This is a video of a dry-run of my screencast for DemoCamp 17 on accessing US-only content that is blocked from Canada.
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Accessing US Content From Canada with a Boxee Box
If you want the answer without having to read the rest: Unblock-Us. If you want to hear more of the story of my experience, read on!
Following the strong recommendation of my friend Ryan Jones, I finally broke down and bought a Boxee Box to replace my 7 year old Dell laptop as my primary HTPC (Home Theatre PC). I’ve been fairly happy with the device and it’s functionality, and perhaps I will do a more comprehensive review at a later time, but for now I want to talk about the setup I ended up using to be able to access US only content (e.g. Pandora, Netflix US Selection, etc.) using my Boxee Box.
If you’re curious about the actual mechanism that is used to block access to US content for those of us located elsewhere, I discussed it in more detail in an earlier post about Pandora. Here, I’ll simply summarize by saying that all computers have an address (just like houses), and that the US content providers check that address when you request content from them, and deny you if your address is not located in the US. There are several ways you can try and get around this limitation, and unfortunately for most of them if you want to get decent performance you’ll need to open up your wallet.
For my Boxee Box I initially tried to use one of my standby solutions for this problem; a paid VPN service. In this case I tried using a service called Overplay, chosen because of it’s fairly low cost ($10/month), and the fact that they had an article specifically about using their VPN with the Boxee Box. I won’t fully replicate their instructions here, but will instead redirect anyone interested in configuring a VPN on the Boxee Box directly to their article here. Their steps take you through configuring the Boxee Box to use their VPN service and turning it on. This part of the process went fairly smoothly, but then I started to encounter some issues.
I first attempted to use Netflix with the VPN turned on. This didn’t work at all, simply leaving me at an unchanging black screen until I exited back to the Boxee Box interface. Worse, after exiting the app it had disappeared and was nowhere to be found, and I could only recover it by restarting the Boxee Box. (I should note that I have a support ticket in with Overplay for this issue, and have not yet heard back) After several attempts with similar results, I attempted changing the VPN server. Overplay has three servers located in the US; one in each of the west, central, and east. I was initially using the East server, so I changed to the Central server. Fortunately the Central server yielded improved results, allowing me to log into Netflix and get my test US-only content (the Tron movie) streaming, as well as to get Pandora configured. Unfortunately I was still experiencing frustrating issues. Occasionally my Boxee Box would decide that it no longer had an internet connection, and I would have to go back into the settings and re-run the network wizard so it would realize it was still connected. I also experienced bandwidth issues with several sources of HD content, exhibited by halts to the streaming every 20-30 seconds as content buffered. Finally I was frustrated by the fact that the VPN was not turned back on when I restarted the devise. Every time I restarted the Boxee Box I needed to go back into the settings and reconnect to the VPN.
My vision for using a Boxee Box was that I could achieve a seamless experience for accessing my local content, as well as the US-only content that I sorely miss. The VPN alternative was falling short of this expectation, so I looked for other alternatives and came across Unblock-US. This is a somewhat mysterious service which appears to have gone through several name changes, and seems somewhat questionable even from the less than professional appearance of their website.
I also am currently at a loss to explain exactly how their service works. There is a Quora article trying to answer this question, but no answer has yet been forthcoming. From what I could find from various discussions it appears to manipulate the DNS requests for the services it enables by returning alternative IP’s, but what exactly it does with your requests after that point I am not sure. It does not seem likely that they are in fact routing all your streaming content through their servers as they offer a lower price point than any other competitors that are providing products based on that form of solution. In any case, the failure of the VPN based solution to live up to my expectations led me to give Unblock-US’s 7-day trial a go.
So far I have only had success with their system. It requires you to go into your network settings and manually change your DNS server to point to their provided servers. This may seem scary if you don’t know what a DNS is, but they have explicit instructions to walk you through this change in the Boxee Box settings. I turned off my VPN, followed their instructions, and went to go test how it worked.
Much to my surprise, I have had no issues with Unblock-US’s solution. Both Netflix and Pandora were still available and working, and the bandwidth issues I was experiencing through VPN were no longer present. One of the inherent disadvantages of Unblock-US is that they have to support every service you wish to use, but their list of supported services is quite extensive. I will continue to make use of their service, and if my experience changes I will updated this post, but so far I am surprised to say I am very happy with how well their solution has worked out, and I intend to cancel my VPN subscription and move my subscription dollars over to them.
