To get started, I downloaded unetbootin-windows-442.exe, and the Ubuntu 10.04 LTS CD .iso, and ran unetbootin to unpack the ISO on a USB stick. When that was finished, I rebooted, went into the BIOS and disabled both the hybrid graphics and the integrated graphics, rebooted again and selected F12 to choose my boot medium, and booted from the USB stick.

With the graphics cards ‘disabled’, installation began in 1900×1200 native mode. I moved my 25GB recovery partition to another USB drive using dd:
dd if=/dev/sda2 of=/media/MyPassport/DellRecovery.partition
I then removed that partition and started the Ubuntu installer.

When installation was complete, and I rebooted, I realized I had no way to download the restricted STA driver, but there’s a workaround — you can install it from your installation medium by running a dpkg command. First, insert your installation medium, then start a Terminal prompt, change to the mount folder, such as /media/cdrom or in my case, /media/CORSAIR … from there, change into the pool folder, so your path is similar to /media/CORSAIR/pool/ and run the following command:

sudo dpkg -i restricted/b/bcmwl/bcmwl-kernel-source_5.60.48.36+bdcom-0ubuntu3_i386.deb \
main/d/dkms/dkms_2.1.1.2-2fakesync1_all.deb \
main/p/patch/patch_2.6-2ubuntu1_i386.deb

This will install the restricted driver and kernel patch, etc.

Next, I downloaded all available updates, rebooted, loaded the restricted nvidia driver, rebooted, and voila:

Now to see if the HDMI output will work at the office in the morning for a dual monitor setup.

Features Announced At Google IO

• Just-in-Time compiler confirmed
• Microsoft Exchange integration including auto-discovery and remote wipe
• New services just as data backup APIs for carriers to move your data from one device to another
• Tethering announced for Wifi and USB, shown in demo, pokes fun at iPad; no word on whether carriers can disable it
• 2x-3x performance boost in the Browser, new Javascript engine is SO much faster
• Optimizations for using the camera, orientation (accelerometers) within the browser
• Speech control and recognition is so much smoother, including Mandarin and Japanese, including speech recognition to make phone calls
• Real-time language translation
• Announced support for Flash Player 10.1 Public Beta and AIR developer pre-release, showed Flash working on Nickelodeon
• New ways to work with apps:
  • Finding new apps (app search)
  • Searching data within apps (showed Mint.com app search)
  • Installing to SD memory with a “Move to SD card” button within the Application Info screen, demoed Need for Speed game
  • Update All and Auto-Update confirmed
  • Bug reporting, can view stack trace online
• Sneak peak of new Android Marketplace, because demo user is logged in, you can view your installed apps and over-the-air app sync
• New Marketplace feature: over-the-air music sync
• Sync your Android device with your iTunes library to live-stream your music to your device

TechCrunch reports that Android 2.2 (Froyo) will support USB and Wifi tethering, though it remains to be seen whether carriers will have an option to disable this feature. TechCrunch leaked some information about availability of tethering within Froyo, and dozens of other sites picked it up, not to mention countless tweets about it. It made some serious headlines, and has had a lot of feedback from users hoping to get a 2.2 upgrade to their Android device when they haven’t even had a 2.1 upgrade yet. All I can say to them is good luck.

What is T-Mobile’s Position, Though?

Shortly after getting my own Nexus One in February, our office Internet connection went down, I had the opportunity to try some of the thirt-party tethering apps in the Android Market, such as PDANet and EasyTether. Having successfully installed PDANet, plugging in my Nexus One via USB and getting the client running on my MacBook, and sharing my MacBook’s new Internet connection with my coworkers, I sent a quick tweet about my successful trial:

Three minutes later, T-Mobile sent a reply tweet:

Early Morning Tethering

Early on a Friday morning mid-March, I awoke to find our home WiFi on the blink. This time, I used EasyTether with my M17x running Windows 7 Ultimate, and sent another tweet about being able to get online:

Within 5 minutes, another reply from T-Mobile:

And, Now That Froyo is Announced …?

After reading the TechCrunch article, and several others about Sprint wanting to charge extra for the EVO “experience”, I decided to ping T-Mobile again about tethering, but this time asking whether they’ll charge us extra for it:

This time, T-Mobile took almost two hours to reply:

What’s the Verdict?

