I was playing with an Android emulator this weekend and noticed that when I set up an Exchange account to synchronize my calendar and contacts with Google, I also started seeing email notifications. I thought that Android might just be acting “smart” and adding an IMAP account based on the same credentials.
So, to verify this, I went to the Exchange account on my iPhone that also syncs to Google contacts/calendar and enabled the Email switch. Lo and behold, I now had a working email exchange account from the Mail app! I sent myself a few emails from other accounts, and got a new mail notification on the iPhone within an average of five seconds.
I looked around and did not see any reference to this being enabled, so maybe this is in preparation for the likely Nexus One release announcement at tomorrow’s Google Android event. Either way, I hope this feature stays enabled since having real push GMail on the iPhone is really handy!

For this post, I think I will try out the Polls plugin.  Vote away!

One of the nice things about being an ugly American is that I make all sorts of ignorant and culturally insensitive remarks about other countries. And as luck would have it, I had that opportunity last week when I visited Montreal. (That’s in Canada.)
The first thing I noticed about Montreal is that it’s a very clean city – like Toronto in that respect. Oh wait – actually, the first thing I noticed was the streets were on fire and full of police and rioting citizens because I guess they won an O-KAY (that’s hockey) game. My flight got in late that night and the taxi driver had to change his routes because the streets were blocked off by police.
Other observations I had were related to confusing things like French-speaking people with the Queen of England on their money and the lack of $1 bills in their currency. Also, the whole “Canadians burned the White House down in 1814? makes me sad inside, but I guess that was a long time ago.
Be Safe,
Josh Coates
Mozy Founder

????????????

[edit] Forgot to add the link! http://www.movabletype.org/2007/09/one_more_reason_to_buy_an_ipho.html

The service allows you to scale from a guaranteed 150 MHz of CPU and 150 MB of RAM to a full 2300 MHz CPU and 2300 MB of RAM. These values are instantly adjustable (which will increase/decrease your monthly fee, of course) and also burstable. For example, if you are paying for the 150 CPU/150 RAM tier, you can burst up to 2300 MHz and 300 MB of RAM if they are free on the server. And if you max out at the 2300/2300 plan, you can burst up to 4 gigs of RAM.

I have signed up to pre-order this service, which is currently invite-only. Although I do like the idea of a VPS with full root access, 99% of the time, I just wish my shared hosting were a bit faster with some sort of guaranteed resources. The Dreamhost PS service will have a max of about 27 accounts per server, as opposed to hundreds on one of their normal shared servers. And, I will still have access to the storage and bandwidth I have accumulated with my time using Dreamhost. I am very much looking forward to when my account is activated on this service, and will follow up with my impressions.

Looks like another yet another botnet is building up from a trojan being sent around as “Postcard.exe”. I followed the botnet to a new channel, and they have almost 450 clients there. Most of those seem to be clients fired off from the trojan. Hopefully, the Undernet admins can stop this one for now. Yes, I know that another one will pop right up, but since this particular beast is coded to join certain channels, maybe it will give helpless attachment-clickers a little bit of a break.

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/03/paranoia_poster.html.

Thank god SOMEONE has a sense of humor!

Technorati Tags: technology, blogging

First make sure you have the Debian package development tools:

apt-get install build-essential debhelper

(More tools might be needed depending on what you already have installed, but you will tend to get warnings about what is missing)

Then, download the PHP sources:

apt-get source php5

(The current version in the Ubuntu repositories at this time is php5-5.1.2, so adjust for version numbers in the future.)

And you will need all the dependencies for building PHP:

apt-get build-dep php5

Change into the debian build directory for PHP:

cd php5-5.1.2/debian

The first step is to edit the “modulelist� file. Insert a line above the one that says

mysql MySQL

with the contents:

mssql MSSQL

Next, edit the file “rules” and look for the section starting with “configure-apache2-stamp”. You will see a line similar to:

--with-mysql=shared,/usr

Open a line above this with the contents:

--with-mssql=shared,/usr

Make sure not to forget the backslash on the end.Now, we must edit the “control” file in the same directory. Add this to the end of the file:

Package: php5-mssql
Architecture: any
Depends: ${shlibs:Depends}, ${misc:Depends}, ${php:Depends}, php5-common (= ${Source-Version})
Description: MSSQL module for php5
 This package provides a module for MSSQL using FreeTDS.
 .
 PHP5 is an HTML-embedded scripting language. Much of its syntax is borrowed
 from C, Java and Perl with a couple of unique PHP-specific features thrown
 in. The goal of the language is to allow web developers to write
 dynamically generated pages quickly.

Move up a directory.

cd ..

Now, run:

dpkg-buildpackage

And go get something to eat. This will do the whole configure/compile for PHP and create debs in the parent directory. When this process is done, move up to the parent directory:

cd ..

And, you will see all of the PHP debs, including the new php5-mssql_[version].deb

Run a dpkg -i on the ones you need, and you should be all set to connect to MSSQL databases.

technorati tags:php, mssql, ubuntu

Yup – today is CSS Naked Day. Strip all that CSS and see how your site works!

I have been using 30Boxes (excellent online calendar) and EvokeTV for a while now. I don’t watch a whole lot of TV, so it is nice to have a simple television listing web app that quickly shows listings and details about shows. It is also very easy to mark shows as favorites, rate them, etc. The shows that I actually watch are accessible in a nice RSS feed now, which can easily be subscribed to in 30Boxes.

Now, after I pick the shows I like using Evoke, I can just go to 30Boxes and they show up in my schedule. Now if there was a way for subscribed events to show up in the RSS or ICS files to allow subscription from a local application/PDA/etc, it would be perfect. If there is already a way to do that, let me know in the comments!

When you upload photos to Riya, it starts scanning them for possible faces. There is an easy to use interface to choose from a list of known names, or assign a new name to a face in a photo. Riya recognizes multiple faces in photographs also. It found faces in all the photos I uploaded except in one that had a profile view instead of a front view of a face. Oh, and a photo of a squirrel. I guess they all look alike?

I could probably come up with a list of “needed” features and changes, but this is still beta, and they are really testing the recognition side of things. Adding better photo management and other features is pretty easy with well-indexed sets of photos, so once this testing is done, I’m sure these features will appear quickly.