Coming from the days of the RIM 850 “Brick” I’ve had a lot of experience with BlackBerry’s in both my personal life and work related roles. With the launch of the Pearl, which introduced BlackBerry to many consumers BlackBerry’s as personal devices, and from the competition from the iPhone, the evolution of the BlackBerry has progressed at a welcoming pace. Gone are the days of just email, calendar, and tasks. Now armed with GPS, faster data connections, and a much more brilliant display the newest generations of Blackberry’s are truly useful and well rounded devices. Connect them to the corporate Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES) and they are an administrators’ dream compared to the open an insecure nature of other manufactures devices.

Here are my 5 top applications that I use on a daily basis for my BlackBerry 9000 (Bold):

1) Email

While this one used to be obvious, most smart phones today have decent email capabilities. With Exchange ActiveSync, push email is a reality for Windows Mobile and Apple’s iPhone. However, Blackberry does it better as what other phone lets you configure email filters, out of office replies, and manage multiple accounts so efficiently.

2) Blackberry Messenger

In the old days I used to message other blackberry users by their unique 8 character PIN. This was useful as you could tell if the message was delivered and also when it was read. More recently BlackBerry messenger has improved on this by tying this into a useful chat client. You can send text, files, pictures, voice notes, and location status, all to whoever you have on your Contact list. The messages are more secure, you can guarantee delivery, and bypass the SMS/MMS headache. We use this application extensively internally for escalations and group communications.

3) Viigo

Viigo is a great application that is basically an RSS reader, news, weather, sports, stocks, entertainment. One of the nice features is you can easily email the content/link to a user, post it to your twitter followers. While it does many things, it is an excellent client for reading RSS feeds and blog posts.

4) Beejive

I originally found this a few years ago when looking for a proper client to interface with our internal jabber server. There are many IM clients for the Blackberry, but beejive takes top honors in my book. The simplicity of setup, usage, and integration with alert profiles as it runs in the background can’t be beat. Looking at the feature list it seems I need to upgrade as it now supports group chat for jabber! Now I can chat with my guys all at once when I’m away from my terminal.

5) Facebook Application

I’ll admit it, I like facebook, and the current client for the Blackberry is top notch. Being able to upload photos, respond to messages, and set your status is quick and easy, as well as integrating with the a Blackberry alert profile. Become a fan of 1-800-HOSTING on facebook.

There are many other applications that I have found since the introduction of the Blackberry AppStore as well as others I have but use on a less regular basis. Pandora, Slacker radio, Shazam, UberTwitter, Google Maps, Telenav, and Mobile Admin. I’ve also finally setup tethering via blue tooth with my laptop so I have a data connection anywhere I have service.

Today marks my 5 years of my employment at 1-800-HOSTING. This company isn’t just a good company to host your web services with, but also a wonderful company to work for. I’ve worked for few large corporations before coming here and I’ve never been treated as well as they treat me here. My choosing to stay here this long is definitely evidence of that.

Part of our philosophy is that if you treat your employees right they will in turn treat the customers right. As employees we are blessed with many amenities that I never saw at any other company. But, probably the best perk of all is the attention paid to the individual. We aren’t seen as numbers, but as actual names and faces. And as a result, I do enjoy my job and love treating our customers well.

As a gift for my commitment to the company for 5 years, the company has awarded me an all expenses paid trip for 2 to Hawaii. I was very excited when they told me. That week in July couldn’t come any slower! I’ve been putting in some serious overtime the past few weeks helping our customers with various complicated problems. I look forward to the relaxing beaches and a break from my 24×7 on-call status.

The first customer I helped here is still a customer. I still call him from time to time to see how his services are working. He lives in Hawaii. While I’m there I might stop by and give him a thank you gift in return for the one he sent us.

I would like to thank our CEO for the trip as well as our staff and customers. It takes all of us to make a successful company that makes these things possible.

I look forward to many more years here serving our wonderful customers and working along side some of the best people I know, both personally and professionally.

Well not always, but typically, yes. If you just want to sort your wedding or vacation pictures for family viewing, then probably not. Otherwise, three very good reasons why you should consider it are Security, Performance, Scalability.

