Accessing my Netgear Stora from Ubuntu

Like many tech-savy people these days I’ve been thinking about buying a Network Attached Storage device (NAS) for some time but being more into software than hardware I’ve never really understood enough about them to lay down my hard earned cash. Well recently my hand was forced by my external hard drive starting to act up and my girlfriends son filling his 70GB HDD with downloaded Flight Simulator extensions (and god knows what else!). After quizzing the infrastructure guy at work about his thoughts I ended up buying the Netgear Stora enclosure along with a Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB drive (another drive to follow next month).

Configuring Android Debug Bridge Server to start as root

In my previous post my previous post I mentioned that one of the problems I faced when trying to install and debug my first Android application was that the Android Debug Bridge (adb) was not running as root. Now shutting the service down and restarting it with sudo was all that was required but that’s a bit of a faff, there had to be a way to configure adb to be started with root privileges – and there is.

Android Development : Moving from Emulator to Device

So I wanted to roll my sleeves up and get going with Android and have come up with a suitable ‘pet project’ to work towards. Now that I’ve got my development environment sorted out, and with my pet project in mind, I decided to do something with the accelerometer. In the Android Development book that I bought there is a sample application to display the current G being experienced by the device as well as the maximum G experienced.

Now the keying in of the code was a useful exercise in itself but there was an obvious flaw in my selection of project – can you guess what it is? That’s right my laptop doesn’t have an accelerometer so even if the code builds (and it does) and runs in the emulator (and it did) the G readings are not going to change no matter how much I shake the laptop around! Doh!

Moving from Amazon S3 to Dropbox for my server backups

For the past few years I’ve been using Amazon S3 for my remote file storage needs, initially it was used for a site I created blog-type in DotNetNuke for my girlfriends daughter to use on her Gap Year trip around the world. The hosting I had at the time was quite expensive in terms of disk space so the low cost of the Amazon service made it an easy choice. Time passes ….. and I start to use Amazon for storing backups of my websites (this one included), initially manually but more recently I’ve been using plugins to do it for me and just send me an email when they are done. Even with this increase in storage I still only run up a $0.10 bill with Amazon every month – very cost effective I think you’ll agree.

Running Screwturn Wiki under Mono

So at work we had a need for a Wiki of some description and after evaluating a number of different systems we decided to go with ScrewTurn. This is written in C# and was initially installed on a Windows Server under IIS – and all was well. At the same time I was evaluating the Statusnet microblogging platform – which we then also decided to implement for internal communication (Yammer and Twitter were deemed as not being suitable).

Now, here lies a problem; Screwturn is written in C# and supported to run on Windows but statusnet is written in PHP and I had no end of problems getting all of the requirements (mainly php_curl) running under IIS. On the flip-side, installing statusnet on a Linux platform like Ubuntu is a breeze once the LAMP stack is installed – but what about Screwturn? Obviously I knew about Mono but didn’t have any really experience with it – would it support enough of the .NET Framework to run the Wiki? If so then we could implement both Screwturn and Statusnet on an Ubuntu server (actually a VM) our DMZ – replacing the ageing tin box Windows server.