Dave Lachapelle

So, this seems to happen on a fairly regular basis. I decide I like my blog, then spend a bunch of time re-designing it, and then make a few posts and finally forget it for a few months.

Well, I’m hoping to finally break the cycle. I just grabbed the new iPhone app for wordpress and am hoping to be able to post quick things happeing in my life, and save the longer posts for when I have time.

I happened across this today and found it quite interesting – wanted to document it for later use.  Effectively, its a method for implementing memcached using Propel in Symfony 1.2.

memcached as singleton in symfony « ESL Developer Blog.

Happened across an interesting / simple explanation for those who don’t know how ISPs screw their customers, and thought I would add another way ISPs screw over their customers.

You can read the first 9 ways here: 9 Ways ISPs Screw You Over.

10.  ISPs advertise speeds in a way that only people who have an understanding of how data is stored can translate.  For example, lets say you pay for a “10 meg” connection, thats not actually 10 Megabytes per second you’re capable of, its actually 10 Megabits.  Now, there’s quite the difference between Megabits and Megabits, but not so much a difference in the acronyms.  MBps is for Megabytes and Mbps is for Megabits.  The real issue here is if you pay for a 10 Megabit per second connection, your maximum transfer rate is only going to be 1.25 Megabytes per second (there are 8 bits in a byte).  Thats also theoretical, you can very rarely actually achieve the theoretical bandwidth provided by your ISP, unless you’re trying to load their homepage or hit a url that they detect doesn’t exist and throw you a page full of ads.

I’ve been a long supporter of transparency from ISPs, but we’re likely never to see that up here in Canada – at least not until the CRTC cracks down and decides we, the consumers, need some competition and not more monopolies.

I happened across this little tidbit as I was scrolling through my RSS feeds.  I’ve been so busy lately, I haven’t even had a chance to read half of the entries in my feed reader (most days now I’ve been just saying mark all as read).  But this one caught my eye.  Apparently Boxee has partnered with a third party to build an actual Boxee Box.  This is definitely good news, and I really hope they can pull it off and come out with a great media center box.  Currently I’m running Boxee off my AppleTV – yes Apple, I hacked your stupid AppleTV to run Boxee because you don’t include XVid or DivX codecs, and thats what all my TV shows are stored in.

—Insert Apple Rant here

This is probably the only time you’ll hear me rant about Apple – they brought out this awesome device called the AppleTV, I was super excited by it, has a really nice interface, easy to use, tied to iTunes, and was supposed to make life easier when streaming media to my TV.  Then I found out that they want you to only use the media format they use, which kind of screws anyone with any significant amount of digital video thats not in mp4 format.  Unfortunately I fall into that category, with somewhere around 1.2TB of TV recorded for viewing at my leisure.  To re-encode all of that, I’d a. have to have a ton of extra hard drive space, and b. way too much time on my hands.  So, really, Apple, get with the times already, just include the codecs in the next AppleTV update and allow me to mount my Samba share on it and I think a lot more people will buy your device.

—End Apple Rant

Even if Apple does include these features – which they won’t – I still think a Boxee box is just what the industry needs to jump-start it.  A lot of other companies have tried to bring out media center boxes, but they all suffer from one critical flaw or another; poor ui, no networking support, poor codec support.  So, I’m putting my money towards a Boxee box when they come out – looking forward to finding more details on December 7th during the Boxee Beta release.

Boxee Blog » a Boxee Box is coming!.

Well, its hard to believe it, but in less than a week, I will have been married for a whole month.  I know that isn’t all that long a time to be married, but it seems since the wedding everyone asks me how I’m enjoying married life.  So, I thought I’d take a few minutes, collect my thoughts and update my blog (something that really needs to happen much more often).  Now that I’m not participating in planning a wedding – I say participating because my wonderful wife really did most of the work – I really have no excuse for not updating my blog.

So, the simple answer to everyone’s question – how’s married life – I think can be summed up as, the same as life before the wedding (minus all the wedding planning).  For anyone out there looking to get married to their long time significant other, I would offer this one piece of advice, don’t expect radical changes to your relationship post-wedding.

And thats all the wedding advise I’ll offer, promise.

Recently came up against a bit of a tough nut to crack, so to speak, and thought I’d write up a quick blog about how I fixed it, in case anyone else has this problem. At MRX, we have several different hosting environments we use, one of which is a shared environment for our smaller clients. The problem being that one of those clients had a vulnerability on their site that was allowing spammers to send unauthorized e-mail through our servers, thereby getting us onto a whole bunch of blacklists.

After a bit of searching around, it seems as though its actually possible to completely disable the mail() function from PHP, however, that was only a temporary solution. This is simply a matter of adding

disable_functions "mail"

to the php.ini file and reloading the apache configs.

While I searched for an actual solution to the problem, I came up with the idea of attempting to use a php_admin_value flag value to disable e-mail for a specific virtual host inside the htaccess files until I was able to determine which was the offending site. Again – brick wall – PHP doesn’t support setting disable_functions in the php_admin_value flag.

