Personal projects, ideas, and the occasional comments on life

Spider-Man Knows

Facebook maintains a large community developer base. Some of these developers are responsible for the well-off Farmville and the like. If the user base is there so will there be developers with dollar signs in their eyes.

Anyone who likes can view the API for free and start writing code. This availability– plus the large user base– is proving to be a fertile ground for mom ‘n pop-style, web-based applications. Perhaps this is worth a look?

Update 2010.04.10
After spending days researching this I have come to the conclusion that there is virtually no documentation of substance. Even the Facebook-supplied examples do not function as promised. Although there are some great, complex applications out there I do not consider this worth my time right now. My hat (and my pitty) go off to the people who got a job working with these APIs. May your families find another way to eat.

I have recently stumbled upon SmoothWall Express 3.0 SP1. I am getting down-right giddy thinking about all the neat things I can do at home with this thing.

SmoothWall Express is a stand-alone, open-source firewall project. It has a large, active community full of helpful people. Some of these helpful people create mods to extend the functionality such as the ultra useful Full Firewall Control mod.

In my experiments I was able to create a very tiny box with two NICs, little RAM (256MB), a spare Pentium 4 I had laying around, and a 2GB Compact Flash card as the local storage. This poor excuse for a machine was able to stand up to some pretty heavy traffic– without ever passing .25 load, mind you– including a few test torrents totaling over 1,000 connected peers.

My ultimate goal is the separation of all traffic according to use. I might have one public, outward-facing interface for the Internet connection and three inward-facing interfaces for the local traffic (private wired, private wireless, and an internal DMZ). I also plan to build a beefy VMware ESXi box so I can sandbox each of my services (vpn, web, SQL, e-mail, ect) and do nearly all of the networking within virtual hardware.