Evangelizer's blog - Technology

Why you should avoid Europe hosting

nospam@example.com (Vangel) — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 01:46:57 -0800

I have been hosting in Europe for over 2 years now. My preferred host isp is German. However after a short holiday of 1 year it has been nothing but nightmare. Don't get me wrong. I am not slapping hosting providers for all of europe just because of one country and one ISP. I say Euro is because they have laws and policies that change very frequently when it comes to cyberlaws and is usually against the ISP and against Freedom in general. If you think US or China is bad , Europe is getting much worse.

Here is what's bothering me. I got slapped for spam posts on the massive bigboards like site I run where spammer posted comments about some local person (no one of consequence mind you) and used her name in the post. The lady was able to threaten my ISP and got my site shutdown overnight. I had a cluster of servers and paid a lot of setup fees. All went to drain hole. I have noticed Netherlands is no longer favorable either. Any tom dick and harry can get your site shutdown. I don't know the real reason behind chasing your not-so-unqiue name as libel on the internet but they are crazy and they do it. Also since you do not reside there you have no say. Get lost. I would recommend against setting up anything in Euro zone.

Italy is also very bad, their politics prohibits posting anything bad about a political person online (WTF?) well they routinely get your site blocked by search engines. If you host in US they cant do shit.

The problem is you can't even talk to your ISP and explain or discuss matters with them. Language is a big issue. THey can write english (translation software perhaps) but they cannot at all comprehend anything by reading or talking.

It seems to me we are all better of hosting in US or your own country. Europe is still unstable and gets influenced by US easily, pointing fingers at them (talk about US and their asshole way of doing things). It seems the recent string of lawsuits against P2P etc has everyone on the edge and they simply slam the services down without a fight. Europe hosting is utterly useless even for the price they offer. Unless you are just dickin around and want a P2P server to download torrents or backup files. Those are ok. Serious stuff, stay away.

Future of Europe hosting looks bleak to me.

Amazon Singapore cheap spot instances

nospam@example.com (Vangel) — Sat, 15 Oct 2011 17:06:15 -0700

It appears they are not many users of AWS in Singapore. You can get away with a spot instance on reserved pricing rates.
I bid for the on-demand pricing however the prices have remained in the lowest bid region give or take 3-4 cents.

Singapore's AWS is a relatively new Cloud Data Center.

Currently I use AWS SPot instances to host Game server on high end EC2 Instance c1.xlarge. Previously if I had to go to a dedicated server provider it would cost me upwards of 700SG$ and very shitty infrastructure and choked network. currently a c1.xlarge costs about 10$ for 2-3 days on Spot instances so its still a massive saving.

There is network issues in Singapore. As usual its the ISPs and monopolies that singapore has harbored for so long. This is not AWS fault but you should know what to expect. Now that AWS has entered the market I think they will pretty much wrap up the price fixing that has been so rampant in the hosting market. Which is already so small its not even important. AWS will bring competitive pricing and worldwide revenue distribution to both South-east Asia and Asia in general.

Singapore was always so disappointing when it came to hosting servers. We all just had to use US servers. This is quite incredible for us individual enthusiasts as well as startups.

can't install Adobe Reader X on Windows 7 or Vista

nospam@example.com (Vangel) — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 10:16:05 -0700

Secure Award Wining Free PDF Reader

Installs easily when run as Administrator. It probably better than Adobe. Adobe reader X does not install as they are trying to do something fishy to your system in their latest release. Their QA probably runs their system as administrator all the time. haha

CherryPy 3.2 is broken. damn

nospam@example.com (Vangel) — Sun, 17 Jul 2011 05:47:17 -0700

sooo dum dee dum I head over to cherrypy download page and download the latest version which happens to be 3.2.1 as of now.

so like a kid opening his christmas gift I untar the archive and run

python setup.py install
File "setup.py", line 25
'wsgiserver2|ssl_pyopenssl' if python3 else 'wsgiserver3'
^
SyntaxError: invalid syntax

I think cherrypy is dead. to pack a failure like this is pretty bad.

