Topic: #tech

Wordpress… what a pain! I’ve been neglecting my blog for quite a while, and seemingly spent way too long trying to keep it up. As of late, every month or so, the LightSail instance on AWS running my blog (and several others) just wants to die. The database keeps corrupting (with so much spam comments), the admin panel is unbearably slow, and all while it costs me around $12 AUD per month to keep running.

Photo Layout allows users to collate a batch of different sized photos to generate a collage of photos on a sheet of paper for printing. Its main aim is to maximise the print area on a sheet of printing paper. Photo Layout is a simple workflow desktop application for users that do all their printing in-house.

I’ve been writing a small app at the moment that manipulates images in REALBasic (now called XOJO) and came across a peculiar crash. Basically, I’m drawing images into a larger image and after loading 100 images and drawing them into other files, it ended up crashing. Nothing could be caught. I soon realised that it was a memory issue (reaching over 4 gigs).

I’ve been working with SAML and SSO for a while now and I’ve always defaulted to using Firefox with SAML tracer. Its a fantastic plugin as it captures all network traffic and then flags SAML requests and responses before allowing you to view the SAML message in plain text. I have always wanted a similar one for Chrome, but the closest/only one I could find is the SAML Request Decoder. It is focused on the actual page itself, and thus, is useful for SAML requests, but then if there are a few transactions / redirects, then it fails to capture them. I thought this would be a great couple day project to work on.

Interesting find earlier today as I come across a very confusing error message on some custom code we have. It seems that DirContext. getAttributes parses the FullDN that you pass to it and grabs the BaseDN to do the search. The reason I’m coming to this conclusion is that I’m using one connection and one connection only to LDAP (specifically for LifeRay), except I’m getting an error for UnknownHostException for a different host.

So I found myself with a dilemma after upgrading to the latest Photos app from Apple on my Macbook Pro. It supposedly takes over from both iPhoto and Aperture. I used to use Aperture, but it was a bit heavy for what I wanted it to do (in terms of just browsing photos and then doing touch ups using Photoshop). iPhoto was actually pretty good for what I was after. It would import a folder I’d drag in, and then I could flag photos I’d like to edit, and then edit them using Photoshop with a simple shortcut! Life WAS great, but it all stopped with Photos.

Keynote: “Graphs are eating the world” was by Emil Eifrem, who is the co-creator of Neo4J, about what graph databases are and whats expected in Neo4J 2.2+. He is expecting to have 1 million records per second on the initial import of data, up to 10 times faster cypher queries and up to 100 times faster concurrent writes. From the sources he has shown, No-SQL databases are becoming more prominent in the enterprise world and its expected that by 2017, 25% of enterprises will be using Neo4J or other No-SQL databases in production.

I had been toying with the idea of moving my hosted emails off the Dreamhost servers and into the hands of Google. My main reason was that I was in fact using IMAP for all my emails and as great as it was, both squirrelmail and roundcube weren’t the best web based email clients. They were just a bit clumsy when loading up tens of thousands of emails and the search wasn’t nearly usable.

We migrated several databases across from ASE 15.0.2 to a new sybase server over the weekend. All went well until this morning when we found out that the like operator wasn’t behaving as expected. Instead of the percent/mod operator representing this definition: “Matches any string of zero or more characters.”; it became “any string of one or more characters”. For example:

Just re-encountered this issue. If you have a table where there is an attribute of type varchar(2000) for instance (really just anything greater than 255), when you pull it out using sybase_connect, it will only return 255 characters. This is outlined as a bug on php.net. To get around this issue, use a convert to text or update the attribute to be of type text if you can.

I’m currently setting up a new server to play with and apart from the usual nightmare of compiling everything and finding all their dependencies and what not, I did hit an issue which I couldn’t find a clear answer online for. I used the following to configure PHP 5.3.2:

We just recently hit the following error from Sybase:

It was my long weekend (yes, I realise the long weekend was last week) project to redo my main webpage, which just required a few more photos to be processed but its now all done (except for the software page and a few small user tweaks). The main thing I wanted was a full screen webpage, showing photos, a simple navigation area and a simple backend. I used Supersized for the main background section, jQuery Tools for the menus and a few transitional bits and pieces and a simple php web service to return the images that you want to see - randomised and appropriate for the screen size. I did just need to push it out otherwise it’d hang around for way too long. I hope to link new photos that I blog up to that page dynamically in the future. Written by Milton Lai

The past few weeks have been a bit intense with work and personal projects, I’ve been at the keyboard quite a far bit to get my first real app out. I’ll have another post later on, closer to the date when I can actually release it. Of course, it won’t be the cleanest release, but there will be regular updates (in fact that means I need an updating mechanism which will make life easier for the people who do end up using the software). I’ve spent a bit of time refactoring my current project before I started the new tasks. I felt that there was a bit of code smell and well as performance issues. One simple example would be to create a local instance for any values which are calculated within loops.

