Ramblings of a seasoned SysAdmin

Google Maps Now With Malaysia Map

Yes I know I know… the title sounds weird. Remember the days when loading Google Maps you can only see the satellite images? Well, if you click on “Map” or “Hybrid”, no useful information was shown.

Those days are now over. I jumped up today at the office when I saw that the Map button now will bring you a much needed detail – road names. Behold! The following is a snapshot of Multimedia University in Cyberjaya where even the small roads inside the university compound are labeled.

Google Map MMU

Even the small street where my home is located has a label now (not shown). How cool is that!?

And if you miss that satellite image, you can always click on Hybrid and you’ll see the satellite image with the road maps on top. Following is a shot of the famous crossroad in the Center of Cyberjaya.

Google Maps Cyberjaya

My US readers… please bear with me while I enjoy this new feature that has just been made available in my country. You obviously had yours some time ago 😉

Turn Off Your Scooter Engine

A few days ago I received a video via email where a little girl was left on a scooter by the father. She accidentally turned the throttle and the scooter shot forward. I found the same video in YouTube:

I really feel sorry for the little girl. It must’ve hurt like hell and she must be traumatized. So if you ever take your children on a scooter remember not to left them alone, and it is better if you turn off the engine and remove the key. She was lucky the scooter did not end up on top of her. The video is not funny at all.

On a side note, please always use helmets! As you can see in the video they don’t have any helmets with/on them.

I promised myself that I will never bring my kid on a motorcycle, with or without helmets.

Checking Limits on OpenVZ / Virtuozzo

Do you use virtual server hosting for your websites? It’s commonly known as VPS. Most hosting companies now uses Virtuozzo, a proprietary operating system virtualization product produced by SWsoft, Inc.

The OpenVZ project is an open source community project supported by SWsoft and is intended to provide access to the code and ultimately for the open source community to test, develop and further the OS virtualization effort.

A couple of months ago when I have not tried OpenVZ, a friend asked me about a problem he is facing with his VPS which is hosting streaming videos and receiving millions of hits per day. He received errors such as:

cannot fork
Error running script: not enough memory
Fork failed

Now that I have deep knowledge in OpenVZ I know what causes the problem. The problem is that his running software and services were using resources more than allocated by the hosting company. If you are using such service, one good way to check is by executing this command:

# cat /proc/user_beancounters

The output would look like this:

   uid  resource           held    maxheld    barrier      limit    failcnt
  101:  kmemsize         473318     927071    2752512    2936012          0
        lockedpages           0          0         32         32          0
        privvmpages        1611      62436       4915       5357         40
        shmpages              1         31       8192       8192          0
        dummy                 0          0          0          0          0
        numproc               9         15         65         65          0
        physpages           887      32985          0 2147483647          0
        vmguarpages           0          0       6144 2147483647          0
        oomguarpages        888      32985       6144 2147483647          0
        numtcpsock            0          4         80         80          0
        numflock              1          3        100        110          0
        numpty                1          1         16         16          0
        numsiginfo            0          3        256        256          0
        tcpsndbuf             0       7856     319488     524288          0
        tcprcvbuf             0      95460     319488     524288          0
        othersockbuf       6660       8880     132096     336896          0
        dgramrcvbuf           0       8364     132096     132096          0
        numothersock          5          8         80         80          0
        dcachesize            0          0    1048576    1097728          0
        numfile             168        399       2048       2048          0
        dummy                 0          0          0          0          0
        dummy                 0          0          0          0          0
        dummy                 0          0          0          0          0
        numiptent            10         10        128        128          0

These info are important because it is most likely that you can’t see what configurations your VPS is running with.

Simple meanings of the columns:

resource – name of the resource
held – current usage
maxheld – max ever used
barrier – soft limit of the resource
limit – hard limit where the VPS will never use more
failcnt – fail count

The most important thing to see is the failcnt column, where in an ideal situation you should see only zeros. In this case, you see that privvmpages have failed 40 times because I on purposely lowered the memory allocated for the VPS and run some programs.

You will never be able to change the resource allocation from within the VPS but at least you know what your problem is and is a good point of discussion with the hosting company.

And oh yes, the values are in 4k blocks which means that if the setting is 4915 the actual value is 19660k (4915 * 4k). Of course this is only applicable for some, and not for countable values such as numpty.

Good luck!

Does PageRank Matter?

As many of us has experienced, Google has finally slapped everyone who has paid links on their site. PageRanks have been stripped off by as much as 2 on most sites. A good example would be this site which has been penalized from PR4 to PR2. I am not complaining, since I never have any good chance to analyze my site to abide by all of Google’s quality guidelines.

This event makes me think on how PageRank really matters for websites. It matters because all of us make it so, by acknowledging the authority of the scheme. Hell, I know I will be happy if my PageRank gets a certain boost.

