Rustic Retreat
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Live broadcasts and documentation from a remote tech outpost in rustic Portugal. Sharing off-grid life, the necessary research & development and the pursuit of life, without centralized infrastructure.
Subscribe to our new main project Rustic Retreat on the projects own website.
Apollo-NG is a mobile, self-sustainable, independent and highly-experimental Hackbase, focused on research, development and usage of next-generation open technology while visiting places without a resident, local Hackerspace and offering other Hackers the opportunity to work together on exciting projects and to share fun, food, tools & resources, knowledge, experience and inspiration.
With more manpower and additional resources we've managed to finish refactoring the initial mockup client code to use the ender javascript “package manager” and decided to go with qwery, bean, bonzo, underscore, backbone, handlebars and domready instead of a fully bloated js framework like jquery or extjs.
For comparison, just jquery without any other needed jquery plugin weighs 32kb after minifying and compression. Our ender package comes down to 28kb including everything else we seem to need. Maps often seem to be perceived as “annoying” by users if the map responsiveness is less than optimal, so we should always keep in mind to make this as lean and lightweight as possible and use other trickery to “emulate” a fluid experience.
Additionally ruebezahl dedicated some of his available storage and computing resources for the cause and now we already have the first public tileserver and the first version of a couchdb based overlay-server running. Great stuff :)
The git repos are up and running, more information on the pad for now:
Today we managed to test the local providers, tile rendering, tile delivery and successfully consolidated the options for the next steps. We still have one seat failing on us, but it's good to know, that we all can buckle our seat-belts. It's been great fun, as always :)
In the past several months it sometimes just so happened, that the geoipupdate tool, available on many GNU/Linux systems to update MaxMind's GeoIP databases just failed. It exited fine but left a corrupt database, unreadable to the application depending on it. In this particular environment, GeoIP lookup is a mission-critical dependency, so it was time to come up with a little cron/logger/geoipupdate assisted bash magic, to update MaxMind's GeoIP Databases automatically and with two fallback safeties, in case the new DB is corrupt or the download failed somehow.
It performed very well for the last several weeks, never raised an alert and is published now, as it might be useful for someone else out there, confronted with the same problem. You could spend your time elsewhere, instead of re-inventing something that is already here and which doesn't rely on alerts, to get a human's attention but tries to fix it by itself in an automated process: