Category: Computing

$700,000 AdSense Check

It’s official. This morning at home I switched on my machine, browsed on LiewCF, saw some posts, followed a link, and fell off my chair.

I am talking about this post.

The check’s total value is $901,733.84 (Canadian Dollars). That’s the check for 2 months. This guy would be a millionaire already if he is in Malaysia. Just think of that… more than RM1 million monthly! It’s not really weird since his site has been up since 2001.

This is really a good spirit lifter, especially since my own AdSense earning is waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay lower than that.

Go to cheques-gallery.blogspot.com to see more checks.

I will send mine in when the value will not embarrass me 😉

Iceweasel

iceweasel_icon.png

Have you ever heard of the browser named Iceweasel? Of course not, if you’re not using Debian. One of my machine at home is running a Debian Etch installation (my torrent box), and a few days ago I ran apt-get upgrade to upgrade the packages.

I was quite annoyed at first, as it’s trying to install a new package (not to mention the huge size) but I let it anyway. Earlier today I launched the web browser in my Xfce and Iceweasel was loading…

Iceweasel is a rebranded Firefox, and exist in 2 independent projects: one by Gnuzilla, and the other one by Debian.

Iceweasel was created since Mozilla demanded that Debian complies to some of the policies and terms that Debian finds unacceptable.

The other products are also re branded. Thunderbird became Icedove and Seamonkey became Iceape.

The current release of Gnuzilla IceWeasel is based on the 1.5.0.7 version of Mozilla Firefox, while the current version of Debian Iceweasel is based on the 2.0.0.1 release of Firefox.

deer_park_globe.png

The most obvious reason for this name change was that Mozilla demanded that Debian retain all branding from Mozilla if they were to continue using the Firefox name. However, because of the Debian Free Software Guidelines that said no non-free artwork and plugins are allowed, they were unable to comply. This generic, non-branded icon on the right was used for Firefox in Debian.

What I can see so far is that only the name changed. All of my plugins can still be used and upgraded normally. As for my active machines, however I always use the extracted package from Mozilla so there would be no way I would realize about the existence of Iceweasel.

Iceweasel. Cute name?

RegisterFly Gets Ditched By eNom

One little, meaningful email from my mailbox:

This is a formal notice to owners of domains which have been registered through eNom via its reseller, RegisterFly.com.

YOU MUST TAKE ACTION NOW TO RETAIN FULL MANAGEMENT RIGHTS TO YOUR DOMAIN NAME.

Although you purchased your name at RegisterFly, eNom is the actual registrar of record for your domains. As we are severing our relationship with RegisterFly, we are aware that this may have an impact on you as the domain owner.
Therefore we would like to offer this opportunity to assist you in securing control of your domain name directly with eNom.

Over the last year, eNom has become aware of an increasing number of complaints from dissatisfied RegisterFly customers.

As an eNom reseller, RegisterFly is contractually bound to adhere to certain standards of customer service in a speedy and diligent manner. Therefore, effective immediately, we have terminated RegisterFly as a reseller of domain names through eNom.

eNom has come to its senses, as when people buy domains from RegisterFly, eNom’s name gets displayed as well. It used to be like that; now RegisterFly is a fully accredited registrar by its own. The question is, isn’t there any control or qualification rules needed by ICANN to allow a company to be an accredited ICANN registrar?

Update: It turns out that when the domains are transferred to eNom we get an extended renewal for free! A domain I had which expired on the 17th Jan 2007 was renewed even though I was ready to let it go. Maybe this is a sign, and I should do something with that domain?

Update: It turns out that the domains are indeed expired. They keep it for themselves, the expired date shown on a whois query is one year later but the system says it’s expired. 🙂

Frustration With Exabytes

Between 00:20 to 02:10 Malaysian time (16:20 to 18:10 GMT) the Apache service on the server hosting this site was down. I know that only Apache was down due to the fact that I can’t access the webites using the web browser but I can access FTP, SSH, SMTP, and POP. Here’s what I put inside the form for Exabytes technical support:

Hi

We can’t access the site using HTTP. Apache may be down. I can access FTP, SMTP, SSH, and POP. I realized that there was a problem with the network at the data center as described in https://support.exabytes.com/index.php?_m=news&_a=viewnews&newsid=209 but this problem will cause outages on all services, not only HTTP.

Just letting you know as you may not realize Apache is down.

Thank you.

