Jacques Marneweck's Blog

Evert mentioned that he is keeping his home directory in subversion.

I tend to have two setups. A full and basic home directory. Version controlled using subversion. Previously I used CVS.

The basic gets checked out at webhosts, etc. which I use. The full gets checked out at work and basically ensures that i have some level of sanity with my shells. I'm using svk to do revision control with subversion.

What's in my version controlled home directory:

• .screenrc
• .zshrc
• .zlogin
• vim settings

The only difference between the two currently is that the work one has a few extra directories setup. I tend to use svk for work.

Posted by Jacques Marneweck at 8:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Does anyone have a decent alternative to Bio Plus? Something that is all natural would be a good start.

Step back over a year to when I was working at Point45 Entertainment, Robby found some nasty tasting stuff which worked better than Bio Plus, but I don't know what it was called. All I know is that he used to source it from the Engen on the around the corner from Parliament in Cape Town.

Does any one have any ideas where I can source something which does not contain caffeine, is all natural and does not give you migraines when going 'cold turkey' from caffeine withdrawal? You might guess that I'm a coffee aficionado (is there such a thing?). I simply cannot resist a good cuppa when out and about which always contains caffeine as the decaf does not taste that great.

Posted by Jacques Marneweck at 10:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

It's crunch time at work. That dreaded time of the coding experience where one has to put in effort to get a project finished. What's weird is that crunch time is starting a week and a day early to get the project out the door tomorrow.

I've managed to drink over three litres of Lipton Ice Tea (Lemon flavour) while coding today. Surprise surpise I've managed to do 65 commits so far today since arriving at work this morning prepared for a bit of a code crunch although I've been coding on this particular project for since last week Tuesday.

I've got my two putty sessions open with one vim in split screen mode for editing two PHP files at the same time and the other putty session open editing the template logic for the application. It's starting to bring me back to my Point45 Entertainment days where we used to do code crunches and spend excessive time in the office working.

Going to go and crack open my first Bio Plus of the evening in a few secs and hit the coding again.

Posted by Jacques Marneweck at 11:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

At work, we are looking for back-end python developers. Pop me your CV and I'll forward it to the relevant people at work.

Ideally they are looking for python developers who have a solid understanding of Internet protocols, Python programming, OO Design and Unix development. Knowledge of Twisted or another event-based communications framework would be a distinct advantage.

You would be working from our offices in Cape Town, South Africa.

Posted by Jacques Marneweck at 12:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Lazyweb,

After much googling and yahooing, I'm busy looking for an open source installer which runs various installers as well as placing various files in directories and creating shortcuts to roll out some software to remote offices, without having to have skilled people installing the said software on the other side.

I'd ideally like to not have multiple files that need to be downloaded, just one.

UPDATE:
Ended up using two different installers, one which was recommended by Francois is Nullsoft Scriptable Install System which was used for distributing the python files excluding the python installation files and Paquet Builder 2.9 for bundling various python modules with python 2.3.2 and then getting it to first install python 2.3.2 and added custom actions to run the rest of the installers and wait till each installer is finished running prior to running the next installer.

Posted by Jacques Marneweck at 1:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It seems to me that I have turned into the bugmaster at work writing bug reports for software which has been developed for work.

Makes one realise that in certain cases that both the bug master and the developer overlook the obvious when things come to common modules getting out of sync, but that is another whole story.

Posted by Jacques Marneweck at 5:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

If you need to easily retrieve a x509 certificate from a remote webserver, the easiest method is:

Which you can then go and copy from the line starting with '-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----' to '-----END CERTIFICATE-----' into the www.example.com.crt file.

Posted by Jacques Marneweck at 5:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

What's new? Telkom support really stinks. They sell you these cheap ADSL routers from Marconi and the reset buttons do not work correctly on them.

Then you spend 9 minutes 48 seconds on hold with their irritating voice on hold message. I wonder what would happen if I rocked up first thing at Telkom Corporate and demanding that they swap their two junk ADSL routers out.

UPDATE:

Turn the power on the marconi ADSL POTS modem off. Push server cabinet key into the reset button and then turn the ADSL router on. Count to 20 and you should see flashing lights. The ADSL router then resets to 192.168.10.200 so reconfigure your machines network card to something in that IP range so that you can open http://192.168.10.200/ in your webbrowser.

Then reconfigure your ADSL router, remembering to disable SNMP (under SNMP community) or rename public if you really have to use it.

Change your root user password to something else the default of root as that is a security risk, explaining why so many ADSL logins have their passwords utilised by others.

Posted by Jacques Marneweck at 9:20 PM | Permalink

I've been looking for a project to test the mogilefs from Danga Interactive. I've finally found an internal project where we can utilise mogilefs to get rid of a bunch of rsyncing of ports distfiles on FreeBSD to using a pseudo proxy server sitting in front of two mogilefs processes.

It's going to take a few hours to write the pseudo proxy and populate the mogilefs instances. For those who don't know mogilefs is written in perl :)

Requirements

• http://www.danga.com/dist/Perlbal/Perlbal-1.01.tar.gz
• http://www.danga.com/dist/Danga-Socket/Danga-Socket-1.25.tar.gz
• http://www.danga.com/dist/MogileFS/client-perl/MogileFS-1.00.tar.gz
• http://www.danga.com/dist/MogileFS/server/mogilefs-server-1.00.tar.gz

I'm going to be hacking on this project tonight.

Posted by Jacques Marneweck at 5:15 PM | Permalink

Kasia has ten tips for new programmers. There are some tips contained within her top 10 tips which even old programmers should start following like documenting code to name one.

