Tag Archives: google

Random Links for Wednesday, October 24th

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Some random interesting links from Slashdot for today:

Some Thoughts on Choosing a New WordPress Theme

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I think I’m going to choose a new theme for my blog. The current theme is iNove (albeit an older version with some custom modifications), and I feel like it looks a bit messy and has gotten a bit cluttered, so it’s time to find something new. I like the 2-column layout, and have a few other things I’m looking for – specifically, aside from something with advanced features like lots of widget support and hooks, something that has good visual separation between different posts and widgets. I also really want something, if possible, with relative column widths. My current home and work desktops both have dual monitors, and the minimum resolution I have on one screen is 1920×1080. When I look at my blog in a maximized window, about half the screen width is wasted with empty space. So, ideally, I’d like a theme that’s based on relative widths, probably with a “min-width” property so it wouldn’t get compressed to an absurdly narrow width on small screens.

I use Google Analytics (as noted in the privacy policy) for visitor statistics on this blog (more about that in a moment). So, I took a peek at the breakdown of visitors by screen resolution, and saw that for the past year, 94% of the 27,500 visits had a screen width of 1024px or more (and the majority of the others looked like mobile device resolutions, so they’d probably zoom the page correctly). So, my first gut reaction was to assume that I could use a theme approximately 1000px wide. Unfortunately, there’s two main problems with that: first, as mentioned by Chris Coyier on CSS-Tricks.com, just because someone has a given screen resolution doesn’t mean their browser window (let alone the viewport) is that size. As a matter of fact, I usually have my main browser window set at about 80% of the width of one of my monitors, with my instant messaging client Pidgin taking up the rest of the space. So there’s one inaccuracy. There’s a potentially much greater inaccuracy in my stats as well, which I’m going to discuss in a separate post.

Inaccuracies in Google Analytics for Website Stats

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I use Google Analytics for visitor stats on this blog. Not because I’m trying to direct-market to my readers or become Big Brother, but for a number of simple reasons:

  • It’s simple – no software for me to update, and nothing that needs to run on my server and read through giant log files every night. Google does it all for me.
  • It gives a lot more information than I can get from just web server logs.
  • Because of Google’s “big brother” tracking, and the vast number of sites that they track people on, I can tell things I’d have no other way of knowing, like how long someone stayed on my page.
  • They tell me useful stats like which search keywords brought the most people to my site and which posts are the most popular, which I keep in mind when writing new stuff and updating older posts.
  • They tell me information about client operating system and browser version, which I think tells quite a bit about my audience.
  • As far as I know, they’re pretty good at filtering out anything other than an actual human visitor.
  • They tell me stats that have no real use to me, but are just cook – like what countries my visitors are from, what type of Internet connection they’re on, their screen resolution, etc.

Obviously not for google, but for me, all of these stats are totally anonymous – I just get percentages or numbers of visits, it’s not like I can see all of the details per-IP address. The most important aspect to me is just the ease of use – I sign up and put a little snippet of code on my pages, and I get an amazing dashboard interface with all of this information. Nothing to install and update on my server, and (most importantly, since I’m now running everything of mine on one virtualized server) no massive program to run as a cron job that has to read all my server log files.

Last week I was talking with a couple of my co-workers, specifically about the stats that I get from Google Analytics. While I know it’s not uncommon to run NoScript especially among the more security- and privacy-conscious groups of people, I was a bit disturbed to hear that they all block Google’s tracking code in their browsers via NoScript. I assume there’s also a percentage of people who still just turn off JavaScript alltogether (although I can’t imagine how they use the modern Web), and many who use the Google Analytics Opt-Out feature. So, especially with as technical an audience as I have, I guess that means I’m likely missing a large number of visitors in my stats. On one hand, I want to respect the privacy of my visitors, and respect their desire to opt-out of advanced tracking. On the other hand, since I no longer parse web server logs for statistics, these privacy-conscious visitors aren’t even showing up in what I think of as my monthly visit count, or in my information on what posts and search keywords are most popular, which I only use for “good” purposes – to make my blog more useful. So that’s a bit of a conundrum.