And the reply I received surprised me:

Dear Ady,
At the moment, our network had high latency.
Our network engineers are currently working on this issue.
You may refer to:
https://support.exabytes.com/index.php?_m=news&_a=viewnews&newsid=209

If you have any enquiries, please do not hesitate to contact. Thank You.
Best Regards,
KM Chow
………………………………..
System Engineer,
Exa Bytes Network Sdn Bhd

With an excellent customer support record so far (at least for myself), I was surprised that this Engineer (?) can’t read well. He shouldn’t have repeated the URL I already mentioned. This somehow implies that the customer can’t read and the reply really looks like a template.

I am hosting at Exabytes Malaysia due to the fact that the customer support is fast, and my access to the server is very fast. But right now I am thinking of moving my blog elsewhere. Too bad some of other sites I host here must stay due to the fact that they are targeted to Malaysian customers and the access is fast.

Thanks, Daddy

Well, this post is not about my dad but about GoDaddy. Tonight, after my continuous disappointment with RegisterFly I decided to buy some domains from GoDaddy. I am still very impressed with their system. Top level automation. For my story I will need the following image to assist me.

GoDaddy

As their promotion mentioned: Private Registration just $4.99 or FREE when you register three or more domains!

Even though I didn’t really need private whois information, it was quite a good offer especially with .com domains priced at USD6.95. So I went and add 3 domains to my cart, clicking the “private” button. That went well – all of the private registrations (rows 4-6) were inserted with cost of 0. At this moment all three domains were at their full prices, so my total cart amount was USD23.64.

Next I simply added a .info domain which costs me USD1.99. Nothing special about it, just the low price but I still get the free private registration. My cart now holds USD25.88.

Next, I needed a simple hosting preferably with unlimited domains so I signed up for a year of budget Linux hosting. That costs USD43.05 (3.59 x 12). The most exciting part here is that the first domain I registered (row 1) became USD1.99 as they promised with the hosting package: Your Domain is Just $1.99 With This Purchase. My total then was USD63.97.

Going further, I was ready to checkout and pay with my PayPal but I remembered a discount code provided by BLAUGH. So I entered it and further obtained 10% discount (even though 10% should be USD6.397 I was given USD5.20 – must be some other calculations). It brought my total to USD58.77.

If I consider my hosting to be paid in full (USD43.05) I only paid 58.77 – 43.05 = 15.72 for my two .com, a .net and a .info domain 😉

I was (am) happy. I would really recommend this service to everyone. And immediately after paying, I can already check my whois, and manage my brand new domains.


www.godaddy.com

By the way, RegisterFly responded to my ticket about domains not registered (see related link), and they say it was a problem with traffic load being too high. That’s a bad excuse.

Connect To Me Via LinkedIn

There’s a new service in town: LinkedIn

It’s a connection building site, more or less the purpose is like those of Ringo or Friendster but targeted to the professional community. It have a paid option where you can see more business information about other people in the community. The site looks professional and the system works really well.

If you ask me, this is a very good opportunity for you to get linked to others and find out if anyone is interested in your expertise. I does not matter if you’re still a student – the system supports it too. Maybe you’ll be able to secure a job after graduation, or even find a place to do your industrial training. As for me, well if there are opportunities to work abroad or remotely I would certainly be interested 😉

Connect to me now: http://www.linkedin.com/in/romantika. Drop me an invitation using my email ady [at] romantika [dot] name

This is not a paid post, and I will not gain anything from this except for valuable networking and contacts.

RegisterFly Woes V2.0

Urgh… RegisterFly did it again. Although I have officially become a GoDaddy customer, I still have like USD30+ in my RegisterFly account so I decided to spend the money on some domains I have in mind. Guess what? I registered and paid for the domains on the 5th of January 2007 but until today there’s no sign of the domain in any whois and they remain free for registration.

So, if someone were to buy those domains from other registrars they still can. It’s so stupid and disappointing especially since they took my money when I registered, and now that I want to use it they don’t exist!

I sent them a ticket two days ago, and until now there’s still no reply. That’s normal even though they boast of 24/7 support on the top of their page. Maybe I should try calling their support number.

Things ain’t that bad as I registered some not so very critical domains… and I can always buy them somewhere else as they have not been registered. 😉

Useful WordPress Plugin: WordPress Suicide

WordPress Suicide is a useful plugin, particularly if you are running tests on your freshly installed WordPress.

Also, if you are trying to import your posts and comments from the New Blogger this could prove useful – if you are unlucky to have problems during your import. Some people succeed the first time, but some do have problems.

As for the importer, I am trying to find time to update it to include features that were requested by users. Currently I can only fix important bugs, if found. It’s currently in version 0.5.

If I had found this plugin earlier I would have recommended it too.

