market://details?id=<packagename>

OR

http://market.android.com/details?id=<packagename>

So for Remembory, I have this:

market://details?id=com.gbott.remembory

The “old” way was to link to the search page by using this:

market://search?q=pname:<package>

… but the details page method saves the user a click, or a tough decision when there are two applications both called Remembory.

Finally the feature that prevented my company from using Rackspace Cloud, and instead using AWS, was fixed! Congratulations to the Rackspace Cloud team.

Another thing I learnt today is that there are two data centers for Rackspace Cloud machines – DFW and ORD. The first server you provision gets assigned to one of the two data centers, and which ever one it gets put into is the data center that all of your other servers will be put into as well. So if the first server gets put into DFW, then all of the other ones you create will be. That is until you delete all of your servers. Then once again, the first server can get put into any data center.

I am hoping that in the future, we will have a choice about which data center a server is provisioned in, particularly since it will help for geographical distribution.

http://code.google.com/p/hive-json-serde/

This SerDe (serializer/deserializer) will let you read JSON files as input for Hive tables. In the future, it will also support writing JSON data, but that is for another day.

Please let me know if you have any comments or questions about it.

Step 2 would be public bug trackers for ALL of their systems, particularly the online ones such as Gmail, Docs, Sites, etc.

Step 3 would be Googlers actually paying attention to them, maybe even hiring a customer support team.

Fingers crossed!

“I would never buy a phone from Google. If something went wrong, I’m screwed! Its not like I can take it into a shop and get it fixed”

How right she was. According to Slashdot, Google is facing a deluge of customer complaints about the Nexus One. Are you having problems? Use the hash tag #fixgoogle if you are on Twitter. All tweets with that tag will appear on fixgoogle.com when I get the site up and running.

If you are using EC2, you will quickly find that if an instance is terminated, any data on that instance is gone – lost forever. At first, this seems like a terrible idea, but in fact, it encourages you to get into best practices, and discover the awesome benefits of EBS.

We have many instances running of different types. We have built a “custom” Debian AMI for each of the instance types we use (web, database, management, etc). If you were to launch an instance with one of these AMIs, you would not have a fully working system. That is because these AMIs have sym-links for important and/or dynamic data. For example, on the web AMI we have created, /etc/apache2, /etc/php5/ and /var/www are all sym-links. To where? A directory that an EBS volume is mounted to. That’s right, all of the web configuration and website code only lives in an EBS volume. It is simple enough to write a little script that creates a nightly Snapshots of each EBS volume.

Now for the power of this setup. Every time you want to bring up another instance of the same type (say, for horizontally scaling), you are in fact doing a restoration from backup. Take a Snapshot (your backup), create an EBS volume, attach it to the new instance, and make it live! This doesn’t just work for scaling, it works for bringing up staging servers that are mirrors of production or running experiments without affecting production.

We can even take it a step further! Those AMIs and Snapshots are all stored in S3 – data available to the whole Region. An instance and EBS volume exist in only 1 of the Availability Zones within that Region. You can use your backups to restore into a new Availability Zone which you can use to create a high-availability solution.

Happy scaling!

* I don’t know Joel personally – we have never met – but I do follow his work, like his company and LOVE Fogbugz!

I also want to call upon all of the mobile application developers out there. Motally is running a mobile analytics contest called Trackappalooza. Here you can win a pass to MWC in Barcelona, or up to $15,000 just for tracking your Android, iPhone or Blackberry app. Motally is the mobile analytics powerhouse providing tracking capabilities for mobile websites and mobile applications.

Good luck!

Enjoy!


$ apt-get install tomcat5.5
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following extra packages will be installed:
ant ant-gcj ant-optional ant-optional-gcj antlr build-essential debhelper
default-jdk default-jre default-jre-headless defoma dpkg-dev ecj ecj-gcj fastjar
file fontconfig fontconfig-config g++ g++-4.3 gappletviewer-4.3 gcj-4.3
gcj-4.3-base gettext gettext-base gij-4.3 gjdoc hicolor-icon-theme html2text
intltool-debian java-common java-gcj-compat java-gcj-compat-dev
java-gcj-compat-headless jsvc libantlr-java libantlr-java-gcj libasound2
libatk1.0-0 libatk1.0-data libbcel-java libcairo2 libcommons-beanutils-java
libcommons-collections-java libcommons-collections3-java libcommons-daemon-java
libcommons-dbcp-java libcommons-digester-java libcommons-el-java
libcommons-launcher-java libcommons-logging-java libcommons-modeler-java
libcommons-pool-java libcompress-raw-zlib-perl libcompress-zlib-perl libcups2
libdatrie0 libdb4.5 libdigest-hmac-perl libdigest-sha1-perl libdirectfb-1.0-0
libecj-java libecj-java-gcj libexpat1 libfile-remove-perl libfontconfig1
libfontenc1 libfreetype6 libgcj-bc libgcj-common libgcj9-0 libgcj9-0-awt
libgcj9-dev libgcj9-jar libgcj9-src libglib2.0-0 libglib2.0-data libgtk2.0-0
libgtk2.0-bin libgtk2.0-common libice6 libio-compress-base-perl
libio-compress-zlib-perl libio-stringy-perl libjaxp1.3-java libjaxp1.3-java-gcj
libjpeg62 liblog4j1.2-java liblog4j1.2-java-gcj libmagic1 libmail-box-perl
libmail-sendmail-perl libmailtools-perl libmime-types-perl libmx4j-java
libobject-realize-later-perl libpango1.0-0 libpango1.0-common libpixman-1-0
libpng12-0 libregexp-java libservlet2.3-java libservlet2.4-java libsm6 libsqlite3-0
libstdc++6-4.3-dev libsys-hostname-long-perl libthai-data libthai0 libtiff4
libtimedate-perl libtomcat5.5-java libts-0.0-0 liburi-perl libuser-identity-perl
libxcb-render-util0 libxcb-render0 libxcomposite1 libxcursor1 libxdamage1
libxerces2-java libxerces2-java-gcj libxfixes3 libxfont1 libxft2 libxi6
libxinerama1 libxrandr2 libxrender1 libxtst6 make mime-support patch po-debconf
python python-central python-minimal python2.5 python2.5-minimal ttf-dejavu
ttf-dejavu-core ttf-dejavu-extra x-ttcidfont-conf xfonts-encodings xfonts-utils
...
0 upgraded, 146 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 101MB of archives.
After this operation, 288MB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]?


WTF? I understand that Tomcat needs some kind of Java, but this is ridiculous. It is installing ant, fonts, compilers and worst of all, the most evil Java ever.

Ubuntu has the sense to make Sun Java available, but even if you do have Sun Java installed, the above is true on Ubuntu.

For shame!

I’ll stick to downloading from java.sun.com and tomcat.apache.org.

So what was my motivation for this?

Well the Rackspace Cloud Management Console is severly lacking in features. Things such as creating an image of a server (just like you can in AWS EC2), and sharing an IP address between servers (something you cannot do in EC2 – an IP address can only be attached to a single instance at a time). It is this second feature that I am most interested in because it means I can use a virtual IP address (floating IP) to create a HA (highly available) “cluster” of Tomcat servers. I plan on using keepalived to do the IP switching, and Apache with mod_proxy_balancer and mod_proxy_ajp to talk to multiple Tomcat servers. Without reading the poorly written API documention and learning that I could create a shared IP group, I would not have known this was possible.

This project is very much a work in progress, and what is in there now represents only about 8 hours of work. I welcome any feedback, and anyone else who wants to join.