Preston Lee's Blog

  • In The News

    OpenRain affiliate img surf‘s Mugr facial recognition services have been receiving some press lately. Here’s the lowdown of what’s been happening.. ReadWriteWeb.com article, by Josh Catone. AltSearchEngines.com comparison, by Charles Knight. RoughType.com article, by Nicolas Carr. Official Mugr blog, by the Mugr team. Public Mugr developer support Google group. Mad props to the Mugr team…

  • Featured In Rubyology Podcast #48

    The talk I gave at yesterday’s Phoenix Rails meeting will be featured in Rubyology Podcast #48, courtesy of Chris Matthieu. Thanks for the effort and kind words! The Mugr.com demo portion at the end got cut out unfortunately, but the meat of the technical discussion is available for your listening pleasure. Slides: Keynote PDF Listen…

  • Rails Presentation: attachment_fu, Kropper and Mugr.com face-based services preview.

    I’m giving a brief talk at tonight’s Rails meeting in Chandler at 7:00pm on what we’re doing with attachment_fu and Kropper for upcoming face-based search service mugr.com. I’ll post the slides afterwards for those who can’t make it, but you won’t get to see the Über-secret developer build unless you come 🙂 Slides: Keynote PDF

  • Rails attachment_fu/Kropper Scaling Fix: attachment_fu_skip_resize

    I recently integrated Kropper into a custom RoR application for OpenRain affiliate img surf. A fundamental flaw in the upload-save-crop-save process used by Kropper is that attachment_fu automatically scales down the image on first save to :resize_to dimensions. After the subsequent crop–which may result in a significant drop in resolution–the image is scaled back up…

  • Dynamically Generating SSL Certificates with Ruby on Rails

    OpenRain had a couple projects recently need to programmatically generate private keys and SSL certificates in Ruby. To contribute back to the community, we’re releasing several small things today. SSLsicle.com A simple form which does the OpenSSL grunt work and pop outs an SSL certificate ready to use with Apache (or whatever). SSLsicle uses.. eassl_fix…

  • Facial Search Service Coming Soon

    My company recently entered into a partnership with img surf to develop Mugr.com: a facial identification/search service initially targeted at the mobile market. I’m pleased to announce that we already have the base functionality working, and are planning to deploy Mugr.com for experimentation in an invite-only beta starting in October. We’re also planning on providing…

  • Subversion For SCM Slides

    I gave a presentation to Arizona’s ASULUG/PLUG yesterday on using subversion for software configuration management. Raw slides: Keynote PDF

  • Sun Introduces Non-Native (Linux) Zone Support

    The “What’s New” document for Solaris 10 8/07 states the update “..includes the tools necessary to install a CentOS 3.5 to 3.8 or Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.5 to 3.8 inside a non-global zone. Machines running the Solaris OS in either 32-bit or 64-bit mode can execute 32-bit Linux applications.” Additionally, “DTrace can now be…

  • Solaris 10 x64: Get Your Sound Card Working

    When I built the $1000, 2TB file server, the on-board nVidia HD audio support of the Asus M2NPV-VM motherboard didn’t work out of the box. It’s a trivial fix using the recently open sourced OSS drivers from 4Front Technologies. (I also tested a Creative Audigy 2 PCI sound card using these drivers under Solaris 10…

  • OpenSolaris ZFS vs. Linux ext3 RAID5

    Preston Says: I asked Dan McClary for a big favor recently: use his general UNIX knowledge and graduate-level statistics voodoo to produce a report highlighting performance characteristic differencess between OpenSolaris ZFS and Linux RAID5 on a common, COTS hardware platform. The following analysis is his work, reformatted to fit your screen. You may download the…

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