Buggedtech – Open Source & Other Geeky Stuffs

You know about twitter right? If you love using it, you may be pleased that you can do it in several ways including the command line. Yes, from the CLI.

Just follow this simple steps from Dave Taylor’s post in LinuxJournal.com

Happy Twittering!

I’m not advocating going home seconds after your work shift ends. Rather, I just want to rehash the proven rule that you should never touch the code if you can help it because the probability that it will break is so high when you’re in the “go to bed” mood. Just do the changes the following work day when you’re sure to have a fresh mind.

Various examples can be cited but the experience I had several days ago is a concrete one. To give you a background, I work in an internet-based company — an experiencial travel directory with the official designation as an SEO. Our current websites are edited “real time” in our development server and then transferred to production server via ftp. Now, seconds before my work shift ended, I suddenly realized that I can still insert a major keyword in our main search pages. I got so excited coz months ago I was resigned into the idea that there’s no more room for additional key phrases in the main search page.

Not wanting to loose the excitement, I fired up the terminal application and connected to production server via ssh. I was so confident that nothing will go wrong coz I will simply add the major keyword to the search page and I know very well that the part I’m about to edit is a static text and hence a no brainer. The first few directories’ search pages I edited went well as expected. It was 2:30 AM and I was already planning to defer doing the changes for the following day. However, I decided to edit one more before I can call it a day. I made the edit, flushed the web caching system, then refreshed the browser for one last look….BANG! The search page has an error. I panicked a bit knowing that this directory has the greatest traffic in all our websites. I tried finding the error stated but I can’t seem to find it.

For about 20 minutes, the search page was broken. I tried recalling and validating what I did but still what I can remember is that I simply added the keyword phrase so my brain was insisting that it’s not the source of the error. Programmers were no longer around and besides, it was already 3:00 AM so I don’t want to disrupt their rest. Left with no choice, I had to fix it myself…a punishment for breaking the “rule”. Good thing the other pages where not affected, including the“searchtext”¹.

With the searchtext still up, I had to redirect the main search page to it so that I could fix the page without discouraging tens of thousands of visitors that’s currently using the directory. Also, the redirect has to be “temporary” so as not to affect the crawling of the page by Google and other search engines. I preferred doing the redirect through it’s apache virtual host configuration (refer to Figure 1) but I could have done it via the coldfusion language(refer to Figure 2):

Figure 1. The apache vhost configuration

Figure 2. Equivalent configuration

With the main search page redirected to the searchtext, I now had the time to fix the code. Not all visitors may like the way the current search page is formatted but it’s better than having a search page and be greeted with error.

notes:
¹ a page that is somewhat like our search page but lists all the options a user can choose with the dropdown menus in the searh page. This is mainly for search engine crawlers but is still usable by humans.

Ever experienced being connected to a remote server via ssh and your terminal freezed due to inactivity? That happened to me several times and I will be a liar if I say I liked it.

Fortunately, I found out about “top”, a *nix command that it intended to show the top processes in the machine you’re logged on to. This same command is what I use as a quick fix/hack to the terminal freeze problem I have.

Freezes happen because connection to the remote server has been idle for some time and the remote server thinks you are not anymore interested in the current session that’s why it decided to disconnect you…hence the freeze. To let the remote machine know that “I will be back please hold on”, just use “top”.

I still experienced some instances that my session was disconnected even with “top”(I think 1/100) but mostly, this short hack worked.

Try it…

NOTE: This is a repost of my old blogger blog dated Sept 14, 2008

In the online world, misdirected/incorrectly spelled email happens. Yes misdirected emails just bounce back to the sender but that’s not a nice way to introduce your company to a new client.

Figure 1: (usual email configurations)

Introducing catch-all. A Catch-all for email, according to Wikipedia usually refers to a mailbox on a domain that will “catch all” of the email addressed to it, so any email address at the domain that doesn’t belong to another mailbox will end up in this default mailbox.

Figure 2: (with catch-all,ideal situation)

Unfortunately, email spammers had come into the picture, trying all possible email address that your company could possibly have.

Figure 3: (with catch-all,ideal situation + spam)

Now, you are to solve yet another problem: spam in misdirected email. Yes, you can draw from your experience and fight spam with every available means. But for me, I’d rather spend my time doing more important things than fight spam with all my might as it’s draining.

Here comes Google’s gmail. In my own experience, gmail has a more superior spam filtering functionality. I seldom have false positives. It has also an auto-forward option. That’s it: use gmail as your spam filtering solution and have it forward to you non-spam emails!

Figure 4: (with catch-all,google as spam filter)

IMPORTANT NOTE:
While you are saved from managing spam and misdirected emails, you still need to weigh the pros and the cons in implementing the solution I propose above. Monitor the:

• volume of emails that’s being redirected per day by your server to gmail, and
• the number of legitimate emails that are actually received

as this is potentially bandwidth intensive. Try assessing if it’s worth saving misdirected emails. If maybe for two months you get 60-95% spam, you may just want to send those nonsense and misdirected emails to trash.

Also, don’t forget to ask permission from your bosses. They may not like the idea of sending your mails to Google, even those misdirected onces, for privacy reasons. Otherwise, you risk losing your job. You had been warned.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT: This cool idea came from reading the post of ex-Yahoo and now Craigslist’s Jeremy Zawodny Using Gmail as My Spam Filter.