Meta – Migrating mice and pen from posterous to wordpress
If you visited my blog before, you might notice that there’s now a completely new look and feel. In this particular case this went well beyond a simple reskin, and actually involved moving my blog completely over from being hosted on posterous.com, to being hosted on my own hosting using WordPress.
I made this move for one larger reason, and several smaller ones. The main reason is simply that my other blog, springlaunched.com is hosted using WordPress, and I’ve fallen in love with the quality of the tools that come with WordPress, and the functionality available through the large number of community plugins. The smaller reasons may be outdated as Posterous has been busy making improvements, but these are what initially drove me to use WordPress:
- Difficulty doing code highlighting
- Frustrating web-based editing interface
- Frustrating interface for working with assets (images, etc.)
My intention is not to start a flame war between WordPress and posterous, but I’ve been very happy with WordPress and would rather only be using one platform across my various blogs, so I wanted to move this blog over to WordPress. This is a quick record (written in WordPress) of the process of migration.
First I created a temporary WordPress site to give me a location to migrate my posterous site to. I use dreamhost for the hosting of this blog, and they have a “1-click” install for WordPress which made this very quick and easy to do. Following the basic WordPress setup (create admin account, give the blog a name, etc.), I went to Tools > Import hoping to see posterous. Unfortunately posterous is not one of the default import options in WordPress.
Fortunately a quick search of the available WordPress plugins yielded a posterous importer which I was able to install.
After installing the posterous importer plugin, posterous showed up as an option in WordPress under Tools > Import.
Clicking on the now available “Posterous” option yielded a basic form with a few fields that needed to be filled in with my posterous info.
After clicking “submit” the plug-in ran off and was able to grab all my posts and comments from my posterous blog and pull them over to my new WordPress blog. Once I had all my posts pulled over I wanted to install Disqus, which is the comment system I use on Spring Launched, and which I like because of it’s social media integrations. This was a fairly straightforward process to install using the plugin system in WordPress, and to setup by going to “settings” in the list of plugins under “Disqus Comment System”, and then selecting “install” at the top right of the settings page.
To import my existing comments I then had to go to the “import/export” section of the Disqus settings, and tell it to import the existing WordPress comments into Disqus.
The last step I had to take to get my content all moved over was to add syntax highlighting to my WordPress blog as several of my posts from posterous had code embedded in them, and the porting process lost much of the formatting. After a little bit of research I came across the WordPress plugin “WP-Syntax”, which gave me the functionality I needed. To actually convert the code that had been imported from posterous to the format supported by WP-Syntax took a bit of montonous copy/pasting, but it achieved the desired result. It is worth noting that if I had a large amount of code in my posterous blog this would have proved quite a cumbersome task!
In order that my old backlinks would correctly work, I wanted to maintain the URL format that posterous uses for it’s posts.
Posterous:
WordPress default:
This setting can be changed in WordPress under Settings > Permalinks:
At this point I had my temporary wordpress instance on dreamhost working like I wanted to, so now I needed to move it over to zittlau.ca where I wanted it to be hosted. First I needed to change the domain in the wordpress general settings.
Then I simply setup zittlau.ca as a fully hosted domain in dreamhost, and then connected through ssh and used the linux command “cp” to copy the files over:
macbook: Ben$ ssh argonauts.dreamhost.com -l [my_login] [argonauts]$ cd zittlau.ca [argonauts]$ cp -r ../migrate.zittlau.ca/* .
Using the terminal may be intimidating for some who are not familiar with the command line. If you belong to this camp you can accomplish the same thing through ftp by copying the files from the temporary folder to the folder for the permanent location.
At this point the migration was pretty much complete, and I was ready to unleash my new WordPress based blog on the world! The one step I didn’t talk about here is moving the DNS from pointing to posterous, to get it to point to the new host. This will be dependent on your setup, but if you have any questions about this step leave them in the comments and I’ll do my best to help!
Happy Blogging!
