On The Fence Development

In my previous couple of posts I've been configuring Dropbox on my Virtual Private server running a headless installation of Ubuntu 10.04. The main reason for this was to enable me to use it for storing backups without having to rely in the Dropbox Web API which has proven to be somewhat flaky - or at least that's my experience. With the Dropbox daemon now installed, configured and running all I need now is a script to perform the actual backups and save in the appropriate location.

In Part 1 I clarified a few points on the Dropbox tutorial for getting the server running on a headless Linux server and while I had it running it was 'locked' to an ssh session, i.e. close the session and the Dropbox server also stopped. The same tutorial provides links to sample init.d files which can be used to start the Dropbox server on boot. This works well enough but there were a couple of things that, again, could have done with a bit more detail.

If you've been reading any of my recent posts you will know that I have been moving from a shared server host to a virtual private server and that I have also experienced issues with my backups. Well with the blog configured and running well the migration was almost complete, but what about backing up my data?

So my move from shared hosting to virtual private server (VPS) was going well so far - I'd moved this blog across and  wired up Exim4 to handling all my emailing needs.

Like many tech-savy people these days I've been thinking about buying a Network Attached Storage device (NAS) for some time but being more into software than hardware I've never really understood enough about them to lay down my hard earned cash. Well recently my hand was forced by my external hard drive starting to act up and my girlfriends son filling his 70GB HDD with downloaded Flight Simulator extensions (and god knows what else!).

In my previous post I mentioned that one of the problems I faced when trying to install and debug my first Android application was that the Android Debug Bridge (adb) was not running as root. Now shutting the service down and restarting it with sudo was all that was required but that's a bit of a faff, there had to be a way to configure adb to be started with root privileges - and there is.

So at work we had a need for a Wiki of some description and after evaluating a number of different systems we decided to go with ScrewTurn. This is written in C# and was initially installed on a Windows Server under IIS - and all was well. At the same time I was evaluating the Statusnet microblogging platform - which we then also decided to implement for internal communication (Yammer and Twitter were deemed as not being suitable).

Many developers will know about the Stackoverflow 'trilogy' of sites which take a fresh approach to user forums. In addition to the Developer, SysAdmin and PowerUser sites the Stackoverflow team are also hosting more specialist sites such as Game Development, photography and even home improvement. In amongst these is a site dedicated to my operating system of choice, Ubuntu. It's still in it's infancy but if Stackoverflow is anything to go by it will flourish into a place where users know that there is quality content.

Ok, so it's no secret that I'm not impressed with the Broadband service from TalkTalk; the connection speed is pretty good but it is unstable - dropping sometimes dozens of times a day. This is just too frustrating for words and the TalkTalk Technical Support is frankly a joke! Anyway, one day I  was trying to download the Ubuntu Lucid Server ISO and was having numerous connection drop outs when a Sky salesman knocked on my door. Now normally I would not entertain these intrusions into my evenings but today was different.

As previously posted I have recently bought myself a nice new Android phone - a HTC Hero to be precise. One of the main reasons for buying it was so that I could look into developing applications for this new platform, thus expanding my skill set.