This summit ran between the 24th and 26th of September. Hosted by InspiringApps in conjunction with ARBP and held in Boulder, Colorado. This town is a great place to visit, especially when you’re into anything outdoors (except for surfing - although there was a surfing diner somewhere in Boulder). The sessions that ran were all quite relevant to almost everything that I do, and of course, some more than others.

I ran into an issue at the end of last week regarding sessions in PHP. The problem was the locking that happens over the sessions. This isn’t what’s now coded in place, but it was a thought I had (bad idea). So I had a PHP file which did a POST to another file - using the following code

I’ve implemented a web service for work which allows you to queue a job, and also to retrieve the job. I also implemented a simple login header which looks after your session through the database. The long term issue that we’ve had in the past is that Safari drops the session (thus losing all global session variables) and also Safari dropping the ability to kill the session in PHP. So I’ve made a simple module which is included on all PHP pages and it sorts out the authentication for you.

This has been one of those user functionalities which I attacked sometime last year and now that I’ve had it placed into the framework, I feel that its been tested and works quite well. The frustration I had with listboxes where you do a sort (lets take iTunes for example) on Artist and lets say you know the name of the song. The list of the titles is in some random (or possibly the date added) order. What I’ve wanted to do, is to sort on the title, but to keep the artist sort. Its the same thing as doing a database query and using “order by artist, title”.

Since last tuesday, I’ve had quite a long week since Nick has gotten back from overseas, so its been a bit of catching up, and doing as we used to do (stuffing our faces with junk food - I haven’t had any junk food since the new year).

This is a quick write up of my encounter with FreeRADIUS over the past couple weeks. This isn’t necessarily a full blown how-to guide. I just want to point out the main differences I noticed when configuring this version over previous versions. When searching for details on how to configure FreeRADIUS, all the versions date back prior to version 2. Since the middle of 2007, FreeRADIUS 2 had been born with little documentation of changes. From my point of view, unless you are spending every day staring at radius.conf, you won’t know what has really happened after you upgrade to version 2. The main change is that they have split up radiusd.conf into modules. From a programmers point of view, good on them, but from a user who looks at this a couple times a year, this was quite confusing. To outline, the radiusd.conf file used to be about 1900 lines and is now down to about 750. What they have done is put this: $INCLUDE ${confdir}/modules/ in the conf file which has remove a lot of the configurations. So now each module/method appears in its own file inside the modules folder. Another significant and overlooked directory is sites-available / sites-enabled. Inside sites-available are default and inner-tunnel, both of which were required for our PEAP-MSCHAPv2 implementation against smbpasswd. The module directory might not be overlooked so easily, but the sites-enabled is, which is a bunch of symlinks back to sites-available. So to get FreeRADIUS to work against smbpasswd you will need to modify the following:

Just had a reencounter with a laptop from about a year ago with the same problem. It’s a Sony VIAO VGN-C25G/B. The problem is that the computer will not wake from hibernation. It gets past the bios, but no further. One thing to note is that this laptop has always gone without a battery, so I’m not sure if that is a crucial factor in this or not. It is running Vista Home Premium.

Second day back at work and this problem arose and as I should’ve been doing a whole lot more of this, I thought it was time to get back into it. So the reception computer, which had phone software running on it - meaning external calls may have not been able to come in into reception, would not show the desktop after logging in.

I plugged in my old IDE hard drives from my old machine and wanted to copy all the data across to my 2TB drive. Dragging and dropping left me with errors of corrupt files and so my command line trick is to use XCOPY.

So I’ve just had a quick update to the sites whole feel and outlook. I like the colour scheme, so far and it would most probably stay like this for a little while. Changing the colour scheme is quite a painless effort, so there might be more changes in the future when I get the time and feel like a change.