Security:
The database should be accessible only by the front-end application server and not accessible by or open to the Internet. To accomplish this, private IPs are used to connect the public http server with the private database server. We use our Private Backend Network (PBN) or add a cross-connect cable between the servers creating private LAN communications. The database server has no public IP nor Internet access. Only the http server has a public IP address.

Performance:
Database applications are generally resource intensive. When you run web/application/database/e-commerce/dns/email services (or any combination) on the same server, you are taking resources away from the database application. Database applications will typically use all the RAM you can throw at them, and you don’t want your visitors waiting for database queries to load. You want it fast, because they want it now!

Scalability:
You hope the millions of dollars you’ve budgeted to promote your site will allow your business to grow rapidly, so you can someday retire a wealthy tycoon - spending your days on the beach sipping your favorite beverage while basking in the sun – right? Create an environment now for that rapid growth that easily allows for scalability. MS SQL and MySQL database applications integrate tools for data replication services – the ability to duplicate the data to multiple servers. A replicated database environment can offer two (2) distinct benefits; 1. performance (utilizing load balancing of multiple db servers) and 2. high-availability (preservation of data in the event of a single server failure).

Need help customizing an environment to meet your needs for security, high-availability, performance and scalability? Just ask - it’s what we do best.

Jay Ellison

My birthday is a few weeks away and as gift to myself I bought a new laptop. My old dinosaur Compaq Presario is nearing extinction. I’ve had it for almost a decade and bought it for $2400 new. I have since done about $1000 in upgrades and repairs on it and it is starting to show signs of needing more. I looked into the cost of parts I’d need to get it back to 100% and it would cost me about $400+. As old as it is it is slow, lacks capacity, and can’t be upgraded beyond it’s current 2GB of RAM. With new laptops running at around $500 and being 3 times the speed and capacity of my current laptop, the decision was simple: buy a new one!

There are several significant changes to my new laptop that break from my traditions in computer purchases. The first of which is its dual core 2GHz AMD processor. I’ve always been an Intel fan, but seeing no significant need for Intel over AMD I switched to the dark-side.

The second break from tradition is its Windows Vista operating system. I’m still a huge fan of XP and the few workstations at home I have all run either XP or 2003. It usually takes me close to 5 years after a workstation OS’s release for me to jump on the bandwagon. I’m more apt to adopt new server OS’s but relearning a workstation is a serious pain.

This brings me to the real point of this blog. I realized I’m pretty far behind when it comes to knowledge of workstation OS’s. I’ve spent the past 5 years with my head buried in the sands of serverland. I’ve neglected userland quite a bit. So, this laptop will also serve as a learning platform for my continued education in workstation OS’s…. even though the first thing I did was set everything to look and act like windows classic environments.

Linux actually handles RAM differently than Windows, and this can cause confusion to an administrator in charge of a system. Customers sometimes contact us with worries of low ram, memory leaks and other problems wondering why their system is constantly low on RAM. Case in point: A dedicated customer once ordered two RAM upgrades before opening up to us about his concern with memory leaks. We were finally able to share with him that he had plenty!

Imagine, Apache has been having some strange issues with faults and sigterms mentioned in log files. Today your boss is upset because it happened during a live product demo and the site went down while some major investors were checking it out. You’ve been tasked not-so-lightly with finding out why. You try some things, then check the memory usage.

You may think you’ve pinned the problem! Merely 162 megabytes of RAM available can certainly cause problems. Come mid-day, that will be exhausted! However, a closer inspection shows you have 2721 megabytes free memory. See the -/+ buffers/cache part? That’s cached memory, that is actually available usable system memory. You’ve got plenty!

What is -/+ buffers/cache?

Linux uses buffers/cache for disk caching (possibly other functions as well) to help your overall system performance. This makes I/O operations and other functions the kernel uses go quicker. The kernel figures if there’s RAM to use, why not use it? (Why not?)

If a program were to start that needs the memory, the buffer is dynamically re-sized to exclude the memory needed by the application. It’s harmless, interferes with programs in no way, and helps your system do other operations faster via the speed of your memory. What’s not to love?