I’ll admit that I do run Google AdSense Ads on my blog, and I’m sure there are some people who block the ads. On one hand, that upsets me a bit; I run this blog to try and share information that I find or learn with others, and the hosting costs aren’t insignificant. If I can get paid to just show some ads, to try and help offset the cost of running the site, I think that’s good. And if other people can help support the site by just letting the ads stay on the page, why not? On the other hand, my hosting costs $50/month (granted the server also handles all of my email, and a whole bunch of other sites). I’ve been participating in Google AdSense since March 5, 2010 (two years and two weeks), and my “estimated earnings” are currently $80. The payout is in $100 increments. So, I haven’t seen a cent from it in two years, so I’ve given up being concerned with it. If you want to be nice, and find my posts interesting, click on one of the ads. Unfortunately, unless I get famous, the ads aren’t going to come close to offsetting even part of the cost of running the site.

Google itself says, “In order for Google Analytics to record a visit, the visitor must have JavaScript, images, and cookies enabled for your website.” There seems to be some buzz about this on the ‘net, and I’ve seen a number of (translated; original post in Dutch) posts advocating building a request to a Google Analytics GIF manually on the server side, and then including it as an image element inside a <noscript> tag in the page. While this is probably one of the nicer solutions (and much more likely to reduce double-counting), it doesn’t capture any of the advanced data (screen resolution, etc.) that JavaScript-based Analytics does, and more importantly, I imagine that many of the Ad blocking extensions also block traffic to google-analytics.com, so this is an incremental improvement at best. There are also quite a few posts about how to make a request to Analytics purely server-side. This has a few disadvantages as well; it bypasses the google domain blacklisting problem that the client-side image has, but it also means you lose the client IP address (and therefore geolocation), and that you double-track any user who allows javascript (so you need a separate profile, and then need to average out the results). It also means that you track every search engine and bot that crawls your site, and possibly every person who clicks a link and then hits “back” before the page finishes loading. I found another blogger who commented about the wide disparity he saw between Google Analytics, the StatsPress WordPress plugin, and AWstats (a server-side log file analyzer).

So what’s the solution?

Most of the options have a down side, but I’m looking for something that’s the best I can reasonably do. As much as I’d rather not, I’m going to look into self-hosted alternatives to Google Analytics (a self-hosted JavaScript-based stats provider), in the hopes that NoScript users will be more friendly to scripts coming from my own domain, and sending requests to my own domain, than ones from Google or other major trackers. I don’t think I want to try anything that parses web server logs as a primary approach, as I don’t think I could ever get a meaningful comparison to Google Analytics or something else JavaScript-based.

I did have one other idea which I think is interesting, though a bit of an overhead. I could have Apache (or, more likely, a Perl script called in the Apache configuration) generate a random string for each request, and save it in an Apache environment variable. The environment variable would then be added to a field in the server logs, and also added (via PHP or whatever else generates the pages server-side) as a custom parameter for the JS tracking code, enabling page hits to be correlated between the JS tracking and the server logs. Assuming the JS tacking backend stores its data in a sane format (and as raw data, not just aggregated), and at the cost of a serious performance penalty, a server-side statistics program like AWstats or Webalizer could be patched to lookup the unique identifier in the JS stats data store, and ignore all hits which were tracked that way.

I’m going to start by looking into self-hosted open source alternatives to Google Analytics, which I’ll post about sometime hopefully soon.

Android 2.0.1 update

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So, I updated my Droid to Android 2.0.1 today. I’ll be honest that it didn’t work the way I’d hoped. When I woke up this morning (December 10th 2009) I had an alert dialog on screen telling me that an update was ready. It gave me three options: “Install Now”, “Install Later” and “More Info”. The More Info screen didn’t show me anything useful. Well, I clicked the “Later” option, figuring that when I got home tonight I’d turn on WiFi, do a packet capture on the router, and save all of the traffic (specifically including the name of the update server). Well, it kept reminding me all day at annoyingly short intervals – probably about every 10 minutes or so. Finally, when I was home and had the WiFi setup, I went to try it again and… yup… when I clicked on the “System Update” button in Settings, the only option I had was “Reboot and Install”.

So… first big bitch about the Droid… Verizon pushed out the update without my consent. I kept hitting “Later” because that was the only way to get the popup to go away. Apparently. after X times of hitting Later (and each time your only real options are Later or Now) it will download the update by itself. Once the update is downloaded, I’m assuming that it *may* just automatically install on the next reboot. That would be a bitch thing to do.