I’ve had this issue since last week, but I havn’t had much time to have a look into it, but basically, when the lid closes, the laptop will go to sleep. Once the lid is opened again, normally, the laptop would wake up, but it seems as though the laptop wakes up, but the screen doesn’t. I’ve tried setting the closing of the lid to go into hibernation, but that has the same results. The users are currently holding down the power button to shut it down, before restarting the machine.

As I explained in the backlog, I did get myself a new computer on a budget. So the whole system cost about $1000. The reasons for most of the parts would be price. I didn’t want to spend too much, but a machine that would run quite well and quiet. So the specs are:

OK… SO.. a whole month as gone by… without a single word from me. As lame as this excuse might be, I just haven’t had to time, and I have been trying to find the time. So the last time I blogged, was before Nick’s 21st dinner with the family. It was a top dinner - peking duck pancakes… mmmm… The week following lead to his 21st party, which was an unforgettable event. Having been to one his of sisters 21st, it followed suit, and being able to catch up with everyone was really good.

So, I have been way too busy with work. Started off with my 10 day project. Was able to get it done after 6, and 4 days of testing. There was just too much testing. I was able to get it done, and was quite impressed with the speed at which I was able to get it done. This project was finished in the week of 18th June.

So, rain, rain, and more rain. Started at Sebel Pier One. Nice hotel, nice rooms. Ceremony was supposed to be at Observatory Hill, but the weather was… terrible to say the least, and it was moved to the receptionplace - WatersEdge. Formal pics followed at the Park Hyatt as well as Observatory Hill, before the reception. Here are a few pics:

So here are a couple of videos from a tour a guy did in Australia. His name is Barnz and is from our neighbouring country, New Zealand.

So here comes probably the longest (I’ll try to make it as short as possible) post I should be doing. So for the past month I’ve been… really busy. Had enough time of course to put the wedding pics up but other than that, havnt had any time for a personal post - really just to catch up on everything so I remember it in the future.

Very long, but eventful week. Project wise, I was able to complete half of it. Basically the functionality I was after, I acheived on Thursday, which is fantastic news, and meant that I didn’t feel like doing too much work after that. Monday and tuesday had me modifiying my stored procedure, since there were confusions about a few of the columns and their links with our database. Many problems this week have been blamed on the Intel Mac. Basically since support for printers and particular applications have ceased and so there are no updated drivers or versions of software that will work on the new Intels. On thing to note, is Adobe Reader 8 is the only one with the plugin that works with Safari on the new Intels. I have yet to call HP to ask for updated drivers for their printers since the Intels appear to lose the connection, and need to be re-added to work.

So, transformation part 2. After many delays… lets go through them. Ordered AVR and speakers last Thursday, was told they would be in on tuesday, speakers arrive today and amplifer due tomorrow. No follow up calls from them, nothing. Monitor… was apparently delivered to the wrong store, and so was sent back to the warehouse but arrived today and i picked it up after work.

So on Monday, I was told that there would be more to do on my project since it’s all out on the table. Yesterday he explained them to me. Basically an extra week of work (I hope) and it’ll all be done. I’m currently tackling one task a day and I should get it done. So following this project, I’ve got a 4 week project, and then a 4-6 month project. Sounds exciting, it really does! I have been very busy the past few days. There has been a virus outbreak and from my understanding, its a symantec vunerability, where the virus gets in, disables symantec and spreads itself throughout the broadcast. On the otherside of our routers, there is catastrophe, but luckily, broadcasts are stopped at routers. So today we were able to patch everyones (hopefully) PC with the lastest version of Symantec 10.1.5.5001. Apparently version 5000 was released a couple days ago, but it got through that, or maybe it was another one. But now we should be safe, unless someone decides to walk into work with the virus and hook it up to the network, and of course have people who didn’t do the update.

Finally, yesterday, I received the little post slip saying that the postman missed me. Received the package today, installed it, works a treat. So its the Alpine KCA-410C Versatile Link Unit. It allows you to connect two CD changers and have 2 pairs of Aux in. One thing I’ll be looking for is the iPod adapter which may use one of the cd changers. I’m not sure yet. Will also be looking for another CD stacker if the iPod adapter uses the other cable hanging out of my head unit.