1TB Hitachi Hard Drive

After 51 year from the introduction of the first hard drive by IBM in 1956 (5MB in capacity), Hitachi has released a 1TB hard drive. For the technical readers, 1TB = 1024GB = 1048576MB. That’s a huge amount of data, and if the hard disk crashes and you don’t have any backups or a RAID setup, you’ll end up kneeling down and crying over your lost data. And just imagine what’s the cost for data recovery service…

Hitachi 1TB Box

In the future if I even consider buying disks this big, I’ll surely buy by pair and setup RAID.

The consumer version of the Hitachi drive is named Deskstar 7K1000 while the two other versions (which will be released later – 2nd quarter) are called CinemaStar for DVR boxes, and unknown name for enterprise with certified MTBF.

The disk contains 5 platters, in which each carries 200GB. The 7200 rpm Serial-ATA drive will have 32MB data buffer. It will be available in SATA 3.0Gb/s and Parallel-ATA 133 interfaces.

Of course, this big capacity drive was achieved by Perpendicular Recording.

For further reading this technology go to http://www.pcworld.com/article/….

Whatever it is, I am sure that late Reynold Johnson will be very happy with what has evolved from his invention and how it has helped mankind.

Thanks for Azidin for the heads up.

Google Analytics Plugin Not Showing

Well, this is not a complaint to the great plugin, but for some themes.

Themes like Intense, and AquaGreen does not have any wp_footer call so the tracking code will not show. How to fix it?

Open up themes/[themename]/footer.php and add <?php wp_footer(); ?> before </body> resulting in:


<?php wp_footer(); ?>
</body>
</html>

Hope this helps. I discover this after 5 minutes of head scratching. 😉

Blogger Moves Out Of Beta

blogger.jpg

Blogger is now out of Beta: www.blogger.com. However I tried my Blogger Beta Importer and it still works 🙂

I think this is because the importer depends on the RSS provided by the New Blogger. Perhaps I should change my importer’s name to New Blogger import?

My true wish is that to have that importer being able to integrate with WordPress importer control panel officially or unofficially but I just don’t have the time to look into WordPress code yet eventhough I periodically checks out the code from the subversion repository. One of my blogs run 2.1-alpha3 and there are many improvements I do like a lot such as the image push to editor and the visual and code editor on the same screen!

IMHO importing from RSS is much efficient than the legacy method of logging into Blogger, publishing the template and extracting from there. But of course, a simple change on the RSS output and the importer will not work 😉

Why WordPress

For those who are still thinking whether or not to migrate from Blogger to WordPress, here’s a good insight by Anita Campbell. Although it was written more than a year ago, it’s still relevant.

Blogger (non-beta) users will be able to use the built-in import function and while you’re at that you might want to take a look at this best practices when moving from Blogger to WordPress, by Tom Sherman.

For Blogger Beta, you can use the script I wrote and still use the same technique described by Tom so that permalinks to your blogger pages will be redirected to your new WordPress site. I have not tried it yet, and since I am sleepy coming back from night shift I think I’ll let you try it and let me know 😉

See ya around.

First Blogger Beta Import

Following the post Import Blogger Beta to WordPress, here is a working example after an import.

Before: homemakerdiary.blogspot.com (Blogger)
After: www.homemakerdiary.com (WordPress)

hmd.jpg

(Images are imported using the plugin mentioned earlier)

P/S – to my current one and only web development client, I am doing this as a hobby during breaks. Please be assured that the real work is progressing well and hopefully by Christmas we can launch it 🙂

Import Blogger Beta to WordPress

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As I have not heard anything about the solution to this problem, I wrote a script. This script is a simple but powerful 😉 script which extracts the posts and comments from RSS feeds at blogger.com.

Instructions:

Copy the script to your main WordPress directory and run it (http://your.name/blogger-beta-import.php). The options are self-explanatory. This means you can customize the category and user before importing.

Warning:

This script represents a security hazard if left on the server. Once you are finished, delete it. Don’t even rename or save a copy on the server. The script does not honor WordPress authentication and checks, but utilizes some of WordPress’ functions.

Limitations:

  • No handling of images (stay on blogger server)
  • Comments will have the names but not email or URL – limitation with RSS from Blogger
  • Unlikely to work if you use other comment systems
  • You need to enable RSS feed for comments – very important!

As for images, they will stay in blogger.com but I suggest you download them at once to your server as Blogger does not allow hot-linking (images will be blocked). You don’t have to do it one by one, you can use this plugin by Notions: Blogger Image Import. I’ve tried it and it worked well. One thing is that it depends on CURL to download images – servers without this extension will not execute the script. Let me know as I have a workaround for this, provided that your PHP version is later than 4.3.0.

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