Anyway, the “More Info” screen, which provides (as far as I can tell) the only release notes for the update, states:

This software update includes enhancements to your DROID by Motorola. Approximate install time: 6-10 Mins. You will be unable to use your device or make emergency calls for the duration of the install. The software updates automatically, and your DROID will power off and on as part of this software update. For more information please visit: www.verizonwireless.com/droidsupport

Not too helpful. And pretty cryptic.

Immediately when the phone turned back on, the first thing I noticed is that the spin-style unlock button has been replaced with an iPhone-style slide button, and the same for the mute feature. Maybe it’s just me, but I also noticed that the on screen keyboard seems to react better to quick keypresses – perhaps they’ve enabled multitouch for this?

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to find much release documentation from Google other than the API changes – no full release notes or changelog like I’d like. And not even a summary of changes that I could find.

At the VZW droid support site, I found a link to a PDF of “Why to Update” (local copy). This sheet lists the enhancements made by the update (“AP:ESD56/BP:C_01.3E.01P”, build ESD56) as:

  • OS stability is improved.
  • Battery life is improved.
  • Camera auto focus functionality is improved, and time between shots is reduced.
  • Enhancements for three-way calling.
  • Audio for incoming calls is improved.
  • When receiving a call on call waiting, the speakerphone now remains on.
  • Bluetooth functionality is improved; background echo is eliminated.
  • Improved Bluetooth phone book transfer of contacts to in-vehicle Bluetooth solutions.
  • After closing a GPS application, the GPS icon will now automatically be removed from the notification panel.
  • Users can now receive SMS and MMS messages after an EMS message is received.
  • SMS and MMS may now be sent to seven-digit addresses.
  • Google contact merging has been updated to accommodate seven-digit numbers.
  • Visual Voice Mail notices now arrive instantaneously.
  • The corporate calendar widget user interface is updated.

This tiny one-page (and very styish – looks like and in-store advertising piece) sheet obviously isn’t anything that could pass for release notes, especially from Google. It doesn’t even mention anything about the changed unlock button!

I’ll keep looking around to find a real feature summary/release notes/changelog, but here’s my running list (I’ll update) of what I’ve found:

  • Changed the unlock slider to a straight line.
  • On screen keyboard typing seems faster.
  • Photo taking is considerably faster, though it’s still painfully slow – it used to take about 10 seconds from shutter button to ready to capture next image, it’s now about 5 seconds.
  • The UI seems to be a bit more responsive overall.
  • I haven’t checked yet, but I’ve seen some forum posts about lost contacts and Facebook sync issues.

Using Google Maps to produce usable, printable maps

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This is a follow-up to my Making maps from GIS data with Inkscape post. After playing around with Inkscape for quite a while, and coming up with the dismal results seen in that post, I decided there has to be an easier way. A little Googling turned up this video tutorial on how to print large scale maps from Google Maps. It turns out that the Google Maps API will honor almost any pixel resolution that it’s passed. The Screengrab add-on for Firefox has the wonderful capability of being able to capture a screengrab of page content, at actual resolution, regardless of screen resolution. So load up a 5000×5000 pixel Google Map, use the Screengrab addon, and end up with a full 5000×5000 pixel image file.

After testing this a bit, I decided to go the Google Maps route. This also has a lot of other added bonuses – I can store my overlay data in simple XML files, add and remove layers on-the-fly, and also make it available online (and, theoretically, to any Google Maps-equipped device used by responders). This even opens up the possibility of using paper maps as a last resort, and providing the Fire Department with live hydrant maps on GPS-enabled handheld devices and phones.

The quirks, however, may need some serious photoshopping (err, rather, gimping) to fix:

  1. With all of the background color, how will this look when printed?
  2. How do I make the town borders easily defined? It would be a lot of raster editing to remove the background color of areas outside of town.
  3. How do I overlay a grid for a street name index?

The first step was to setup a large Google Map to develop with. I used PHP and Monte Ohrt’s GoogleMapAPI PHP wrapper class. It was simple enough to setup a big (3300x5100px) map, zoom out in Firefox, and start adding some stuff. My examples and development pages, if you want to take a peek at the code, are here.

