Archive for the ‘General’ Category

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Facebook Vs. Myspace

Monday, July 2nd, 2007

Some study just hit the news recently (that I lost the link to) about Facebook and Myspace demographics, and apparently Facebook appeals to more sophisticated users (college people, professionals), and Myspace appeals to kids. What a shock.

Theres a good reason Facebook is growing rapidly. Its not filled with crap like myspace is (and you can at least ignore the crap in facebook, while myspace throws it at you), and in the words of many of my peers… it now has the stigma of AOL. You know, how in the late nineties (and now) anyone who used AOL was a total n00b? Yeah, thats what myspace is now. Its for kids.

Of course, facebook keeps adding on more crap to the site… they better watch out, or it will be the same thing as myspace. We like the clean look and easy navigation.  Thats the #1 reason I’ve heard from people about why they use facebook. Its clean. Don’t screw with it too much.

Note: I swear I will have a more useful post next time. Like, about my new web stats program that I’m developing because I’m tired of the existing ones not telling me what I want to see so I have to run grep…

Links:

http://www.slate.com/id/2168872/
http://blogs.zdnet.com/social/?p=216

Posted in General | No Comments »

Fixing MySQL InnoDB problems on Gentoo

Sunday, July 1st, 2007

For some reason, transactions weren’t working on my MySQL installation on my Gentoo server, despite me creating the tables as InnoDB tables. I poked around and discovered that InnoDB wasn’t enabled for some reason, so I figured upgrading MySQL should do the trick. So I went ahead and upgraded my version to 5.0.40 and I got the following great error:

InnoDB: Error: ib_logfiles are too small for innodb_thread_concurrency 8.
InnoDB: The combined size of ib_logfiles should be bigger than
InnoDB: 200 kB * innodb_thread_concurrency.
InnoDB: To get mysqld to start up, set innodb_thread_concurrency in my.cnf
InnoDB: to a lower value, for example, to 8. After an ERROR-FREE shutdown
InnoDB: of mysqld you can adjust the size of ib_logfiles, as explained in
InnoDB: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/adding-and-removing.html
InnoDB: Cannot continue operation. Calling exit(1).

After doing a number of things including deleting the databases (I don’t have anything important in it at the moment, just for testing) and rebuilding them and other weirdness, its turns out all I needed to do was increase innodb_log_file_size to 2M from 1M and it was fine. So thats ok, and that error went away… in retrospect, it seems like an obvious solution. Very annoying that it wasn’t set to that by default.

But still “SHOW VARIABLES LIKE ‘have_innodb'” is showing DISABLED. So InnoDB is still not enabled. So to fix this thing, I go back in and rm -rf /var/lib/mysql , and then run emerge –config =dev-db/mysql-5.0.40… and when I log back into the mysql console, it works. Seriously, wtf?

Conclusion: InnoDB is a picky thing. Make sure your config is correct.

Posted in General, MySQL | No Comments »

Carputer Pictures Updated!

Thursday, June 28th, 2007

I’d like to point out that I just added some new pictures of the carputer and the AWESOME case that I was able to convince my dad to make! Seriously, the picture of the case does not do it justice. Heres one of them:

View of the carputer case.

You can view the other pictures of the linux carputer (including pictures of it mounted in my car, finally) at the carputer portion of the site.

Posted in Announcements, Carputer, General | No Comments »

Business tips you can learn from strippers

Wednesday, June 27th, 2007

Quite honestly, I don’t really read any blogs on a regular basis of any sort. However, I am definitely one of those types of peoples that start clicking on interesting links and reading them and wasting horrible amounts of time on them (this is why I avoid Wikipedia if I can).

Anyways , this is a great link I randomly found. 10 sales and marketing tips this guy learned from strippers. Enjoy.

http://www.wisecamel.com/2007/06/20/10-sales-and-marketing-tips-i-learned-from-strippers/

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Virtual Roadside on the Wii!

Friday, June 22nd, 2007

I’ve been busy working on stuff for Boys State for the last week, so pardon the lack of blogging. 🙂

I created the virtual roadside almost a year ago, and it was my first major effort with javascript. I tried to be standards compliant and such, but never realized how good of a job I did until recently when some friends and I were browsing the web with my friend’s Wii… so we went to the Virtual Roadside and to my utter surprise it worked flawlessly! How crazy is that?  Anyways, heres the link:

Virtual Roadside on the Wii 

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Samba over an SSH proxy

Sunday, June 17th, 2007

I’m at Boys State for the fifth year in a row as a staff member where I serve as the webmaster/technical support person. Its always a lot of fun here at MSU, especially with the gigabit ethernet that I have access to… simply awesome.

Anyways, I needed to do some development on my server at home, and really.. my favorite editing tool for PHP is Notepad++, hands down. So, I found this link that tells you how to setup a SSH tunnel that lets you connect to a samba server on the remote server. Pretty neat idea.. it tells you to install a virtual network adapter that you can do your port forwarding to. Anyways, heres the link:

http://www.blisstonia.com/eolson/notes/smboverssh.php

Posted in General, Howto, SSH | No Comments »

Google to be the “Next Great Satan?”