I try to download 3.2.0rc2 ... oh empty directory

ok lets try 3.2.0rc1 ... found something.... download

untar

python setup.py install
...

tada! it works...
but frankly this isnt getting cherrypy any points for uploading a broken package 9completely uninstallable) into their repo as so called stable fracking release. @the Devs of Cherrypy, when toasters show up at your doorstep you will remember this.

end of rant T_T

Beanstalk versus Memcache

nospam@example.com (Vangel) — Sun, 03 Jul 2011 17:20:05 -0700

Yes its the title but this isnt a smackdown. The fact is beanstalkd was inspired from memcache. However memcache is considerably old and not very useful in many real world scenarios. That is why we have Queues. While memcahe could be made to behave as such it's far more complex and prone to programming error as compared to beanstalk. However if you are looking to deploy on the cloud and want a slimmer and faster Alternative to AMQP ( like RabbitMQ) then Beanstalkd is the way to go. Once you go Beanstalk you aren't going back to stock again.

Few useful resources that discuss and share example of AMPQ, beanstalk etc are as follows:

http://adam.heroku.com/past/2010/4/24/beanstalk_a_simple_and_fast_queueing_backend/

http://parand.com/say/index.php/2008/10/12/beanstalkd-python-basic-tutorial/

For those interested in RabbitMQ and AMQP with PHP here is some helpful pointers

http://www.slideshare.net/old_sound/integrating-php-withrabbitmqzendcon

Thanks to all these authors for their contribution. The reason I share these and not the others because the Articles are right to the point instead of the self centric useless posts some people make before getting to the point (if there is any to make).

got ITILv3 foundation certified, thanks to CITREP grants from IDA

nospam@example.com (Vangel) — Wed, 04 May 2011 15:34:50 -0700

Please see my update below about CITREP claim process before you swipe your credit card

Singapore is awesome in some ways. I don't know of any other country where the state provides funding for technology certifications like this grant. CITREP Currently its modified as CITREP Enhanced so the governing body i.e. IDA has removed some certifications and also reduced the funding percentage. It used to be 80% for course fee (w00t) and 100% exam fee (w00t x 2).

Unfortunately, I could only make it for one certification by the time I got around to getting the upfront 100% payment in my pocket via credit card. Thanks to the funding I got ITILv3 certified for a few hundred bucks. I met a few people during ITILv3 who had got ALL good project management certifications exceeding 12,000$ in 80% funding days which ended 31st March 2011. That's what I get for sitting on my eyes with my ass closed (or something like that).

ITIL foundation is damn easy. I got my course and exam done at NTUC Learning Hub Bras Basah Road. It was tough to go everyday after work from 7 pm to 10:30 pm and return home by 12 AM or so for 2 weeks. The class timings and schedule vary according to size and availability of Trainers. It was completely theoretical and the lecturer was awesome and experienced. He explained the concepts clearly and also provided good tips on exam taking. I burned them to brain and aced the exam only 2 days after the course with 95% score. Yep! that easy. A dumb guy like me finished the exam in 15 mins with 95% score with only about 2 hours of dry run after the course. ( I tried to study but counter strike deathmatches are hard to ignore)

I hear PMP and Six Sigma are also easy. But I don't like theory too much. I did that a lot in college already.

In the current Citrep-enhanced scheme the course choices are limited and very few actually qualify (PMP is still in) and the funding is lower between 50% - 70% at most (details in link above). Still quite great considering you can save as much as 2000$-3000$ on every certification you get! Unfortunately the really good technical courses like VMWare Vsphere for advanced folks (which are actually cloud computing related and cloud is covered by the new CITREP scheme) are not part of the scheme as they don't have a real exam (one criteria for course to be considered for funding). I have written to IDA to consider such advanced technical courses, let's hope the funding goes on and covers more advanced high level subjects. For everything else there is ..... FT.

UPDATE: The claim process is very very flawed and doe snot help the candidate at all. After sending in all the documents including test results and certificate (which takes additional 2-3 weeks after exam) they replied to me [the IDA claims] and asked for a missing course completion certificate. I am sure I sent it but never mind I emailed the same to the on the same day. That was June 9th 2011. I was then informed that I will be sent an approval email as they have forwarded it for "FURTHER APPROVAL". Now it's 1st of July and I have not heard from them yet. I was told that "AFTER APPROVAL" email it will be another 3 weeks at least before I get a cashier's order for the bloody 80% of the funding promised. I gave my exam immediately after course completion to be sure that I don't have to bear the frackin credit card interest too long. That was in April ( I started my course end of march and finished second week of april, the following monday I cleared the test).