I guess we’ll have to wait for the Froyo announcement from Google, and then a follow-up announcement from T-Mobile, as to whether they’ll let the Nexus One have an untouched 2.2 build, or whether T-Mobile will tweak the software to disable USB/WiFi tethering and/or charge its users more per month. It’s already been announced that T-Mobile will slow down our cell network bandwidth once we’ve transferred 5GB/month, but so far they’ve been very cool about allowing tethering on their network — via third-party apps that users are unlikely to run for extended periods of time. AT&T has allowed tethering on certain devices if you pay a premium monthly data plan price ($60/month), Verizon charges extra for USB tethering, and WiFi tethering on their Palm Pre Plus devices, and Sprint has announced they will charge extra for the EVO’s data plan which, coincidentally, allows tethering — is that Sprint’s way of charging for WiFi tethering?

If I were King for a day

If I were T-Mobile, I’d leave tethering alone on Froyo, let the users have access to it, continue to slow our bandwidth after 5GB, and use that as a serious advantage against the other 3 major carriers. It would bring in lots of additional customers, especially road warriors, and would most definitely increase their brand popularity.

Rumor has it of course that the Nexus One will get the first roll-out of Froyo, so it remains to be seen how T-Mobile will handle themselves with this new OS build. Personally, I can’t wait to see what’s in store for the Nexus One when Froyo is announced.

Over lunch today, I did some benchmarking with Linpack on my own Nexus One, using a stock Android 2.1 build, and the Nexus One provided by Adobe. It was astonishing to see the difference in MFLOPS (Millions of FLOating-Point operations per Second), essentially a high-precision mathematics sequencing instruction set that tests how quickly a CPU can run a known number of calculations. Since Linpack themselves publish a benchmark Top 10 for Android devices, I’m not disclosing anything that hasn’t already been publicly confirmed by others.

Dare to Compare

The stock Nexus One with Android 2.1 averages in the high 6.9 to low 7.0 range for MFLOPS, but the Nexus One running the Debug release of Android 2.2 (aka FroYo, “frozen yogurt”) can apparently achieve a score of up to 40 MFLOPS. My own testing confirms it at a high-36 to mid-37 range:

How it’s Done

Google has already confirmed that a new JIT (just-in-time) Java compiler will be in Android 2.2, but I don’t pretend to know how the Java virtual machine works or how JIT would improve it. Rumor has it that Android 2.2 will be announced at Google IO next week, so hang tight!

Update, May 12 10am PST

As specified above, I don’t know whether this is JIT in action. I can’t confirm or deny that JIT is part of the Froyo release. The Nexus One provided to my employer has a developer release of Froyo on it, but I’m not allowed to disclose the features of the OS — but if this stuff makes it into the official release WHOA BABY.

Update, May 20, 9am PST

Google announced at Google IO that Froyo does indeed have the new Just-In-Time compiler.

For as quickly as the HTC Incredible came to market, there are already some HTC Incredible Accessories shops popping up online. You may well want to check out some of the Droid Incredible Cases available, or at the very least a Droid Incredible Screen Protector to protect against scratching. I’m always paranoid about scratching the screen of my Nexus, but I do protect the device with a silicon case.

Is the “Incredible” a Nexus One “killer”? Verizon seems to think so, since they’ve pulled their support for the Nexus One at Google’s phone ordering page. Personally, I think it’s a bit arrogant to use an attention-seeking adjective to name the phone. What will be their next phone? The “Stupendous”? The “Ridiculous”? The “Ginormous“?

If I were up for a contract renewal or wanted to change carriers, I would pass on the HTC Droid Incredible. I multitask quite a bit with my Nexus One and already drain the battery every day — I even purchased a second battery for emergency use — so I can’t imagine having significantly less battery life on the new HTC device. That, and given that Verizon’s network is yet incapable of letting you talk on the phone and use the Internet on the device simultaneously, I would wait until their network expansion is complete before considering this phone. However, if you’re locked into Verizon and looking to pick up an Android-based device, the HTC Droid Incredible does have some significant advantages over the Motorola Droid like nearly double the processor speed, an FM radio, and 802.11n wireless.

Disclosure: this blog post was sponsored by talkietech.com, but all opinions are my own.

I have my Facebook account locked down fairly well with very few details open to the public (my website and Email) and I of course followed my own instructions on how to properly opt out of Facebook’s “Instant Personalization” settings. Or so I thought.

