Currently access to the application is in a limited trial mode, meaning that you can only get in via an invitation. I’ve requested access through their “Keep me Posted” form, so I’ll keep you posted once I get in (btw, has anyone managed to get approved?).

OView CMS presentation from DrupalCamp Bucharest from Chris Fuller on Vimeo

Please do ignore the babbling at the beginning, it’s just my first presentation. I would also recommend you to watch Drupal and Solr at DrupalCamp Bucharest (http://vimeo.com/24866800), a very interesting presentation by Paul Grigoruta about, of course, as the title says, drupal and solr.

We’d like to provide additional color on what were working on right now (please note that we always know more and understand issues better after we fully recover and dive deep into the post mortem). A networking event early this morning triggered a large amount of re-mirroring of EBS volumes in US-EAST-1. This re-mirroring created a shortage of capacity in one of the US-EAST-1 Availability Zones, which impacted new EBS volume creation as well as the pace with which we could re-mirror and recover affected EBS volumes. Additionally, one of our internal control planes for EBS has become inundated such that it’s difficult to create new EBS volumes and EBS backed instances. We are working as quickly as possible to add capacity to that one Availability Zone to speed up the re-mirroring, and working to restore the control plane issue. We’re starting to see progress on these efforts, but are not there yet. We will continue to provide updates when we have them.

(http://status.aws.amazon.com/)

This issue has affected the RDS service and EBS volumes. Among the victims of this outage we count Foursquare, Reddit or Quora. Even some of the RDS instances I get to manage have been affected – luckily no critical production deployments. As of 11:09 AM PDT, Amazon still cannot give an ETA on when all services will be fully recovered – hopefully no critical data will be lost.

This outage gives a grim wake-up call on the risks associated with using cloud computing – even Amazon can have a serious problem. Don’t get me wrong, I think cloud computing is great – scalability, high-availability, monitoring, business model to pay for what you actually use -, and Amazon has been doing a great job, but it now becomes clear that even a cloud (or at least part of it) can become a single point of failure. For the past 2 years since I’ve started using AWS I’ve experienced weird and annoying problems with the reliability of the AWS services – ELB’s going MIA, EC2 instances gone dead, but this is by far the worst.

We’ll probably see some good things coming out of this story though, such as complete overhaul of the strategies behind deploying applications in the cloud – distributing services across different availability zones, and why not, across different clouds, backing everything up with private clouds.

If you have any comments or experiences you would like to share, just post a comment below, as I am very curios to see what strategies you used to mitigate this issue?

Below you can find the mobile support matrix (using the grading system for progressive enhancements):

The framework provides also a powerful set of components: pages & dialogs, toolbars, buttons, content formatting, form elements and list views.

I recommend also you start reading the jQuery Mobile API. Did someone built any demos using this framework? Care to share?

Oct 6, 2010 11:33:31 AM org.apache.solr.core.SolrResourceLoader 
INFO: Solr home set to '/opt/solr/example/'
Oct 6, 2010 11:33:31 AM org.apache.catalina.core.StandardContext start
SEVERE: Error filterStart
Oct 6, 2010 11:33:31 AM org.apache.catalina.core.StandardContext start
SEVERE: Context [/solr-example] startup failed due to previous errors

or

SEVERE: Exception starting filter SolrRequestFilter
org.apache.solr.common.SolrException: java.security.AccessControlException: access denied (java.io.FilePermission /opt/solr/example/./lib read)
        at org.apache.solr.servlet.SolrDispatchFilter.(SolrDispatchFilter.java:68)
        at sun.reflect.NativeConstructorAccessorImpl.newInstance0(Native Method)
        at sun.reflect.NativeConstructorAccessorImpl.newInstance(NativeConstructorAccessorImpl.java:57)
        at sun.reflect.DelegatingConstructorAccessorImpl.newInstance(DelegatingConstructorAccessorImpl.java:45)
        at java.lang.reflect.Constructor.newInstance(Constructor.java:532)
        at java.lang.Class.newInstance0(Class.java:372)
        at java.lang.Class.newInstance(Class.java:325)
        at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterConfig.getFilter(ApplicationFilterConfig.java:255)
        at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterConfig.setFilterDef(ApplicationFilterConfig.java:397)
        at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterConfig.(ApplicationFilterConfig.java:108)
        at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardContext.filterStart(StandardContext.java:3709)
        at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardContext.start(StandardContext.java:4359)
        at org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase.addChildInternal(ContainerBase.java:791)
        at org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase.access$000(ContainerBase.java:123)
        at org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase$PrivilegedAddChild.run(ContainerBase.java:145)
        at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method)
        at org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase.addChild(ContainerBase.java:769)
        at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardHost.addChild(StandardHost.java:525)
        at org.apache.catalina.startup.HostConfig.deployDescriptor(HostConfig.java:634)
        at org.apache.catalina.startup.HostConfig.deployDescriptors(HostConfig.java:560)
        at org.apache.catalina.startup.HostConfig.deployApps(HostConfig.java:495)
        at org.apache.catalina.startup.HostConfig.check(HostConfig.java:1269)
        at org.apache.catalina.startup.HostConfig.lifecycleEvent(HostConfig.java:300)
        at org.apache.catalina.util.LifecycleSupport.fireLifecycleEvent(LifecycleSupport.java:117)
        at org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase.backgroundProcess(ContainerBase.java:1337)
        at org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase$ContainerBackgroundProcessor.processChildren(ContainerBase.java:1601)
        at org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase$ContainerBackgroundProcessor.processChildren(ContainerBase.java:1610)
        at org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase$ContainerBackgroundProcessor.run(ContainerBase.java:1590)
        at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:636)
Caused by: java.security.AccessControlException: access denied (java.io.FilePermission /opt/solr/example/./lib read)
        at java.security.AccessControlContext.checkPermission(AccessControlContext.java:342)
        at java.security.AccessController.checkPermission(AccessController.java:553)
        at java.lang.SecurityManager.checkPermission(SecurityManager.java:549)
        at java.lang.SecurityManager.checkRead(SecurityManager.java:888)
        at java.io.File.canRead(File.java:706)
        at org.apache.solr.core.SolrResourceLoader.replaceClassLoader(SolrResourceLoader.java:159)
        at org.apache.solr.core.SolrResourceLoader.addToClassLoader(SolrResourceLoader.java:130)
        at org.apache.solr.core.SolrResourceLoader.(SolrResourceLoader.java:99)
        at org.apache.solr.core.SolrResourceLoader.(SolrResourceLoader.java:197)
        at org.apache.solr.core.Config.(Config.java:93)
        at org.apache.solr.servlet.SolrDispatchFilter.(SolrDispatchFilter.java:65)
        ... 28 more