Posted by Jacques Marneweck at 10:13 PM | Permalink

So we have some Wacom Cintiq's at work which I've played with a little bit tonight just because the boss came back to the office with his dad and sister and wanted to demo so I booted up one of the other graphics department pc's and started working on drawing something while Rob demo'ed on the other cintiq.

Oh boy! These are awesome for drawing pictures on even though I haven't drawn much in years. I'm not good like the three musketeers in our graphics department hang they draw way better than me.

And still the boss won't consider allowing me to work in the art department. *sigh*

Posted by Jacques Marneweck at 2:19 AM | Permalink

I'm starting to think more and more that Internet Exterminator has not been made to follow web standards.

Getting a certain website at work to render decently in Internet Exterminator has made the HTML code bloat up by an added 20% of extra HTML code just to support IE and make the site look the same as it does in Firefox.

I just dislike IE even more!

Posted by Jacques Marneweck at 9:46 PM | Permalink

At work I have various collegues who believe in pulling practical jokes on each other.

One of the current one is that one of staff members toy donkey has been kidnapped during the early hours of the morning an a mysterious ransom note was placed as her desktop wallpaper and her home page on her webbrowser.

Highly ammusing none the less when she was trying to explain to various other colleagues that her donkey was kidnapped.

Posted by Jacques Marneweck at 10:59 PM | Permalink

I've decided that I'm actually going to try and learn more of the features of vim which would make it easier to use than having to fight with it all the time. There are various annoying little misfeatures which annoy me but don't annoy me to the point where I'm going to change the editor which I'm using to editor which I dislike even more.

Joey was meantioning that one should take a look at editing in vim which is quite useful. I'm hopefully going to get some time next week to pick our resident vim zealot in the office's brain a bit to get vim to work more efficiently for me. There are also notes on working with multiple windows in vim as well.

Posted by Jacques Marneweck at 10:11 PM | Permalink

Found a resource for annoying telesales people who don't do their research prior to phoning me and wasting my time trying to arrange a meeting to tell me why their company needs where I work to use their company etc. Quite ammusing!

The Direct Marketing sector regards the telephone as one of its most successful tools. Consumers experience telemarketing from a completely different point of view: more than 92% perceive commercial telephone calls as a violation of privacy. Telemarketers make use of a telescript - a guideline for a telephone conversation. This script creates an imbalance in the conversation between the marketer and the consumer. It is this imbalance, most of all, that makes telemarketing successful. The EGBG Counterscript attempts to redress that balance.

Posted by Jacques Marneweck at 4:05 PM | Permalink

Yeah it's been a long weekend. Work has been going hetically and I think I'm way too tired to do maths for making tables with images look decent. Prehaps it's just me the fact that I've not had any coffee since the morning. Normally I have a good couple of cuppa's of coffee during the day at work.

Reminds me of a couple of months ago before the big code slush to release a big project which was the accumulation of three months of coding and trying to keep web-standards compliant while keeping code which interacted with various other 3rd-party services and what not working according to the RFC.

Posted by Jacques Marneweck at 1:20 AM | Permalink

If anyone is using the Man3000 buffer boxes and has specification and/or technical documentation for these buffer boxes I would like to chat to you regarding how these buffer boxes work as I need to write my own software for analysing PABX data instead of using the useless Man3000 software which is full of integer overflows etc.

If anyone can point me in the wright direction seeing that Technical Information Systems do not have documentation according to the unhelpful lady on their support line. Also Hymax can't help either seeing that they only sell the buffer boxes from TIS. *sigh*

Continue reading "Anyone using the Man3000 Buffer Boxes?" »

Posted by Jacques Marneweck at 2:20 PM | Permalink

Busy learning another programming language which is fun in itself, but I tends to be a bit frustrating as I tend to think PHP a bit too too much.

Also need to break some habits and remember to indent my code.

Posted by Jacques Marneweck at 8:58 PM | Permalink

Received some good news today regarding my change of scenery. I'm starting work tomorrow which is good news rather than having to go for more job interviews.

I've also started learning some python which in a way is a good thing to know as I'll be able to hack up on various other things rather than my normal php and perl and occasionally c.

Posted by Jacques Marneweck at 11:10 AM | Permalink

I was searching on the internet for some business related information and came across some useful links:

• Top ten mistakes that the small business makes

Posted by Jacques Marneweck at 11:27 AM | Permalink

Jeffrey Veen is quite correct that Open source content management software sucks in a piece on his blog titled Making A Better Open Source CMS.

Open source content management software sucks. It sucks really badly. The only things worse is every commercial CMS I've used. But it really doesn't have to be that way.

Even closed source CMS's suck. You have people who have no User Interface experience coming along and telling you to change this do that and the user interface goes from bad to worse. Also the people who are designing the CMS aren't the people at the end of the day who have to use it.

Jeffrey says that various open source CMS have been written by geeks for geeks, which is true.

It was software written by geeks, for geeks. This whole category of software desperately needs to be redesigned with writers, editors, designers, and site owners in mind.

Here are my recommendations to the folks writing open source content management systems.

Make it easy to install. Your tool will see better adoption if you stop to consider the out-of-the-box experience before you ship it. I want to download, unpack, and run an installer in my browser. Ask me a few questions, and then you go set up the database tables and write the conf.php or whatever. Set constraints for yourself as you design this experience: 10 minutes from download to running, never send a user to the command line, never force open a text editor. It will be hard, but you're good at solving hard problems, and this is time very well spent.

I personally prefer an easy to edit config file for just the database details and maybe a couple of settings. Allowing users flexibility of what they can change is an art. Customisability without loosing functionality is key.

