#“Google Buzz Team Nearly Gets It Right”

The single most important feature missing from Buzz since the day it launched is the ability to hide all the Twitter/Friendfeed/Flickr/Reader/Whatever auto-imports that everyone was doing. When you strip away all of that time-delayed crap you could get to the heart of the service. 

They have just announced that you can now mute per source per person. For which they should be applauded. 7 months later. 7 months after I and a ton of other people banged on and on and on and on about it. But of course they had to leave out the real feature we wanted “Turn off Twitter Globally” “Turn off Friendfeed Globally”. C’mon, man-up and accept that it isn’t working as a cess-pit of bot imports.

But because I have always wanted the service to work (tough love guys, tough love) I am now going to disable all of the services for all of the people I follow, one by one, just to see how many are actually using Buzz. People who are actually there, not their bots. From a group of approx 160 people, I’m predicting 4-5.

The service should always have been check-in integration and discussion built on top of Google Places. And that functionality is there on Android, albeit totally unknown by 99% of users.

In the meantime hallloooooooo Facebook Places.

Reboot.

#“Accessing Amazon RDS Instances from your Desktop”

Whilst we are huge fans of the Amazon RDS database service (particularly the Multi-AZ setup), one thing that can be a problem is accessing your databases from the desktop. The standard trick of running an SSH tunnel to your EC2 instance doesn’t work here. 

#“Our House Media Sharing Setup”

I was asked on Facebook the other day what our media sharing setup was in the house. So I did a diagram. The core machine is a pretty low-end self-build PC but with a kick-ass 512MB Video Card with HDMI output. It has all our movies and TV on 2.5TB of storage and then all the other machines in the house access that media over Wifi or Gigabit LAN. That machine runs Boxee which we use to watch all our media on a bog-standard LCD TV. The PC is more than capable of streaming movies to multiple XBOXes, PCs and Wiis simultaneously without breaking a sweat.

UPDATE: Slightly tweaked diagram after the comment from James.

#“How to browse Windows 7 shares from Ubuntu when it suddenly stops working”

#“Could UberCab work in Ireland?”

#“Another reason to love Boxee on your TV”

#“Getting OpenVPN working on Android”

There are many uses for a VPN and they are generally very easy to setup on desktop computers. The experience with phones can be variable. iPhone is a doddle but Android is a horror (see my last post). The built-in PPTN VPN is utterly broken and does not work over 3G at all or for more than a few minutes on Wifi. The steps to get an alternative working on a HTC Desire are as follows:

1. Brace yourself
2. Install Windows OpenVPN and get it working on your PC with your VPN provider
3. Root your Android phone. If you don't know how to do this, stop reading now.
4. Replace the standard ROM with the latest community Froyo. Either Cyanogen 6.0 Nightly or DeFroST are good(I use DeFroST). OpenDesire does not seem to work in the later steps of this process and I haven't had a chance to try any of the Modaco ones with Sense still enabled.
5. Install the Google Apps add-on too if your ROM doesn't include them.
6. In Android Market, install the "OpenVPN Settings App"
7. Note this is not the same as the OpenVPN Settings Page in Network->Settings. I wasted a ridiculous amount of time trying to get Cert files etc working there. Avoid it. That settings page is the source of most of the confusion around OpenVPN on all the forums. I'm sure there is a use for it if you have your own keys/certs etc but not for generic VPN users.
8. Copy the config directory from C:Program FilesOpenVPN (including the sub-dir) on your PC to a directory like openvpn on the SD Card on your phone
9. Go to that OpenVPN Settings App you installed
10. Tell it where you have stored the config files and it should show you the configurations you copied from the PC
11. Tap on the config you want and all going well, it will connect for you
12. You are in business!
13. I've noticed that it sometimes disconnects after a minute or so and then reconnects and stays solid after that.
14. All of the above works on both WiFi and 3G

#“Android not suitable for the Enterprise?”

I'm been trying and failing to get two features working on Android over the weekend: VPN and Proxy. A ton of googling revealed that both are utterly broken and have been since V1.0 of Android. Whilst my use-case is trivial (getting Facebook Places working outside of the US), the much bigger use case is a much bigger deal: the Enterprise.

#“Facebook Places is a Total Winner”

I've been saying it for months, but Social Check-in will be owned by Facebook and Google. Startups that didn't take M&A offers from them are completely deluded. This is not a "we could be the next Twitter" scenario. Now that I've seen Facebook Places in action, I believe that even more

#“Very quick thoughts on Facebook Places”

1. U.S. Only to start with. Grrrrrrrrrr
2. Mobile-Web-based for most which is fine
3. iPhone before Android. Grrrrrr.
4. Facebook Pages are not the sames as Places Pages. That's a bit odd. Surely the intersection of a Page's Fans (or Likers or whatever they are called now) and people who check-in is really powerful? Or is it that you have one Starbucks Page but you need 400,000 Starbucks Places Pages? Which makes sense I guess.
5. But it does mean every business starting all over again from scratch building a "fan-base". And on which one do Fans hang out and where do the companies interact with fans? Or will Pages start being deprecated in favour of Places Pages? Given that you can now advertise either on Facebook.
6. Haven't been able to claim our business yet (later today?)
7. This is gonna be huge. And I don't care what anyone says about pure-play check-in Apps like 4SQ or Gowalla. Unless they have something else, utterly unique, to build on top of this, they are dead-meat.