Cruise:Onboard Twitter/StatusNet

StatusNet for JoCo Cruise Crazy 2

StatusNet is an Open Source project to create a Twitter like service. There is a fan initiative to investigate it's suitability for onboard communication.

Proof of Concept

There is a proof of concept server located at https://grimstatusnet.dyndns.org/statusnet/. Access is by web, iPhone app, Android app, or desktop app. Mobile clients should use grimstatusnet.dyndns.org/statusnet as the server.

Issues

A list of known issues with the current proof of concept server.

• Error reported during account creation
  • Likely due to incorrect configuration of sendmail
  • Should just disable email validation
    • After looking at the registration code, sending emails is not configurable. Source needs modification to allow for this. Should be pretty easy to do.
• As of July 2010, native Twitter app doesn't work with StatusNet. Authentication in the app is hardcoded to official Twitter site.

Improvements

• Disable attachments
  • Doable with configuration $config['attachments']['supported'] = false;, but still see the attachment icon, and receive the misleading error message like "image/png" is not a supported file type on this server. Try using another image format."
  • Probably only possible to remove icon with CSS
• Disable location services
  • We're gonna be on a boat.
  • Done. Need to set the following in the config:
    • $config['location']['sharedefault'] = false; # sets default to false
    • $config['location']['share'] = false; # disables user's ability to change default
• Disable OpenID
  • Done, need to unload the OpenID plugin with the following in the config:
    • unset($config['plugins']['default']['OpenID']);
• Install PHP bytecode accelerator
  • APC appears to be the defacto standard
• Disable URL shorteners
  • Look into disabling URLs

Hardware

The current proof of concept server is running under a free Amazon EC2 micro instance. Available RAM is 79MB of 613MB. During the current light testing, CPU usage has not exceeded 15%. Likely need 1 GB and a low end processor for real hardware. A small, cheap netbook is almost certainly likely to handle the load.

Software

Software	Version
OS	Ubuntu 11.04 Beta 1 64 bit
StatusNet	0.9.7
Apache	2.2.17
PHP	5.3.5-1ubuntu7.1
phpMyAdmin	3.3.10deb1
ddclient

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