Setting up Goggle Apps as your own CDN

• Install Python
• Download Google Apps SDK
• Signup for Google App Engine and create an application
• Download CDN Example, nicely put together by Andreas Krohn of digitalistic.com
• Extract archive and edit app.yaml, changing application:digitalisticcdn to application:
• Put all the images you want to upload in the images directory, etc.
• Download Digitalistic's batchfile uploader here. Edit it so it points to your Python install directory, your Google App Engine SDK and your digitalisticcdn / customapp directory.
• Double-click on this newly edited batch file to run it, the first time it'll ask for your username & password afterwhich your files will then be uploaded (hopefully) to your newly created appengine cdn.

So after all that, you should be able to access your images via,

[application identifier].appspot.com/images/[myimage.gif]

Thanks go to Andreas Krohn of digitalistic.com for putting together the zip archive example, batch file and original tutorial.

After getting back from vacation in Vegas I decided I needed to sort my laptop out once and for all. So partitioned the drive in two, one with Vista Ultimate and one with Fedora 9.

On top of this I really wanted the Fedora partition to be encrypted and using LVM so I can resize later, glad I did that.

However in all I had two problems along the way,

Fedora 9 Wifi doesn't support TKIP

The first thing which I couldn't fix was the Wifi. I was using WPA+TKIP which is available in the network configuration panel, all good but everytime I tried to connect it'd popup the password entry screen again; really annoying.

Thankfully I found the reason to this, Fedora 9 does not support TKIP even though it's available in the control panel; switching to WPA+AES clears that problem.

Just wish they documented that better ;-)

32-bit Flash on a 64-bit build

Adobe released the Flash 9 libraries to the linux community but only as 32-bit binaries, I installed Fedora using the 64-bit build so with some tweaking managed to fix that too.

• Adding Flash to Fedora

In Terminal do:

su -c 'rpm -Uvh http://linuxdownload.adobe.com/adobe-release/adobe-release-i386-1.0-1.noarch.rpm'
su -c 'yum install flash-plugin'

Now specifically for 64-bit Fedora builds do:

su -c "yum -y install nspluginwrapper.{i386,x86_64} pulseaudio-libs.i386 libflashsupport.i386"
su -c 'mozilla-plugin-config -i -g -v'

Afterwards close & reopen Firefox and you should now have Flash 9 running on your Fedora 9 64-bit desktop.

To install Skype on an AMD-64 system, you'll need the 32-bit libraries (if you're distro is 32-bit, skip this bit),

sudo apt-get install ia32-libs

Now grab the qt4 libraries,

sudo apt-get install libqt4-gui libqt4-core

Download the appropriate Skype package from...

• Skype Linux

Firefox should download it to your desktop so...

cd Desktop
sudo dpkg --install --force-architecture --force-depends skype-debian_2.0.0.72-1_i386.deb

And you're done, with the Webcam driver installed and enabled you should now be able to make video calls too.

• Ubuntu Webcam Install

An annoying thing about building an email system is the fear of your server's IP getting accidentally logged on one of the many Anti-Spam blacklisting sites.

These site's basically record who they think is sending spam emails, so if they think you're one of the bad guys you go in their book; which as you can imagine services like GMail, YahooMail and Hotmail reference these to gauge bad senders.

To check if you've been unintentionally listed;

• First use SamSpade.org to get your site's IP Address
• Then type that IP in EmailStuff.Org to check if you've been blacklisted.

Most site's will allow you to request removal from their black-lists without too much of a problem.

Hotmail's SpamBox

Another thing i'm trying to figure out is how to stop emails my webapp sends from going into into Hotmail's spam box, it's ok with Gmail and everyone else, but bad with MS Hotmail.

'Hotmail have a propietry spam filter which is prone to false positives from some senders for no aparent reason. Hotmail wont tell you why it is classed as spam.'

Thankfully Thomas Glasgow has suggested that if you should first send an email from YahooMail to your site, then reply back to YahooMail; YahooMail should then interpret that as a good site and stop doing this.

Not sure whether it works for Hotmail but worth a shot.

Using the Firebug addon YSlow from Yahoo I managed to tune site performance a little more by adding 'expires' to the nginx.conf file

location ~* ^.+.(jpg|jpeg|gif|js)$ { root /var/www/apps/myapp/public; access_log off; expires 30d; }

What this basically does is tell NGINX that any files of type jpg, jpeg, gif, and js with the root dir specified shouldn't be logged for access and have an expires value set to 30 days.

As most of the images I use on-site don't change that much this works perfect for me.

Updated my NGINX example files in the [CODE DOWNLOADS] area so you can grab a copy.

More tips located at...

• Zhesto Nginx notes
• Nginx Full Example 1
• Nginx Full Example 2