Even though I have opted out and set up restrictive privacy settings as seen to the left, visiting http://www.facebook.com/cormyn will allow you to view my entire friend’s list, and show you all products, apps, music and games that I am a fan of, or have selected that I like. Honestly, I could care less that the world can see that I like Jason Mraz or Sara Bareilles, they’re both excellent musicians. And I’m certain that nobody is going to lose any sleep knowing that I’m a die-hard Dr Pepper fan or that I play some of Zynga’s games on Facebook.

However, despite my efforts to follow Facebook’s instructions to opt out of Instant Personalization, I visited CNN.com this morning to read a news article about a tweet I read a few minutes ago, and saw the following:

Upon clicking an article, I also saw this at the top right of the screen and also at the bottom of the article I was reading:

This is definitely something that concerns me. Not only is the front page of CNN showing me messages about one of my Facebook friends, it’s also aware of the fact that none of my 300-something friends on Facebook have “recommended” the article on their Facebook pages, and suggests I get the scoop and be the first of my friends to do so.

Seriously, Facebook? I’ve opted out, I’ve blocked the three partner sites, yet there are still other sites out there, implementing your “like” button for your grandiose “social web” scheme, and my information and web browsing will be made known to you just because I happen to be logged into Facebook?

That’s right, folks: as soon as I’ve logged out of Facebook, CNN fails to show any of the text/graphics which I show in the screenshots above.

I will admit, the web developer in me is amazed because I know the effort and technology that goes into building something like this. At the same time, if the only way I can NOT see this information is to log out of Facebook, then perhaps I will reserve a separate browser for my Facebook activity, and use my primary browser choice (Google Chrome) for the rest of the web.

Either that, or I need to see if AdBlock has a rule implemented that blocks Facebook’s iframe on every other web site. That’d be convenient.

Of course, then came the mind-numbing exercise of clicking the PuTTY icon, and having to double-click the “cygwin” profile I made (for scrollback, colored terminal, etc). A quick Google search later, and I had my answer.

1. Create a shortcut on your desktop for PuTTYtel.exe (right-button drag and drop the executable works great, select “Create Shortcuts here”)
2. Right-click the shortcut icon and select Properties
3. Under the “General” tab, give it a meaningful name
4. Under the “Shortcut” tab, where it lists your target as “C:\whateverpath\puttytel.exe” change it to include a parameter of -load (single dash) and then a string (quoted if it contains spaces, etc) of which profile name you want to autoload. Since mine was called “—-cygwin” (so it would appear at the top of my stored session list), my new Target line became this:
"C:\Program Files (x86)\putty\puttytel.exe" -load "----cygwin"
5. Click OK to save, then right-click on the shortcut again and select “pin to taskbar”
6. Now you can simply click that icon, and it will immediately load that PuTTY saved session for you.

Be warned though that even if you do take some of the following steps to opt-out, your friends might still be able to share some of your public information (Name, Profile Picture, Gender, Current City, Networks, Friend List, and Pages) without your consent as these ‘partner’ sites will have access to your friend’s contact list which can contain public pieces of information about you.

To help protect yourself, here are some links at Facebook that can help you opt out of as much of this F8 platform as you can:

1. http://www.facebook.com/settings/?tab=privacy#!/settings/?tab=privacy&section=applications

You’ll notice a new check box at the bottom called “Instant Personalization” which is enabled — this was Facebook’s way of forcing you to opt into their f8 platform without asking you first.
Recommendation: un-select the “Instant Personalization” checkbox.

2. http://www.facebook.com/settings/?tab=privacy#!/settings/?tab=privacy&section=applications&field=friends_share

This first link will let you control which pieces of your profile data can be shared by your friends.
Recommendation: turn them all off.

This is where you can see who has access to various pieces of information you store on Facebook.
Recommendation: set everything to “Only Friends”.

4. http://www.facebook.com/settings/?tab=privacy#!/settings/?tab=privacy&section=contact

This is where you select who can access the contact information you store on Facebook.
Recommendation: Lock this area down unless there’s information here that you truly want to be publicly available such as an IM screen name for your friends to find. I have contact information that I only make available to family (cell phone, etc) so I have a contact group set up, and give them permission to certain pieces of info that wouldn’t be shown even to “only friends.” I let my web site, iandouglas.com, be available to ‘everyone’.

5. Block the partner apps you don’t want your information given to. Each of these three links will have a “Block Application” link on the left menu of the page.
Recommendation: block these apps unless you want these partners to have your data.

