle !

UPDATE: Looks Like Dropbox did not like the excessive traffic, I have updated the links.

Here is a Picture from the event ( sorry I didnt take more than one, and I'm am not pictured since I was running the camera , but my empty chair is pictured :P )Click for a larger Picture

Hope everyone else has a great weekend, enjoy the new Release !

I have updated this page with all the needed details ( even has a section to RSVP if you wish to be counted )

A Huge thanks got out to the great people over at Cowtown Computer Congress Hackerspace for offering to Host the event! Should be a great time.

I'd also like to setup a time before hand ( maybe an hour prior ) to do a "key signing party" for anyone that would like to exchange information. If there are any Debian Developers in the area I'd be thrilled to have one stop by to sign keys too, even if they could not or wish to not stay for the Lucid Release party, I still need one to begin part 2 of the NM process.

Just drop a note in the comments or email me ( me@brandonholtsclaw.com ) if you need any more info.

First this will work for anyone that uses IMAP to currently fetch their mail, no matter the provider even though I'll be hi-lighting Gmail because thats what I use. This also works well for GMail and/or IMAP Backup of your email.

In short the setup is as follows:
IMAP Server --> offlineimap --> Local Maildir --> Evolution Reading Local Maildir

Soo lets get to the meat of this, first install offlineimap sudo apt-get install offlineimap then lets configure it, below is my config file, most everything should be straight forward (the formating below seems wrong on planet click the post link to copy/paste):

[general]
accounts = brandonholtsclaw
maxsyncaccounts=1
ui = Noninteractive.Basic

# This excludes some folders from being synced. You will almost
# certainly want to exclude 'All Mail', 'Trash', and 'Starred', at
# least. Note that offlineimap does NOT honor subscription details.
folderfilter = lambda foldername: foldername not in ['[Gmail]/All Mail', '[Gmail]/Trash','[Gmail]/Spam','[Gmail]/Starred']


Save that file as ~/.offlineimaprc and then create the directory ~/.maildir/

Make sure to chmod 0600 ~/.offlineimaprc so because it stores your email password and you dont want anyone else reading that. Other than that you are now all set, just Setup a new email account in Evolution and tell it to use Maildir , point it at your ~/.maildir directory and your golden.

If anyone else uses a setup similar to this and noticed something glaring I missed please drop me a comment, and I'll update the post ( plus I might learn something new ).

Cheers!
P.S. Dont forget to add a crontab to run offlineimap once in a while ( every ~10 minutes ) to check for new mail and sync your local changes back to the IMAP server.

Here is a direct link to the announcement ... comments welcome.

Cheers!