TOCPCs – The Elite Geeks Blog

… so the ancient Charles Babbage once authored. Data Validation is a very, very, very important aspect of any user facing application, be it a website, be it a program, be it a simple calculator. The data must be validated to ensure it conforms to the expected input, prior to being used for logic processes [...]

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There are many various languages about, and which one to use for a particular purpose is a decision in itself. I’ve got many choices when it comes to putting something together for a particular purpose, for example, recently, I’ve been using bash to handle simple tasks. PHP was my previous language of choice for anything, [...]

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I decided to use some of today to resolve an issue with MySQL Slave setup, where statements fail for various reasons. I could ignore the statements that fail – but that could be potentially dangerous – leaving with no slave backup at all. The next best option to ensure the database is up to date [...]

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A boo-boo! (See the end, I found a solution). I was testing an upgrade for MySQL, from 5.0 to 5.1, to gain Row Based Replication instead of Statement based replication (as statements are a cause of SBR breaking, and it doesn’t proceed til I tell it to). So, in my usual lazy, just do it, [...]

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I hit a small problem tonight, I wanted to make it possible for a GreaseMonkey Javascript running on one domain, to publish data to another site using GM_xmlHttpRequest. The problem was cookies. In order to recognise the person posting, the site requires cookies, and that’s just something XHR can’t manage outright by itself. So, I [...]

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After travelling 460KM today, I’ve discovered how annoying a hardware failure can be. My colocation box is a HP DL360, G3, so it’s not exactly bleeding edge, but it’s a fantastic server, does it’s job and does it reliably. Last night, we had a planned outage for just a short time to move the box [...]

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I was working on an issue being experienced by someone remotely attached to my asterisk machine, and found an abnormality. I use a realtime implementation to allow for easy addition of users and to have the data I want in MySQL (makes it easier to monitor activity in CDR, etc). The problem recently was as [...]

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Looking into the docs for Asterisk 1.6.0 for a solution to a NAT issue, you can find that asterisk reinvite has improved significantly in the later versions. Previously, you had to turn it off for peers stuck behind NAT, this is resolved in newer versions of Asterisk which attempt to determine if a peer is [...]

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Recently, I have been toying with Asterisk 1.6.0 to work in some new internal features that I want to leverage. One of the key features I took advantage of is the context option for each SIP peer. It is possible to exclude one group of users from calling another group by using contexts. Let’s say [...]

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After my last post, I attended the interview, and have remained on the edge of my seat waiting for a result. Then, after a short week wait, a response. It’s not a disappointing reply, but it’s not successful just yet. I made the short list for the second round of interviews, which being very soon [...]

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Recently I’ve put a lot of progress into completing my studies for the course I’m studying (Diploma in IT – Sys Admin). Much of the items are as I described several months ago, mindless paperwork describing something that you have done countless times already – but of course, in this day and age, certification is [...]

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I don’t find the end of a day providing client support rewarding. It’s actually quiet tiresome. It’s more fun providing support than it is assisting with product selection and sales enquiries, but client support doesn’t really leave one feeling the raw feeling of acheivement at the end of a day. I have just completed an [...]

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I’m currently developping an application, to allow for fast import of data, which is going to stem from a larger project to allow for better online service delivery. The accounting application used is one of the known brands of accounting applications – there’s only two in Aus, and it’s not MYOB. The company who develops [...]

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Today I was fixing a credit card gateway issue with someones website. What seemed to be the case was that a cart system was purchased, and just on the fly someone decided to break away one of the existing payment modules and slap something together which would work with eWay. The system was passed back [...]

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One of the reasons I can see spammers continually trying to connect to a server, is because they get rejected quickly, and have more than one bot to go and retry. I think the better solution to this issue (and issues related to SMTP auth attacks, and 550 errors), are having an error counter in [...]

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At the end of last year, I concluded that I would want my Diploma in IT, and was certain to acheive that. I enrolled into the course then, and have found that I have a total of 800 hours (in TAFE terms) of study to complete to get my Diploma in IT. The hours are [...]

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We took the car to the auto electrician today, and low and behold, the parts recycler gave us the wrong dang size electric window mechanism. So, tomorrow is going to be spent tracking down the right part, and then seeing if they can supply, if not, venturing a little further south to find one! The [...]

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I host a trivia room (well, two) on an IRC network, it gets a few visitors, and has a host of regulars and is a great room. I don’t have much involvement in it, it’s just running there, my partner does more with it then I do. The trivia room runs off a MySQL database [...]

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Google Analytics is a great Google service (from the company of “Do No Evil”), but, how useful is it really? They don’t seem to have much in the way of Adwords integration with Analytics for testing a complete visit from click on search engine through to complete sale, and even then, they don’t report adequately [...]

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I’m amazed when I see this sort of items appear in front of me. Some one paying thousands of dollars for a ‘web site’ and getting what amounts to automatically generated rubbish, or unplanned scripting errors and the like. The business today I spoke to had an issue with a website they paid $3,500 for, [...]

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I fixed my virtual hard drive . Now has a brillant (yet imaginary) 116GB of Free Space. Fantastic. The fix was to simply run resize2fs with it mounted in read/write mode, I kept assuming it’d need them not mounted, so was trying to resize it, when it wasn’t existing. I got some sweet speeds on [...]

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There are 3 ways to do things. Homer: The right way, the wrong way, and the Max Power way. Bart: Isn’t that just the wrong way, but faster. Homer: Yes. I’m reminded of that episode of The Simpsons each time I hear of someone trying to do something where something else is already available to [...]

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Virtual Machines are a great way at hosting multiple services, and keeping your overall costs low. Computers have become very much so beefed up that the grunt they have spends a lot of time idle, and only peak loads when you are doing intensive tasks, even then, they generally keep within 50% of the processors [...]

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There’s a few ways to do things. The first is the right way, the second is the wrong way, and the third, is perhaps a combination of both in a more interesting combination. When the right way doesn’t (or can’t) work, and the wrong way is not an option, you then need to figure out [...]

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I spent a bit of today RAIDing through the internets and digging for RAID info. Specifically what I want to do is upgrade the physical disks on my RAID array. Unfortunately, I can only have 2 physical disks, and both are used by my RAID setup, which mirrors data. So I sorted through some Google [...]

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That was a question put to me today. Well not exactly that, but a version of it. I got thinking. Do I code simply because its ‘something to do’? Nah. Not really. There’s plenty of other stuff I could do. Locally, I could do more and earn more, surely. So it’s not “something to do”. [...]

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I decided it was time to stop writing out 5 lines or more per MySQL query and instead, create a function to encapsulate that query, and run some tests on the result to determine a result to be returned back. The query is multi purpose, just like the original mysql_query. But, instead of, after the [...]

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Seeing the site run more today, has revealed that the accuracy of the monitoring is increasing considerably, to the extent that outages are at new lows. The outage log shows that in the last 24 hours, there have been just 3 outages in total, with the most notable being VitalTel, who went down at 9am [...]

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The excellent part of having identical (or near identical) hardware is when something cops a nice drink of Sprite, you can simply swap the components over, and power it up and your good to go again. You can’t generally do that when swapping between say an Intel 865PE chipset, and an Intel P35 chipset, simply [...]

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Unfortunately (and its very unfortunate), the update I planned to release tonight isn’t going to go ahead as planned due to an issue with a particular provider. The particular provider issue wasn’t determined until just recently, but has been fixed. The reason for the delay? Well, I was investigating that issue and the time it [...]

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