There's only a small problem - as of now, searching for either "Google Plus" or "Google+" or even just "Google" in the App Store app does not find the app.  I'm sure this will be fixed, but for now if you want to find it search for "Google huddle" and it will be the only result shown.

Here's a direct link to app in iTunes: Google+.

So how do you get in on the action? Right now there isn't much out there but Google has created a form on which you can sign up to be notified when new info is released:

To stay updated as the Google+ project develops and get a heads up when we have more details to share about Google+ developer opportunities, sign up here. Your email will be added to a Google group. In addition, we'd love to gather more information about you.

I was notified "Your information has been sent to Google and your email has been added to the Google+ Developers group" after filling it out. Knuckles cracked, sleeves rolled up and ready to build cool new things once APIs surface - bring it!

What will you build?

Photos were taken with an iPhone 4 running iOS 4.2.1 with HDR (High Dynamic Range) turned on. Roll over the image to see just how much more detail the HDR photo was able to pull in. In particular, check out the sky, the background buildings, the parking space stop, the car's brake discs, wheels, side and top. Pretty amazing that you can do this with your phone today!

Note: You need JavaScript enabled for this to work.

An embarrassing event for Gawker for sure, but a something positive can come out of it - bringing awareness to using the same weak password on more than one sites, and a chance to provide lessons in online security to educate users regarding the pitfalls and the best practices to avoid them. By this time you all know the drill, if you used the same password on other sites start by changing those passwords first, then proceed by changing all of your passwords to unique, high-strength passwords.  There are many password manager software packages out there that have excellent built-in high-strength password generators, or you can just make up your own long passwords by combining mixed-case letters, numbers and punctuation.

You would think this pretty much covers it, and there's not much else to be done. However, one site out there has gone the extra mile and gets the extra credit in recognition for their forward thinking regarding their users' online security. That site is LinkedIn. Earlier today they disabled all the accounts that were compromised by the Gawker security breach and required all users to reset their password. Initially there was no explanation for it, choosing to simply say "We have recently disabled your account for security reasons." Most people put 2 & 2 together, and about 10 hours later around 6 PM EST LinkedIn emailed out this official statement:

[...] This was in response to a security breach on a different site, Gawker.com, where a number of usernames and passwords were exposed. We want to make sure those leaked emails and passwords were not being used to attack any LinkedIn members. There is no indication that your LinkedIn account has been affected, but since it shares an email with the compromised Gawker accounts, we decided to ensure its safety by asking you to reset its password. [...]

A minor technical flaw is that they allow users to use the old password when setting the new password. While this may be as-intended, I can see a problem with it: when people got the original notice which did not tell them why they were asked to reset their passwords, some could have been annoyed and used the same old password. Had they known why they were asked to reset their password, they would probably have been more likely to use a different password.

Regardless, this is a commendable effort on LinkedIn's side, and I both hope and encourage more online businesses to follow in their footsteps. This of course means that LinkedIn's software engineers likely downloaded the Gawker torrent, but unlike the other guys who did the same, they used it for good!

Suffice to say that omnitty is great for working on large numbers of similarly configured servers at the same time such as those making up your web farm. I use it almost every day (and I'm not an admin by day!) for a variety of tasks such as switching out hosts files on 16 boxes at the same time or tailing/grepping debug logs to troubleshoot prod issues.

A while ago I switched to a Mac running OS X as my primary desktop at work. All fine and dandy, until it came time to run my favorite SSH multiplexer. Most of the other guys on OS X run Cluster SSH (cSSH), but I was determined to get omnitty going. It put up a bit of a fight but I eventually got it to work. Below I list how you can do the same.

First, ensure you have gcc (gcc -v will tell you), make and patch. If you don't have them, stop here and install them - Google will readily show you how.

