New and Improved www.endurotracker.com

After 3 months of work, there is a new and improved www.EnduroTracker.com site available.
This site is targeted towards the triathlete or endurance athlete who want to plan and track their training sessions from any available internet enabled device (PC, iphone, blackberry, etc).
If you have friends who do endurance sports like Triathlons, bike races, road races, or swim races refer them to www.endurotracker.com. ( a triathlon training log site )
On a technical note, www.EnduroTracker.com is now using substantial more hardware, and is now using several new redundancy strategies to handle large loads, maximize performance, and deal with hardware disaster scenarios. It uses redundant web servers, and redundant database servers.

Host Names in Linux

Configure the Hostname

On the shoulders of giants, this an excerpt from very detailed post on postfix (smtp software) at

http://souptonuts.sourceforge.net/postfix_tutorial.html

The computer that these examples are taken from is "squeezel.squeezel.com", and it exists on IP address 192.168.1.81. The short name is just squeezel. Another computer, on IP address "192.168.1.155" is "tape.squeezel.com".

     /etc/hosts

   # Do not remove the following line, or various programs
   # that require network functionality will fail.
   127.0.0.1       localhost.localdomain           localhost
   192.168.1.81    squeezel.squeezel.com           squeezel
   192.168.1.155   tape.squeezel.com               tape

You may also want to edit "/etc/sysconfig/network" and add or check the following.

    HOSTNAME=squeezel.squeezel.com

Finally, to put all changes into effect now, run the following command with root privileges.

   $ hostname squeezel.squeezel.com

Some of the settings in the postfix "main.cf" file depend upon the hostname.

Amazon Flexible Payments Service (FPS) Part I, An Overview

Amazon Flexible Payments Service (FPS) is a set of web services that allow developers create applications to move money from one entity to another. Payment can be in the form of credit cards, bank account , or Amazon Payments balance.
Requests can be made either via SOAP or REST. In my case I had to use REST because Mono (.Net on Linux) has not implemented WSE 2 or WSE 3.
Another important feature to be aware of is Instant Payment Notification (IPN). This frees up a developer from having to implement a scheduled job that queries Amazon FPS for completion of payments. Because IPN will push (publish) a response to your listening website/webservice for you.

References:
Getting Started Guide: http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AmazonFPS/2007-01-08/FPSGettingStartedGuide/
Developers Guide: http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AmazonFPS/2007-01-08/FPSDeveloperGuide/