make sure you read this: http://osdir.com/ml/solr-user.lucene.apache.org/2009-11/msg01071.html. It looks like an issue with the package installation of tomcat6. Basically, all you need to do is
“set “TOMCAT6_SECURITY=no” in “/etc/default/tomcat6″

That I hope will help others, as I spent 4 hours debugging this.

// here we create our base custom content type
function create_my_type() {
  register_post_type( 'my_type',
		array(
			'labels' => array(
				'name' => __( 'My Types' ),
				'singular_name' => __( 'My Type' )
			),
			'public' => true,
		)
	);
}
// here we add metaboxes for custom input fields, if we need any
function my_type_admin_init() {
  // we check if the aiosp_meta function exists, and the AIO SEO plugin is active

  if (function_exists('aiosp_meta') && is_plugin_active('all-in-one-seo-pack/all_in_one_seo_pack.php')) {
    add_meta_box('aiosp',__('All in One SEO Pack', 'all_in_one_seo_pack'),'aiosp_meta','my_type');
  }

}

add_action('admin_init', 'my_type_admin_init');

Et voila, you now have the AIO SEO editing box working on your custom type. Your template should be ok printing the post meta tags added by this form if it correctly implements the wp_head() function. Of course, you need to make sure you have defined properly defined your new custom content type, and here you can read a great tutorial on how to do that.

Designers everywhere are trying to spice up their designs and communicate to end-users better using icons, and while there are many high quality, free for commercial use icons, finding them could be very difficult. I remember the times when I was browsing through dozens of blogs and websites trying to find icons, and when I did, quickly save them to disk. Well, keeping track of all my icons turned out to be more difficult than I expected as the number of collections increased. But, a few months ago, I stumbled upon an interesting icon search engine – iconfinder.net. Well, it’s not a fully fledged, google-like search engine, it’s more of a icon repository, were iconsets are uploaded and tagged, so that it’s easier to find. A couple of weeks ago, a new icon search engine has been released, findicons.com, with similar capabilities as the one mentioned before. In this post I’ll try and compare them side-by-side; I’ll be reviewing search features, save-as features, API, tagging, and ease of use.

Iconfinder.net

Let me start with iconfinder, since this one was the first to emerge. It was quite a pleasant surprise for me when I discovered Iconfinder. Search capabilities include searching by name/tag, finding specific iconsets, or even icons inside an iconset. Refining search results is done by using a slider to select the size range (from 0 to 128 px) and a license filter. You can even apply white, transparent or black as background color to the icons, so you can check, before downloading, if the icon you found might match your design. It even shows related searches, based on the tags assigned to the icon. You can contribute to the search results by adding or deleting assigned tags. Submitting icons is easy as well – through a webform, intended for webdesigners, or a bookmarklet, so you can share any website that has nice icons. The REST API is useful, especially for designing you custom search tool – there was also a Firefox search engine add-on for Iconfinder.net, but unfortunately I can’t find it anymore. The API produces results in both XML and JSON format. There are currently 156,469 icons available in 484 icon sets, and the number increases every day.

Findicons.com

Findicons has more or less the same features as Iconfinder. What adds extra, compared to the previous one, is the user space capability. The most important feature a user account brings you is the ability to add icons to favorites, a feature that I really miss when using Iconfinder.net. Also, comparing search filters, on findicons.com you can filter icons by colors, style (3d, glassy or hand drawn) or license, and sort the results by relevancy. Also, a powerful feature is the Convert icon, which support bmp, eps, gif, jpeg, psd, svg, tga or tiff formats, adding to the existing ico, icns and png formats, though saving the icon in png format could easily be the most used. The icon details page allows you to quickly save the icon in other available sizes, edit tags and even suggests similar icons. The API is not yet launched (at the time of this post being written), but the team behind this project announces this feature as “under construction” (currently in testing).

Conclusions

Overall, the two projects are powerful tools for the designers, containing a huge library of icons, easily browseable and searchable. I would loved more to see Findicons.com presenting a more different layout – it looks too much like an IconFinder clone, but the advanced search filters and user account make it a valuable resource. If you haven’t already started using any of these tools, I recommend you do.