I must say, the past 3 days have been a drag. It has been long, but the main reason is because I haven’t been in the working mood. Just feels like I should be taking a break. Since it has been 3 days, its a bit hard to remember everything that has happened. I have put through a request to salary sacrifice myself a MacBook Pro. I’ve also been looking at the BenQ 24 inch monitor, and just today, I had been looking at Synergy. So my little plan is to get myself the 24 inch, hook it up to my macbook pro as an extended screen, get myself a 19 inch benq, and hook that up to my desktop computer and run synergy. Also have a set top box hooked up to the 24 inch. This is of course my dreaming, but only time will tell.

Its been a great week so far. Sunday, I ended up heading with a couple mates to Cantebury Leagues for some snooker. Having not played in nearly a year, I somehow managed to win, finishing off all the coloured balls in one turn. Not being a gambler or been on the pokies in nearly 2 years, I put 5 dollars into a machine and came out with 14.85. Great win for me. Me and one of the guys headed to Dooleys for a free dinner (for members, every year, around the june/july, they put 50 dollars of credit onto your membership card, which is great for free food).

These past two days have been busy. Spent yesterday completing the new project the boss put me on. It was finished when I left on thursday, but today received a call, and i guess we understood two different things. I followed what he had scribbled down on a piece of paper, so he is at fault as much as I am. I did finish it today though, so I’ll see his verdict on monday. I did come across a problem, which I don’t know how to do it. Basically, I made a short script which ran all the create files, stored procedures and pop files. I also needed at the end of this file to update some fields in the database. I had been trying to figure out a way to do it, other than creating another file and running it. No luck as yet, but I’m sure the boss knows how.

Its been 3 days, 3 very long days, or very short depending on how you want to look at it. As mentioned, I had a meeting with someone who needs clarification on many aspects of my export. It went quite well, I spent the first half of monday generating error pages for her, where there is bad data. It of course had to be in a usable format so to make it easier for her and others to fix. During that day, and since then, we have been flooded with new users, new computers and more computer problems. Not blogging everyday of course means I dont remember them.

Friday was a quieter day at work. I spoke to one of the people who is working on my project and we will be having a meeting on monday to discuss the data. I did have one slight hiccup as someone bought themselves a MacBook Pro, and needed their things migrated from her old Macbook to the new one. This has been done many times before. But after doing the transfer, it seemed that only the applications were imported and not her personal files and settings. The slow migration started, by booting the old macbook as a firewire HD, and copying over her personal files. All her documents were transfered but i noticed that her favourites we not there. I asked a colleage and he said to copy of the libraries. Not the macHD libraries but her personal ones. So I started, and soon received an error about the file being used. The transfer stopped and another colleage mentioned that I really shouldn’t transfer the libraries over since that will copy over anything ‘wrong’ with the old system into the new. I thought it was ok, and tested her entourage, to see if it was working. I was, but now it would give me a popup saying to reopen. Big problem since I told the lady to come up in 20 minutes to pick it up, and 20 minutes had passed. To cut things short, I created another user, set their library folder permissions to allow the current user to copy them, I backed up the old one, and copied the new profiles’ library folder over. Entourage worked which was great, but a few things still needed to be copied over. This time, i didn’t select all and paste, but copied exactly what i needed. Nervous times. Went home earlier on friday, and went to a friends brothers 18th. Quiet night, with a bit of gaming to be had.

Just a quick upgrade to WordPress 2.1. Head here: http://wordpress.org/development/2007/01/ella-21/ for more info.

Well isn’t this one going to be a long write up. I have been quite busy lately with work, work and more work, and of course, my latest task - Heroes. So of course today is Australia Day and its a time where all aussies invite their family and friends over for a BBQ. Today just wasn’t one of those days. Instead, it was spent shopping, with my cousin. Of course it was planned that we head out for a jog, but ended up at Chatswood Westfields. This got bad to worse as I entered J.B. Hifi and purchased, what I thought was a bargain. Of course, it was a bargain. I wouldn’t buy anything unless it was. So that notion landed me with a brand new head unit for the car. The Alpine CDA-9855R was the item and it is oh so beautiful. Top of the range CD player for Alpine - it has the most… I think I could go on for days. So anyway, got home and installed it. It only took about 30 minutes, to rip out the old one and throw in this one.

So it seems I’m catching a cold. Seems like I started feeling like this on saturday. So anyway, arrived at work to an email from the boss to have a meeting at 1:30 today for 2 hours… So i had been working on the binary code sets and cursors, and started working it out. Got to a point where I KNEW it was nearly there, but something was missing.

