It's been a crazy month...

Hey all,

I havnt updated the blog in awhile (although I have been using twitter more regularly), and just wanted to give you all some updates. It's been a crazy month with tons of stuff going on in my life. I've finally finished a series of interviews at a few places, and I'll probably get a better idea next week where I stand with the job search and where I'll end up. The Flow Messenger front has been a bit quiet for me these days, as I havnt run into much problems at all, and its growing ever so slowly organically with $0 marketing put into it. It's probably an area that i'll need to learn more about if I come up with another idea. At the moment, I'm playing with Cassandra, and hoping to migrate over from MySQL Cluster to bring down the cost of running a Highly Available data store.

What I'm up to:

• I'll be in NYC Dec 17-20, so if your around, send me a tweet @vincentyoung
• Meeting with people as often as I can when I'm in Toronto
• Finish documenting the backend of Flow Messenger and publish some articles on setting up a HA environment on Linodes.
• Get some stuff ported to Cassandra from MySQL cluster (This is gonna be abit painful and require some thought)
• Various dinners and parties in the next few weeks.

I also ended up going to DigitalMediaCamp Toronto last week, and it was great seeing all the interest in making Toronto a digital media hub that is able to support startups. Definitely the next step is to aggregate all the incubator/startup/digital media stuff together, and connect the following together: Funding, Skills, People, Opportunities. Time 4 Change was a great idea I learned as a result of participating in the conference, and I would encourage you to check it out too - http://www.t4change.com/

Bugs in Flow Messenger

If your experiencing issues in Flow Messenger, please email support@flowmessenger.com. It's much easier for me to manage the issues this way, and I can work with you one on one. And you should be checking http://www.flowmessenger.com/ for updates and not this blog. :)

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iPhone and secure RESTful authentication?

Find out how Flow Messenger's Authentication mechanism works. It's pretty cool way I thought of implementing RESTful Authentication using a something similar to OAuth and few iPhone tricks like using Apple Push Network servers to deliver the passphrase to the App.

Check it out over at: http://www.flowmessenger.com/blog/2009/11/10/iphone-and-secure-restful-authentication.html

Negative Caching with Memcached

Some thoughts on using Memcached as a negative cache. This can be useful against users abusing your webservice when combined with other techniques like well thought out firewall rules and authenticating requests against sane parameters.

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Very disappointed in Apple...

Slight set back on Flow Messenger's app approval process...

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Submitted to Apple App store for review

Submitted Flow Messenger to the App store several hours ago, and just working on the landing page for my application. I'm super relieved that it is finally done, but I know there is still lots of work that needs to be done like continuing to tweak the server.

Check out the features and screenshots over at http://www.flowmessenger.com

Still alive:)

Heya all, Just wanted to post an update about what I've been up to. These last 2 months I've been super busy hammering away at developing my first iPhone application. It's pretty much code complete and I'm just putting on the finishing touches to my iPhone application before I submit it to Apple for approval. The application is pretty much an iPhone to iPhone/iPod Touch messenger. 2 months ago, there wasnt anything out there on the app store that was pretty much BBM for iPhone. so I started working on my own version.

Despite the discouragement of others releasing their apps before mine(Ping!/WhatsApp!), I feel that the features and the stability that I can deliver on will ultimately give the end-user a better experience. Before I get into too much detail, a few strengths of my application are: Group conversations, contact list management, received message receipts, no registration required, and will be free(adsupported). I have a few more features built into my app, but those are the big ones that I see a need for. Plus I've set up a pretty impressive HA environment to run the webservices on, and it's extremely easy for me to add additional HTTP and SQL cluster nodes as I need them.

So two months ago, a few days after my last blog entry I started this project, with the primary intention of learning how to create RESTful webservices built on cakePHP framework, iPhone development, and some fun High Availability areas like setting up LVS for load balancing, MySQL cluster, and alternatives to apache for serving up static and dynamic pages.

In the end, Im pretty sure I accomplished all my goals. I'll be doing several writeups on several challenging parts of my project that I hope will be of interest to people. So check back soon :)

iPhone Tutorial 2: Testing your app on the iPhone or iTouch device

The iPhone simulator that is provided with the SDK is all fine and dandy, but if you ever needed to test the hardware inputs such as the camera, accelerometer or even remote notifications, you will need to deploy your application that you are developing onto the actual device for furthur testing. Find out how to setup Xcode and load provision profiles onto your device, so you can quickly get your application up and running on an iPhone or iTouch...

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iPhone Tutorial 1: Hello World

A brief walkthrough through hello world on the iPhone SDK

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No more ie6 please!

Came across an awesome message for people still on ie6 which i stumbled upon here

no more ie6 please :P