im-roberto

If you have not yet heard of google voice its basically a service that provides you a phone number that you can use to make phone calls, and send and receive text messages through google. In any case the best way to find out about the service is to simply watch the videos posted on the website at http://www.google.com/googlevoice/about.html.

Google Voice is a very convenient service because it can save you money on your cell phone bill by no longer needing to pay the extra $15 for unlimited text messages all you need is access to the web. This service is easily available on any phone that uses the Android OS. Unfortunately Apple did not approve the Google Voice app on the iPhone appstore and therefore there is no easy way to receive push notifications to your iPhone when you have received a text message or voice mail on your google voice number. The closest thing you have is the ability to receive e-mails that are forwarded to your phone (if you have your e-mail set up on your phone).

Luckily you still have some options if you are an iPhone owner. You do need to jump through a bit of hurdles if you wish to get this done though.

Things you will need:

1. An iPhone.. Duh!
2. Prowl (iPhone App)
3. Either an account at: http://googlevoice.ub3rk1tten.com/voicegrowl/ or with https://www.gvmax.com/

I have used the Voice Growl service in the past and works quiet well, with the exception that at times the service does go down for a few minutes. I have not tested or used GVMax but it does sound promising and the software is now open source as well which may be something you Java nerds may like to take a look at.

Sadly enough these services provide you with a means to receive Push notifications to your iPhone when you receive a message but still does not provide you with an easy means to reply back. You can simply use googles renovated google voice mobile site which works well but depending on how fast your connection may be can slow you down. Or if you have a jailbroken iphone you can always give the app found in Cydia.

If you are one handy developer there are also many libraries written in various languages that you can use to your advantage for receiving and replying to messages. Prowl has various 3rd party libraries you can use to send notifications to your iPhone. I have found the php library found at github to work well for all my needs http://github.com/Fenric/ProwlPHP. Aside from that there are also various third party libraries for Google Voice (aka unofficial google voice api) in many languages all you need to do is perform a google search, I currently use the PHP library found at github http://github.com/aaronpk/Google-Voice-PHP-API. If you are a developer with a little creativity and a bit of time you can come up with a good solution for your iPhone Google Voice needs.

I will soon be posting my own code as well as I currently use Google Voice -> My Dreamhost Procmail -> Prowl & Gtalk to receive messages and currently working on an XMPP format to send messages back.

A few weeks ago I attended my first LA Ruby meet up. Basically it’s a group of Ruby enthusiasts getting together and talking about Ruby and Ruby on Rails. I was rather surprised the community was more of an older mature crowd than. I would have expect various to be young web entrepreneurs or something of that liking. There was a speaker at the meetup from Heroku showing off their product and how awesome their dynamic cloud services work. It’s basically a cloud within a cloud which makes for interesting ultra dynamic services. Along with Heroku we also had another guest speaker who spoke of marketing and pitching your web product to the masses. It’s been a while since I blog and thought id share my wonderful experience with the LA Ruby group earlier this month.

Ever since I came across the Youtube Edu site I’ve been watching a whole lot of programming videos and have picked up a whole bunch of concepts that I would have never learned on my own. Personally I see this as a very good resource to those who really want to learn the concepts of software engineering as well to those seasoned programmers that just need to refresh and get a quick reference to some concept of some kind.

Beginning Programming in Java :
http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=84A56BC7F4A1F852

The Home Server Setup

Parts used:

• Intel BOXD945GCLF
• Kingston 1GB 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM
• APEX MI-008 Black Steel Mini-ITX Tower
• Seagate 1.5TB Sata Hard Drive (purchased at Fry’s Electronics)

Installing the Ubuntu Desktop Operating system is pretty plain and simple. All I basically did was install the Ubuntu distro onto my flash drive (I didn’t install a disc drive on the server) and booted the server computer with my flash drive and followed the installation process from there. I decided on using the Ubuntu Desktop version primarily because I wanted to have the ability to use the computer for more purposes than one, for example as a Boxee TV set top, or just as another internet terminal in the household.

Once after I finished installing the operating system I went ahead and installed all the necessary updates which in a sense almost took just as long as the actual operating system installation itself, but no problem that was used as good quality time to serve myself a nice refreshment (beer) and sit back and relax a bit.

Note: Once after installing all the Ubuntu updates and restarted the system I noticed that the NIC card was no longer connecting to the Internet. As I searched through the Ubuntu forums I found out that one of the kernel updates has a little issue with the Intel D945GCLF motherboard. After couple of minutes searching around I came across a post with recompiled version of the update with the issue patched.