Make it easy to get started. Give first-time users a series of quick wins that become increasingly complex. When I first log in, I want to create a Web page. Next, I'd like to add some styles to it. Then, I'd like to make links to some other Web pages. I'll build a navigation system after that, and start to add other features eventually. But I want to feel successful with your system within a few minutes. I don't want to you to present the stunning power at my fingertips until I'm comfortable with my surroundings. Please save the content ranking, on-the-fly PDF creation, community forums, and user polls for later. I may eventually want that stuff, but not the first time I log in.

So do you give users the ability to go from a basic setup with help guidelines enabled to turning off the help/instructions at a later stage? Marketing people say things like our product is feature rich or carrier-grade without understanding the meaning of the words. I suppose that it is a selling point to use certain words in a way to market a product as being something it is not.

Continue reading "Jeffrey Veen hits the nail on it's head regarding CMS" »

Posted by Jacques Marneweck at 6:46 PM | Permalink

Following on from various Six Apart staff members rambling on about what software they use in their daily work, I've decided to hack something similar up. Use the comment system to say what software you are using to do your work.

Behind The Scenes is a new series where we here at Six Apart discuss what tools (software, technology, etc.) we use to do our work.

For web browsing I use Mozilla Firefox for my webbrowser, which is a fully web standards complaint web browser.

Mantis Bug Tracker is used for tracking all the bugs, feature requests, documentation changes, etc. in various software packages which I've written.

Vim is used for editing source code for various code repositories which I maintain. My .vimrc file contains currently:

Network monitoring uses Nagios with SMS notifications via Clickatell to my mobile phone. I have also written some custom plugins for Nagios for certain daemons we have running including our SMS Engine Daemon.

I use a combination of OS's for work including FreeBSD 4.x and 5.x

Continue reading "Behind the scenes" »

Posted by Jacques Marneweck at 9:39 AM | Permalink

Futurex Cape was not that great this year. If you compare it to the previous computer faire which was held at Grand West, I'm highly disappointed with this years Futurex.

I bumped into various people from Roger, Patrick, Mark, Pieter, Daniel, and various other people while walking around looking at exhibits.

The novell stand was a disappointment as it had a big pengiun with a SUSE logo on it and the sales lady from Smartsource had no clue as to various offerings from Novell and upgrade paths for CNE's and CNA's or knew much about Netware 6.5.

Various large ISP's should have had stands at Futurex like UUnet, Internet Solution and Data Pro to name a few. Storm's stand was dealing more with their VOIP offering which looks interesting rather than marketing the other services which they currently offer. They were using a Cisco router which had four voice cards for each normal phone as well as a 128Kbit/s ISDN dial-up to their Cape Town network for the demonstration. Storm has hired some mime artists to perform by their stand to draw attention to their jik white stand. Too bright a white for my eyes! A pity I never had Amanda's phone number on myself as it would have been nice testing Voice over IP and talk to here in Phoenix in the States again.

More interestingly M-Web are moving away from UUnet for their bandwidth to the Internet Solutions. The M-Web Business Adviser which mweb are advertising for making the right decision regarding connectivity is not really what I'd consider a useful resource for a company to make any informed decisions about any of M-Web's Business Solutions offerings. What is intesting is that Tiscali has been using SAIX for dial-up infrastructure, Polka has been using the Internet Solution's dial-up infrastructure, and M-Web has been using their own dial-up infrastructure and using UUnet for connecting their WAN.

The M-Web Business Solutions were demoing their Business Server offering which looks interesting considering that they are using FreeBSD 4.9 for the OS, while falsely advertising that they are using Linux for the OS and providing the clients with a web interface for managing mail users, which websites staff can visit, using squid delay pools, and various other bits and pieces, which provides the clients more control of the solution via one common web interface without having access to the server, and the server remains property of M-Web and they lease it to the client. I would say that they are competing with Datapro and Storm Internet in this regard. The frontend uses PHP which I find interesting considering that MWeb is a ASP shop for their South African Operation. Their Nambian portal uses PHP.

CLUG and Obsidian Systems were maning a Linux Stand where they were promoting Open Source. They were also distributing a cd which contained Open Source Software and instructed you to make copies of this cd for your friends. Interestingly enought it was sponsored by the Shuttleworth Foundation.

Enough of myself rambling on about this.

Continue reading "Futurex Cape" »

Posted by Jacques Marneweck at 5:37 PM | Permalink

South Africa is toughening up its legistation when it comes to child pornography. I think it is good that they are reworking this particular law, but there are more ethical issues at stake here like do we have the right to invade clients privacy?

Large corporate companies could be prosecuted if any of their staff were caught with child pornography in their emails or attachment folders thought to have been deleted.

...

That Internet service providers will face criminal prosecution if they fail to block access to child porn sites after members of the public or the police have informed them of their existence; and

That people who repair computers will be held criminally liable if they do not report clients whose computer hard drives contain child porn. The same applies to photography on films sent in for developing and printing.

So what is going to happen now is that if you fix a clients PC you are now going to be required by law to snoop on the said clients PC looking for child pornography? If you install a cd writer does that now allow you to go and search the harddrive for images of child pornography? I don't think that it is the way to force computer techies to now have to snoop on other peoples computers looking for objectionable material.

Yet according to Cyberlaw@SA

Regulating pornography is a very difficult thing to do. On the one hand an adult’s right to privacy, as entrenched in section 14 of our Constitution, should be guaranteed. On the other hand it may in certain instances be necessary to infringe on such a right to safeguard the rights of others, for example the protection of children against exploitation from criminals creating child pornography.

I would also like to know how they expect ISP's to fork over money for purchasing hardware for filtering users web browsing habbits? Look at an example of a kiddie porn website having a IP of 255.255.255.255 which is also shared with say 5000 other websites on the webserver and you block by IP then you are blocking the other 4999 website which do not contain the objectionable content.