Microsoft Docs.com: http://www.facebook.com/docs
Pandora: http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=139475280761
Yelp: http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=97534753161

Once you block them, you can verify they’re listed here: http://www.facebook.com/settings/?tab=privacy#!/settings/?tab=privacy&section=applications&field=blocked_apps

The f8 platform will allow web developers to add a ‘like’ button on their sites, and if you’re a content publisher, face it — you’ll WANT to add that to your site. But this HTML iframe will give Facebook access to every site you visit that includes the LIKE button, however those sites won’t be able to *publish* anything on your Facebook wall, for example, unless you specifically permit them to. However, FB will still know you’ve been there, and who knows what they’ll do with that information (they’ve declined to specify what they’ll use that information for). It seems the only

Also included in the f8 platform is a means to set up partnerships between Facebook and groups like Microsoft, Pandora and Yelp which will gain access to any public information you have on Facebook, including your name, gender, profile photo, and friend connections. Even if you set your own privacy settings to opt-out of giving these partner sites your information, your friends could still unwittingly give this information to the partner sites without your consent. To fix this, Facebook says you must manually visit each of these partner sites and ALSO opt-out of their f8 platform settings. To recap, to restrict my public information from being given away, I must:

1. DE-select a checkbox in my Facebook privacy settings that FB has already turned on without my consent
2. Find a list of partner applications at Facebook and manually block each application from within Facebook
3. Visit each partner’s web site and click a “no thanks” link
4. Convince every one of my hundreds of Facebook friends to do the same. One friend not complying will undo all the work I do myself.

That’s an awful lot of hoop-jumping to protect my privacy. Not to mention the first point that every site that starts including their LIKE button will give Facebook a means to log every page I visit which I have no way to opt-out of.

Granted, this platform will certainly, in Facebook’s words, make web “more open and social.” But at what price? How is my web experience going to be better if I have to lock down my social network profiles and spend time opting out of these partner sites when my friends who do NOT do this work will end up sharing my information any way, without my consent?

In the 90′s, there were tons of computer viruses that would infect a person’s PC and upload their address book to a central location which would then attempt to re-infect those users via Email. This feels eerily similar. Even if I lock down my settings, a friend who doesn’t will sent their entire friends list to these partner sites which will include my Facebook information. How is that a better experience for me?

From Facebook’s own help FAQ’s:

What data is shared with instantly personalized partner sites?
When you and your friends visit an instantly personalized site, the partner can use your public Facebook information, which includes your name, profile picture, gender, and connections. To access any non-public information, the website is required to ask for you or your friend’s explicit permission.
http://www.facebook.com/help/?faq=17100

How do I opt-out of instant personalization?
You can opt-out of instant personalization by disallowing it here. By clicking “No Thanks” on the Facebook notification on partner sites, partners will delete your data. To prevent your friends from sharing any of your information with an instant personalization partner, block the application: Microsoft Docs.com, Pandora, Yelp.
http://www.facebook.com/help/?faq=17105

I was recently contacted by a gentleman via Email asking if I’d sell him the site, or license a copy of the site to him “to tinker with” as a personal project. We’ve sent a few Emails back and forth, but I’ve had a busy week and didn’t get back to him until today. Turns out he, or his company, have posted a scriptlance.com project request to clone my site and add extra functionality to it. Today, when I logged into Google Analytics, I noticed a few incoming links from scriptlance.com, a site I’ve looked at in the past for freelance work, so I followed the links and found his project request.

Honestly, I’m quite flattered. While this isn’t the first site I’ve built for which I’ve seen subsequent freelance project requests to clone, it’s always a nice feeling to know I’ve done a good enough job on a site, building up a user base, that makes the site and its functionality worth copying.

I’m a little bit torn on the idea of just selling the web site, but I’m unsure if that would constitute “selling” the Email addresses of my users, which I promised all 4,000 of them is something I wouldn’t do. However, I made that promise in the context of selling their Email addresses to marketing companies, etc..

Any thoughts or opinions?

For example, a coworker and myself, while we were both employed at Rubicon and playing darts all the time, came up with the idea of a mobile web app (thus, usable on any mobile device that could access the web) to track dart scores, perhaps let users register and track scores over time. I registered “dartscore.mobi” and we put up a basic scoring system for 501/301/x01 games, and promptly got way too busy to ever carry on the idea. Now, at the risk of an expiring domain name, I’m left with the decision of paying money to renew the domain for one or more years, and dream of a time when I could work on the project, or just drop the idea. Or, write a blog post about the idea, and see if there’s enough interest to carry on the idea.

