• GMail interface now takes up full width in all orentations
• Web site title is shown in toolbar of browser.
• Reopen account that was last used previously on app launch.
• Web browser controls are now in one toolbar.

As of June 19th, I’ve also submitted version 1.2.1 which fixes a number of memory leak and crash issues. The most severe woud occur when the iPad was low on available memory and indicated this to MailWrangler. MailWrangler would try a little too hard to free up memory and crash. I’m hoping this update is approved quickly.

Coming down the line shortly is version 1.2 which should include a whole host of bug fixes, UI improvements, and a change so that GMail will be shown full screen in both orientations. Landscape will no longer have the accounts list always shown.

MailWrangler has been more popular than I had originally expected, but I’m trying to do what I can to keep up with bugs and feature improvements. If you have suggestions feel free to leave a comment, email me, or yell at me on twitter (@adinardi).

This first release is a bit raw, but it is a first step down the path I started almost two years ago with my initial attempt at releasing MailWrangler for the iPhone. Purchasing it will support me in my endeavor to build a much more powerful app than the current 1.0 version.

MailWrangler is mostly a pet project to fill a personal need. Suggestions and feedback are welcome so that the app can evolve in a way which may make it useful to others.

I’m expecting to put out a 1.1 release later this week which should include at least:

• fixed account sorting (ascending instead of descending)
• a built in browser for opening links

This will definitely be a free upgrade.

Check it out on the App Store here.

I really wasn’t planning on building anything, but I once again ran in to the need to check a couple of different GMail accounts on my iPad. The GMail web interface is really nice on the iPad — and browsing conversations is just much nicer on the native GMail interface. If the iPad Mail.app had threading it might change things — but I’ve found even OS X’s Mail.app threading is nothing compared to GMail’s anyway.

So I’ve submitted a basic MailWrangler Version 1 to Apple. Depending on how this goes I have some things I’d like to do to improve it. I’ve also discovered that with a little bit of effort I might finally be figuring out how to properly use image editing software.

For those of you who don’t know what XMC is: Xen Management Console. About a year ago I began setting up a Xen “cluster” for CSH to use. With about 10 physical machines we needed a way to manage Xen and the VMs on them. We set up the hardware to be as dumb as possible by having them all PXE boot a nicely modified version of Gentoo that myself and Dan W. put together. These machines keep no state and have read-only root filesystems. Storage is on another system and shared via AoE (ATA over Ethernet) and a custom python server I wrote to manage the A0E exports. DNS/DHCP and are handled by another machine which is CSH’s central DNS/DHCP system as not to replicate services.

XMC allows for some fun things like drag and drop live migrations, basic load balancing when booting new VMs, and basic access permissions to allow users to boot/reboot/shutdown their own VMs.

The project was my first large scale working with Xen and python, so the code isn’t the prettiest you’ve ever seen. I hacked a lot of thing to “just work” and never had time to clean most of it up. Since I was concerned with making it work quickly I wrote some of the worst Javascript I have in a long time. I did use my jscore library, though, so that makes me a little happier.

At the moment the project is pretty dead and barely running due to hardware failures this past summer. Also, since I’ve moved on from school there seems to be some enterprising new CSH members who want to replace the system (hardware and all). Because of this I figure this project is probably dead, but maybe it’ll come in handy to someone, somewhere.

XMC on github

I’ve licensed MailWrangler under the Apache 2.0 License. It’s a little more restrictive of a license than my other projects, but it is also much more “popular” of a project than my others. I have no idea if anyone will really care — but hey, maybe someone will. I don’t have much intention to personally do much with the project going forward (a big part of me just letting it out in to the wild). I’m more than willing to accept patches and merge forks back in to the project and keep the code on github up to date from others. I suppose it could be a decent alternative gmail “client” for those of us with developer licenses.

The thing to note about the current state of the code is that it doesn’t really work. I wrote it for the first SDK released by Apple and never updated it. An update at some point broke some parts of it, namely being able to add an account. If anyone fixes it I’ll be glad to patch up my copy of it for others.

Enjoy.

http://github.com/adinardi/mailwrangler

The objective for the weekend was to get a server which could accept, decode, process and respond to DHCP requests on the network. My first goal wasn’t to build a robust server — really it was to learn something new and see if it could be reasonably done. After pretty much two days of solid work (Saturday and Sunday) I had a working server. It assigns the same IP to every machine that requests an IP — but I was able to get a PHP program to handle sockets and UDP packet parsing to read and write DHCP packets correctly. That was arguably the hard part. The rest is just standard application logic.

