Suite Deal in Vegas

I am in Las Vegas right now for a 2-day Leadership Training Camp that my boss wanted me to attend. I am staying at Bally's.

I was supposed to get a $110/night special rate for people attending the training, but I ended up booking a room directly from Bally's web site for only $59/night. When I arrived at Bally's they told me that they didn't have any rooms left at that rate and gave me a complimentary upgrade to a Grand Suite (check out the virtual tour on their web site), their deluxe guest room. It is probably the nicest hotel room I've ever stayed at in Vegas. It is huge and has a king bed and whirlpool tub. Too bad I have to enjoy it all by myself :(

My First Facebook App

I have been working on writing a Facebook application since September, and I'm excited to say that today, it has been approved by Facebook and is now listed in their Application Directory.

My application is called We Read and is for Facebook users to share books with their friends. It lets you comment on and discuss books and display them in your profile for your friends to see. I used Amazon Web Services and since I joined Amazon associates, I can earn a commission whenever a user clicks on one of my books and buys it on Amazon.

Please try installing We Read and let me know what you think. I plan to enhance it with new features every week or so.

Ubuntu Baby

max-week2-019
Originally uploaded by kweiner

From early on, Max is learning to love Ubuntu!

A good friend of mine made this onesie with his computer and Iron On printer paper. It was definitely the most original baby gift we received.

When Max is old enough to start using a computer, he will start off with Edubuntu, a version of Ubuntu geared towards kids. The Edubuntu website calls it " Linux for Young Human Beings".

Infant Inventions

Last week, my first kid was born. As my wife and I have been learning how to care for a newborn, I couldn't help but wish the following solutions existed to make the job easier. Maybe someone has already made these products. If not, there's gotta be a market for them out there. Let me know if you have other solutions.

• Diaper Window

A little see-through plastic section on the bottom of the diaper so we can easily look and see if there is any poop deposited without having to take the diaper off or stick a finger in. Checking a diaper always irritates my baby, and we end up checking many times a day - whenever the baby is crying.

• Changing Table Stirrups

My baby always cries and wriggles around while we change his diaper. It is really hard to keep his legs up and spread apart so we can clean his bottom and scrotum without getting his feet or changing table dirty. If we could only insert his feet into stirrups during his changing, it would be so much easier.

• Pee Catcher

Baby boys are known to spray their pee straight up in the middle of a diaper change. Pee gets everywhere: on the floor, on the wall, on your hands, on the new diaper, and on his clothes. I know there are some pee guards you can buy and some books recommend putting a wipe or diaper over the penis until the new diaper is on. These might prevent pee from getting on the walls and floor, but not necessarily from getting all over the changing table and the baby's clothes. There needs to be a Pee Catcher that wraps around the baby's penis and collects the urine into a plastic bag.

Reverse SSH Tunnel For Facebook Application Development

I have been playing around with developing Facebook applications recently, and I have found it difficult to setup a development environment because to test my application, Facebook needs to access it on a remote server. If my application is running on my workstation which is behind a firewall, then Facebook has no way to access it.

A friend at work told me about The RFacebook Tunnel which allows Facebook to connect to a port on a remote server which tunnels its traffic to a local computer. That is exactly what I need, except that I'm using Java instead of Ruby to develop my application. I started looking into doing this reverse tunneling myself just using the command line and found out that it is very easy!

All I needed to do was to issue this command from my workstation:

ssh -gNR 8888:localhost:8080 www.myremoteserver.com

This creates the tunnel so that any requests to www.myremoteserver.com:8888 are forwarded to my workstation on port 8080. Voila! Now Facebook can easily access the web application I'm running locally behind a firewall.

There was one little thing I left out. In order to get the tunneling to forward traffic from machines other than myremoteserver.com, I had to edit /etc/ssh/sshd_config and add the following line:

GatewayPorts yes

This site has some more information on why I had to do that.