Manually generating #yeg trash data
Unfortunately Alertzy is running out of the garbage pickup data that was published by the City of Edmonton on their open data catalogue. I’ve been assured that the data will be up shortly, but our data was set to run out on May 31st and that was starting to get a little too close for my comfort.
I wrote a quick rake task (Alertzy runs on Rails) to generate the data for June 2011 while we wait for the data catalogue to get up and running. I encourage anyone to borrow the code (and point out any mistakes they find!) if they are in a similar position. The code can be found here:
namespace :alertzy do desc "Populate June 2011 data" task :populate_june => :environment do generate_june_data end end def generate_june_data mondays = [6,13,20,27] tuesdays = [7,14,21,28] wednesdays = [1,8,15,22,29] thursdays = [2,9,16,23,30] fridays = [3,10,17,24] mondays.map! {|day| DateTime.parse("June #{day}, 2011 7:00:00")} tuesdays.map! {|day| DateTime.parse("June #{day}, 2011 7:00:00")} wednesdays.map! {|day| DateTime.parse("June #{day}, 2011 7:00:00")} thursdays.map! {|day| DateTime.parse("June #{day}, 2011 7:00:00")} fridays.map! {|day| DateTime.parse("June #{day}, 2011 7:00:00")} mondays.each do |date| [{:zone => "D", :day => 5}, {:zone => "D", :day => 6}, {:zone => "D", :day => 7}].each do |zone| GarbagePickup.create(:zone => zone[:zone], :day => zone[:day], :pickup_date => date) end end tuesdays.each do |date| [{:zone => "E", :day => 7}, {:zone => "E", :day => 8}].each do |zone| GarbagePickup.create(:zone => zone[:zone], :day => zone[:day], :pickup_date => date) end end wednesdays.each do |date| [{:zone => "A", :day => 1}, {:zone => "A", :day => 2}].each do |zone| GarbagePickup.create(:zone => zone[:zone], :day => zone[:day], :pickup_date => date) end end thursdays.each do |date| [{:zone => "B", :day => 2}, {:zone => "B", :day => 3}, {:zone => "B", :day => 4}].each do |zone| GarbagePickup.create(:zone => zone[:zone], :day => zone[:day], :pickup_date => date) end end fridays.each do |date| [{:zone => "C", :day => 4}, {:zone => "C", :day => 5}].each do |zone| GarbagePickup.create(:zone => zone[:zone], :day => zone[:day], :pickup_date => date) end end end
Blackberry CEO’s not getting treated “fair”
There seems to be a theme the dynamic co-CEO duo of Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis are going for in the media lately. Techcrunch just ran an article discussing the somewhat unfavorable early reviews for the playbook where they quote Jim Balsillie, and the BBC is airing clips from an interview with Mike Lazaridis where issues of security in India and the middle east are discussed. In both cases each half of the duo seemed to think they are not being treated fairly with Balsillie responding to statements about the playbook with “I don’t think that’s fair", and Lazaridis responding to questions with "that's just not fair". This comes across to me as somewhat comical. Why this pair thinks that the rest of the world has some obligation to treat them in a "fair" manner is beyond me, and further more why they think the appropriate way to respond is by calling the world out is even more confusing.
RIM is clearly facing an increasingly challenging market where they are facing competition from giants where they long enjoyed little or none. The only way they are going to remain competitive in such a market is to take an assertive stance. If reviews for your device aren't what you hoped they should be, then take that as an opportunity to engage in authentic dialogue with your reviewers and customer base. If there are concerns over the security of devices, then use this as an opportunity to advocate for the security of your device relative to your competitors. In both cases by responding with such a weak claim to fairness they are fundamentally failing to control the message.
I have a huge amount of respect for RIM and what they have accomplished. They have established a global brand, and created the concept of the smartphone. I want to see them continue to succeed and show that a Canadian company can compete against the US based gorilla's, but this is not the way to accomplish that.
Creating a branch of a repo on GitHub
This is a simple thing, but it took me some digging to find some straightforward instructions. For my own future use and hopefully to save some others the same searching here they are:
1. Make sure your local repo is up to date
git pull origin master
2. Create a local branch
git checkout -b [local branch name]
3. Perform your changes to your new local branch.
4. When ready to commit to github:
- If you want the github branch name to match your local name:
git push origin [local branch name]
- If you want the github branch name to be different than the local name:
git push origin [local branch name]:[remote branch name]
Also, as a bonus, to delete a remote branch use:
git push origin :[remote branch name]
Thanks to Joe Savak and his post here which I based my instructions on.
