For my latest venture, MyFamilio, I needed to know if a user’s Email address is a Gmail one so that I could show the user his/her contacts from Gmail.
Figuring out if the user is on Gmail is usually easy – the Email ends with @gmail.com. But what happens for all of those Google Apps for Your domain (like my own, which uses the @sandler.co.il domain) ?
Well, you can easily detect that by running a DNS query on the MX record.
[Read More]I’ve started a new technical blog which talks about the cloud. It’s called Forecast: Cloudy and it will feature thoughts, ideas and some code driven mostly from my experience running services on cloud infrastructure.
The first post (after the traditional “Hello World“) already has some code :-)
Check it out and don’t forget to tell me what you think about it.
I was searching an example of using Python Imaging Library (PIL) to extract the GPS data from EXIF data in images.
There were various half baked examples that didn’t handle things well, so I baked something of my own combining multiple examples.
You can get it here: https://gist.github.com/983821
Or see it embedded below:
Twitter’s Kestrel is a cool scala based queue server (based on Blaine Cook‘s (@blaine) Ruby based Sterling).
The two main features I like about Kestrel are:
If you happen to be running it on Ubuntu 10.04 and want to use the provided init script (kestrel.sh) you’ll notice that it just won’t run.
[Read More]Below are the steps necessary to connect your iPhone / iPad or any other computer via a PPTP VPN.
Why would I want to do this? For various reasons such as allow you to access information and servers that are behind a firewall, or maybe you just need to route traffic through different servers.
I’ve tested this on a 256mb Rackspace Cloud instance running Ubuntu 10.04 and with an iPhone and an iPad. Thanks to Yaniv for debugging the instructions.
[Read More]If you are using Varnish version >= 2.1 and experiencing an ever increasing CPU usage up to a point where you need to restart the service to force CPU usage to drop you may want to add the “-h classic” argument to the command line.
This will revert to use the older hashing method instead of the newer “critbit” that was first introduced in version 2.1.
You can read a little bit more about it on the Yedda Dev Blog.
[Read More]Installing ies4linux on Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala by just running “./ies4linux” might show some warnings such as:
IEs4Linux 2 is developed to be used with recent Wine versions (0.9.x). It seems that you are using an old version. It’s recommended that you update your wine to the latest version (Go to: winehq.com).
In my case it showed the above text, which seems to be a warning, and run the UI but then got stuck and didn’t complete anything.
[Read More]Launching a startup is like sending a message in a bottle. If the message is not clear, no one will come to visit your lonely island or send you a postcard back.
When you launch your startup, your online presence (i.e. website, twitter account, facebook page, etc) and the buzz you manage to create online via the online official and unofficial press are the message you are passing to your users. If the message is not clear you can lose a lot of attention.
[Read More]I was just reading over at TechCrunch about Google quickly hiring Don Dodge after he was let go from Microsoft. It seems Don will be doing what he used to do at Microsoft – Developer Evangelism (good for him, and Google!).
I’m very happy to see that Google is putting their stock options and cash where their mouth is to evangelize their APIs, platforms (Android, AppEngine) and tools to developers.
A while back I wrote about the lack of Google’s outreach in the Israeli developers community, and it is still very visible in Israel by the jobs listings as well as various events and conventions that Microsoft Technology still dominates the Israeli high-tech software scene.
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