So to be safe set aside 6 months to get your money and dont sign up for anything else if you're cash strapped. You will just dig yourself a huge hole, the CITREP will just lend you a finger to push you into it. Lol. So much for the funding and crap. Well lesson learnt. I just have to make someone pay me back for this one way or another.

Best Job ever for ITIL certification + VMWare + Citrix XenApp + Windows 2003 + Server Admin + Presales + Post Sales + Solution Architect + whackamole

nospam@example.com (Vangel) — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 11:24:48 -0700

Last week I got a call from a recruiter for the position of Consultant with following skills
"ITIL certification + VMWare + Citrix XenApp + Windows 2003 Server Admin + Presales + Post Sales + Solution Architect + whackamole" with at least 2 years experience as Solution architect. Ok I more than qualify I suppose. A admit I added the "whackamole" but it just looks good there, you have to admit.

So I ask whats the deal it sounds to good to be true. I mean I have never heard of such requirement in Singapore which is why I do web development and SEO. (Lot of jobs here right now for cool SEO guys, I mean come on even we ourselves make our own personal little gold from SEO )

The recruiter replied "the pay is very good. It's 3,500$ per month ...MAX". I was like WTF... this is SPARTAAA moment!!! After a long moment of silence I said

"there must have been a misunderstanding.. you see that was my pay THREE YEARS AGO!!" and I started working from 600$ a month and made my way there.

They just didn't move my cheese, they stole the frickin bacon too.

On the bright side, it means the pay is so low in the market, and if they are really able to hire someone good for that kind of pay then this is what I think. This is the right time to start your tech business. People are spending on IT and hard core development. So if you pay a little bit more you can get good people in.
By the way India is actually paying more than Singapore and I don't mean Index wise but absolute dollar-to-dollar terms. India is matching it. Go figure.

a new contender appears... Pylons I choose you. Pylons vs Django

nospam@example.com (Vangel) — Sat, 02 Apr 2011 19:47:06 -0700

Today I really want to fight.

I love django. But love is like that... fleeting. The stability and reliability of django is undeniable. So anyway why I think of pylons.

Pylons is developing very fast. That may be good or bad. The first Problem I encountered with django recently was lack of common interface to NoSQL. There is work under development but nothing concrete. There is talk of Alchemy but nothing concrete and usable. Pylons on the other hand simply loves to merge with anyone and create off springs. Damn iRobots.

If you visit http://pylonshq.com/ you will see that it does claim support for NoSQL and SQLAlchemy. Catch.com is known to use pylons and MongoDB so there is production stuff..

When using PHP I used to be scared of how to start a project like Advertising Marketplace. Yes its been done like Adbrite.com but looking at OpenX it just doesn't look like something I would wanna do. To me OpenX has fail written all over it.

With django I just want to get started. I know it will be a breeze. Except I hate MySQL or SQL in general when it comes to interwebs. My experience with running the massive GoNZB.com usenet search engine reminds me how painful it was. Which is why Pylons comes into the scene and with Form Alchemy it hard to not think of Pylons.

There is a good starting point for everyone at Pylons just like Django. http://www.pylonscasts.com/ shows screencast. or it must. But sadly right now its always offline.

We shall see if I make somehting in Pylons. Right now I am hard at work with a django based enterprise solution plus my very boring ITILv3 certification which promises a job of 33,000 US$ per annum. Singapore I choose you.... I fail.

Call to undefined function Xmlelement::header() cakephp

nospam@example.com (Vangel) — Fri, 18 Mar 2011 17:30:36 -0700

making rss with Cakephp or something along the lines on XML content type?

try this
$rss->items(array_values($items));

also make sure $helper array has 'Rss' and 'Xml'

have fun

django iphone and python iphone related projects

nospam@example.com (Vangel) — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 13:02:59 -0700

There are some good examples, snippets and projects now in development for mobile environments like iPhone and Android. I am not speaking of application development per se, which is limited to platform-only programming. In my one sided opinion, no phone is so great as to ask for its own development environment, language and platform. We based apps is the way to go. This is my compilation of django or python related iphone stuff. Ill post android stuff later.