Chrome eats IE as Firefox watches
This is not intended to be a well researched in-depth post; if I have a chance I’ll look into these trends further and offer some more in-depth insight, but right now I just wanted to share an observation.
Looking at developing a new web application I’ve started to do some initial research into the current market shares of various leading browsers. Looking at the WC3 statistics, I found what looks to be an interesting trend.
In September 2008, (the first available data point for Chrome) the market shares for the leading 3 browsers were as follows:
- Chrome – 3.1%
- Internet Explorer – 49.0%
- Firefox – 42.6%
In the January 2011, the latest available data, the shares are:
- Chrome – 23.8%
- Internet Explorer – 26.6%
- Firefox – 42.8%
Or in terms of deltas:
- Chrome – +20.7%
- Internet Explorer – -22.4%
- Firefox – +0.2%
Ignoring all the reasons that this wouldn’t be a scientific conclusion, this suggests that Chrome might be taking market directly from Microsoft, picking up the customers that Firefox wasn’t able to convert when it maxed out it’s market share in the mid 40%’s. Off the top of my head I can think of several reasons that could be contributors to this trend; Chrome’s stronger appeal to the mass market through it’s simpler interface, possible conversion of IE6 users to Chrome instead of IE8, impact of mobile browsing (i.e. Android based Chrome users).
I’d be happy to hear any insights from others that may have given this trend more thought.
Apps4Edmonton – Open Data App Competition
If you follow my blog than you’re already aware that I entered an application called Alertzy in the City of Edmonton‘s Apps4Edmonton competition. Tomorrow Chris Moore (@chrisj_moore), Edmonton’s CIO will be announcing the winners to the competition. I thought this would be a good time for me to express some of my personal views on the competition, so that it’s clear that my opinions aren’t influenced by any of the outcomes. I’d also like to take this opportunity to express my gratitude to the City of Edmonton for holding the competition, and for all the developers involved in the competition for showing what a creative and vibrant development community Edmonton has.
What worked!
Lots of submissions
I’m sure I’m not the only one who was both surprised and impressed with the number of applications submitted into the competition. There are a wide variety of applications, on a wide variety of platforms. Some of them showed some great creativity, and I’m sure will continue to grow into successful applications.
Great prizes
This was likely one of the contributing factors to the number of submissions into the competition. I really applaud the City of Edmonton for their progressive IT policy, and the vision to take a risk and invest $50,000 in prizes into the competition. It would be nice to believe that the same quality and quantity of applications would have been possible without the monetary incentive, but there’s nothing like a little cash to motivate!
Good use of social media
For those active on twitter there was an almost constant flow of traffic on the #apps4edmonton hash tag both by administrators, developers, users, etc. It was great to see this temporary community pop-up around this competition.
Where things might be improved
Community Voting System
Having community voting as part of the competition might have seemed like a good idea on paper, but didn’t really seem to pan out in reality. Due to the limited size of the sample size of votes, it really did devolve into a “popularity contest”. For Alertzy I can testify that we beat the pavement to recruit anyone and everyone we knew or used to know in Edmonton to vote for us. I can only assume other competitors went through similar processes. I would suggest that having a separate mini-competition with a small prize for the “community favorite” to be awarded to the App with the most votes would have removed the “popularity contest” from the main competition.
Categories
The current contest used categories consistent with the plans of the City of Edmonton’s new City Vision. This was a cool idea, but unfortunately we only had access to certain data sets, and consequently it was much more difficult to develop applicable apps for many of the categories. I think categories aligned along other lines (for example technology such as Web App, iPhone App, Android App, etc) would allow for a more balanced distribution.
Clarity of Rules
The rules for the competition in regards to dates were often somewhat vague, and adhered to. The community votes are the best example of this issue. The voting was said to end on “FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 10, 2010″, without clearly specifying when during this day this voting would end. This time also came and went without any indication of a closing of voting on the site. There was also no clear indication that the “likes” on the contest website were the “community votes” referred to in the rules.