Google has announced for quite some time now, that they don’t like paid links. This is understandable because this kind of link will effect the PageRank and search results. However this is a critical move for many bloggers who makes money via paid posts where they are not allowed to include the rel="nofollow" tags in the links inside the paid posts. And to make things worst – there is a cyclic dependency: PageRank will be lower for paid bloggers, and paid bloggers are ranked by PageRank.

Being an occasional paid post writer myself I realize that many paid post operators uses and acknowledge the authority of external ranking systems such as PageRank and Alexa. The higher their rank, the better chance they get to grab those high value posts. Alexa is still alright, since it is based purely on traffic but stricter schemes like PageRank is sure a pain for those who have been seriously blogging for money.

And do not forget: advertisers seeking to put paid links on your site will also look at your PageRank! 😉

Once obvious thing for this site is the occasional paid posts, and the sponsored links. For now, I shall only put links from advertisers who agrees to allow the rel="nofollow" tag on their links. This way they will benefit from clicks and not from search engines. When I have the time I think I’ll look into the guidelines and use the Google Webmaster tool to ask for reconsideration.

How about you? How much does PageRank matter to you?

Firebug and Gmail

When I log on to my Gmail today, I received an error bounded by a red box that says “Firebug is known to make Gmail slow unless it is configured correctly”. I didn’t know that!

And as always, Gmail is nice enough to provide a simple workaround.

Firebug is an excellent add-on normally used by web developers so most people will not see this warning at all.

By the way did you notice that there’s a very big improvement in Gmail in terms of UI and also speed?

Buka Puasa & A Kid

On Thursday a close family friend invited us for buka puasa (break fast). We had a good time talking and enjoying the lovely food. As we were about to return home my better half mentioned Jaya Jusco and the family only little boy aged 2+ heard it and wanted to follow us.

I was worried because I have no experience with kids whatsoever. But we took him anyway with the permission of the parents. The kid name was Imran, and he’s such a nice little boy. At first we thought that he’s like every other kid and cry when the car started moving without his parents.

But he was indeed very serious. So since we made a promise (and it’s no good to break a promise to a kid) we brought him there. In the car he talked so much that he took my worries away. Once arrived he was so happy and as he promised he behaved like a very good boy! Amazing.

And I was happy he enjoyed every ride and machine he tried on (although we only let him play the safe ones). Not to make his parents worry so much, after about 1 hour we decided to bring him back and he didn’t resist much. Back at home he was so happy and jumped here and there it made me feel happy as well.

I actually enjoyed that 1 hour outing. After 4 years of marriage maybe it’s time for a kid? 😉

Busy Times & Work

I have been very busy for the past several weeks and I am expecting that I will be for the coming weeks as well. The reason is mainly that I have just changed my dayjob and this new place is a tough place to work in. Contrary to my previous place, it is so uptight and strict that I just feel so tired when I return home.

Previously, as soon as work ends at 5pm or so I still have the energy to go for a jog, swim, or even hitting a hundred balls at the driving range – and come back home working on some codes. Being able to keep my mind off worrying about the rules, I was productive but I simply can’t do the same thing now. As soon as I arrive home all my energy has drained and the bed is my best ally.

I had multiple offers at the end of September, 3 largest offers came from Mid Valley, Cyberjaya, and Singapore. Considering packages, career advancement, and commuting I chose Cyberjaya. 10 minutes to work is a blessing because I hate wasting my time in the car doing nothing productive. Singapore was an exciting opportunity as well but with all of the preparation that needs to be done I can’t make it a reality. Mid Valley was also promising in terms of career advancement but using the Kepner Tregoe® techniques it failed miserably on the 1 hour+ commute to work in a traffic jam.

WordPress 2.3 Plugin Compatibility

As everyone might have realized by now, WordPress 2.3 has been released. WordPress 2.3 contains many improvements mentioned in the release page, and one of the most critical change is to the database structure where several database has been removed and added. Relations are all different now, so plugin authors: check your plugins!

What I like is the Plugins/Plugin Compatibility/2.3 page in WordPress Codex. The list is by no means complete, but it’s a good start for you to see if the plugins you are using are effected by changes in 2.3.

My two plugins (Random Posts Widget and Collapsible Archive Widget) were also affected by the change, since I couldn’t find the suitable WordPress function to use for some of the things I needed to do. However I’ve fixed them to be compatible with 2.3 while maintaining backward compatibility to the 2.2.x series.

Please be careful when you download a plugin next time, and see the “Requires WordPress Version” and “Compatible up to” fields.

As for me, since I use a lot of custom plugins and also homemade ones, I’ll need to find the right time to upgrade 😉

Stuck Dog

Behind my house there are currently 3 dogs, owned by my neighbors. There used to be only one, but the other 2 have just been added to the family. I think they are renovating their fence or something, because the fences are torn open at the wall side behind the house.

