Here’s how:

• In Google Maps, get the directions you want.  Drag the path, click till you’re happy.
• In the top-right of the screen you’ll see the “Link” link – click on that, and copy the URL to your address bar

• Now add the string “&output=kml” to the end of the url, and hit enter

• A download dialogue should now pop up asking you where you want to save the file maps.kml – save it
• Now use gpsbabel to transfer the track to your GPS.  For my Garmin it works like this:

gpsbabel -i kml -t -f maps.kml -o garmin -F usb:0

And that’s it…

Alertfox

To use AlertFox, you first have to install the iMacros plugin for your browser (available for Firefox and IE).  This makes recording a macro (sequence of clicks and data entries) a piece of cake.  You can choose to have clicks recorded by the id of the element you are selecting, or by the X/Y coordinates.  Once you have recorded a transaction (you may need to edit the script to replace session ids with wildcards (*)), you can create a “sensor” with it on the AlertFox site.  A Sensor is a rule set including the macro which should be carried out, how often it should be executed, in which browser, and what the acceptable time is that this transaction should take.  You can even define from which location the test should be carried out (“Europe Zone” and “World Zone” connections both currently come from servers hosted by serverloft in Germany, “US Zone” connections come from theplanet servers in Houston Texas).

When things go wrong: If the transaction cannot be completed (server is too slow, a page in the sequence is not as expected, …), you immediately get an email warning with a link to a screenshot.  This is great!  Setting up a host of these sensors I feel like I’ve got a horde of tireless monkeys working day and night clicking, typing, and making screenshots.  On your AlertFox dashboard you have a good overview of all your sensors, when they were tested, and what the results were each time.

One small annoyance: you often won’t be able to use a macro recorded in Firefox for IE – there are small differences in how they recognise tags which sometimes break cross compatibility.  Solution: record the same transaction twice – once in Firefox, and again in IE.

Why outsource monitoring?

You might wonder what the point is of outsourcing your web application monitoring: surely you can monitor server load in-house.  This will cover many causes of downtime, but what if your server is running fine, but network interruption has made it unavailable from outside?

So you do need to have monitoring from a remote server… Maybe you have another server and can make both of your servers monitor each other, or maybe you want to use a basic monitoring service which makes simple http requests to test if your server is online.  This is better – you will know if your server goes offline, but that doesn’t cover some of the most common problems which could occur…

One of the typical errors on a web application which won’t be caught by any of the above methods is your payment system breaking.  A software error, or a glich in the payment fulfillment provider… it will allow users to visit your site, put items in the shopping cart, but not complete the checkout.  Your burning marketing money bringing them to your site, and no cash is coming in.  The only way to be sure your site is working is to test real transactions in a real browser, but … monkeys aren’t that clever, and employing slave labour will probably get you in trouble.

If you are an online marketer it is quite likely that you are responsible for driving traffic to a site, monitoring and optimising your campaigns without having any control over the site you are working for.  If the site goes down or a section is broken you want to know asap so that you can inform your customer and stop burning marketing budget on a broken site.

What does it cost?

They have 4 packages ranging between free (only one Macro, and that only on Firefox) and $199.  I used the PRO2 version for $99/month which is the cheapest version which allows testing in IE and Firefox.

Links

I spent all my time talking about AlertFox because it’s the only one which fulfils my requirements, but there are many other monitoring services which may be up to your needs if you don’t need application level monitoring (DNS, HTTP, FTP, …), and here’s a list of some of the others I looked at:

• Serverguard24
• Alertra
• Uptrends
• Wormly
• Alertsite
• Site24x7
• Dotcom-monitor
• Pingdom
• Webmetrics

The key to this method is Varnish.  Varnish is a state of the art reverse proxy, and you should be using it to accelerate your web applications, even if you don’t need to switch service provider.  Explaining Varnish in detail goes beyond the scope of this howto, but in summary, clients connect to the Varnish proxy on the server, which (based on a vcl configuration file) either servers from its cache, or forwards the requests to backend servers.  This can allow you to have a farm of web servers all with one frontend, or just take the load of your backend servers by efficiently serving static content .  Varnish also allows complex filtering, and this is what makes the transition from one service provider to the next a piece of cake.

For the following I’ll use the terms “old” as your old ISP server, and “new” for your new ISP server.

Here’s the basic steps:

• Set up Varnish in front of your web server redirecting all requests to the local backend.
• Add a new backend in your Varnish configuration, defining your new IP as the host.
• For each application (typically a domain):
  • Copy files and databases from old to new
  • Install the files and databases on new.
  • Test the new server (make a static entry for the domain(s) in your hosts file)
    • Are all required modules installed?
    • Is everything working as expected?
  • Add a rule in your Varnish configuration that will forward all requests to this domain to your new server.
  • If you have a very active site, you may still have a few seconds of downtime in this step…
    • Put the web application into maintenance mode
    • Dump the database from old again (to get latest changes since your testing)
    • Load the database into new
    • Reload the varnish configuration to activate the forwarding to the new server
    • On the new server, take the application out of maintenance mode
  • Now all requests which hit your old server for this domain should be invisibly forwarded to your new ISP
  • Check that everything is working
  • Change the DNS entries for the domain – as this propagates, less traffic should be hitting your old ISP
• When you see no more traffic hitting your old server, you can turn it off.