The first step was to draw a polygon for the outline of the town. I found some very detailed information on how to get zip code boundary lines on Matt Cutts’ blog. Apparently, he’s a Google software engineer, heading up their webspam team. I grabbed the files from the Census, as described, and came up with the boundary for my zip code looking like:

        60      -0.741427638843858E+02       0.409963180802469E+02
      -0.741375870000000E+02       0.410075970000000E+02
      -0.741308870000000E+02       0.410061970000000E+02
      -0.741308870000000E+02       0.410061970000000E+02
      -0.741307260000000E+02       0.410032600000000E+02
      -0.741326870000000E+02       0.409955970000000E+02
      -0.741278870000000E+02       0.409943970000000E+02
      -0.741280870000000E+02       0.409938970000000E+02
      -0.741327870000000E+02       0.409853970000000E+02
      -0.741352870000000E+02       0.409830970000000E+02
      -0.741369600000000E+02       0.409818620000000E+02
      -0.741410520000000E+02       0.409821940000000E+02
      -0.741412870000000E+02       0.409826970000000E+02
      -0.741412870000000E+02       0.409826970000000E+02
      -0.741417870000000E+02       0.409847970000000E+02
      -0.741427870000000E+02       0.409863970000000E+02
      -0.741482870000000E+02       0.409868970000000E+02
      -0.741536880000000E+02       0.409899970000000E+02
      -0.741510880000000E+02       0.409929970000000E+02
      -0.741531880000000E+02       0.409965970000000E+02
      -0.741571880000000E+02       0.409988970000000E+02
      -0.741557880000000E+02       0.410013970000000E+02
      -0.741461870000000E+02       0.410018970000000E+02
      -0.741400870000000E+02       0.410065970000000E+02
 
      -0.741375870000000E+02       0.410075970000000E+02
END

As per Matt’s instructions, I stripped off the first and last lines, converted everything to normal decimal notation, and built it into a PHP array:

$MP_boundary = array();
$MP_boundary[] = array(-74.137587, 41.007597);
$MP_boundary[] = array(-74.130887, 41.006197);
$MP_boundary[] = array(-74.130887, 41.006197);
$MP_boundary[] = array(-74.130726, 41.003260);
$MP_boundary[] = array(-74.132687, 40.995597);
$MP_boundary[] = array(-74.127887, 40.994397);
$MP_boundary[] = array(-74.128087, 40.993897);
$MP_boundary[] = array(-74.132787, 40.985397);
$MP_boundary[] = array(-74.135287, 40.983097);
$MP_boundary[] = array(-74.136960, 40.981862);
$MP_boundary[] = array(-74.141052, 40.982194);
$MP_boundary[] = array(-74.141287, 40.982697);
$MP_boundary[] = array(-74.141287, 40.982697);
$MP_boundary[] = array(-74.141787, 40.984797);
$MP_boundary[] = array(-74.142787, 40.986397);
$MP_boundary[] = array(-74.148287, 40.986897);
$MP_boundary[] = array(-74.153688, 40.989997);
$MP_boundary[] = array(-74.151088, 40.992997);
$MP_boundary[] = array(-74.153188, 40.996597);
$MP_boundary[] = array(-74.157188, 40.998897);
$MP_boundary[] = array(-74.155788, 41.001397);
$MP_boundary[] = array(-74.146187, 41.001897);
$MP_boundary[] = array(-74.140087, 41.006597);
$MP_boundary[] = array(-74.137587, 41.007597);

Though this data doesn’t seem exactly 100% accurate (at least by my knowledge of the town, and every map I can find) it’s quite close and a very good start.

I’ll update later this week when I have some more done…

Android links – maps, dial a phone number

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If you’ve used Google search from an Android device to search for a business, you’ve probably noticed the two interesting “buttons” to the right of the search listing – “Get Directions” and a button for the phone number. It turns out, these are pretty easy to implement.

The “Get Directions” link is a simple link to Google Maps like This One. The links are actually pretty simple:

<a href="http://maps.google.com/maps?daddr=42+Pierce+Ave%2C+Midland+Park%2C+NJ+07432">Get Directions</a>

It just uses a regular Google Maps URL, with the destination address encoded. When the link is clicked in the Android browser, a dialog pops up asking the user whether he wants to open it with the browser or the Maps application. If Maps is selected, it automatically opens with the address from the URL in the destination input box, the phone’s current location as the start input, and gives easy access to directions and navigation.

The telephone links are a bit more interesting. Apparently, the Android browser uses the Phone app to handle the “tel” scheme, as defined by RFC 3966.Therefore, clicking a link like:

<a href="tel:2015555555">201-555-5555</a>

on Android will bring up the Phone app and pre-enter the digits for 2015555555. Luckily, it doesn’t automatically dial the number. If you want to give it a try and are using Android: 201-555-5555.