Then users start using anonymous proxy services which gives them access to the content which is being blocked, then is the ISP going to be liable for the clients bypassing the filtering to view of the other 4999 websites? I think our parlimentarians need to look at the technical aspects as well before deciding xyz needs to happen.

I think one needs to ask various questions prior to this law going through. We need to look at:

• Who do they think is going to need to maintain this new child pornography blocklist/blacklist?
• How are they going to distribute it for ISP's to block?
• Who is the ISP's primary point-of-contact at the FPB?

I think that it would be a good thing for the Film and Publications Board is going to hold some workshops in Cape Town, Johannesburg and Durban with ISP's prior to implementation to ensure that the ISP's understand the legal implications as well as how to handle the block requests. Just imagine someone tells you that they've found child pornography on a website then you block access to said website and that website is just a website does not contain any content which someone has informed the ISP about? Is there someone at the Films and Publications Board who will take the URL in question and verify that it does contain the content in question?

Posted by Jacques Marneweck at 8:23 AM | Permalink

So I've written a batch script for making it easier to repair the btrieve database files with bookworm using the putil utility. Pity that repairing the database takes forever on ancient hardware. Even on more modern hardware with ample RAM repairing indexes, etc. is quite time consuming. Reminds me of when waiting for the Novell Directory Services to syncronise changes and the loads of coffee breaks which we used to take ;)

Posted by Jacques Marneweck at 2:09 PM | Permalink

It has been recently brought to my attention that picoSOFT Bookworm is no longer being maintained or supported in South Africa by the developers of the programme. Bookworm is a library managemnt system which was developed initially for Westerford High School by picoSOFT.

If anyone has the various patches which were available on the picoSOFT website, drop me a line.

Posted by Jacques Marneweck at 12:16 PM | Permalink

Disabled Spam Assassin today after one client complained about the SPAM filtering. I think its about time to setup a second mail server for users who WANT SPAM and have their own domain names.

Posted by Jacques Marneweck at 9:47 AM | Permalink

Something which always suprises me when ideas which I've brain stormed on with a team and implemented gets blatently copied onto another companies website. For example one provider has copied way too many ideas from one project onto their website and have blatently used the old wording from a mock up version of the website ignoring copyright.

Now what I'm wondering why they can't be original. I suppose it has to do something with being a new market leader or am I just mistaken?

Posted by Jacques Marneweck at 8:28 AM | Permalink

Telkom's ADSL service has been down for more than 50 minutes now and has just come back online. One could only reach machines on their Belville Services Lan, which is not optimal.

According to a network notice posted by SAIX they are experiencing a 'SAIX National Network Failure' with a call reference of STT000000003619, which impacts 'All customers'.

Typical that one cannot contact the SAIX Cape Town or Johannesburg staff and UUnet's UUdial infrastructure breaks during the Telkom outage. Lovely stuff!

No wonder we have sites like Hellkom and various other variations.

Posted by Jacques Marneweck at 6:18 PM | Permalink

We've launched the next best thing to bubblegum earlier today, which has been getting positive feedback.

Posted by Jacques Marneweck at 5:51 PM | Permalink

Simple solution to the issue I was talking about earlier. Disabled outgoing scanning of SMTP mail and re-enabled TLS. No more mail is moved to sentitems which has not been sent via SMTP unlike the previous anti-virus software I was using was doing.