Then, after verifying the prerequisites are there, follow these steps:

1. Create a new, empty working directory and download everything below to it (i.e. mkdir /tmp/omni && cd /tmp/omni).
2. Download libROTE, the terminal emulation lib omnitty uses. ROTE is not often updated, the version as of this writing is 0.2.8 (filename: rote-0.2.8.tar.gz). Unpack (tar zxf filename).
3. Download the omnitty tarball (filename: omnitty-0.3.0.tar.gz); unpack.
4. Download my OS X patches tarball omnitty-0.3.0-rote-0.2.8-OSX-patches.tar.gz; unpack. Extra credit: check out the README and the patch files.
5. Patch, build and install rote in one shot (sudo will prompt for your pw):
   cd rote-0.2.8 && patch < ../rote-0.2.8-OSX.patch && ./configure && make && sudo make install && cd ..
6. Patch, build and install omnitty in one shot:
   cd omnitty-0.3.0 && patch < ../omnitty-0.3.0-OSX.patch && ./configure && make && sudo make install && cd ..
7. Run omnitty!

You now have this invaluable tool available to use on your Mac! Enjoy it as much as I do.

master/wp> UPDATE user SET ad_id='fb' WHERE user_id = 1337 LIMIT 1;

It's a good way to ensure that if you seriously fcuk the query up, you only update 1 record. For multiple records, there's another good practice to get used to: do a SELECT first, using the same exact WHERE criteria you plan to use in your UPDATE statement. This verifies the set you will be affecting when you do run the UPDATE is indeed what you want to update, and you can plug the row count you get from it into your UPDATE's LIMIT clause.

Yelp is an iPhone app that's frequently updated, which is what you want to see from an app developer  -  timely updates that keep the app current and in sync with their web service.  As Yelp happens to be one of the apps I use almost daily when out and about, I checked to see what this latest update includes. I LOL'd when I saw this - good thing I was sitting down!

"Superamazing bug fixes and, unfortunately, still no jet packs."

ROFLMAO! Unfortunately, this doesn't really relay what was fixed, but it was original enough to get me to update.  Happy to see that people to there still have a sense of humor!

While I have not played with Maebo, I really liked Moblin 2.1's interface on a 10" netbook.  One can clearly see the GUI is optimized for the limited real estate offered by this class of devices.  While at this point MeeGo is vaporware (much like HipHop for PHP, still MIA as of today), the first project release is scheduled for Q2 2010. I hope MeeGo has native VM support so it runs without workarounds like those required by Moblin.  Can't wait to play with it!

Some of the tasty meat:

• single-process multithreading model in their own HTTP server allows sharing of DB connections between threads
• you can run directly in their own interpreter, HPHPi, for faster workflow
• they made some PHP extensions thread-safe, code to be released with HipHop

As an audience member said, can't wait to start playing with it!

One of the key values at Facebook is to move fast. For the past six years, we have been able to accomplish a lot thanks to rapid pace of development that PHP offers. As a programming language, PHP is simple. Simple to learn, simple to write, simple to read, and simple to debug. We are able to get new engineers ramped up at Facebook a lot faster with PHP than with other languages, which allows us to innovate faster.

Today I'm excited to share the project a small team of amazing people and I have been working on for the past two years; HipHop for PHP. With HipHop we've reduced the CPU usage on our Web servers on average by about fifty percent, depending on the page. Less CPU means fewer servers, which means less overhead. This project has had a tremendous impact on Facebook. We feel the Web at large can benefit from HipHop, so we are releasing it as open source this evening in hope that it brings a new focus toward scaling large complex websites with PHP. While HipHop has shown us incredible results, it's certainly not complete and you should be comfortable with beta software before trying it out.

HipHop for PHP isn't technically a compiler itself. Rather it is a source code transformer. HipHop programmatically transforms your PHP source code into highly optimized C++ and then uses g++ to compile it. HipHop executes the source code in a semantically equivalent manner and sacrifices some rarely used features — such as eval() — in exchange for improved performance. HipHop includes a code transformer, a reimplementation of PHP's runtime system, and a rewrite of many common PHP Extensions to take advantage of these performance optimizations.

Some interesting facts: the project took nearly two years to come to fruition, and the idea for the project came at a Facebook Hackathon.  PHP creator Rasmus Lerdorf posted this on Twitter today: "HipHop on simpler template-style PHP pages probably isn't going to help you too much. It's not going to make your SQL queries any faster."

Check the original post around 7:30 PM Pacific tonight, Feb 2nd, for the official release.  Presumably, the project will be posted here, the place for all Facebook Open Source projects.