So after my misadventure last week (not being able to find the place), I got myself a phone number and found it. Lead my Kim Cheng from Bantus in Perth, it was a great night. I havn’t been to capoeira classes in over a year. It was great to get back into it. Those people from Perth of course call things slightly differently than what I was used to, but got straight back into it. Started at 7 and finished two hours later. I know tomorrow I’ll be very sore and I can already feel the blisters on my feet.

So past couple days have been a bit rough. Well more busy, since on monday two people were away and so, because it was my first turn for IT help. It’s even better when everyone comes in at around 9-9:30 and you get calls at 8:20. So yesterday had a little chat with the boss about exactly what he wanted from what I was doing. Got the objectives sorted and have been working on it since. If the boss comes in tomorrow, “we” have a meeting about what has been going on with this project since the people who are interested in it want to see and discuss plans. At the present time, my boss should be looking at my code and my results. I’m sure all criticism will be constructive. We shall see tomorrow.

So past 2 days of work have been ok. There has been a number of problems with everyones computers. All not being related, but just receiving quite a few number of calls. Can’t remember too much about yesterday apart from finishing slightly early, hoping someone would be free to do something with. Instead, heading to J.B. Hifi in Parramatta to have a look at head units for my car. It’s been about 1 and a half years, nearly two, since I installed my JVC KD-G615 which has been operating quite well and has good sound coming from it. I do however want a head unit with crossover adjustments and possibly time alignment. I know that top of the range equipment has higher/better quality parts and has very few settings for you to change - so to listen to the original recording rather than too much treble or too much bass, to enjoy what the artist/recording company want you to hear. Nevertheless, I’ve went to look, but J.B. Hifi didn’t carry the models I wanted to look at from Alpine. I’m looking at Alpine, Kenwood and Clarion. Problem is that if i want the crossover adjustments, they only seem prevalent in the highest models in both the CD Player range and DVD Player range, which is very costly. So, can only keep looking or hope for a bargain on eBay.

So at Macworld, the MacBook Thin wasn’t announced at keynote. Disappointed, guess I’ll have to keep my eye out for another laptop for work, or maybe one of the Macs… I want the features of the MacBook Pro but smaller than 15 inches.

Yes, I have purchased my second official game - C&C Generals. It was only 15 dollars - bargain. I do realise that this game is 4 years old and that explains the 15 dollars, but its a great simple game. I’m not into RPG’s or games which require a lot of time and dedication. So yes, over the past 2 days, I have been playing games. I dont normally play games, but guess this is what you do when you are bored.

So I spent most of today with a colleage fixing a slight problem that was started by someone else yesterday. We went about it the wrong way and so spent most the day fixing it. The lady had a local account on the computer but someone else wanted to use it, and at work, you can have users login through the domain. Since they wanted to do this, it was set up yesterday so she had the proper account being the domain server account. She came into work this morning and came straight up to IT wondering where all her files were. Since creating the new user, a new profile was created and everything was gone. So to recover this, there are two ways, one works better than the other, we of course did the more stupid method which was the first one to come to mind. The better method took some searching.

So, today aint was quite a long day, but this was due to the fact that my boss is going on holidays tomorrow for a week and so had to give me something to do. So he went through a small process of exporting filemaker database and importing it into sybase. This is all a part of a larger project which may or may not be done by us. This is more a learning experience about database modelling. Task i was working on yesterday, well the heat dropped off it since the funds and products we were after to make it happen, have made the bosses of the project rethink their plans.

So I spent most of yesterday sleeping, catching up with sleep, although wasn’t such a great idea since sleeping patterns were ruined. Apart from that, I invested some time in reading up on REALbasic. It’s what I will be / just started using at work. Because my work is a macHouse to say the least, with also PC’s lurking around the place, REALbasic allows programs to be compiled for windowsm, macs, and linux. Getting the hang of it and can’t wait to start building proper applications that at least do something useful and not just talking to itself.

Many updates over the past day on my website. Guess I’ve got the time, so to make the most of it. If you head to http://www.mlai.org/ you will now see a spash page with a simple navigation box. Finally got time to get the gallery up and running with wedding photos I’ve taken over the past few months. I’ve made a note to keep my 2007 wedding album up to date by having a couple photos from each wedding. Still got a few things to change, to personalise it a lot more, but at least the information is there for everyone to look at.

This is the start of my first real blog.