Posted by Jacques Marneweck at 9:16 AM | Permalink

PING www.saix.net (196.25.1.200): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 196.25.1.200: icmp_seq=7 ttl=242 time=33079.287 ms
64 bytes from 196.25.1.200: icmp_seq=15 ttl=242 time=35420.450 ms
64 bytes from 196.25.1.200: icmp_seq=16 ttl=242 time=35814.133 ms
64 bytes from 196.25.1.200: icmp_seq=23 ttl=242 time=38676.151 ms
64 bytes from 196.25.1.200: icmp_seq=38 ttl=242 time=43415.460 ms
64 bytes from 196.25.1.200: icmp_seq=39 ttl=242 time=43708.732 ms
64 bytes from 196.25.1.200: icmp_seq=43 ttl=242 time=44843.092 ms
64 bytes from 196.25.1.200: icmp_seq=50 ttl=242 time=44320.490 ms
64 bytes from 196.25.1.200: icmp_seq=56 ttl=242 time=44848.026 ms
64 bytes from 196.25.1.200: icmp_seq=66 ttl=242 time=44604.587 ms
64 bytes from 196.25.1.200: icmp_seq=70 ttl=242 time=45431.179 ms
64 bytes from 196.25.1.200: icmp_seq=75 ttl=242 time=44682.764 ms
64 bytes from 196.25.1.200: icmp_seq=80 ttl=242 time=44235.269 ms
64 bytes from 196.25.1.200: icmp_seq=93 ttl=242 time=42992.421 ms
64 bytes from 196.25.1.200: icmp_seq=96 ttl=242 time=41787.554 ms
64 bytes from 196.25.1.200: icmp_seq=110 ttl=242 time=40343.490 ms
64 bytes from 196.25.1.200: icmp_seq=121 ttl=242 time=37508.918 ms
64 bytes from 196.25.1.200: icmp_seq=150 ttl=242 time=28525.819 ms
64 bytes from 196.25.1.200: icmp_seq=151 ttl=242 time=28004.440 ms
64 bytes from 196.25.1.200: icmp_seq=159 ttl=242 time=26036.399 ms
64 bytes from 196.25.1.200: icmp_seq=162 ttl=242 time=25197.906 ms
64 bytes from 196.25.1.200: icmp_seq=164 ttl=242 time=25355.435 ms
64 bytes from 196.25.1.200: icmp_seq=187 ttl=242 time=18765.632 ms
64 bytes from 196.25.1.200: icmp_seq=194 ttl=242 time=17100.235 ms
64 bytes from 196.25.1.200: icmp_seq=201 ttl=242 time=16379.506 ms
64 bytes from 196.25.1.200: icmp_seq=203 ttl=242 time=16041.146 ms
64 bytes from 196.25.1.200: icmp_seq=204 ttl=242 time=15780.467 ms
64 bytes from 196.25.1.200: icmp_seq=207 ttl=242 time=15319.449 ms
64 bytes from 196.25.1.200: icmp_seq=209 ttl=242 time=15178.826 ms
64 bytes from 196.25.1.200: icmp_seq=212 ttl=242 time=13225.197 ms
64 bytes from 196.25.1.200: icmp_seq=213 ttl=242 time=12468.821 ms
64 bytes from 196.25.1.200: icmp_seq=221 ttl=242 time=7500.034 ms
64 bytes from 196.25.1.200: icmp_seq=223 ttl=242 time=6518.530 ms
64 bytes from 196.25.1.200: icmp_seq=224 ttl=242 time=5744.437 ms
64 bytes from 196.25.1.200: icmp_seq=225 ttl=242 time=5543.010 ms
64 bytes from 196.25.1.200: icmp_seq=230 ttl=242 time=5273.073 ms
64 bytes from 196.25.1.200: icmp_seq=233 ttl=242 time=4790.298 ms
64 bytes from 196.25.1.200: icmp_seq=234 ttl=242 time=5080.640 ms
64 bytes from 196.25.1.200: icmp_seq=235 ttl=242 time=5161.465 ms
64 bytes from 196.25.1.200: icmp_seq=237 ttl=242 time=5155.991 ms
64 bytes from 196.25.1.200: icmp_seq=238 ttl=242 time=5530.894 ms
64 bytes from 196.25.1.200: icmp_seq=240 ttl=242 time=6077.924 ms
^C
--- www.saix.net ping statistics ---
248 packets transmitted, 42 packets received, 83% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 4790.298/24796.847/45431.179/15312.784 ms

Typical SAIX performance over the weekend which happens as regular as clockwork. *sigh* I wish Hellkom would get their act together and sort out their routing and connectivity issues and get us some speed and a more reliable ADSL service.

Posted by Jacques Marneweck at 2:15 PM | Permalink

I've picked up a weird case of MyDNS running away and not resolving queries on a FreeBSD server. It works well for a couple of hours and then requires a svc -k /service/mydns to kill it and svscan to restart it again automatically.

Quite annoying as my c coding skills are non existant seeing that I don't use c much any more, and bind is buggy.

Posted by Jacques Marneweck at 1:44 PM | Permalink

Yesterday I noticed when I was chatting to a client that told me that he did not receive a email which I had sent him earlier during the day, and I checked my sent items and noticed that the email in question was in my sent items.

Running exigrep through the mailserver logs I noticed that infact it had not been delivered. The anti-virus software which I use seems to have issues with using Authenticated SMTP for outgoing messages when you are sending more than four messages in a sitting.

Posted by Jacques Marneweck at 7:56 PM | Permalink

SAIX's International Bandwidth is up the creek again.

When you start seeing things like 64 bytes from *snip*: icmp_seq=122 ttl=49 time=10034.261 ms you know SAIX's International routing is screwed yet again. Since last night latency with the boxes in the states are bad. Maybe it's about time Hellkom actually fix their SAIX network routing issues.

--- *snip*.co.za ping statistics ---
245 packets transmitted, 151 packets received, 38% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 446.626/5822.911/10034.261/2087.363 ms

Posted by Jacques Marneweck at 10:03 AM | Permalink

Automating tarball collection comes in quite handy as I hate having to login download find link copy paste, etc. etc. too time consuming.

Posted by Jacques Marneweck at 8:18 PM | Permalink

Following up on a previous post about South African Identity Number Validation the gender is specified by the 7th number in the id number.

For females they have a 0 and for males it is 5. For people who have gender changes they keep their original identity number according to information from Home Affairs.

More about this later.

Posted by Jacques Marneweck at 11:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (1)

I've started using PHPDOC tags a few months back and never really did get round to generating documenation for various software codebases which I maintain.

I've started to generate some documentation for complex applications which I maintain and haven't maintained / coded on in ages, it makes things quicker to coding rather than reading code.

Posted by Jacques Marneweck at 7:38 PM | Permalink

I've changed various aspects of my SPAM filtering capabilities on the mailserver to start using SPF which rejects forged emails from @freebsd.org for example at SMTP time. Also I've started requiring that the mailhubs start using SMTP callouts to verify sender email addresses. This also helps get rid of excess SPAM prior to Spam Assassin which is resource intensive from having to handle the mail. We will see how things shape up with the changes.