Using this procedure, you can comfortably move any number of applications with minimal downtime, and enough time to test each one as you go.  It also will allow you to transfer applications where you do not have control of the DNS entries: you can do the transfer, and then inform the domain owner to change the ANAME entrie for their domains.

Some situations where this might cause problems:

• Your application has IP based filters or bot-blocking active – if so your new server will be getting a lot of traffic from one address (old server)
• Your application is not compatible with Varnish?  Some web applications (Squirrelmail for example) generate many unnecessary or duplicate HTTP headers.  Varnish chomps everything after the first 32 lines of HTTP headers, which in turn can cause the application to fail if something important was after the 32nd header…

To install the Perl module:

perl -MCPAN -e "install WWW::Pixelletter::API"

Or get the latest release from github:

git clone git://github.com/robin13/WWW--Pixelletter--API.git
cd WWW--Pixelletter--API
perl Makefile.PL
make
make test
make install

To actually use the module, you will need a script like send_by_pixelletter.pl (included in the samples folder of the repository).  Place this in your ~/bin/ directory.

To add the fax functionality to Nautilus you will have to add a script to the scripts directory:

~/.gnome2/nautilus-scripts/pixelletter
#!/bin/sh
gnome-terminal -x ~/bin/send_by_pixelletter.pl $NAUTILUS_SCRIPT_SELECTED_FILE_PATHS

This will cause a terminal to open, and interactively ask if you want to send by post or fax, and get the necessary details.

Beware!  If you are sending by post, the first page of the PDF should have the address placed so it will show through a standard DIN A4 envelope address window, otherwise the letter won’t go anywhere!

If you do register an account at Pixelletter, please enter this URL in the “where you heard about it” section!

And now we move on to Ireland, today.  Eircom (the major ISP in Ireland) have agreed to block access to file sharing sites, including Pirate Bay.  Before I continue, I have one thing to say: “Eircom you weak kneed b****!” I cannot believe that they have bowed to pressure by the Irish Recorded Music Association (Irma) and are going to blanket block access to file sharing, whether it be nefarious film and music rips, or the latest (free, no copyright) Linux distribution, or home video made by your pal down the road!

Blocking file sharing is like banning video cameras because you could film porn with them, or banning balaclavas because you could rob a shop with one.
TV and radio stations are subject to strict regulations on what they can broadcast and who they pay revenue to.  Up until now, the Telco’s have claimed immunity from this control because they only provide the transport medium, and do not have no control over the source or destination.  The way the internet is built, this is very true: a company in Ireland cannot be made responsible for content generated in Sweden, and making it responsible will only end in tears.  As in this case, if they block Pirate Bay, they will block a lot of illegal file sharing, and some legal file sharing.  They will probably miss out on some other file sharing platforms, and thereby allow illegal content to be transferred by other channels.

You may wonder then, if succumbing to the pressures of the Irma is just opening the door for Eircom to be their puppet, and setting a precedence which may eventually end up with them being responsible for all the content they transfer, why would they do it?  Short term gain!  File sharing accounts for a huge percentage of the data transfer which the Internet Service Providers (ISPs) like Eircom have to pay for these days.  They get the monthly subscription fees from their customers, and pay for all data they send/receive outside of their own network.  They are winning if they pay less than they charge.  If they can justify blocking a significant portion of the traffic they have to pay for, they can save a lot of money, and shunt responsibility for the degraded service away from themselves (good for press and image).  For the short term, it makes sense, especially because with current technology it is not be possible to block all illegal activity while allowing all legal activity.  But if they can follow most requests made by Irma (a minimal effort, and little bad press because it can easily be sold as “doing the right thing“) and as a result reduce their overhead by 90%, they’re in a win-win situation.

Some examples of laws which would be similar in effect:

• Banning balaclavas because most bank robbers use them.  Never mind about the people who want to keep their head warm when it’s snowing!
• Make a toll collector responsible for the legality of the content of the trucks passing through his booth.
• Banning fluids on aircraft because you could make a complex liquid bomb out of liquids.  As a result millions are spent by passengers buying “safe” water in the duty free and millions more spent by transport authorities removing liquids from said passengers.
• Making hammers illegal – you could intend to smash in a head with it rather than hang a picture on the wall.

Let’s put this in perspective:  I think for example that it’s good that access handguns is restricted – they are extremely powerful, and their effects are nearly always violent.  Peer-to-peer file sharing technology on the other hand is a very general tool, equivalent to a hammer in the real world.  In the hands of an angry mob, it is a dangerous weapon, but most of the time it is the basic tool of every handy man.

I have purposely left out the whole issue of copyright infringement, and whether it should be legal or not to copy music and film.  That is another issue.  For now I would like to have only illegal activity banned or blocked and retain the right to freedom of speech and not be censored.