So now I’m debating building a web site just to list these ideas, since very few people read this blog at all.

C’mon, Google, get your act together. I’m not gonna drop $55 on a car dock without a LOT more details.

Combined with the prevalence of micro-blogging such as Twitter and Facebook status updates, writing out full-length quality postings seems to be quite old-school now. While in the process of migrating my old blog articles back to WordPress, I’m reading through all of them again and finding some oldies but goodies, such as “Reasons to Date a Geek” and “I, Geek, take you, Mini-geek” among others. I also see lots of failed potential such as setting up thedouglasclan.com as a photo site for our family, and I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve switched from one blog engine to another or posted about new layouts on the site.

Like most full-time employees, I fear blogging about my workplace or what I’m working on, so as not to get dooced which really only leaves a few areas of my life to share that I feel could help others: running a freelance business, web development, marriage, finances, and being a new dad. And since I’m not particularly an expert in any of those areas, I imagine iandouglas.com will be a culmination of all of those topics. I’ll do my best to categorize and tag my ramblings so you can filter out only what you really want to read.

For anyone curious enough, here’s the query I used to migrate from Drupal 6.8 to WordPress 2.9:

INSERT INTO wp_posts (id, post_author, post_date, post_content, post_title, post_excerpt, post_name, post_modified, post_status)
SELECT DISTINCT 120+n.nid, 1, FROM_UNIXTIME(created), body, n.title, teaser, REPLACE(REPLACE(REPLACE(REPLACE(LOWER(n.title),' ', '-'),'.', '-'),',', '-'),'+', '-'),FROM_UNIXTIME(changed), "draft"
FROM drupal6_node n, drupal6_node_revisions r
WHERE n.vid = r.vid;


The 120+ vaue in the ID field is because I currently had 120 items in my wp_posts table already, and each post must have a unique ID. So, I simply added a value of 120 to whatever ID value was in Drupal. The ’1′ value in the post_author field assigns my WordPress user ID as the author of each article. I also added a post_status of “draft” so I could go through the articles, verify their integrity, and then publish them.

First off, my apologies for lack of photos. I thought about documenting it while I worked, but it was late last night. However, I do need to replace some of my handiwork with proper stuff like heat shrink and insulated wires to cut down on some radio interference.

First, I cut the iPod/iPhone adapter from the Pixxo unit, and saw that there were 8 wires (red, black, white, green, yellow, brown, purple and orange). Next, I cut a micro USB cable and saw that while it was well shielded on the outside, inside the foil insulator were only four wires (red, black, white and green). I twisted the matching wires together, taped it up enough that nothing was shorted, and tested it in the car, and my Nexus One started charging. w00t

Only thing left was to trim the wires back as far as I felt comfortable, shorten up the micro USB plug, and get everything taped up better. Which worked like a champ, except that I had no electrical tape, and I’m sure that as good as blue 3M Painter tape is, actual electrical tape or heat shrink would do a much better job.

Then, I shortened and spliced a stereo 3.5mm audio cable, as the one that shipped with the Pixxo unit was about two inches two short.

The net result:

(hosted at picasa)

For me, the flexibility of a multi-tasking phone with a fast processor, decent screen resolution, and the new Android 2.1 feature set. For my wife, the superb MOTOBLUR tool on the CLIQ (running Android 1.5 or 1.6, I forget) gives her a means to combine all of her social/texting/facebook/etc feeds into a single experience. She’ll get an Android 2.1 upgrade in the near future, according to Motorola, which will give her even more voice commands.

Another nice feature is that both phones sport a micro USB connector for charging — for the first time ever in our marriage, we have similar phone charging needs. Using a $5 coupon for newegg.com, I ordered two more three-foot micro USB cables for $2.99 each, so we’ll have enough cables for our laptops, desktop PC, etc. Next purchase will likely be a two-port USB charger for the car so we can keep both phones charged on road trips.

Our experience with the Android Market has been pretty nice. I’ve found myself looking over her phone to see which apps she’s found, and she’s found some great apps and widgets. She found some text-to-speech tools, and is looking for a decent voice recording app. I found Android versions of the iPhone apps I used the most: Bump, Pandora, last.fm, Dropbox (Droidbox), a mobile Bible, Stitcher, Shazam, Instamapper, Flixster, and a Starbucks Card manager. Sadly my Starbucks Gold card has been so overused the card’s numbers have worn off.