Posted by Jacques Marneweck at 2:17 PM | Permalink

CO.ZA's having routing issues and what not and appear to be down from the UUnet network.

traceroute to co.za (206.223.136.195), 64 hops max, 44 byte packets
*snip*
3 fe11-0-0.gw2.cpt1.alter.net (196.30.176.34) 23.420 ms 3.741 ms 220.988 ms
4 atm8-0-0sub100.ir2.mia16.alter.net (196.30.229.170) 201.048 ms 199.887 ms 198.764 ms
5 POS0-1-0.IH4.MIA4.ALTER.NET (152.63.86.145) 202.301 ms 199.768 ms 202.270 ms
6 202.at-5-1-0.XR2.MIA4.ALTER.NET (152.63.7.130) 202.701 ms 202.443 ms 201.210 ms
7 0.so-4-2-0.XL2.MIA4.ALTER.NET (152.63.101.46) 203.883 ms 200.897 ms 201.488 ms
8 0.so-0-0-0.TL2.ATL5.ALTER.NET (152.63.10.106) 218.045 ms 224.908 ms 233.837 ms
9 0.so-2-3-0.TL2.NYC8.ALTER.NET (152.63.1.177) 238.552 ms 240.251 ms 234.225 ms
10 0.so-3-1-0.XL2.NYC4.ALTER.NET (152.63.21.17) 234.494 ms 233.527 ms 233.355 ms
11 0.so-7-0-0.XR4.NYC4.ALTER.NET (152.63.18.30) 237.043 ms 233.739 ms 233.512 ms
12 210.ATM7-0.IG2.NYC4.ALTER.NET (152.63.18.69) 235.527 ms 236.513 ms 234.940 ms
13 iscoza-oc3-gw.customer.alter.net (208.192.177.206) 372.967 ms 333.729 ms 360.440 ms
14 168.209.247.30 (168.209.247.30) 237.040 ms 235.535 ms 235.625 ms
15 168.209.0.85 (168.209.0.85) 267.808 ms 272.937 ms 284.568 ms
16 196.26.0.12 (196.26.0.12) 271.755 ms 278.207 ms 274.533 ms
17 168.209.89.54 (168.209.89.54) 275.466 ms 265.749 ms 276.746 ms
18 cisufrm-cisrb1.posix.co.za (160.124.254.2) 284.211 ms 293.076 ms 281.401 ms
19 * * *
20 * *^C

Also squid is timing out. How fun!

ERROR
The requested URL could not be retrieved

While trying to retrieve the URL: http://co.za/

The following error was encountered:

* Connection Failed

The system returned:

(60) Operation timed out

The remote host or network may be down. Please try the request again.

Your cache administrator is webmaster.
Generated Tue, 15 Jun 2004 07:43:50 GMT by *snip*

Posted by Jacques Marneweck at 10:54 AM | Permalink

On a MySQL 4.0.20 slave I keep seeing the following:

When I'm expecting it to complete successfully like it did when I have previously run command in the past when replication when belly up.

Posted by Jacques Marneweck at 1:50 PM | Permalink

Neil Blakey-Milner one of the resident hackers has some interesting points about bad code readability looking back at some of the code that I've been hacking up and improving for the past couple of months, I had a serious shocker when I was assigned to migrate a clients website from their current hosting provider over to a work box.

The coding style is bad. Hard coded in every single file is the mysql_connect(....) and mysql_select_db (....)

Things can be simplified if one uses a common auto_prepend file or even a common configuration file which can be included which contains the username, password, common database connection routine, etc.

It makes life a lot easier when dealing with a client moving their site away from the current host, having different settings for development and production webservers, etc.

Posted by Jacques Marneweck at 10:51 PM | Permalink

Spent numerous hours today interfacing with various XML data sources for generating some content for one of the websites which I code on.

XML_Serializer is a quick and easy way of using XML with a small learning curve and enables one to intergrate XML into PHP based applications quite quickly.

update
Colin's placed his xml2array code online which I've used previously for a configuration file for one of my old personal websites.

Posted by Jacques Marneweck at 7:13 PM | Permalink

Silly easigas have no clue how to ensure their gas stays in the bottle and not leaking out into the road. Hopefully their technician fixes up their gas pipelines before one of our consultants lights up a cancer stick and blows up three big gas bottles and two flats and cars parked in the road.

Lets just hope I'm not at the office when this occurs.

Update
There technicians did arrive and fixed their connection to the big ugly gas bottle. At least now it does not smell like smelly gas!

Posted by Jacques Marneweck at 3:50 PM | Permalink

Busy sitting in the dungeon upgrading a couple of servers operating systems. One thing that I'm sure of is that it's very cold! For some reason today it feels colder than it normally is when I'm here at UUnet, suppose it's because hardly anyone goes in and out of the datacentre on a weekend?

Posted by Jacques Marneweck at 1:38 PM | Permalink

Don't bother calling me on the 0848800148 phone number as I no longer have that phone. Also don't bother calling any of the numbers starting with 021 4XX XXXX.

Posted by Jacques Marneweck at 3:58 PM | Permalink

Ever coded something for work and then get told a zillion and one times that they want it changed by every other person at work. One person wants it to work a certain way who will be data caputuring the data. Another person decides that it's not the way they want it to work, so they decide you need to do a rewrite of the code for the umpteenth time.

Enough to drive any sane person insane!

Posted by Jacques Marneweck at 11:16 PM | Permalink

SAIX's ADSL offering is really blowing goats (excuse the pun), but I really hate having to login multiple times a day to my SSH sessions which I use for coding and doing work.

Posted by Jacques Marneweck at 5:44 PM | Permalink

Go a take a look over at www.phpcommunity.org for the beginnings of a website dedicated to PHP developers, which is going to be similar to what use.perl.org is to perl mongers.

Posted by Jacques Marneweck at 12:26 AM | Permalink

I've been thinking for a couple of years now that the co.za domain registration system needs an overhaul to work entirely via a web interface rather than doing email updates, which could work similar to Open SRS / directnic etc. web interfaces, where the ISP would have an interface which would plug into the co.za system via a set of API's which the ISP's would utilise using HTTP/S POST or XML.

