Archive for April, 2010

Is Facebook Going to Start Forcing Us to Make Some Info Public?

To say that Facebook has come under fire for its privacy (or lack there of) would be an understatement. They’ve been opening up users’ data to the world with changes to privacy settings after the introduction of several new features. All of that seemed to come to a point for me today when I logged in to my profile and was greeted with a new feature to find pages I might be interested in linking to. Handy? Well, maybe. The feature scans your profile for key elements and finds pages “for you” so you can join. Problem is, it does things like search hometowns, jobs, etc. which is all the information in our profiles that we’re trying to keep private in the first place. Keep in mind that pages are public to the world, and for me personally, I’ve become very selective in the pages that I link to. But what was scary were the options at the bottom of the prompt:

If you’ll notice, there’s a very important option that’s missing: “No”. Perhaps this is a misconception due to a poorly-worded prompt, but it was a bad one to screw up at this stage in the privacy game.

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Filed under Tech Trends : Comments (0) : Apr 28th, 2010

Photo Publishing from iPhoto to Drupal

This last week I’ve been working on a site for posting photos to share with family/friends/etc. I have my photos all organized nicely in iPhoto and thought iWeb would be a slick way to export those pictures right to my website (via an FTP server I’d setup, at least). (Why not to Flick/Facebook or other, you ask? I want to still “own” my pictures) I’ve used iWeb in the past to create little static sites and thought it would work wonderfully for this. After all, everything Apple makes “just works”, right? Turns out it’s not quite everything. Apparently, iWeb exported photo galleries are a no-show in Firefox (and Chrome) (fixes posted didn’t seem to work for me :( ). Would’ve been nice to know before I started, but I guess I know now.

Anyway, so I started trying to find a nice piece of software to publish my pictures fairly easily from iPhoto. Since I would rather have a CMS (but was willing to put up with the likes of iWeb for organization integration), I decided to take a look at a few open source products to see if one of them would fit the bill. I found an awesome combination that I thought was worth mentioning.

I found the iPhoto2Gallery plugin for iPhoto. The website says it works with iPhoto 08 but it seemed to work just fine for me on iPhoto 09. After I setup a Gallery2 site quick and the plugin didn’t seem to login. Then, when searching for a solution for that problem I hit another lucky break, I ran across this module for Drupal to emulate the Gallery API for publishing! Once the module is enabled, I tried it out and it seems to work flawlessly!

If you’re looking for a slick way to publish your photos from iPhoto to something that’s not Flickr or Facebook and are not wanting to pay for a .Mac account, check out this combination of software. It’s pretty slick!

Just as a note, the default Drupal gallery module is ‘ok’. It’s much better if you add the previous/next buttons :)

Filed under Uncategorized : Comments (0) : Apr 19th, 2010

How to Treat Painfully Slow DNS Lookups in OS X

I’m not really sure what made this suddenly appear, but I’ve noticed over the past few days that my initial connections to websites have started taking longer and longer. Today, it became painful as the browser would say it was “Looking up example.com” for a good 3-4 seconds (if not longer) before loading the page. Once the lookup completed, the site usually came down pretty fast. Thanks to a (not so quick) Google search, I ran across this forum thread. It turns out, disabling IPv6 in OS X speeds things up quite a bit. To disable, go to System Preferences -> select the network interface you’re using (probably Airport) -> click Advanced.

Then, in the TCP/IP tab, change the drop down next to “Configure IPv6″ to “Off” instead of “Automatic”.

This worked for me. My browser and other various apps no longer take several seconds before loading pages on the web!

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Filed under How-Tos / Tips : Comments (1) : Apr 15th, 2010

Zimbra on Minimal Hardware

I really like Zimbra, but it tends to use a ridiculous amount of CPU while just sitting there, which makes it a bad choice for someone like me who wants to run it with a few users at home as a virtual machine. As I stated growing the amount of virtual machines on my physical host at home, things started to get a little cramped. Zimbra just plain uses far more CPU “out of the box” than the other virtual machines (I’ve got enough RAM) and it was starting to become my bottleneck.

