Building a personal site harnessing the (free) power of the cloud

If you are like me and

• do not want to pay for web hosting;
• the server at your lab/department/company doesn’t have software good or new enough (due to administrative and maintenance reasons) to host a decent modern PHP/Python/Perl CMS/Weblog/Whatever platform;
• do not have to a database accessible to any usable web server you have access to;
• do not have a public IP;
• think plain HTML suck too much to represent yourself as a computer geek;
• hate the limitations (No Javascript, No CSS tweaking, etc) of most commercial personal site/blog providers;
• …

Then this might help.

Google has been offering its cloud platform Google App Engine for a while and I haven’t imaged to use it as a personal site host until recently. A personal site doesn’t care whether it is superior in its resource provisioning and availability and we just want to have it for free.

Here is how to set it up.

1. Go to appspot.com and register. Then create an application.
2. Download the SDK and start programming or just use an existing CMS application such as app-engine-site-creator (open source, from Google)
3. Upload the source code to App Engine and you are good to go!

Moreover, you can

1. spend 10 bucks a year to buy a domain name if you want;
2. use Google Apps Standard Edition, a free service, to do the mapping from your domain name to your site at appspot.com.

So now, what freedom have you got?

• The ability to put Javascript, Flash based content on your site.
• Nice administrator console and full control over the database. (Or the BigTable if you will)
• Full control over HTML, CSS and anything as long as you have a little Python and Django programming skills.
• No programming experience? No problem! The app-engine-site-creator is just as easy to use as Google Sites. You create pages using the built-in page editor and store them in the database.

Want to make your site more social? Try FriendConnect. Now that you have the source level full control over your site, adding gadgets are just a piece of cake.

Why not let Google’s warehouse computers work for the rest of us (for free)?

mediawiki on ubuntu

I shouldn’t have used the mediawiki package from ubuntu’s repository. My initial thought was that since I wasn’t that eager to taste all the newest features of mediawiki, I’d better use the package management system of the OS and avoid all the hassles of manual upgrading.

However… after I upgarded from ubuntu 8.04 (hardy) to 8.10 (intrepid), there were still errors like the following shown.
1146: Table 'wikidb.mw_protected_titles' doesn't exist (localhost)

Apparently the database wasn’t updated with the system upgrade, it turns out that the ubuntu package didn’t provide me the AdminSettings.php (not even an AdminSettings.sample) file for updating database. So I had to add it by myself and provided it with database admin password and then run
php update.php
under {mediawiki_root}/maintainence manually.

Hope this helps.

ViewVC on Ubuntu

Couldn’t find a manual for viewvc on Ubuntu, which has a very simple configuration procedure.

After installation with aptitude,

1. add this line to apache configuration: i.e. a separate file under /etc/apache2/conf.d/
   ScriptAlias /viewvc /usr/lib/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi
2. modify/etc/viewvc/viewvc.conf
   root_parents = /path/to/dir/which/contains/svn/roots : svn                 
   1. To enable code highlight, also install highlight and set: use_highlight = 1
   2. By default there is a line cvs_roots = cvs: /home/cvsroot. Comment it out otherwise there is a “cvs” directory in your web interface which links to nothing.

And. you are done!

New office

Today I moved from 332 Benton to 334A Larsen and took the cubicle used to belong to Ming Zhao, who just graduated and left for Miami. Wow this is place is awesome! Although I feel sad about leaving the old room with the friends that I made there, I am more excited about the new environment here. I hope this brighter, quieter and closer-to-coffee place will help me be more productive.

It seems that after Pierre and I moved in, most ACIS student have migrated to the base. I am sure that I will enjoy the great atmosphere and do great research here!

PageRank 3…

This poor little place has been abandoned by me for more than 1 year! So sorry… but surprisingly, it has been awarded a PageRank 3 from Google. Not high enough to surprise you but given that it was on its own for the whole year…

I guess the major reasons of this would be:

1. This higher ranked page kindly links to me
2. This very important post and the buzzword GWT.

That’s easiest PR3 I’ve ever got, lol~~~

A GWT-based Boggle Game

Yesterday we demonstrated our final project of COP5255 (Concurrent Programming) in Lab 115 of CSE building. It took me by surprise that the demo was not in a way that we just showed others how the game should be played in our system but actually let all the people in the lab play it. This caused a bug showing up during the game and maybe some points deducted. But I did enjoy the fact that people told me that it was the best one that day (before the bug showed up). I think it is because Seho and I were the only team that provided a web-based game and the Google-style interface is nice to look. (http://sand.cise.ufl.edu:21140/boggle/). This class is about to be over but we can still provide more features like “all the words on the board”, “words that you’ve misses”, “words that everyone missed”, “links to new words” after HW4. When it is done, it certainly would be at as good as this one.

Actually from Arijit, I knew it was the same project assigned in Prof Sanders’ previous classes and I was not into word guessing games (because I suck at it), it just made me excited that I got a chance to use GWT. There are a lot of 2.0s coming up lately and Web 2.0 seems to be the first one that overturned the world. I am just trying to get adjusted to it. Maybe some one would say that relying on a mechanism which translates Java to JavaScript is not a good habit but the dialects of different browser dialects are just the agony for web programmers.

WebOS became a buzz word a long time ago but hasn’t become prevailing. Maybe OS is too much for now but what Google has been doing all these year certainly puts people’s way to use a computer to another level. Maybe later when the computing power of the client machines, the transfer rate of network and the capabilities of browsers increases and the protocols become more standardized and include more stuff, we are able to use or make more fancy things over Internet.

For a common user, we used to work on a single computer and then things got scattered all over and overwhelming, it would be exciting if we could (or we could let them) see the world and do all stuff imaginable in a simpler and more organized way and comes whenever needed (utility computing?) in feature.

Ubuntu 7.04 Beta Released last Saturday

http://www.ubuntu.com/news/Ubuntu704Beta

Plenty of stuff to try out. Maybe it suffers from some bugs before it’s officially released, but at least the problem with my wireless PC card is fixed.

It’s improved support for VMs might interest us more.

Server highlights

Virtualisation support: On x86 systems with the Intel VT or AMD-V extensions, Kernel-based Virtual Machine support (KVM) allows users to run multiple virtual machines running unmodified Linux. Each virtual machine has private virtualised hardware: a network card, disk, graphics adapter, and so on. We have also added VMI support, which provides optimized performance under VMWare.

Hello world

Hello everyone. I am very excited about opening this blog and the chance to share stuff with guys at ACIS. Actually another reason is that no one from other places has ever commented on my non-Chinese posts before.