Once I find the other part of this post I'll place it online. Thanks to Hetzner I don't have it *sigh*

Posted by Jacques Marneweck at 12:57 AM | Permalink

Looks like Clickatell are having more issues again. First it was their Thawte SSL certificate on api.clickatell.com which had expired, now it's all their web services that they provide are down. Fortunately for their MD I don't phone people at 11 O'clock at night.

jacques@phantom:~$ curl -i http://api.clickatell.com/
curl: (7) socket error: 61
jacques@phantom:~$ traceroute www.clickatell.com

traceroute to www.clickatell.com (196.7.150.219), 64 hops max, 44 byte packets
1 vlan547.hr1.cpt1.alter.net (196.7.150.129) 0.571 ms 0.511 ms 0.523 ms
2 ns1.clickatell.com (196.7.150.219) 0.470 ms 0.480 ms 0.363 ms
jacques@phantom:~$ curl -i http://www.clickatell.com
curl: (7) socket error: 61

Continue reading "Clickatell's having httpd issues" »

Posted by Jacques Marneweck at 12:24 AM | Permalink

*sigh* I still wish I could find a web designer down here in Cape Town, who can design layouts like Damien or Mena Trott. It's actually quiet depressing that nobody who does web design and looking for career and who also happens to have the skills of someone like what Rasmus Lerdorf is to PHP except the equivalent in Web Design and Graphics Design.

Continue reading "Web Designers" »

Posted by Jacques Marneweck at 1:09 AM | Permalink

Finally received the new cellphone after six months today. It's definately not a good-bye, good-bye supplied phone but a Cell C supplied Nokia phone.

Posted by Jacques Marneweck at 1:10 AM | Permalink

I was at a supplier yesterday when he asked me something along the lines as to how did I hear about them? I still remember them from one of the sites where they sponsor SMS messages which was designed by Team Science.

Posted by Jacques Marneweck at 10:35 AM | Permalink

For those who have not noticed, Horde 2.2.5 is out! :)

Time to make upgrade Horde and the various other components again and this time document the whole installation process so someone else can do it next time, seeing that I've got other things todo.

Continue reading "Upgrading Horde + IMP et al" »

Posted by Jacques Marneweck at 9:17 PM | Permalink

I thought having to deal in the past with MWeb technical support consultants in the past was bad, due to people on their helpdesk have no knowledge of how a dial-up works, etc.

WorldPay have taken the cake! Both James and Colin cannot fathom the idea that before they can do a test transaction on the one website they need to register for an account. Silly I must say!

Continue reading "WorldPay staff are idiots?" »

Posted by Jacques Marneweck at 6:01 PM | Permalink

After launching the next best thing to bubblegum, and implementing various Apache hacks to do URL Rewrites on the fly, it's all now tweaking so that the XHTML code validates.

Posted by Jacques Marneweck at 3:58 PM | Permalink

Got to love this. The night before a site launch and things I had tested prior to one of the previous site launch dates does not work, even things that were working when I tested them yesterday are broken today so I'm haveing to debug HTML that someone else is breaking here. Good old chown -R root:wheel templates/ to put a stop to it again. *sigh*

All I need now it this issue again. <form ...> tags are missing so forms don't post. Talk about sabotage from the inside *sigh*.

Back to sorting out this stuff.

Posted by Jacques Marneweck at 1:32 AM | Permalink

My old unreliable Nokia phone has vanished off my desk at work today *sigh* Last time this happened I was working for a Internet Cafe in Sea Point a couple of years back. Now I have to go through the irritating of dealing with the police. *sigh*

Continue reading "Darn cellphone's vanished" »

Posted by Jacques Marneweck at 12:34 PM | Permalink

Busy getting ready to launch the biggest thing since bubble gum in the next couple of hours, which at the moment is keeping me wide awake with excitement, seeing that I've not launched a portal of this nature before. Anyway the future is almost here :)

Posted by Jacques Marneweck at 1:35 AM | Permalink

Busy experimenting with Nokia Business Cards (VCard's). There is quite a delay on delivery due to the fact that the message is split over two or three messages, which gets delayed by a minute or two after sending the business card.

Quite interesting all this mobile stuff which I'm working on over the last few months.

Posted by Jacques Marneweck at 7:38 PM | Permalink

Disable service notifications via SMS to my phone over weekends when I want some sleep.

Posted by Jacques Marneweck at 12:56 AM | Permalink

*sigh*

When you need a phone number from the Yellow Pages and you get

Sorry there is no database available at this time. you know things are not going to look to bright during the day.

Continue reading "Yellow Pages Database is Down" »

Posted by Jacques Marneweck at 1:29 AM | Permalink

Busy taking MySQL 4.0.17 out for a testspin since it was released a couple of days ago.

mysql> select version();
+-----------+
| version() |
+-----------+
| 4.0.17    |
+-----------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

Posted by Jacques Marneweck at 1:51 PM | Permalink

UUnet's Cape Town network now has bi-directional fibre for lower international latency.

...
2 fe11-0-0.gw1.cpt1.alter.net (196.30.176.33) 61.259 ms 1.022 ms 235.423 ms
3 atm8-0-0sub100.ir2.mia16.alter.net (196.30.229.170) 198.478 ms 199.719 ms 197.613 ms
4 POS0-1-0.IH4.MIA4.ALTER.NET (152.63.86.145) 199.412 ms 201.279 ms 197.557 ms
5 302.at-6-1-0.XR2.MIA4.ALTER.NET (152.63.7.226) 198.538 ms 198.328 ms 197.875 ms
6 0.so-4-2-0.XL2.MIA4.ALTER.NET (152.63.101.46) 198.220 ms 197.589 ms 197.761 ms
7 0.so-3-0-0.TL2.ATL1.ALTER.NET (152.63.101.53) 214.613 ms 214.393 ms 214.807 ms
...