After installing Zimbra and just leaving it running, it used the better part of a processor core most of the time. That’s not good if you’ve got a limited amount of hardware like I do. However, it wasn’t too difficult of a process to get my Zimbra server to use almost no CPU most of the time. As a great side-effect to this project, I will be trying to bump down the amount of memory allocated to my Zimbra VM, but that wasn’t the highest priority. I am running on the latest version of Zimbra (6.0.6 at the time of writing), but the tricks should apply to almost any version.

First, I started with disabling services that I really wasn’t using. I’m not monitoring my Zimbra server using snmp, so snmp was a pretty easy one. My server isn’t for an IT department or hosting service, so stats and logging history isn’t overly important, so I also chose to disable logger and stats. To disable those, run:
zmprov ms mail.whatan00b.com -zimbraServiceEnabled snmp
zmprov ms mail.whatan00b.com -zimbraServiceEnabled logger
zmprov ms mail.whatan00b.com -zimbraServiceEnabled stats
Now, let’s do a restart:
zmcontrol stop; zmcontrol start
This really only gave me gains in memory usage, but since I didn’t need them turned on, that was ok. Another good candidate to disable would be antispam and antivirus, but I didn’t want to turn off spam filtering on my system.

After disabling those extra services, I still was having CPU spikes every minute (which ultimately was what I was after). After doing a little digging, it turns out that Zimbra was calling zmmtaconfigctl which makes several zmprov calls. If you have been around Zimbra for any amount of time, you know that zmprov calls are expensive and time-consuming. It turns out that this script just scans to updated config to apply to the MTA. I really can’t think of a reason that I would need this every minute. A quick Google search led to a forum post on how to increase the interval of which this script is called. It’s defined in zmlocalconfig and 60 seconds is assumed if the value is not set. I chose to have it run every 2 hours (a fairly arbitrary decision):
zmlocalconfig -e zmmtaconfig_interval=7200
zmmtactl restart
That got my spikes down quite a bit, but I was still getting spikes of nearly around 20% every couple of minutes or so. While this wasn’t all that detrimental, it would be good for my overall CPU usage to get rid of it. A quick look at the crontab for the zimbra user showed that the script /opt/zimbra/libexec/zmstatuslog. Apparently, this script checks the status of the Zimbra server and displays the status in the Admin Console. Since I rarely ever log into the admin console, I really don’t need this to run very often. While there’s really no use for me to have it running every two minutes, I did leave it set to run every hour:
0 * * * * /opt/zimbra/libexec/zmstatuslog
Now it’s time to look at the good we’ve done.

This is what we started with:

Obviously, quite a bit of CPU usage. You can see why I needed to do something to fit more VMs on this host.

And now:

Looks great now!

There are a few extra cron jobs left in the zimbra user’s crontab that really don’t need to run for me such as the Dspam cron jobs, but those only run once a day. If you’re really zealous, you can disable those as well, assuming you have Dspam disabled (the default).

Update: For anyone who is interested, I did the 6.0.6 -> 6.0.7 upgrade a few weekends ago and had my cron jobs reset. All the other changes stuck.

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Filed under How-Tos / Tips : Comments (15) : Apr 10th, 2010

Firefox Java Plugin on Ubuntu 10.04

For anyone playing with the new Ubuntu 10.04, you may be as surprised as I was to find that the sun-java6 packages are no longer included in the default repositories. The proprietary packages from Sun Oracle have been swapped out for the open source openjdk implementation. After stumbling around in the dark for a bit, I managed to figure out that the installation is quite simple:

sudo apt-get install openjdk-6-jre icedtea6-plugin

After installation, be sure to restart Firefox and double-check that the plugin has been installed by going to “about:plugins” in the address bar. You can search for “java” to make sure the plugin exists.

Just like my previous post about Flash in Chrome on Ubuntu 10.04, it’s a bit annoying, but not too bad to install.

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Filed under How-Tos / Tips : Comments (10) : Apr 7th, 2010