The fun part begins

Installing Samba was a walk in the park, all I did was created a folder named TimeMachine (I’ll explain later), and right clicked it and selected sharing options. It prompted me that I needed to install Samba in order to share that folder , and did it automatically after going through the menus. Once having the folder I wanted to share the folder I selected I went on to setup Avahi to broadcast that the server has Samba up and running to the rest of the computers in the network:

Opening Terminal on the Ubuntu Machine and running the following command:

Sudo gedit /etc/avahi/services/samba.service

Copy and paste this into the text editor:

<?xml version="1.0" standalone='no'?><!--*-nxml-*-->
<!DOCTYPE service-group SYSTEM "avahi-service.dtd">
<service-group>
<name replace-wildcards="yes">%h</name>
<service>
<type>_smb._tcp</type>
<port>139</port>
</service>
</service-group>

Save and Close the file editor, and restart the Avahi service by doing the following:

Sudo /etc/init.d/avahi-daemon restart

Now that my MacBook was able to see the new server setting up TimeMachine to backup to the server was a little trickier. I had to follow a guide that explains how to do this same process but with Netatalk so I had to skip a couple of steps. Basically you have to set up TimeMachine so that it can use network devices for back ups. This is done by going on Terminal on the Mac and punching in a mini code:

defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

once running this command you should be able to select a network share for backing up data.

The next step was a little trickier.

Time Machine didn’t work right away, it gave me an error, telling me it was unable to create disk image and what not. So what I ended up doing was going under the Utilities folder in the applications folder and running Console, on the left navigation menu I selected All Messages and re-ran TimeMachine’s BackUp Now option and waited while it did its thing. On the Console application you’ll notice after a couple of seconds or minutes a message with something along the lines of:

Creating disk image /Volumes/TimeMachine/computername_0014e3856bd0.sparsebundle

Of course with computername being the name you gave your mac during initial setup. Open up the DiskUtility app and from the toolbar Create a New Blank Disk Image with the name that showed up in the console:

computername_0014e3856bd0.sparsebundle

Unfortunately I didn’t really added a Volume name to it so I left its default name but for the Volume Size I selected a small size.

Volume Format: Mac OS Extended (Journaled)
Encryption: none
Partitions: Single partition – Apple Partition Map
Image Format: sparse bundle disk image

Copied over the image to the shared folder on the server, and jumped on Terminal with my Mac to bloat up that tiny image to something usable, lets say around 500 gigabytes. Navigated to the following:

cd /Volumes/Name of Shared Folder

Remember I had already mounted the share folder on my MacBook simply by going under the file manager and on the left hand side clicking on the server share and connecting as the user I created on the server. Once in the Volumes folder and inside the mounted drive can do a quick ls command to make sure that the sparsebundle image is there. There I ran the command to resize the image file which was:

hdiutil resize -size 500g filename.sparsebundle

Time to give TimeMachine another run.

Believe me that you’ll be glad to have resized the image file after  it was transferred onto the server, otherwise you’d have to sit and wait for an empty 500gig image to be transferred from one computer to another.

TimeMachine worked perfectly after this, the only thing is that it did take some time doing the initial backup because it was nearly 150gigs of data that was transferred.

Links and Resources:

• Ubuntu
• LAN issue Fix for D945GCLF
• Setup Samba for Bonjour networking with OS X 10.5 Leopard
• HowTo: Make Ubuntu A Perfect Mac File Server And Time Machine Volume
• Installing LAMP On Ubuntu For Newbies
• Resize a Sparse Bundle Image using Terminal

I’m going to be making a small server for my house to hold all my music files, as well as serve my TimeMachine backups for my Macbook. This server is also going to be more than that, being a geeky kind of guy that likes to try out several different things I also plan on adding a full fledged web server with the works “LAMP,” and possibly Ruby on Rails. Unfortunately none of the home servers sold have these capabilities or the ability to add custom software to them, aside from that their price point is a little hefty compared to buying the parts and building it yourself. Besides Linux is free, and very customizable.

So over the weekend I went out and bought a 1.5 terabyte hard drive at Frys Electronics for $130, and purchased a case, and stick of memory from New Egg under $70. Now I just need to go out and purchase the motherboard and CPU that will be the heart and brains of this. I’ve decided on going with an ATOM based CPU mainly because it does require much power (go green!) and fits in a small ITX case.

The only dilemma I am now having is trying to decide on what Linux flavor I am going to be using for this server. I’ve been doing a little bit of testing using VMWare and Fedora 10 on getting Netatalk and TimeMachine working together but have not succeeded in the task. I have had a little more success using Ubuntu and a small tutorial I found online on how to get it running, except that Ubuntu does not come with the installation packages for a LAMP server as an option during the initial installation, which will cost me more time than if I were to use Fedora. I can always go with the Ubuntu server option but I plan on keeping a Gnome gui set up on the Linux box just in case if in the future I decide on adding Boxee, Miro, or some other online media software of that type.

Of course this will be an on going project and I will do my best to keep all changes made and hopefully some pictures while building it posted on the site.

Update: added links to its respected sites