Category: Computing

Global Warming Effects Geeks Too

In the area where I live (and work) it has been so hot for quite while now. Since I am working in an air-conditioned office at work and in my home office I did not really realize how seriously the heat has become until I received multiple alerts from my SMART monitoring software.

Seagate disks have an extra SMART attribute BE, which means the number of °Celcius before the temperature of the drive reaches 100 (boiling point). The threshold is set to 45 by Seagate, which means that if BE value reaches 45 it is bad for the drive. This attribute balances with C2 (temperature). For example if the drive temperature is 40, C2 will read 40 and BE will read 60. This means that it takes 60 °Celcius more before I can boil water with the hard drive.

My Seagate Momentus has been reaching 55° Celcius for quite a while, and this means that the special attribute reading is now 45 – SMART failure. I am not too worried but I did get myself a notebook cooling pad.

SMART Failure

To make things worst, on Saturday night after a fun night with a bunch of close friends celebrating my birthday, the 2 drives connected at the primary channel on my development PCs started to have problems. This is based on logs as I went to sleep after reaching home that night. It was on Sunday morning I realized what have happened.

After some testing I found that the IDE cable was at fault. Pheww! Luckily not the disks! So I got myself some new IDE cables and now it’s running fine. This is what happen when the kernel can’t write to the disks:

crazyload.jpg

The processes keeps on hanging there waiting for their turn to write. I am however not very sure that heat can damage IDE cables as I have never heard of this being mentioned anywhere before.

Now I am in the process of scratching my head thinking on what to do to cope with this heat problem at my home office. Any ideas?

WP-Cache and GoDaddy Hosting

I have several blogs hosted on GoDaddy servers.

If your WordPress blog is hosted on GoDaddy hosting, do not use the WP-Cache plugin or your site will intermittently produce Error 500 (Internal Server Error). I can’t spot the error even when I enable the error logs – there seems to be none!

I’ve heard similar complaints from other GoDaddy hosting users. One thing I am sure about is that the problem is not because of the combination of WP-Cache and WordPress 2.1.3 as I have blogs hosted elsewhere that works fine with this combination.

I guess I will have to dig deeper… when I can find the time! Anyway the server speed and stability so far is good without WP-Cache – which is what we want to achieve by caching the pages. Hopefully the blogs do not overload the server anytime soon.

Imation Disk Manager II

A funny story. I just bought myself a 4GB flash drive to substitute my old 128MB Imation flash drive. So I was trying to format the Imation drive when I found a big loophole to the software.

The Imation flash drive comes with a firmware that automatically creates an executable to run the Imation Disk Manager II software. You can make the whole disk public, separate the disk to 2 partitions (public & secured), and the whole disk secured.

imation1.jpg

For the secure partition you’ll need to run the software and enter a password if you want to access the files in it. I am not in the hacking business so I have no idea how secure it actually is. But this is another story, not about the secure partition.

After I have copied the files to the new location, I simply execute the software and it let me reformat the entire disk without asking for a password. Easy, but dangerous. If the drive falls into the hands of somebody clueless (say your 4 year old brother) or someone with bad intentions, you can say goodbye to your data πŸ˜‰

imation2.jpg

I was actually looking for looking for the Imation Swivel Pro flash drive but no shop in Low Yat have the 4GB version. They only have the 2GB version. I surely don’t think that the Imation Clip Flash Drive is available over there!

In the end I got myself a Sandisk Cruzer Micro 4GB drive which is a U3 compatible drive. Now I have Portable Apps and U3 in one drive πŸ™‚

Unsolicited Mails

I hate it when I receive unsolicited mails such as this one. I have never registered for any services by this company, and most importantly I only use my disposable emails from Yahoo! to register for any untrusted services in the Internet.

So this is a human imbecile who harvested my email. I already have 2Mbps broadband. I was thinking of bombing their email with like a million messages a second but considering today’s computing and storage power I think it will just be useless and wasting my precious time.

spambroadband.jpg

Hmm… This low life company (so called Broadband Multimedia) is located in KL and have branches in Johore and Penang. I will never be a customer of a company who spams me without me asking for it. Never ever. I am guessing ez-marketing is an affiliate or a subsidiary who is specially created to spam Internet users. 😑

Hosting: Responsibility of Customer or Provider?

This post is specially dedicated to Exabyte’s latest customer newsletter, which provide very useful information on how customers could prevent servers from overloading and causing service downtime.

I do agree with what Exabytes have to say, and it is true that I noticed that when the services were down, it was indeed caused by processes using too many CPU and memory resources. However it must also be noted that not all users are efficient programmers, and sometimes the codes simply made to achieve a certain goal without considering the impact to the server resources. This is the user’s fault.

