Sifry's Alerts

Gotta love that Treo 600

So I'm here at SFO waiting for a plane, and rather than jack in and pay T-Mobile's (or Boingo's) data rates for a quick sip of email, I'm gleefully using my new Treo 600 plugged into the combined USB sync/charge cable I just bought. Add Sprint's unlimited data plan ($5/month) and a nifty piece of software called PDANet, and I'm happily surfing away at 145kbps all the while charging both my laptop AND my phone.

Getting some looks of envy from other tech-enabled travelers. Hello from the future!

BoingBoing adds Technorati support - you can too!

Tonight, BoingBoing added in a new feature that allows you to to find "Other blogs commenting on this post" for each post. It is an ingenious use of the Technorati search functionality embedded inside of the Movable Type template that BoingBoing uses. This is a great way for a site to provide a distributed commenting system that incorporates transparency and accountability - to comment on BoingBoing, you just post something that links to BoingBoing, and you'll show up in the "Other blogs commenting on this post" page. It also discourages spammers and trolls, because all comments must be posted on the commenter's blog, and those posts are accountable - even if you want to remain anonymous, the commenting blog can now itself be commented upon, ad infinitum.

Here's how you can add it to your own Movable Type weblog template:

1) Edit your blog
2) Click on "Templates"
3) Click on "Main Index"
4) Somewhere imbetween the <$MTEntries$> and the <$/MTEntries> tags, add this to your template:

<a href="http://www.technorati.com/cosmos/search.html?rank=&sub=mtcosmos&url=<$MTEntryPermalink$>" title="Technorati Cosmos">Other blogs commenting on this post</a>

5) Click on "Save"
6) Click on "Rebuild Site"

I just added it to this blog. Here's a link to the template for Sifry's Alerts main index page. Give it a go, and let me know how it works for you!

The pinger is now fixed - it was a logfile permissions problem

The pinger was disabled since we moved over to the new server on www2 - and this is because of the nonstandard place the pingers were storing their logs. They were originally storing logs in /home/technorati/pingerlog, but the /home/technorati directory did not have execute permissions for the www-data group, so nothing could be written to the file.

Rather than fix that, I just changed the logging structure - created a new directory called /var/log/pinger, changed its ownership to www-data.www-data and then changed the pingers to use this new directory.

All is now well again.

Sputnik launches new indoor/outdoor AP for only $250!

My friends over at Sputnik just launched a new, indoor/outdoor AP, the Sputnik AP 200. Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night shall stay these rugged, high-powered APs from distributing Wi-Fi for a distance of miles, with optional external antenna, of course.

The specs rock:

• 200 mW transmit antenna
• environmentally sealed and tested in temperatures ranging from -4° F to 158° F
• works with a variety of directional and omni-directional antennas (Sputnik sells a bunch)
• supports Power over Ethernet (PoE), so you can deploy them anywhere
• uses transmit power control, so you can reduce interference and increase bandwidth
• plug-n-play provisioning, making it a snap to grow your network
• WDS repeater range of over 3 miles

Of course, the real magic is in the Sputnik Control Center software (disclaimer, I had something to do with developing it...) that lets you authenticate and track users centrally, and build a managed wireless network from the ground up just by plugging APs into broadband.

Best news of all: this baby is only $250. You can start a hotzone for as little as $495, which is the special price for a Sputnik AP 200, a Sputnik AP 160 and corresponding Sputnik Central Control license.

Great work, guys!