Continue reading "Lower Latency" »

Posted by Jacques Marneweck at 5:07 PM | Permalink

I did some google searches on domains I own over a two day period and it seems that google has problems with their results. Not only is PageRank broken or rather not working properly seeing that alexa tells me that google finds 67 links to one domain of mine yet going directly to google's site it tells you a completely different story.

Continue reading "Google Pagerank and Index Corrupt?" »

Posted by Jacques Marneweck at 2:28 PM | Permalink

You got to love UUnet's management console. I've noticed that various graphs we generate for internal usage (i.e. how many ports we are utilising on UUnet's dial-up infrastructure, which realm is using ports, etc.) is no longer working. Seems like someone was having fun and zapped my login again. I'm not going to complain seeing that I'm not responsible for the accounting side of things.

Continue reading "UUnet management console borked" »

Posted by Jacques Marneweck at 10:56 AM | Permalink

How does one teach 'an old dog' some 'new tricks'?

One of the problems with having seperate web developers and web designers is that the web designers have no idea to code in PHP and the web developers don't want the designers messing with their PHP code.

Continue reading "trainedmonkey?" »

Posted by Jacques Marneweck at 12:01 PM | Permalink

Busy coding an telesales application which allows telesales staff to be more efficient and allows reporting to actually see what telesales staff are getting upto. All I need now is a good 'ole 3com NBX for telephone call reporting, etc. to find out how long they are on the phone for.

Continue reading "Coding" »

Posted by Jacques Marneweck at 5:53 PM | Permalink

Good old Telkom still makes me sick to think that they can do as they please, and provide disgusting service. For example you order some SAIX services online via their SAIX ISP site. First application takes them 4 hours to process which is not too bad. Then two days later you order an ADSL login which takes nearly two weeks to arrive, and by the time it arrives the client who requested it tells you that they no longer require it because 'you took too long'.

Continue reading "Telkom SAIX" »

Posted by Jacques Marneweck at 11:48 PM | Permalink

I've managed to get the InfoSat stuff to work using the pentavalue satellite card and the VPN (Virtual Private Network) using PPTP (Point-to-Point Tunnel Protocol) working quiet well after trying to figure out how to make it work well on a Redhat Linux server.

Continue reading "Satellite Internet -- an alternative?" »

Posted by Jacques Marneweck at 4:50 PM | Permalink

Well I've setup a demo online store using the default oscommerce setup and changed a couple of things and threw up an password protected admin area for administering the os commerce site. For some unknown reason the oscommerce guys don't believe in having a password protected admin area or meantion anything about that in their notes.

Continue reading "more oscommerce .nfo" »

Posted by Jacques Marneweck at 11:53 AM | Permalink

I've been playing around with the osCommerce shoping cart system which looks much cleaner and works quite fast compared to various other shopping cart systems. One of the nice features is that it uses PHP and a MySQL database backend. The other bonus is that it's open source software.

Continue reading "osCommerce" »

Posted by Jacques Marneweck at 3:15 AM | Permalink

It is scarey how many people run Mail Servers which do not have PTR records! According to the various RFC's which requires that Mail Servers have PTR records. Most SPAMers Mail Servers do not have PTR records.

Continue reading "Mail Servers that don't have DNS PTR Records" »

Posted by Jacques Marneweck at 4:38 PM | Permalink

I spent some more time hacking up my php class that wraps around UUNet's UUdial Management Console to manage my customers dial-up accounts and view logs, etc.

Continue reading "PHP Interface to UUdial Management Console" »

Posted by Jacques Marneweck at 3:24 PM | Permalink

Don't we just love .za government? The Regulation of Interception of Communications and Provision of Communication-related Information (RICPCI) Act is making my life busier than usual coding various internal applications to deal with the requirements of storing and validating information users provide us with.

Using PHP and MySQL to develop the application, which is a killer combination. :)

Continue reading "RICPCI Act" »

Posted by Jacques Marneweck at 12:03 AM | Permalink

I'm going insane! My phone won't stop ringing and I can't take it. It has never been this bad, but it used to be like this while working for a previous employer, in a previous life time. I really wish I can escape for a couple of minutes and relax, but that's not going to happen tonight.

Continue reading "Insanity now!" »

Posted by Jacques Marneweck at 9:32 PM | Permalink

How fun! The dial-up infrastructure provider my company uses decides to "improve" their service offering and they now start providing a degradation in service as their new improved service! And clients all assume that I'm stupid and stuff, seeing that dial-up product range has been sold by myself in certain cases to the majority of the clients. Also the world's largest global ISP who we outsource our dial-up infrastructure requirements to is UUnet who apparently carry over 40% of South Africa's local internet traffic and over 44% of the global internet traffic from what we've heard.

Continue reading "UUnet dial-up infrastructure changes" »

Posted by Jacques Marneweck at 8:38 PM | Permalink

I rewrote my php class for South African Identity Number validation. Turns out that the information I received from Home Affairs was making me loose around two-three clients because I was not accepting their registration forms unless they faxed me a copy of their ID document seeing that they had failed the validation routine.

Continue reading ".ZA ID Numbers" »

Posted by Jacques Marneweck at 11:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Those damn penguins a.k.a. City Police decided to pull over the mini-bus taxi that I happened to be travelling in on the way to Cape Town today. Oh boy just when you think it cannot get worse those penguins took a good 30 minutes to write up two sheets of fines for the taxi driver. The one penguin needed to tell the other penguin what he had to write on that ticket.

Continue reading "Those damn Penguins" »

Posted by Jacques Marneweck at 2:56 PM | Permalink