As for those Apache issues, hopefully you’ll figure them out before your boss has another incident! At least you’ve solved the issue with the memory. It’s not a bug, leak, or coding issue: it’s a feature.

I’d like to credit Vidar at Linux Ate My Ram! for addressing this issue for the internet community at large, and for being the inspiration of this posting. [He has also written source code to prove this theory should anyone want to experiment.]

Despite being the modern leader in social networking, Facebook has a powerful application programming interface (API) that most people are unacquainted with. So, next time you venture off to the world of socially imperative networking, keep in mind that you’re only one click away from a bucket of brilliant development tools. At the foot of every page generated in Facebook, there is a development URL. Go ahead, click it!

From quiz generators, to fully functional web based RPGs; these development tools will allow you to implement almost anything into Facebook’s versatile infrastructure. Companies and individuals alike can have a more powerful presence on the web. And when used properly, this can add an influential perspective to your companies outreach capabilities. With the bonus of having a social network with millions of users to deploy on top of; who could possibly ask for more?

Are you ready to start construction on your web application yet? Assuming you know a morsel of PHP, and if you’ve also found your way to http://developers.facebook.com/, you can see that they’ve tried to make it just as easy to socially network, as well as develop with their API. Facebook gives you the fundamental tools to help you begin your project. So,  I’m sure you can locate precisely what you’re looking for in their developer wiki. Or, if you’re still stuck, you can signup for their web forum. With such an extensive user base, you can almost always get the support you’re looking for, at almost any time of day.

Don’t forget you’re not bound to Facebook’s servers, and you don’t have to pay some exuberant royalty fee. If you’re interested in pure growth, the development team at Facebook allows you to host most (if not all) of your content off site, on your own web space. This is accomplished with a simple API key/application secret that is generated with your specific account (You will need to add the Facebook Developer App to your specific Facebook account in order to begin getting things done).

Since social networking is becoming more of a social norm, are we going to see things evolve accordingly? Is your company going to be able to keep up with the demand of the now generation? Facebook took a huge leap forward with social networking. Are you ready to take another?

I came across a video from the Google I/O 2009 convention where Google Wave was first demonstrated to developers. I figured I would only watch a few minutes of the hour and 20 minute video before I would bore and go on to something else. Instead, I found myself watching it from start to finish. I was completely gripped by all the cool features of Google Wave and then struck by all the flexible possibilities.

Google Wave is an approach to collaboration and communication which integrates and innovates many of current ways we communicate such as email, blogging, micro blogging, forums, collaborative documentation, scheduling, etc. It does so with the use of what it calls waves. A wave can be anything from a collaborative document to a conversation (even real-time chat) and it can start as one, morph into another or even have pieces taken out and formed into new waves.

Probably the coolest part of this is that it will be open source and extensive client and server APIs are available to extend, customize, and improve the service. It is also built on the idea of a protocol that would make it possible for individual companies to house their own wave servers and share the same functionality with users on other wave servers.. and it’s all web based.

The possibilities are endless with this and it can tie into any existing technologies like twitter, facebook, blogger, and wordpress. Updates can be made on the fly and comments and changes can all be managed from the wave client, simplifying and centralizing management of communication in disparate systems.

I’m infatuated with this technology already even though it is still in development. I’m not fond of technological prophecies as I have been burned several times (so HDDVD lost to blue-ray… sue me). However, I do believe this has the potential to radically change communication and collaboration.

I recommend watching the whole video. I know it’s long, but in my opinion it is worth it.

Google Wave Developer Preview at Google I/O 2009

I look forward to hosting and supporting your wave servers in the future!

My last volume Linux Shell Insights: Volume 1 had some talk on the social plane about it so here’s Volume 2. Enjoy.

Here are a few more one-liners. I also call for the assistance of our audience; if anyone has more reliable or efficient methods to accomplish the ends in this article, get involved and comment!