So, after a bit of searching, I decided to just add the following to each site’s .htaccess files:

php_admin_value sendmail_path "/dev/null"

Essentially sending all e-mail to /dev/null for that particular site. Perhaps not the most elegant solution, but it was effective, as we are no longer sending e-mail through a broken form and I was able to alert the affected client that they had a problem.

Continuing on my latest theme of blog upgrades – I just got a new server set up for myself over here at the new MRX datacenter, and got my blog transitioned over to it. If you’re reading this post, then likely you’ve gotten the new DNS. If you hit my blog from twitter and get a 404, well, you don’t have the new DNS yet, and you likely won’t be reading this yet.

I’ve taken the liberty of setting up Varnish in front of Apache, I know my blog doesn’t get much traffic, but at least it should respond a lot quicker – sometimes I find wordpress to be kinda slow. I’m going to be tweaking the config, and once I have it just right, I’ll post my VCL code here for anyone who’s interested in optimizing Varnish for WordPress installs.  It also has the added benefit of protecting my blog should (hell freeze over and) one of my posts suddenly become popular.

So, big news of the week, Oracle just bought Sun Microsystems for some ridiculous amount of money ($7.4 billion in cash).  Aside from the obvious moanings of how I wish I had $7.4 billion in cash just sitting around so I can buy up companies like playing monopoly, this deal has me (and likely a number of other people) wondering about the future of MySQL now that its going to be owned by Oracle.

I’ve been reading up on the topic a lot, and it seems as though no one’s really talking about whats going to happen with Sun’s newest acquisition.  I can’t say I’m not just a little concerned, since all of our work here at MRX is powered by MySQL databases.  Thats not to say I’m afriad of Oracle, just its both expensive (as in not free) and complex.  I’d argue, so complex that not many people out there who know Oracle are looking for work.

One interesting point I did find when reading up on the topic that I didn’t really know, is that Oracle does own a number of other database systems including TimesTen, Berkeley DB open source, as well as InnoDB.  However, none of these directly competes with Oracle, whereas MySQL does.  So, the question is, do they monitize MySQL to a lesser degree than Oracle (while maintaining some form of stripped down free version), do they drop MySQL alltogether and provide some form of migration path to Oracle 11g, or do they simply let both co-exist and continue monitizing Oracle.

If I had to guess, I’d say they will likely monitize MySQL to a lesser degree than Oracle, probably in the form of support contracts mostly, and still continue to provide a free open source version of MySQL.  Obviously they would charge for any new features they decide to add to MySQL along the way.  Probably very similar to Redhat Enterprise’s business model – seems to be successful for them.

So, I just upgraded to Ubuntu Jaunty on two of my VMs here at the office.  I know its not set to come out in a final release for a few days, however, we’re in the process of migrating to a fully virtualized system, and unfortunately Intrepid has some issues with iSCSI connections.  Namely if you try and shut down the machine, it’ll hang because it tries to disconnect the drive before its unmounted and then just throws errors.

Anyway, as per usual, the upgrades went more or less flawlessly – minus a few symbolic links that needed to be re-created.  Since I don’t have GUIs on these machines (waste of resources on servers if you ask me), a quick:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install update-manager-core
sudo do-release-upgrade -d

And about half an hour later and I was all upgraded.  No more iSCSI disconnection problems, and one new feature I’ve found that actually changed my whole workflow when it comes to servers.  That being the inclusion of screen-profiles, a sort of profile manager for screen allowing you to create default screens that open when you log in, as well as status bars, clocks and notifiers.  If you haven’t heard of it, I’d highly recommend you check it out.

Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope – Alpha 3 | Ubuntu.

Okay, so I’ve seen a number of ads promoting both Vista and Low-cost PCs coming out of Redmond recently.  Not that I watch much TV, so either they’re just being targeted to the TV I do watch, or they’re on all the time, all over the place. Now that said, I am a Apple fanboy, I’ll admit it, I love most Apple products, that said though, I am willing to criticize them where I believe they’ve missed the boat (ahhmm, AppleTV and Codecs).

In any case, there are two types of ads I’ve seen, one that features children using Vista to do fun stuff with photos.  Okay, they’re cute, and Vista works for children, I get it.  Thing they forget to mention is that those computers had better be locked down and never connected to the internet, unless of course you want to be exposing your 8 year old child to random porn popups while they’re looking at photos of their dogs.  The other type being the ones where people are sent out looking for low price laptops and pass over Macs because they’re either too “cool” or too “expensive”.  Both of which are silly propositions to make, since if you were to compare hardware in any recent apple laptop to an equivalent Dell or HP, you’ll come out at about the same price (last time I did it, I think I was $50 in).

Now again, I’d like to caution that I really enjoy Apple’s – I work on one all day – that said, I grew up on PCs and when I finally did make the switch after working at Barking Dog Studios, I decided that the platform fit me much better.  What I’m really trying to say is that someone at Microsoft should take a good hard look at your advertising campaign, and perhaps give it a once-over to remove all the BS you’re pushing on people.  Or better yet, instead of spending millions on an advertising campaign, build a product that works and works well that people will want to spend exhorbitant amounts of money on.