Get links from twitter to improve RSS Reader experience

For some time now I’m using Fever to get more out of my RSS feeds. It’s nice to have a rating on articles which are important to me. There are some high volume feeds I just don’t have the time to scan, but still if something important comes up I don’t want to miss it. This is also where a great service comes in a guy I know from College build, it’s called Chillitweets. Chillitweets scans your twitter stream to extract links and presents them to the user. Since, by definition, I follow users I’m interested in they will as well post links I’m interested in which get added via Chillitweets RSS feed to my Reader. Now they can be used to rate the feeds I’m presented with. I’ve been a user of Chillitweets since the early days and I gotta say Mario really build a great service there. And to see NodeJS in action is always nice :).

Todo.txt TextMate Bundle

Todo.txt is a command line todo list manager completely based around a bash script to manage a txt file which holds the todos and an Android App is available as well. Since it is just a plain text file it is really nice to work with, and it syncs very easily, even if the machine you are working with doesn’t feature a GUI.
From time to time there is the need to edit the file not via the command line but via an editor. To ease my life doing this I was looking around for some support in TextMate, and since there was none I decided to start a TextMate bundle for it. Currently there is just some syntax highlighting but I plan on adding some commands as well as soon as I figure out what might be useful in the editor. The goal is not to replace the command line after all since it works perfectly well. So for anybody interested check it out, code is available on github.

UPDATE: Started to add commands, nice to use ruby to extend my text editor.

SSH into Windows

Sometimes it’s just nice to have a secure access to the Windows box at home. In my case, if possible, I try to use SSH all the way, especially since it allows tunneling as well as file access in an easy to use fashion. So just for a quick setup I currently am using freeSSHd on Windows. To be more secure I only allow authorization via a ssh key for my own specific user. This is done by copying the “key.pub” file to “C:Program Filesfreesshd” and rename it to the user using it, in my case it’s now “phil”. Now just change the settings to only allow specific users, and the authentication to require Publickey. Now everything just works like every other SSH server, and it’s possible to use this connection for tunneling, file access and in my case to tunnel my RDP connection.

Walkthrough to Root the Nexus S under Android 2.3.4

This has been done under MacOSX 10.6 with the current AndroidSDK. First a little advice: Root first setup all Apps later because the data will be lost during the unlock process.

Step 0

Necessary Software:
Android SDK
Fastboot for Mac
Superuser setup
Clockwork Recovery

Step 1 – Software

With all the Software together you are half way there, just install the Android SDK (unzip) somewhere. For me it is in “/Developer/android-sdk”. And run:

$ cd /Developer/android-sdk/tools $ ./android

And install the newest SDK stuff just to make sure everything recognizes correctly. Extract fastboot and Clockwork and keep the files at hand.

Step 2 – Bootloader unlock

Boot the Nexus S in fastboot mode by holding down “Volume Up” and “Power” to boot. Now your are able to connect via fastboot so run

$ ./fastboot devices

This should show a serial number, which confirms the phone connects correctly. Now it’s time to unlock the bootloader, which will wipe all your data.

$ ./fastboot oem unlock

Step 3 – Flash recovery

Now its time to install a custom recovery which allows for the superuser mod to install correctly.

$ ./fastboot flash recovery recovery-clockwork-3.0.0.0-crespo.img

Step 4 – Install root mod

Finally we are now able to install the Superuser mod. So reboot the phone and copy the su-2.3.6.1-ef-signed.zip to the device. Reboot again into the recovery mode, and run the recovery.
You need to mount system as well as USB storage and now its just a simple install from SD Card to get the rooting going.

Step 5 – All done

Be happy and get some root Apps such as Wireshark :)

References

theunlockr
nexusshacks

Networking with NodeJS @munichjs

Yesterday I did a quick talk about ‘Lower’ level networking applications with
nodejs at munichjs. Lower in this
case means sending binary Data via a UDP/TCP socket, handle DNS resolving and
such. Interested? Talk a look at the slides

Network with nodehttp://static.slidesharecdn.com/swf/ssplayer2.swf?doc=networkwithnode-110505063900-phpapp02&stripped_title=network-with-node&userName=philippfehre

View more presentations from Philipp Fehre.

