上周情人节半夜在珠江三角开发的Pay4Bugs虫虫网就开业了。Pay4Bugs虫虫网结合网路用户的共同力量，迅速的帮助企业进行软件测试。企业可以自己指定每个臭虫的赏金，降低软件开发成本。一般网路使用者也可以加入虫虫网测试员的团队于家里赚钱。

A revolutionary software testing service launched a few hours ago. It features clear, up front pricing and pay for performance testing.

Follow the instructions in this post to install the InlineAttachment gem.

Add the following lines to DummyClass in inline_attachment.rb

def parameters
    { :format => :html }
end 

def accepts
    []
end

def protocol

end

A new OpenID Provider has been launched for the China market.

Awesome web-based tool that helps to generate ruby regex! http://www.rubular.com/

Congratulations to Friends at ClutchWave LLC for launching PricePlow.com, soon to be the leader in shopping for supplements. Whatever you’re looking for, be it protein, vitamins, weightloss products, fatty acids or amino acids, Priceplow will help you find the flavor you want at the best price.

Amazon Web Service’s new Content Data Network, Cloudfront was launched two days ago. Previously Cachefly had been the premier choice for Small and Medium size businesses looking for a content data network to speed up downloads for the users.

I was mainly interested in download speed in the Greater China region and North America.

To test relative speeds, I downloaded the same 20 megabyte file at several different locations from each of Cachefly, Amazon S3 and Amazon Cloudfront and noted the range of speeds.

New York City – Time Warner Cable (Queens)

• Cachefly: 1100 – 1200 kilobytes/s
• S3: 1000 – 1100 kilobytes/s
• Cloudfront: 1100-1200 kilobytes/s

Cleveland, Ohio – Time Warner Cable

• Cachefly: 88 – 172 kilobytes/s
• S3: 65 – 80 kilobytes/s
• Cloudfront: 74 – 92 kilobytes/s

Taipei

• Cachefly: 230-240 kilobytes/s
• S3: 140 – 150 kilobytes/s
• Cloudfront: 170 – 180 kilobytes/s

Guangzhou, China – China Netcom 4 mbit dedicated fiber

• Cachefly: 430 – 495 kilobytes/s
• S3: 220 – 240 kilobytes/s
• Cloudfront: 440 – 490 kilobytes/s

Fremont, California – Hurricane Electric

• Cachefly: 3580 – 3990 kilobytes/s
• S3: 270 – 850 kilobytes/s
• Cloudfront: 5940 – 6350 kilobytes/s

Conclusion
When Cloudfront is fast, it is really fast! It wins out for top speed and for flexibility given how like all Amazon Web Services offerings is controlled by an API.

Cachefly is still in our experience the fastest overall in the regions that are important to us. They also do not suffer from some of the restrictions Cloudfront places on updating files. With Cloudfront, updates can take up to 24 hours to reach edge servers. Cachefly does not have this problem. Updates made by ftp or sftp appear momentarily across their network.

I have been using Nuevasync over the last few weeks to sync contacts and calendars on Google Apps with my iPhone. It is an excellent service…very few bugs except for the occasional self-replicating contact. However when I came in to work today I found out sync was no longer working. At 11am China Standard Time, Nuevasync’s website is unavailable. Hope they’re just down for maintenance. Their service saves a lot of time and hassle. I would be more than happen to pay a few bucks a month if it would result in more reliable service.

The version of libnss-ldapd included in Ubuntu 8.04 has many bugs that have been fixed. One rather annoying bug is a problem parsing map configuration. Please find the deb I built of 0.6.4 on 32bit Ubuntu 8.04.1 here.

I spent quite a long time googling for a way of re-creating symmetric cone nat in house without buying Cisco hardware. Hopefully someone else will find this useful. This was done on Ubuntu 8.04 beta.


eth1 = public ip
eth0 = lan ip


echo "1" > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward
/sbin/iptables --flush
/sbin/iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o eth1 -j MASQUERADE --random
/sbin/iptables -A FORWARD -i eth1 -o eth0 -m state --state RELATED,ESTABLISHED -j ACCEPT
/sbin/iptables -A FORWARD -i eth0 -o eth1 -j ACCEPT