A nifty iphone push notification system with source code and some documentation
http://leepa.github.com/django-iphone-push/

A mobile admin interface for django (this is great I think my future/existing clients will love this. too bad my company works with Symfony blah blah)
http://code.google.com/p/django-mobileadmin/

comment: the docs are weirdly located at http://api.rst2a.com/1.0/rst2/html?uri=http%3A//django-mobileadmin.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/docs/overview.rst&style=revver-dev someone should download and pdf this before its gone.
Drawback is they use google code hosting (lol?) but realizing their mistake here's teh github mirror
https://github.com/jezdez/django-mobileadmin

How to switch template when iPhone is detected an example
http://djangosnippets.org/snippets/2035/
Some more ideas on templating for iPhone using a mini_render_to_response
http://menendez.com/blog/easily-code-iphone-templates-django/

comments: I would double check if the user agent string is correct and what about iPads? nvm them they are a nuisance.

then there are idiots who just waste time, stealing docs and making it into iphone app. i am telling ya this iphone thing is getting crazier than it should. it might head the iDotComBust way

[and then we found Kyle!...] iPhone Web service with Django
http://justinvoss.wordpress.com/2010/09/03/creating-a-simple-iphone-web-service-in-django/

haven't covered python as it requires filtering through lot of crap and ghost projects which have no code.
EDIT: oh there if ofcourse
http://pyobjc.sourceforge.net/documentation/index.html pyObjectiveC.
This might come in handy for those
who prefer python. If you have used Pyrex then I suppose this should be easy for you to pick up. I have not even started on that stuff yet.

if anyone happens to visit this page out of traggazillions of interwebs you are fated to be here. share what you know before you leave. xD. thanks,

why cloud computing sucks ... most of the time.. ok all the time

nospam@example.com (Vangel) — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 18:18:19 -0700

There are a lot of self serving marketing morons who don't know what clod computing is. they will not even understand it. but it doesn't stop everyone from getting on the band-fuck-wagon

So anyway the story about "Cloud" computing goes like this..

Once upon a time there was teh internet and some sites became huge.. and more people got online (with their shitty phones, tablets and dookieberries)
so anyway some sites who were making a killing realized that they cant use off-the-shelf shit and low paid monkey programmers to run a profitable business.

so they hired very geeky multiple phd people to re think the deisgn of the interwebs to support their own ultrafuckcluster of a website.
The scientists and architects came to the same conclusion as anyone in Computer science would. So they designed their own Web servers, failovers and data management systems etc etc which supported the business of corps like Amazon and Google and Yahoo. who have traffic problems of the 3rd kind (i don't know what is the 3rd kind i just made that up but you know what I mean)

So as most american ideas go they just thought.. cool this works so lets just keep adding bigger shitz. and so they did..
eventually they added so much they dint really need it. plus seeing as how yahoo hit the drains it would be wise to get rid of the shit before its too late
and you're left with tons of hardware and resources which uses software that no one else can.

so...... they brought in marketing people like Dick fulloshiteamy (i made that name up too since they all sound the same) and they pimping the cloud. great stuff.

Now why it sucks most of the time.

You have to see how the system was built.. it was built for the specific business and then they kind of put it together so others could use it. or at least parts of it.
this means most of the businesses will have to spend tons of money to redesign or design stuff which will only work for a specific type of platform like google app engine or Amazon. So if you decide you got bad customer service and we should move then tough luck mate... Dick fulloshit is nowehere to be found :o
lets hope that never happens...

so anyway why are still some techheads still want to use it.

back in 2006-2008 I was working on a similar massive service delivery problem and came up with an architecture (through referencing) that is very similar to Google app engine for e.g. The reason was my company couldn't afford (or rather they dint wanna pay for anything if they could) a solution like amazon aws and lots of developers. I was the only one... to do everything. So in a way its easier for people like me to just get it from google and not worry about all the DNS load balancing, failovers, NoSQL style DBs etc etc.

too all the fucking moron companies who decided they are Cloud Hosting provider because they use VMWare (like this one) ... go burn in hell coz that would make me your Cloud King as I used VMware way before you knew how to spell it. And since you say you is Cloud Interweb I better see your fricking SLA not just for uptime but for service delivery (CPU, Memory, Storage, MemCache, Response Time, replication, NoSQL, Batch jobs etc) as well or you will have a bunch of lawsuits to deal with.

p.s. don't host with web visions, i have been at their data centers. their own site is slower than my VPS hosted site like 3ezy.net which is distributed and load balanced using rsync and clever dns config (eff yeh \m/!)

end of rant.