1. Obtain your internet IP
   There are two ways to do this (both below.) This can be useful in bash scripts that require your IP address. It’s useful in a dynamic IP environment when handling dynamic DNS in some fashion; though can be useful in a variety of scripts in which NAT may exist making eth0 unreliable for this information.
   shell# wget -O - -q checkip.dyndns.org | grep -o “[[:digit:].]+”

   You can also use curl if it’s your tool-of-choice.

   shell# curl -s http://checkip.dydns.org/ | grep -o “[[:digit:].]+”

   If you’ve got a static IP that is directly connected to the internet; it’s best to just scrape the information out of ifconfig.

   shell# /sbin/ifconfig eth0 | grep inet | grep -o “[[:digit:].]+” | head -n 1
2. Get Distribution Information/Version
   From time to time we get support tickets or calls asking “What distribution of Linux am I running?”. Here’s a way to ascertain this under most modern Linux distributions we offer.

   Most Linux distributions follow the “Linux Standard Base” and have a file in /etc matching *release. You can take a look by running:

   shell# cat /etc/*release

   This does the same thing if you find it easier to remember.

   shell# lsb_release –all

   NOTE: You may have to cat the file /etc/debian_version on some Debian releases.

3. Shortcut to list all system users
   I stumbled upon this one by a typo once where you can get a peek of system users. This shouldn’t be considered authoritative, as /etc/passwd is your daddy; but it’s quick to verify the spelling of that strange developer who insists on the username supercalifragilistic_expialidocious.
   Tested on: Debian, Redhat
   shell# ~(HIT TAB TWICE HERE)
4. Lost Plesk Password
   Here’s one of those gems that we keep close to our chest, but I’m willing to reveal it to you. If you misplace your Plesk Admin password, on UNIX it stores it in /etc/psa/.psa.shadow. This is a read-only file, changing the password here does not change it for Plesk. It’s a good way to jot your memory if you forget though.
   shell# cat /etc/psa/.psa.shadow

Continue to keep an eye out for my next list!

We recently helped launch the new web site www.discoveramerica.com which is the “official travel and tourism website of the United States”. The purpose of this post was to point out that it’s not only a really cool website but it’s also a site that I will actually use. It never occurred to me that  the government could ever run a “good” website until my wife started paying our personal taxes online several years ago and she quickly learned that Dallas Country really had their stuff together, almost too much in fact. While we appreciate the convenience a little lag wouldn’t be so bad when it comes to paying taxes.

Anyway just a quick post congratulating all the great people at www.discoveramerica.com for the launch of a very helpful and interactive web site and for selecting us (1-800-HOSTING) as their Managed Hosting provider for such an important web site.

Corporate transparency is all about putting your company out there for the public to see, therefore becoming more transparent. In today’s world, where you can find out almost anything about anything, what does it tell your consumer when they can’t find you?

In the traditional sense, corporate transparency has meant being able to turn your company “inside out” for the public to observe. To have your history, reports, data, tax returns, all available and easily accessible for viewing. This became especially important when corporate scandals such as Enron and WorldCom came to light.

Companies have since embraced the importance to have transparency and taken the appropriate steps. But as consumers move to into a newer, much more accessible world of finding information, what’s next in terms of corporate transparency?

It used to be, consumers would go to your company’s website to find the information on the products, services, and prices they needed. Now, that’s one of the last places they go, if at all. If a consumer can only find information on you by going to your company’s main website, but nothing through general searches, this signals a red flag for the customer.

With the explosion of the social media sites such as twitter, facebook, and Linkedin, it is almost impossible not to find the kind of information you are searching for. It is in the best interest of companies to have an invested presence on these sites. It lets your customers know that you want to reach out and build a lasting relationship. This in turn builds customer loyalty and also can help grow your consumer base in ways you wouldn’t have been able to through just the traditional company website.

For almost every type of business today, it is essential that companies are proactive about the information that is available to the consumer. If you aren’t putting your company out there first, then someone will, good or bad.

As consumer interest grows more into having a multitude of avenues available to research a company or product, it seems that corporate transparency is moving towards this as well. You as a corporation need to have information readily available on your company website, as well as reach out the public on all these other sites that are becoming much more prominent in the consumer’s eye.