Every now and then there seems to be a massive commotion going on and I have always thought that the dogs are fighting with each other. But today I realized that it was actually because one of the dog is stuck in between the fence. It’s funny but I feel sorry for the little guy at the same time.

This video was taken after it got tired trying to get loose. I wished I thought of taking a video before that and you can really see how the poor thing struggled.

Why I Set Up VPN On DD-WRT On My Router

Everyday I receive a massive number of emails from many sources and half of them are valid (i.e. not spams). And at certain times I receive huge attachments from friends with pictures or other things. With a normal Streamyx ADSL connection this is fine, but when it gets hiccups my email retrieval process normally gets interrupted in the middle (timed out). 90% of the time my Thunderbird go nuts and corrupted its own “state” database. This means that it “forgets” which message it has downloaded and which has not.

This will not be a big problem if I set my email client to “delete from server” each time but I set it to “leave on server” as an online backup. I know I know I am a freak. Because of this, the next time it retrieves, my email client will download every message from my Inbox (which is in the thousands because I still keep my emails since 1997). This is insane.

I needed a more robust solution and as a Linux geek I used fetchmail to download my emails to a local server and set it to “leave on server”. From my observation, it does not have the same corrupting effect as Thunderbird when a timeout occurs. Good, one problem solved. Next, I set my Thunderbird to retrieve email from the local server which is faster than a speeding bullet. OK, I exaggerated. I set it to “delete from server” where the server is the local server. Good, another problem solved.

Now I have my emails intact regardless of what the connection condition is.

But… when I am on the road I have a problem to retrieve my emails. I heard someone is shouting, “why the hell don’t you just use the webmail?”. When it comes to email, I think I have Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Except for GMail, I will need my Thunderbird to compose my emails.

This is when I realized that I can do something about it. I enabled a simple VPN server on my Linksys WRT54G router which I have flashed with DD-WRT. Here’s a complete guide that I followed: http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/PPTP_Server_Configuration.

I have never regretted since, but I do have to make sure that the connection to my home is stable enough. But please be warned that this will only work if the connection you are using allows PPTP pass through.

There you go, a story of someone having email OCD. What’s your excuse?

Oh BTW I also have a PAC (Proxy Auto Configuration) setting on my browsers so when there is a connection to the Squid box at home (the VPN is connected), it’ll utilize the cache. 😛

Do You Own An MP3 Player?

MP3 players today are as common as a discman or walkman used to be. Back then we have to carry a bigger pouch to pack in our CDs or cassettes, and each of them usually can carry only about 17 songs – and that was already considered many.

Today, with a device the size of a cigarette lighter and sometimes smaller you can pack hundreds of song and you can barely feel the weight. It’s the miraculous mp3 player. They come in all sort of shapes and colors a confused toddler just might think it is candy 😉

I have been toying with the idea of owning a good one (maybe an iPod?), with gigabytes of space to store my songs but until today even after spending much more on other devices I still never bought one myself. I only own a 512MB Creative Zen Neeon that I got for free last year.

What about you, what mp3 player do you currently use and what’s your dream device?

Four Months Later

Right, I have been occupied with so many things lately that I neglected this blog. September 2007 is one of the months this year with very low post count 🙁

Being subscribed to the Got Heroes forum, I received an exciting reminder this morning: Heroes Season 2 is going to start today! Chapter 1 of Season 2 is going to be aired tonight in the US, and that means I shall be able to watch it tomorrow! Chapter 1 is titled “Four Months Later”.

I am really looking forward to it, are you?

Potret Mistik

Tonight while doing some coding work, I turned on the TV and the satellite decoder was tuned to Astro Kirana. Since it is an old movie that I have never watched before, I decided to go along just to see what it is all about. As a matter of fact, I started writing this post at the last moment of the movie.

The movie is titled “Potret Mistik”, a production by Metrowealth Movies production and directed by A. Razak Mohaideen.

It is one of the dumbest movie that I have ever watched, and I am thankful I didn’t go watch it at the cinemas when it was released in 2005. The movie is filled with dumb and repetitive dialogs, and the chasing scenes are really dull and not exciting. What I am looking for is the thrill and suspense on what will appear in the next screen, not an old schizophrenic maid who chases people with a butcher knife. I mean, come on… the artist who were chased is a strong guy and he can at any time run faster than the old lady. It’s a different thing if you can really feel his fear, though. Most of the time in the movie, I was laughing and didn’t really see the point. I didn’t know what the director wanted me to feel – sorry? scared? amused?

I am one of the supporters of the Malaysian movie industry but these type of movie really make me think twice before booking another ticket for a Malaysian movie. Of course, I like all of the movies made by Yasmin Ahmad. I am starting to feel that my better half is right for not wanting to go along with me when I wanted to watch a Malaysian movie.

Among other movies that I still haven’t watch:

Waris Jari Hantu
Jangan Pandang Belakang

What about you? What do you think of Malaysian movies in general?