The final step is how to implement this. I don’t know if most mobile browsers (Blackberry? iPhone?) also support the “tel” URI scheme, or how they’ll handle Google Maps links. But if you’re looking to include Android-specific content, the user agent string from my Motorola Droid (Android 2.0) looks like:

Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U;Android 2.0; en-us; Droid Build/ESD20) AppleWebKit/530.17 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile Safari/530.17

I know that there are a number of PHP classes out there to detect browsers (like Chris Schuld’s browser.php) and some things to detect mobile device capabilities (like WURFL or Tera WURFL, both using the WURFL data). However, if you just need to know whether your user is on Android or not, I’d personally recommend just checking the user agent string for “Linux”, “Android” and “WebKit” until a better browser identification system is found, as these are not likely to change in the near future.

Weekend of Code (Android)

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The Droid is here (literally, sitting in my pocket), and I have the next two days off of work – plus the weekend. Minus personal commitments, that’s about two full (call it 16 hour) days to get some work done. While I have lots of things that could use my attention – a number of neglected projects, my big new PHPsa project, and some server consolidation at home – I’ve decided to dedicate the time to Android development.

I’ve got the ADK installed and running, and the emulator is wonderful (especially with the Droid skin). And I know it’s wrong, but I think I’m going to be developing the first app for Android 2.0 (especially given the new ContactsContract API in 5).

I’m having a few issues with Subclipse, even on the latest OpenSuSE 11.1, and still have a few things I want to do on the phone… but hopefully I’ll have a beta build of the app by the end of the weekend. I’ve already done most of the data modeling and sketched out the storyboard.

I’m not going to say much about what the app is until it’s ready, but it’s something targeted at people like me – SysAdmins with way too many things on their plate for their number of waking hours.

Droid!

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I don’t like writing posts with a low useful content quotient, but here goes.

After having only one new (i.e. not used) phone in eight years – and the one new one was a Treo 700p, obsolete when I bought it – I decided to bite the bullet. I bought a Droid! While I was almost dead-set on it before I even held it in the store, my feelings of love at first sight were even more clear when I started to play around with it.

So, here’s a little overview of what I did first, what my plans/questions are, and what’s next.

First minutes/day:

  1. Unpack everything and start to figure things out. Test phone, SMS, data.
  2. Setup IMAP email for my personal account (need to look into IMAP-IDLE).
  3. Go through the entire Settings menu and try to set things up. Find out that the default apps can’t be removed. The app screen, by default, is pretty full…
  4. Export my contacts from my Palm (no sync cable, had to use php-pdb to export a CSV, then manually edit ALL of them in Gmail.

So after having the phone for about 12 hours, here’s what I’ve installed on it:

  • Listen (Google Labs) – Great podcatcher app. The speaker is a bit too quiet for easy listening on the drive to work, so I’ll need to get one of those FM radio interfaces.
  • AnyCut – allows creation of arbitrary shortcuts on the desktop, including direct dial.
  • ConnectBot – full-featured SSH client including key-based auth and storage of multiple user/host settings.
  • Meebo IM – IM client. It does AIM, which is nice, but doesn’t do IRC.
  • Android Battery Dog – App that graphs battery voltage, temperature, capacity over time and also stores a simple CSV log (which I intend to parse out later for historical data).
  • Bookmarking for Delicious – Allows saving of bookmarks to del.icio.us (but not retrieval).
  • To Do List – A very simple To Do list app, until I find something that works with Google Tasks. No syncing.
  • VoiceMemo (JavaCodeLand.com) – A really simple voice memo app.
  • WiFinder (PGMsoft) – Pretty much useless. Shows a scan of WiFi networks, but only shows encryption, channel number, and signal strength in bars.

The few problems I’ve noticed so far:

  • The touch-sensitive buttons along the bottom row (specifically the search button) seem to be right where my thumb wants to rest when holding the phone in landscape mode.
  • As others have mentioned, the camera quality isn’t great, but it’s much better than my Treo 700p.