Wednesday, June 13th, 2007

Now, don’t get me wrong, I love google. I use their search engine for most of my searching needs (thanks to the Firefox browser bar), I have a gmail account that I’m starting to like to use more and more, I have adsense, I use Google Maps for any directions that I may need when my car computer and its GPS isn’t quite working… and the list goes on.

Google fails privacy study

Apparently, Google is one of the worst companies when it comes to privacy, which I certainly could believe. I mean, if I sign into gmail, then do a search from the firefox search box, then it shows my email address and ‘My recent search history’… which really, I don’t mind all that much, but I certainly don’t remember signing up for that. And theres a lot of instances where some google tool or another will show some search data or whatever somewhere that I never really expected it to show up.

I think right now Google is doing a lot of good things, and is moving their data around for a lot of good, useful purposes. I mean, the whole “Web 2.0” thing is about sharing and manipulating data in useful social contexts. However, theres a ton of potential for bad as well as good, and Google having bad privacy policies is just the start.

Right now, a lot of people hate Microsoft for a variety of reasons (many of which I think may be justified, many that aren’t as well). However, I think in the future Google will be the next target for people looking for something to hate. Disregarding their “Don’t be evil” mantra, you can only go so long with that kind of success before you start on the evil path. People used to fear big brother… well, with Google street view it almost is big brother now (yes, they’re not the first to do that).

All in all, I still love my Google tools, and you’ll have to pry them away from my cold dead hands until there is something better out there. But, soon enough Google will be Evil. And we’ll still use their tools, just like we use Microsoft Windows. Just watch.

Posted in General | No Comments »

Codepress vs. Editarea

Friday, June 8th, 2007

A short while ago I wrote an article discussing Codepress, and some of the problems I had with it (link to Codepress Problems). There were other issues that came up as well over the past few weeks, but I found a different javascript-based highlighter called Editarea. Editarea appears to have been around about the same amount of time as Codepress, except that it seems to be harder to find. Anyways, a short table of some of the features that they both have/don’t have.

  Codepress Editarea
Syntax Highlighting
Syntax Highlighting (web things like HTML, CSS, JS) Yes Yes
Switch syntax highlighting “On the fly” Yes No
Convienence Factors
Auto Complete Yes No
Auto Indent No Yes
Change Tab Size No No
CTRL-S support Simple patch Simple patch, has save button
Find/Replace No Yes
Indent selected blocks of text Complex patch Yes
Show Cursor Information (line, column) No Yes
Word Wrap No No
Copy/Paste Removes tabs Original Text
Feel
Speed Quick Slow
Bugs Stable Stable
Misc
Dynamic Line Numbers No Yes
Browser Support IE, Firefox, Opera IE, Firefox, Opera
Ease of integration Easy, has install notes Easy, has more documentation and options

So, who wins? Right now, I say Editarea is winning, since Find/Replace, good copy/paste, and block indenting are all critical features that you don’t realize you’re missing until they’re gone. However, I feel that in the future both editors will continue to improve significantly. Hopefully they solve the tab size problem.. 🙂

Note: While writing this, I found yet another syntax highlighting editor with no official name at http://marijn.haverbeke.nl/highlight/ . This one isn’t quite as nice looking as Editarea or Codepress, BUT it does appear to do word-wrapping nicely. I’ll have to look into it more.

Posted in General, Javascript | 1 Comment »

Zombie Risk

Monday, May 28th, 2007

My roommate and some friends came up with the idea of “Zombie Risk” a couple of years ago, but I think its still worth mentioning. He had it posted as a PDF for the longest time, but its now on his blog. Funny thing is, I still haven’t gotten around to playing it…

Check it out: http://jonathanryan.org/2007/05/28/zombie-risk/

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Awstats and 1and1.com logfiles

Monday, May 21st, 2007

I use 1and1.com for my web hosting, and they provide raw dumps of the apache logs for the website. Which is great, because you can do whatever analysis on them and it works nicely.. except for two things:

  • They don’t use a standard LogFormat directive
  • After about 6 weeks, the oldest log files get deleted

So, after much trial and error, I figured out a decent way to use Awstats to do my log analysis. I wrote a cron job that runs every monday morning (had to modify my crontab from the default), which basically downloads the latest logfile from my 1and1 account, and then runs awstats on it. It sounds pretty trivial — but 1and1 names their logfiles in the format access.log.[week].tar.gz.. which works until the year rolls over. So I added some logic in there to intelligently rename the files like access.log.[year].[week].tar.gz.

You can download the awstats 1and1 cron job here.

To use it, you need to be running Linux, and have awstats installed. You will need to modify some of the parameters of the cron script, but its decently commented. Additionally, your awstats configuration file needs to have the following two directives in it:

LogFormat= “%host %other %logname %time1 %methodurl %code %bytesd %virtualname %refererquot %uaquot %otherquot”

LogFile=”gunzip -c $(for i in `ls -rt /home/awstats/roadside/`; do echo /home/awstats/roadside/$i; done) |”

Just make sure you replace /home/awstats/roadside with the directory that you want to place your logfiles. Refer to the script for more documentation.

Note: The biggest problem I have with it is that it only updates once a week. I played with doing it every day, but then awstats tended to drop/ignore records that were out of sync, and it seemed to be better to have complete stats instead of having them updated every day. If you have a good solution for this, let me know!

Posted in General, Howto, Linux | 1 Comment »

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