The code is available on GitHub here: http://github.com/adinardi/phpdhcp.

What’s the plan for the future? I’m thinking of at least wrapping up the packet parsing class and have that available as a library for people to use. I don’t think it’s worth my time to finish the rest of the server. Being that I’ve already graduated and this is a critical service — there’s a good chance I won’t have the time to support it when they need it. As such it probably isn’t the best idea to actually put it in to production use there. Of course, if there are people interested in seeing this project completed — by all means let me know. I had planned on making the DHCP server part have a plug in system of changing the storage system backing the server so that it could run off a database and do things that the normal ISC DHCP server can’t be configured to do. When there’s no strict config (just an API that calls your storage system and asks for the info for some MAC address)  you can make your system return whatever IP / config that makes sense for you.

CSH was interested in a system where you could have statically and dynamically assigned IPs in the same pool. We’re running out of IPs so if we can have static assignments and dynamic mixed you can conserve space by not having to segment the network arbitrarily.

I think I need to get back to doing crazy things with javascript. Did you know there’s an implementation of the javascript runtime in javascript? Yeah.

At home I’ve used an array of IDEs and editors, never finding one I’ve really liked besides the old standard of VIM. I’ve used VIM for much of my development for years, so I’m pretty proficient. At the same time, it just doesn’t fit in well with OS X. I’ve used Textmate a bit before, but never really for long or on a large project. That was about to change.

Most of the developers at the company use Eclipse. I personally find it slow and buggy — and so do some of the other developers. I decided to download Textmate and give it a good, solid roll. I quickly got up to speed on the shortcuts and was able to get things done without cursing at my editor constantly. There were, though, shortcomings from the setup the other developers had come up with over time for Eclipse. Myself and another new developer put together a nice array of additional bundles to Textmate which made it complete for us to get our work done, at Mac speed.

• Synchronize remote directory [rsync+ssh]
  • Forget trying to keep track of files you’ve edited to upload or using a separate sftp app for your project. This bundle allows you to set up a remote location to push files changes and full project synchronization to. It uses rsync and ssh so you’re looking at needing a remote unix machine with both set up and functional. Also, it uses SSH keys since I don’t believe it has a way to request a ssh password.
• TM-Ctags (I’ve forked a fork and upgraded it a bit)
  • This will enable you to search for class, function, and other definitions in your project. When you update from source control or add code you need to update the index. Once that’s done you can search based on current text under the cursor, arbitrary search, or even code completion based on the indexed code.
• Ack in Project
  • The built in find in project in Textmate is slow. This bundle uses ack to search much faster and also display results in a more reasonable fashion. It’s not perfect, but it is an improvement. I have some thoughts on upgrades I might make in the coming weeks.

That’s the short list for the moment. We’re finding new bundles to add all the time to make things better. Also, we’ve got a list of features we’d like to have and I’m doing what I can do find / upgrade / create bundles and plugins which fit our needs. Over time I’ll update this list with new additions.

The guy who rode with me, Scott, decided it would be fun to try and visualize this data with Google Street View to “watch” the trip without us ever having to actually record it. After a couple of days of processing, downloading, and building the end result was this video he posted to YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2d-VAAyB9c.

Coming soon: pretty graphs of the data. Need to have day where I can actually sit down and work it out. There’s way too much involved in moving. Way too much. Like a day spent in the DMV (but hey, I’m a CA resident now!).

TINI Hardware Code: http://github.com/adinardi/csh-drink-tini
Drink Server:  http://github.com/danw/drink
Touchscreens: http://github.com/adinardi/csh-drink-touchscreens
Old Javascript Touchscreens: http://github.com/adinardi/csh-js-touchscreen

I think that covers it. The TINI code and the Touchscreens are licensed MIT, and the server is GPL at the moment due to libraries being used. Documentation is kinda light, which will possibly change as I get time once classes end. Someone needs to make sure someone else can maintain this stuff once we’re gone, right?

Chances are better it’ll just get replaced. That TINI code is the oldest stuff here, dating back to 2005. We’ve replaced everything else since then. The server has been written twice since then. Yeah, CSHers get bored.