My list for future research/development:

  • WAP pages for my web-based personal finance app, fuel log, etc.
  • IMAP IDLE
  • Tasks/to do app that syncs with Google Tasks.
  • A Cycle System app.
  • How to quickly mute all sounds on the phone.
  • How to do tones by person or group for not only ringtones (phone) but also SMS, Email, etc. Also, a way to set certain hours of the day when audible alerts will be disabled, other than a specified whitelist (email, SMS, etc.)
  • Verizon Visual Voicemail
  • Do some development with the geolocation JS API.
  • Console on the phone?
  • SCP/SFTP program.
  • TV listings (perhaps a WAP version of my script that pulls from SchedulesDirect (unfortunately, due to their redistribution policy, this is a private, authenticated page).
  • Nagios checker/notifier
  • RSS reader
  • WAP page for PHP EMS Tools callin.
  • How to handle IMAP folders?
  • Script to backup Gmail contacts, other data stored with Google.
  • Thunderbird Gmail contact sync.
  • A wifi scanner/survey software that shows all of the important stuff like signal strength in dbm, noise floor, etc.
  • Something like kismet that integrates the GPS and wifi scanning.

First big Android … fisaco

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Well, I wanted to call this a $#!^storm, but I don’t think it’s grown to those proportions yet. But any new platform will have its hiccups, and Google is relatively new to the OS world.

So, here’s the news. Google issued a legal Cease and Desist order to a developer Steve Kondik (known as Cyanogen). The story goes something like this… Steve is an active Android developer, doing a lot of work on the lower-level stuff (lower level than apps), including multi-touch and more home screens. His changes are essentially at the OS-level, and Android doesn’t have a full-fledged package management/patching mechanism like Linux distros, so making use of them requires recompiling stuff and re-flashing the device with a new ROM image (since the installation apps can’t handle stuff this low-level). Here’s the rub: in order to work on a device, the ROM image needs to include both closed-source Google apps and proprietary (device manufacturer) drivers. While these apps and drivers are available for download, the license terms prohibit redistribution. But in order for Steve to create a fully-functional ROM image, he has to include the closed code.

There are some writeups on this at Linux Magazine and a good, timely analysis at Linux Insider.

There’s also a clarification by Google’s Dan Morrill on the Android Developers blog.

So, what’s my take on all this (not that another guy taking about this is needed)?

Firstly, I think this is relatively minor. The community will work around it, whether with Google’s blessing or not. The bigger issue that’s coming to light is the fact that Google isn’t simply altruistic, they’re a for-profit entity. They have every right to be, and they have every right to exercise some amount of control over Android. The community needs to realize that Android isn’t a silver bullet, and isn’t even the Linux of the phone world. On the other hand, Google needs to realize two important facts: 1) the openness of Android is what’s driving developers to it, and they need to do all they can to continue that, and 2) most of those developers are flat-out used to running Linux with an all-GPL system, and aren’t used to the concept of not being able to roll their own distribution.

So what’s my advice?

  1. Google should further decouple their Apps from the Android platform. Specifically, instead of requiring users to back things up, they should provide a redistributable application that installs their other apps. Allow a user to flash a bare-bones community ROM image, and then pull whatever else they want from Google. If Google intends on toeing the line that Android is Free but the (Google) Apps aren’t, then Google should provide an acceptable means for users of community ROM images to easily and painlessly re-install the closed Google apps on that image.
  2. Google should require that handset manufacturers do the same. Create a redistributable application that can be part of community ROM images, which will (via tethering or whatever) download and install any proprietary device-specific drivers that are needed.

Bottom line of my opinion – it’s fine if Google exercises their full control over their own closed apps. But they should provide an avenue for non-technical end-users to easily upgrade a community (i.e. Free) ROM image with the expected Google Apps and device manufacturer software.

New Projects

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In terms of ongoing projects, I should be updating RackMan sometime soon, and also adding the demo site.

I’ve begun to move DNS for all of my domains in-house, mostly because since everything is behind NAT, it’s a real pain to manage DNS entries in two places (one of them being GoDaddy’s web interface). Because of the NAT issue, I’m also writing my own BIND configuration tool, currently named MultiBIND Admin. In addition to managing multiple zones in a sane way, it stores all configuration in MySQL. Among other things, it can store different IP addresses for A records for the inside and outside views. Zone files can either be pulled by a script on the name server (push capability is being worked on) or downloaded (for uploading to a DNS hosting provider like GoDaddy).

For my final project for my XML web design class, I’m going to be making some “mashup” with RackMan, Google Maps, Google Visualizer, Nagios, and a few other tools…

Stay tuned…