I guess you know that there is a big BUT coming: when I experience service downtime I can see that many many cron (task scheduler) jobs are running out of control on the server. Some of them were even a few weeks old. The processes are obviously user cron jobs. In this case there is a lack of policing activity from Exabytes. When a service is down, the engineers simply restart the service and not do any investigation on what caused the overload.

After receiving an email confirming that the service is already up, I usually go in and check the zombie processes and they are still there, hogging MySQL and CPU resources.

We need to keep in mind that not all users are technical and have shell access like me, and they might not even know that their application / cron job is causing any resource problems. So IMHO it’s the provider’s responsibility to alert users if such case happens.

Now I only serve images on the server, and the server in US actually checks if the user is from Asia and if the Exabytes server is up. If it’s up then the images will be served from there. If not then users will have to wait for images to load a little longer.

Click on continue reading to read the rest of this post.

Continue reading Hosting: Responsibility of Customer or Provider?

Secure Your Wireless Network

Since a couple of months I’ve heard quite a lot of concern in the Internet about Wi-Fi security. The WEP encryption standard has been widely known and easier to crack. This means that a guy next door can easily sniff your packets and break into your wireless network after he manage to get your key.

WPA was an interim solution to cope with this problem, which was later finalized by WPA2.

I have less time nowadays to look into such matters but I do realize I have to do something about it. Not that I suspect my neighbors hacking into my wireless connection, but then again who knows?

After work yesterday I poked around my WRT54G v2.2 and see whether I can implement WPA2 in my own wireless network. I was using Sveasoft’s Alchemy as my firmware and the highest security level I can set is WPA. I was not satisfied and do some more research until I find DD-WRT which is based on Alchemy, meaning it should have all functionalities of Alchemy, and much more. WPA2 security is indeed included.

Continue reading Secure Your Wireless Network

Portable Application – A Reality

Not everything that you dream of can become reality. But one of my oldest dream has come true. I really wanted that my frequently used applications can be brought along anywhere I need them, and be used in any computer I want to.

I found PortableApps. It can be used as a suite, and can be used individually. And the software list is great, comprising of most important software you’ll ever need. Well, almost. Obviously huge software such as graphic design software is not in the list (yet).

Coupled with my Maxtor OneTouch III Mini, it’s going to be a portable powerhouse. Here’s a screenshot of PortableApps running from my 128MB USB thumb drive.

PortableApps

Bad Domain

I just tried to register to Chitika and Nuffnang and they both rejected my email address with this domain – @romantika.name

I thought all systems have updated the checking code to include .name as well, as it has been around for quite a while now.

Invalid email

Well I sent them an email to notify about this glitch. I think they’ll want to update, as this decreases frustration when bloggers with .name domain try to register.

Update: My email to Nuffnang bounced went through but I think the error I received was due to forwarding to multi recipients (like what I usually do for important email addresses). In this case, Timothy’s mail address was unreachable.

This message was created automatically by mail delivery software.

A message that you sent could not be delivered to one or more of its
recipients. This is a permanent error. The following address(es) failed:

timothy at netccentric.com
(ultimately generated from admin at nuffnang.com.my)
retry time not reached for any host after a long failure period

—— This is a copy of the message, including all the headers. ——

Return-path: <ady at romantika.name>
Received: from [206.190.53.33] (helo=smtp108.plus.mail.re2.yahoo.com)
by server.nuffnang.com.my with smtp (Exim 4.63)
(envelope-from <ady at romantika.name>)
id 1Hawvh-0007WZ-9g
for admin at nuffnang.com.my; Tue, 10 Apr 2007 00:41:22 +0800

Oh well no big deal. I’ve registered using another email anyway πŸ˜‰

Update: I received a reply from Nuffnang. Well done, people. Good speed.

Automated WordPress Backup

Since I am maintaining several WordPress installation now, I feel that it is quite a tiring chore to backup the databases every now and then. I used to do it once a week, and it is even a recurring event in my pocket PC. It was WordPress Database backup 0.8 and every time I clicked on the link on the plugin page, the site is no longer there. I thought Skippy was doing maintenance and because of other commitments I let the thought go.

A few days ago, I was thinking of writing an automated plugin, and I searched for it first not to reinvent the wheel. I found it at a different site: http://www.ilfilosofo.com/blog/wp-db-backup, and learned that the plugin has changed hands from Skippy (Scott Merrill) to Austin Matzko.