We’re both spoiled with the voice search tools, and yesterday I transferred our family calendar into a shared Google Calendar so our phones will update with appointments, etc., so we both have a better handle on who’s where and when. No more “I’ll have to check the calendar when I get home…”

Overall, it’s really nice to finally have a decent multitasking phone, not a uni-task setup like previous Nokia/WinMo/Pantech/Samsung models or the iPhone. Finally, I can stream Pandora music, use turn-by-turn directions, while constantly updating my location on Google Latitude all on one device.

There are a few key differences in our phones, but they share many commonalities thanks to the Android OS. The Nexus One is a touch screen device only, whereas the Motorola CLIQ has a slider keyboard (which isn’t always needed, but my wife needs the physical keyboard. Both have a 5 megapixel camera, and I think the CLIQ’s cpu runs about 600MHz to the Nexus 1GHz speed. They both have similar RAM/ROM sizes, and I may upgrade her microSD memory to a 16GB card for her birthday (shh!)

Moving to a new platform wasn’t without its hiccups of course.

We had difficulty getting her old contacts from her AT&T SIM to her CLIQ. Ultimately, we put the SIM in an old Samsung Blackjack II, sync’d it with Outlook, used a third-party tool to sync Outlook to Gmail, then had to set those Gmail contacts to family/friends labels, at which point the CLIQ sync’d them over the air (OTA). What an ordeal.

We also had to figure out how to get the camera gallery to send photos to Facebook on the CLIQ. While MOTOBLUR has Facebook integration (it only does status and contact sync’ing), the CLIQ doesn’t include the full Android app for Facebook; simply installing the app immediately gave us an option to ‘share’ a photo with Facebook. The CLIQ also came preconfigured to show weather in New York, which we really only need to know to tease a SoCal friend who recently moved to the frosty NYC area, and it wasn’t completely intuitive how to fix that. There were some other minor things she asked me to handle for her.

On the Nexus One, my only pain point was getting my productivity apps installed as soon as possible, and that T-Mobile took nearly two days to get the data plan working on my phone so I didn’t have to rely on wifi. Nowhere was it documented that I needed to remove my battery to cold-boot my phone.

Now it’s time to learn some Java so I can tinker with some app building of my own. Now that I have a commute to work, I may revisit my old w98podfetch application and build a nice UI for it. There are a handful of podcast downloaders for Android, but I see a lot of comments about how there are too many limitations.

In a quest last night to find a cheaper alternative to giving AT&T $180 of my hard-earned cash every month for our two cell phones, I decided to take a page from BillShrink, and include some of the other phones that their users were requesting, along with additional phone features.

I’ll add more to the list as I have time, but this was my evening project last night. It’s ugly, it’s not written well, but it gets the point across. I’ll work on the overall look of it if enough people find it useful. Specs were gathered from several sites including the carriers, the phone manufacturers, a site called “pdadb” and a few items from the BillShrink chart.

http://iandouglas.com/cellphones.php

My chart will let you view specs from a single phone in the list, or multiple phones side-by-side so you can see their capabilities. I thought it would be interesting to list screen resolutions and DPI (calculated from the diagonal size), internal vs external storage, USB connector types, and more details about what the minimum/maximum carrier plans would include for the money you’ll pay for the phone over two years of ownership.

Since nginx was already compiled with redirection support, I simply had to locate the correct configuration file and add a few lines of code, and away it went.

First, I checked out /etc/nginx/ and opened the site configuration file within the /sites-enabled/ path. For this example, let’s say the site was m.iandouglas.com:

# vi /etc/conf/nginx/sites-enabled/m.iandouglas.com

In here, I’d look for the ‘server’ block and add my redirection rules:

server {
	listen      80;
	server_name m.iandouglas.com;
        root /var/www/m.iandouglas.com/public;

	# redirect iPhone/iPod users to the new iphone site
        if ($http_user_agent ~* '(iPhone|iPod)') {
                rewrite ^/$ http://m.iandouglas.com/iphone/index.html;
        }
.
.
.

Then a simple nginx restart:

# /etc/init.d/nginx restart

… and we were all set.

In a nutshell, create a folder in the root level of any drive, and call it “GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}” (without the quotes).

0.0.0.0 www.facebook.com facebook.com apps.facebook.com
0.0.0.0 www.myspace.com myspace.com
0.0.0.0 www.digg.com digg.com

etc. Add as many sites as you want. When you want to stop being productive at work, simply comment out those lines (like during a lunch break). Just be sure to uncomment the lines when you need to be productive again…