Perfect Internet Framework - Frame thy fearful symmetry aka my idea of perfect project

nospam@example.com (Vangel) — Mon, 28 Feb 2011 16:46:55 -0800

Python 2.x version with maybe Django as a framework (this is where I am split, I want SQL Alchemy and Pyrex*) and PostgreSQL as Database.
Nginx as application server
Nginx-static deployment as static file server
Mercurial distributed source control http://mercurial.selenic.com/
Cassandra or MongoDB

what else am i forgetting in my quest....

P.S. I am just a noob here on pythoning so I am listening to everyone and everything out there. Keeping an open mind and learning as I go along.

* Pyrex is not directly required as much of Pyrex can either be used from 3rd party or translated to python alone. KISS

+ reference to William Blake's The Tyger http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:The_Tyger_BM_a_1794.jpg

microsoft bing uses google for search ? really. lets see

nospam@example.com (Vangel) — Sun, 27 Feb 2011 10:13:14 -0800

I have always wondered that if Bing and Yahoo barely crawl my site how do they manage to send me 30% of my traffic???

the crawl stats as I check now on average per day is as such:

From Yesterdays access logs

Googlebot - 2988 crawler hits
Bingbot - 35 crawler hits
Yahoo! Slurp - 21 crawler hits

According to search engine traffic report for past one month jan 27 to Feb 26 is as such

Google - 2524
bing - 307
yahoo - 164

others - 100

i am not surprised if google finally claimed it and they can easily prove it isnt it ? http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/microsofts-bing-uses-google-search.html

I believe more than anything the problem of Google's dominance is simply resources. Only googlebot seems to be able to keep up with crawling and indexing even the most newest of sites and be able to index it within hours. Something that is impossible for Yahoo or Microsoft to catch up with at their current state looking at stats. What is surprising is bots like Yandex (russian search giant - in rusia) are crawling more efficiently than everyone else put together and is second only to google. Maybe americans should look past their shores for opportunities to invest or this could be one very painful lesson for the investors as they seek to only support their own nationality. Didn't the west claim free trade was good?

Python 2.4 2.5 2.6 and 2.7 Windows MySQLdb python installation

nospam@example.com (Vangel) — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 10:21:11 -0800

Let us save time on this very annoying mysqldb install for python. Its not working for me on Windows, Centos or anywhere. I need to get work done and googling around isn't helping much. I would rather just install it however and as long as it works we can get along..

So reminder to me for next time:
You can't install eggs and sources for any library from Python packages GO HERE
http://www.lfd.uci.edu/~gohlke/pythonlibs/ Installer.

Because googling will not help you find this link thanks to spam and "SEO" < < This is the place with other libraries as well so might come in handy if I get stuck again. There are some sites who copied from here and started to promote it etc. talk about a-holes.

back to practicals: In the link above simply search the page for MySQL-Python which is the official package name. Then find the right file by looking for python version (only difference is for amd64 but since thats a dead thing we can ignore those). I have used the mysqldb-python win32 for python 2.6 and python 2.7 on Vista and Windows 7 respectively without issues. for example the package name MySQL-python-1.2.3.win32-py2.6.‌exe means its MySQL-Python version 1.2.3 for ANY windows platform with python 2.6. Look for similar package.

I thank the maintainer and I hope he/she continues the good work.

p.s. I hate those [specially american] blogs that talk so much story and cock-a-dooodle instead of getting to the point. As soon as I read "I was eating my ... " when searching for mysqldb compile errors I know its a f*gg*ts blog.

How to add Live support / live salesperson to your site website for free

nospam@example.com (Vangel) — Sat, 12 Feb 2011 15:12:07 -0800

Live chat support and sales is all the rage when it comes to internet marketing. Unlike some people who talk a lot before giving ou the meat let me get right to the point.

There are two ways you can do this for free.

1. Zopim - Free Trial. This is good because you can try for free and continue to use for Free if you are a small operation.
The advantage of Zopim is integration with most internet messengers like Yahoo!, MSN, GTalk, AOL etc.
I have made a lot of sales online using this tool for my personal code projects. Buyers want to make the final decision and may have a quetion
and you can put their mind to ease right away. Zopim was also very easy to setup with their step-by-step guide

2. Yahoo Messenger PingBox. Follow the link and its self explanatory.
Personally I hate Yahoo Messenger. It just brings back bad memories. haha But feel free to knock yourself out.