Updated version of pingfire extension. This is my fork with bit.ly support
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pingfire.xpi

Two of the brightest fellows, Dr Evan Hughes  and Dr David Salmond (DSTL), who were my  examiners, recommended the award of the PhD. 

I have a several friends, who have a great product ideas, based on complex scientific algorithms. Each time when I suggest using cloud computing for developing product we go through a round of questions. I will put them down here, so I can reference it.

This is a short example how to build very simple chart for EC2 Spot Instances using Timeplot

Some things broke. I am really dissapointed by mt backup/restore procedure. It doesn't restore properly.

http://mashable.com/2009/09/03/iphone-att/
My main project is to develop algorithms and methods for wireless bandsharing. It is estimated that it will be an issue by 2017. I think it started to hit us now.

For those who would like to play heroes and who are trying to run Movable Type under nginx in cgi mode, additional fastcgi parameters in nginx:

fastcgi_param    PERL5LIB $document_root/mt/lib;
   fastcgi_param    MT_HOME $document_root/mt;
   fastcgi_param    MT_CONFIG $document_root/mt/mt-config.cgi;

the rest can be taken with from here with cgi wrapper.
With this additional parameters mt-check will be successful, but in my case it failed with:

Can't connect to data source '' because I can't work out what driver to use (it doesn't seem to contain a 'dbi:driver:' prefix and the DBI_DRIVER env var is not set) at /var/www/*/htdocs/mt/extlib/Data/ObjectDriver/Driver/DBI.pm line 75 at /var/www/*/htdocs/mt/extlib/Data/ObjectDriver/Driver/BaseCache.pm line 320 Since I don't know whom to blame for this error and can't fix it on spot, I will leave MT under apache for now. For those interested in runing MT under lighttpd, this tutorial makes much more sense, then official doc, and it's closer to my previous blog install.

Updated version of pingfire for firefox 3.5 

On the second day of my holiday, my provider VAServe basically seized to exist. It had a major breakdown with data loss up to 40% in both data centers in UK and UK.
So my VPS including backups went down. On my return I find out that I cleaned all backups from my  laptop, - freeing space for the holiday photos.  VAServ recovered and provided me with new clean VPS,
I managed to recover Movable Type from 3thd May backup, but find out that backup/restore facility doesn't work as good as promised. I had to reset all styles in order to get it working - no styles. I don't remember exact plugins I was using (except for my hacks) for tags and active streams, so their settings and templates lost.
Things usually happened when I am away, so I was planing to do full backup of the server on the last day, but instead I was deploying django website to dedicated server up till 2 o'clock in the morning.
Stay tuned for Wedding and Honeymoon photos.

Visualization

If you remember movie “Minority report”, you may be delighted to know that interface featured in this movie is available for linux and mac, see demo video on http://oblong.com/ . There is an ongoing work to move this interface into wearable devices, see presentation on TED http://bit.ly/FOupJ

Building 3D social networks

Croquet IDE http://www.opencroquet.org/index.php/Main_Page . Software development kit for building 3D multi-user virtual world, similar to Second Life. See demo on the link - it shows that web programming doesn’t mean typing commands. Can it be our next alumni website?

Extend twitter

You possibly heard about twitter.com on radio or read about it in newspaper. This is a service which limits your post to 140 characters. But you may overlook that there are services like twitter, with source code available for free, see http://identi.ca/ code is available for download at http://laconi.ca/trac/ . Jaiku is another microblogging service running on google app engine http://www.jaiku.com/ with source code available at http://code.google.com/p/jaikuengine/

There is a project which extends an idea of microblogging with location aware services http://cloud27.com/, which is powered by http://pinaxproject.com/

Cloud computing

I mentioned google app engine earlier and this is representative of the modern trend called cloud computing or to be more precise software as services (SaaS). Cloud computing is reincarnation of very old idea of per hour usage of virtual machine (do you remember the old PL or IBM mainframes on which you can use 2 Mb RAM by hour only?). Pioneered by amazon elastic cloud (Amazon EC) which produced a service to allow people to hire virtual server on their premises and pay as little as 10 pence per hour. Here is an example how scientists are using cloud computing http://bit.ly/1KkWNR for intensive computation. There are several interesting projects: Amazon EC2 compatible open source projects are: http://enomalism.com/ and http://eucalyptus.cs.ucsb.edu/ Google App engine compatible open source project: http://code.google.com/p/appscale/

VPN solution

Moving your own infrastructure on somebody’s else premises can cause some security issues and one of them can be addressed using Cohesive VPN Cubed http://www.cohesiveft.com/vpncubed/ which claims to be secure openvpn based solution and easily be deployed in distributed fashion. We are in process of preparing trial with Cohesive to run it on our equipment, so if you would like to contribute, please contact me.

Bookmarking and collaboration service

There is a yahoo own delicious.com service, which allow you to bookmark, assign a tag to the links and share them between your computers or friends. But recently emerged service which not only allow your to bookmark and share link, but add sticky notes or on the page and save and share this notes as well. See http://www.diigo.com.