I was excited to learn that the new plugin support the cron hook provided by WordPress 2.1. Yay! And the plugin worked flawlessly:

WP DB Backup

One thing you might want to take note is that the cron event is not a real, system cron event but it is triggered when your site is accessed. I noticed that when I installed and configured the email function on a newly set up installation (hence no traffic) it didn’t work until I access the site.

The plugin can also be configured to save the backup files to the server, but of course this is not recommended because of security reasons.

Have a try, I believe you’ll love it. However do remember to also backup your image files separately!

Another Reason Not To Host In Malaysia

Would you register your blog if the Government ask you to? Although I rarely write about any sensitive issues related to the Government, I have to express myself on this one.

So now Malaysian Government is planning to make it compulsory for bloggers to register themselves. Here is an article from The Star: Bloggers may have to register

According to another this news in The Star Online, “… plan to register all bloggers using locally hosted websites …”. If this is true, I am not related anymore since I moved out from Malaysia hosting. So was my decision to move from Exabytes the correct decision to make?

We have to wait for the official announcement from the Government.

My opinion is that this is entirely not necessary. From what I see now the Government is creating another enemy, instead of embracing bloggers for a better country. Why can’t the Government take it as a challenge to make things better, or even take it as the voice of the people living in this country? There must always be a reason why people talk about bad about the Government, not only in Malaysia. A Malay proverb: Kalau tak ada angin takkan pokok bergoyang which means exactly that.

And really, this is the classic case of kerana nila setitik rosak susu sebelanga (because of one bad thing/person the entire group receives bad reputation).

So after this there should not be any question anymore why Malaysians do not host their website within the country. Not that the service is good anyway.

As usual I include the original news below in case the original article is no longer available.

Continue reading Another Reason Not To Host In Malaysia

Bye, Exabytes

It has become worst since these last few days. Mails are missing, and site is not accessible many times. I’ve set up server monitoring at host-tracker.com and I receive on average 6 downtime alerts per day, with monitoring triggered every 30 minutes.

I’ve seen people writing about my plugin said “if you can’t access the site, try again later“. And my AdSense stats reveals that very little impression made meaning that many people are having problems to access this site, and 4 others I have set up in this server.

Accessing this site is slow, very slow. I have to do something about it now.

As I have SSH access to the server, I can see so many cron jobs that have been running for a few days, not finishing its job. One thing about Exabytes’ servers is that they have a lot of features and allow people to do things that many overseas hosting company does not allow you to do. That’s a good thing except that when a user do something stupid, there’s nobody to look over the problem.

Well, the Engineers are fast when you report something, and they are doing a good job in reactive work. But I don’t see any proactive work being done. Once I reported that the MySQL server is taking a lot of load and freezing and asked them to check which user is doing this (even if it is myself), so that it can be prevented in the future. All they can say is that the MySQL server is now running fine.

Even though it is not downtime, it is certainly close to one. The server load sometimes goes as high as 34 (this is not percentage, this is a 1 minute average load on a UNIX machine – number of process fighting over CPU resources).

pangkorload.jpg

And I don’t think they are going to do anything about it. I am not sure how many domains are hosted on this particluar server but I am guessing there are a lot. I checked PHP’s max_execution time using CLI and it is set to 30 seconds. So why does the ones running from cron did not die?

Continue reading Bye, Exabytes

JavaScripts getElementsByName – IE Vs Firefox

A little coding story. I spent quite some time to figure out what’s wrong with my code. Consider the following code:

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<html>
	<head>
	<script type="text/javascript">
	function getElements()
	{
		var x=document.getElementsByName("myInput");
		alert("First Element value is: " + x[0].value);
	}
	</script>
	</head>
 
	<body>
		<div id="myInput"></div>
		<input name="myInput" type="text" size="20" value="1" /><br />
		<input name="myInput" type="text" size="20" value="2" /><br />
		<input name="myInput" type="text" size="20" value="3" /><br />
 
		<input type="button" onclick="getElements()" value="How many elements named 'myInput'?" />
	</body>
</html>


Firefox will correctly alert you with “First Element value is: 1”
IE in the other hand will alert you with “First Element value is: undefined”

Why is that so? Because there exists a div with the same id myInput. In this case the JavaScript clearly uses getElementsByName. Can’t IE differentiate between Id and name?

FeedBurner Feed Replacement

If any one of you just updated to the newer version of WordPress, make sure that you also update to the latest version of the plugin.

A fellow blogger encountered this error on WordPress 2.1.x yesterday, as he still had the version 2.1 of the plugin.

This is caused by the removal of generate_page_rewrite_rules function in WordPress 2.1

I checked the 2.1 version of the plugin and indeed it is calling to the function at line 43. Version 2.2 of the plugin had this removed.