HTML5 WebSockets, very cool. (part 1)
I only found out about these at the Future of Web Design on Tuesday. I knew they existed in the spec but had never really investigated what they were or how they worked. Now I know I am excited. It seems they are to web apps what the XMLHTTPRequest was when it started to get used for AJAX. So let’s look at what they are, and then why they can be so beneficial to web development. It’s also worth pointing out at this stage that only Chrome 4+ (I think that version, I’m writing from memory) supports WebSockets natively although apparently Mozilla want to implement them in the next iteration of Firefox (they are already available with an add-on), so don’t expect to be using them in any non-specialist projects just yet.
Tethering the Google G1 — at last!
Wow, I have wanted this for such a long time and I finally found out how to do it today. In fact I have posted this entry whilst on the bus using my Android phone’s 3G capabilities with my laptop connected by USB.
And you don’t have to have root access!
OK, so how does it work. There’s two parts. One on the PC (or Mac…) and one on the phone. The phone bit is easy thanks to the man behind Proxoid a proxy App for Android. It’s free and available in the Marketplace. Also it’s a tiny download and has almost zero configuration! The PC bit requires the Android SDK, which is a free download from Google. Here are the instructions:
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VPS Migration for thechriswalker.net – New Host, New OS, no Plesk
Not that I didn’t like Plesk. I just have the urge to understand things well, and I couldn’t understand all of how Plesk worked… So I wanted it “all-manual”, like the true hardcore (read: idiot) I am.
I had been using a VPS to host this website (amongst other things) and it was getting old. It ran on CentOS 4 and used Plesk as a control panel. PHP was down at version 4.2.2 or something and MySQL still at version 4.x. I didn’t understand server administration as well as I do now and the whole thing was a bit of a mess. So I decided a fresh start, with a VPS on more powerful hardware and built cleanly.
So I went for a basic VPS from 34SP.com with no control panel and using Ubuntu 9.04 as the OS. They set up the server quickly and so I went about configuring it how I wanted. There were a couple of snags along the road and so I’ll tell you about them here too.
Mongo — and the coolness of Document-Oriented Databases
I have been following a PHP Rapid Application Development Framework called Lithium with much interest (for other reasons which I fully intend to blog about later) and they are the ones I owe for turning me on to document oriented database systems.
So what are they and why are they so cool, and what/who the hell is “Mongo”?
Let’s deal with the what first. “Traditional” database systems are Relational, they are characterised by strictly defined tables, strong relations between tables and their ACID compliance. It simple terms that means you say:
“I want a table of users and each one will have a first name, a last name and an email address, and each of those will be a ‘text’ entry of a maximum of 255 characters”.
If at a later date you want to add more info, then you have to go back and alter your table definition, give the old rows default values and fix any coding bugs that relied on the previous structure (not that you’d ever develop such a dependant application). Now the approach in a document oriented database is that you say:
“I want a table of users”
Then you can give each one whatever data you want. you may have one user with a name and address, another with a name and phone number only, a third might have a phone number and address but no first name. All these records can co-exist! That’s pretty different and I really didn’t know whether it was a good idea. So I played with MongoDB.
UPnP Wizardry
You may notice an Xbox360 related theme in my current posts, as after getting one, most of my technology thought process is involved in something to do with it. Hence the Xbox Live Gamercard API I wrote about before. Now we get on to UPnP.
Universal Plug and Play is used for 2 mains things as far as I can tell.
- Dynamically opening holes in firewalls/NAT configurations for inbound connections to services. (bad!
- Media Discover/playback/control on a local network. (good!)
The first is bad in my opinion. I don’t want the ability for some software behind my firewall to allow connections into my network. It might make some software function a little more smoothly, but if it’s that important that connections can be made inbound I would have set up a port-forward myself.
So I am only concerned with the second scenario.