This is a quick update to talk about the recently released OS X Widget for entering time into Hermes: Sandals. Sandals was checked into the Horde CVS repository last night and is now ready for use. Hermes, the Horde timetracking application, can be used to track time against a variety of projects, clients, and deliverables (including tickets and todos kept within Horde).
Hermes achieves this integration by taking advantage of Horde's excellent inter-application API functionality. Sandals takes advantage of Hermes using Horde's XML-RPC exposure of application APIs. While Sandals is a bit rough around the edges (especially when it comes to catching and displaying helpful error messages) it does work well and can be used out-of-the-box. Check it out by grabbing the latest CVS version of Hermes and look in the scripts/ directory for Sandals.wdgt.

In addition to Sandals I wanted to announce a recent Codelet upload. checkubc.rb is a Ruby script that will monitor OpenVZ virtual machines (either from the host or within the guest) and report when a container gets too close to its configured limits. It will additionally send an alert whenever a failcnt increases. Check out checkubc in the Codelets section of this website.

The .ca Datacenter was just freshened with some new hardware in the rack. This hardware comes as a very needed addition to the growing infrastructure. The hardware I speak of is a pair of boxes with the following hardware specs:

Intel Core 2 Duo 3.4GHZ CPU, 4x1GB DDR 667. 6x320GB SATA Drives

They were named in honor of the US and Canadian roots of the Alkaloid Networks. Pearson and Kennedy have been racked and cut into production. This adds 6GHZ, 8GB's ram, and 2.0TB's to the rack. We dedcided to build out the boxes with the Nexenta distribution. A blend of the OpenSolaris kernel and the GNU Userland. Ben Klang founding Alkaloid Member was just accepted to the Nexenta Core Development Team. This means he will be able to build and commit packages upstream into the Nexenta apt repository. The good news is all the hard work Alkaloid puts into building out our infrastructure around Nexenta will be available to the whole community. The first public service hosted on these boxes is our new Nexenta mirror. I'm pleased to annouce to the world:

http://shiny.alkaloid.net

The goal of these two boxes is two fold. They have enough processing capacity to run all the .ca Alkaloid services. They will only be doing this temporarily until we can get the remaining two SuSE servers decommisioned. Ever since SuSE has gotten into bed with Microsoft we have decided to move away from using it in our production environments. The end goal being a set of 4 servers all running Nexenta. The first set will be the less powerful (A64 3000+, 4x512MB, 2x120GB HD) and will be used to run services such as dns, dnscache, ldap, kerberos, and network monitoring. This will leave the other more powerful servers (Core 2 Duo 3.4GHZ, 4GB, 6x320GB) to handle www, mysql, and php. This will hopefully allow us to survive a slashdotting without getting swamped. I keep fearing its only a matter of time until footstops gets swamped after a digging or slashdoting. Or any of the other sweet projects that we are working on.

We will keep you posted on the progress of our migration off SuSE and onto Nexenta.

Looking to add online video support to Footstops.com, I scoured the internet looking for an online video plugin for the WYSIWYG editor TinyMCE. Everything I found was very insecure, opening up dangerous tags such as <object> and <embed>, to the end user. I wrote mceOnlineVideos as a plugin to add Google and YouTube Videos but uses an image placeholder and replaces the image during output. This keeps the content safe from malicious users but still very usable to end users.

See mceOnlineVideos in action at Footstops or read more about it and download it here.

In other news, there have been some cool developments in the last little while. Ben Klang, an active developer for Horde, is now hosting the main CVS tree for Horde right here on Alkaloid Networks and Jeff Smith is opening up Realclip development again for use in a number of large-scale projects on the horizon... but I'll let those guys fill us in on the details.

Alkaloid Networks is proud to announce the merger of Lucid Interactive's Docupedia. Originally started by Alkaloid Fellows Jeff Smith and Bryan Rite, the Docupedia has sustained regular and growing traffic since its founding. Key articles such as the WEP cracking tutorial have been mentioned on Digg.com as well as other internet news sites. Now the Docupedia has come home to roost and can be found at its new URL docs.alkaloid.net. Welcome Docupedia!

This was an excellent opportunity to resurrect the once-lost Solaris LDAP client with OpenLDAP server How-To. Unfortunately, due to an oversight during the last site conversion, the document was delinked from the Projects page. It has now found its new home on the Alkaloid Docupedia and hopefully will continue to expand to cover Kerberos integration.

As our final piece of housekeeping news, the PodMail demo has been restored to full functionality. While the RSS feeds continued to operate, we had disabled the phone-in side due to technical changes. If you haven't yet checked out the demo, we encourage you to do so now. See the PodMail site for more information.