Examples can be found on github like Nodrrr to use growl from nodejs, the DNS channel patch for node and also even though it is alpha an will be broken from time to time the RDNS resolver

Slimy Vim

Since taking a look at clojure again I was looking
over at Emacs thinking, even though it feels unusable to me it has the nice
feature of evaluating an expression right here and now. Since I’m kind of
invested in both Vim as well as Textmate, with Vim being my current favorite,
I was looking around to get similar. What I came across first was running the
VimClojure Plugin which includes the Nailgunserver, running a single clojure instance evaluating the code you sent to it.
Even though it feels nice to use it mainly works for clojure and is kind of
heavy weight to set up. A simpler solution was described in a post about setting
up clojure on Vim and uses slime to pass
code to a screen window running some interpreter. The nice thing is it works the
same for ruby, python, nodejs, clojure, etc.. My current setup is available found at
Github

Simple git work flow

The concept of having multiple branches of code and merge them when needed is
a complicated concept to many people. When SVN was first introduced it started
with the premise to be a “CVS done right”. This means cheap branches, as well as
what is supposed to be easy merging. Actually SVN is a great hassle to use especially
when working with branches, which is why a lot of developers are actually
not really fund of branching and merging all the time. But git is different,
really, honestly… well at least to me ;)!

After working with git for some time now I got in the habit of a pretty basic
usage pattern which works quite well for me, so let me introduce you to it. Whenever I
want to work on a new feature I first branch of the current master to have my
own little sandbox to work and explore in.

$git checkout -b feature_XYZ

Now I got an unchanging environment, in which I can work and there is no one
else changing stuff except me (or maybe a small team). Commits only happen to
this branch.

After the feature is done the code needs to be merged in the master again.
Since the master probably changed during the implementation, I first rebase the
feature branch so I can actually do the merge inside the branch and don’t break
the master. So first pull the newest master and than rebase.

$git pull $git rebase master

If there is a conflict I resolve it and create a commit describing the merge and
continue the rebase

$git add CONFLICTINGFILE $git commit -m $git rebase --continue

After rebase is done I switch to the master and do a merge which should not have
any conflicts now

$git checkout master $git merge feature_XYZ

Now the whole thing can be pushed, while the master was working all the time,
and therefore a real parallel work on multiple features is possible. This is
possibly not suitable for work in large teams but for me as a single developer
working in small teams most of the time it works amazingly well.

Set DNS servers in NodeJS on a per channel bases

In NodeJS DNS request are handled in the background via the ares library to enable asynchronous requesting. Ares allows the DNS server to be used set on a per channel bases, but this is not exposed in NodeJS, but is is quite simple to enable it by patching node_cares.cc. In essence this enables setting the DNS server via the parameter CHANNEL_NS on creation. To expose this towards NodeJS there needs to be an extension on the default dns.js module. The reason for me to enable this was to use different nameservers on each request, so the extension creates a new channel each time a new nameserver is needed.
I packed everything in a Github repository including some examples.

Me can haz IPv6 with Airport Extreme at Home

Ok so since I really like to have access to my home machine, and also like to be able to server
some web stuff for testing proposes it decided to setup IPv6 at home. After all the process took
about 10 minutes and using my Airport Extreme as a Tunnel endpoint was rather painless to my
surprise.

Setup an account with tunnelbroker and create a tunnel

This is really easy, just go to the tunnelbroker-page and create an
account. Afterwards create a so called “Regular Tunnel”

Configure the Airport Extreme

Open the Airport Utility and go to Advanced and IPv6. There you configure IPv6 as Manually and enter the
configuration presented by tunnelbroker when creating the tunnel. The configuration mapping is:
Server IPv4 -> Remote IPv4; Server IPv6 -> IPv6 Default Route; Client IPv6 -> WAN IPv6, Routed /64 -> LAN IPv6.

Now set the IPv6 DNS Server under internet TCP/IP to the server provided by tunnelbroker as well,
to get more of the IPv6 goodnessm, which isn’t really much after all so… take what you can get ;).

Try it

To confirm that everything works check in the terminal via a simple

ping6 ipv6.google.com

Yay you can now use IPv6, at least whats out there, which isn’t much after all. The good thing is you get a lot of
addresses accessible so no more “Port 1337 forwards to fu, 4848 forwards to bar”-mapping.

BTW: I blacked out some numbers just because everybody else does it ;)

EDIT: To make setting the IPv4 endpoint easier I created a script to do that for you. It can be found on
github. This is especially useful if you are on a dynamic IP connection
like normal DSL or Cable.

Introduction to Git and how to using it

Recently git gained a large userbase, and is quickly becoming the default standard for version managment. So for me it
was time to get a larger understanding of it besides just “using it like I think it works”. So to get up to speed
quickly I decided to search for some talks on it. So here my quick introduction worth watching.

GoogleTechTalk: Git

Great talk by Randal Schwartz about Git. Even though it’s not the newest it really is a great explanation of the concepts. Since embedding sadly is disabled check it out at youtube. Like with pretty much everything Randal does the talk is really worth it.

O’Reilly Webcast: Git in One Hour

For an introduction to actually using git the O’Reilly Webcast is a great resource

Cheat Sheet

Nice command overview

Git Tower

For those not really that familiar with the command line, or people like me who keep forgetting the command, Git tower is quite a nice app to use with Git.