Another issue of contention was whether modification of applications during the two weeks of voting and judging was allowed within the rules. For those who looked closely the following could be found in the FAQ:
Feel free to change the app through the course of the competition. Just remembered that you will be judged on the app that exits at the close of the competition (11:59:59 a.m. MDT on Friday, August 27, 2010).
However, the ability of the judges to be able to judge an application based on what was there exactly at a given time is questionable.
Conclusion!
I want to make it cear that I’m not complaining about the competition. I applaud the City for it’s efforts and for providing this platform for Edmonton developers to create and share. I hope that my feedback can help improve the competition if the City chooses to offer a similar event again, or that it may help other city’s or organizations in similar competitions.
Best of luck to all entries. I’ll see everyone at the event tomorrow evening!
Rails Host Review – (the good) SliceHost
As I explained in my earlier post berating HostingRails, I built a project for the City of Edmonton’s Apps4Edmonton contest in Ruby on Rails called Alertzy. In order to make our project live, we needed to find a host for it. Our initial host fell incredibly flat, so in our second iteration we made sure to perform more research into our available options. We were initially looking for what I would call a “Rails Host”, as in a hosting provider who gives you an out of the box solution ready for rails hosting. Under this criteria we found a few potential options, but then we stumbled upon SliceHost.
SliceHost Review
I’ll summarize my impressions of slicehost here:
Pros: Very fast setup, very good performance, very professional
Cons: Start from a blank image on a VPS
Our intention was not to use a VPS provider who didn’t provide an out of the box rails compatible solution. The reviews for SliceHost, however, were just too good to ignore. All the reviews which we were able to find for this hosting provider were positive, so we decided we had to give them a shot.
It is important to understand that SliceHost is not so much a Rails hosting provider, as a generic VPS hosting provider. They simply provide you with a “slice” which has certain performance metrics and a blank OS install on it, and then it is up to you to configure the server to do what you would like it to do. This has the advantage of complete freedom (SliceHost would prove as effective a PHP host as they are a Rails host), but comes at the cost of configuration.
With our decision to give SliceHost a try, we proceeded to go through SliceHost’s registration and payment process. Their cheapest slice starts at $20, but we opted to go for their $25 plan which got us 384 MB of RAM, 15GB of storage, and 225GB of bandwidth. For some reason we flagged something in their system and had to go through an additional verification step. This process was completed promptly by SliceHost, and our account was online and operational within 45 minutes of the start of the process.
With our account in place we now had access to their control panel, where you are able to configure your DNS as well as choose an operating system for your Slice and launch it. The speed with which a new slice comes online impressed me greatly. From the time of choosing the operating system and launching it, it takes only ~20 seconds before you are ready to start connect to and start configuring your slice.
Unfortunately the next step of this process involving configuring our Slice to run Rails proved to be very difficult. This was in no way SliceHost’s fault as this process is exactly the same as configuring Rails to run on any system, but the convenience of having a ready made image to use would be an advantage of using another Rails specific host. The tutorials that I was able to find for configuring Rails to run on a SliceHost VPS were out of date and didn’t work with the more recent versions of Ruby and Rails. (I will try and put a tutorial outlining my own experiences online in the near future). I opted to use Capistrano and Deprec to deploy Rails on the new server, and due to the same shifts in versions this proved to be quite a headache to deploy on the Ubuntu 10.04 server we had opted to run. It took me approximately 10 hours to resolve all the bugs in the deprec scripts to where the deployment could fully run.
Once I had Capistrano and Deprec functioning I was able to deploy our site to SliceHost. Finally being able to access our site on a good host with great performance was more than sufficient reward for the past day of struggle deploying Rails! The difference between HostingRails and SliceHost was truly night and day, and we’ve received very good feedback on the responsiveness of our site.
In conclusion, I had a hard time deploying Rails, but in no way was this the fault of SliceHost. In everything that is their responsibility, SliceHost has so far delivered either up to, or more often exceeding my expectations. I intend to use them as my default host for similar projects going forward. If you would like to check the responsiveness of our site, go check out www.alertzy.com which is running off our slice.