Code Emitter

Im ROCKZ-Forum gibt es gerade ein Thema über schwarze Löcher, bzw. speziell, was “dahinter” passiert. Ein interessanter Brainfuck. Read the rest of this entry »

Die Fachschaft Wirtschaftswissenschaften der Hochschule Bonn-Rhein-Sieg hat aufgrund der Zusammenlegung mit dem Fachbereich Wirtschaft in Rheinbach dazu aufgerufen, Logo-Entwürfe zu erstellen. Kurz gesagt: Ich habe mal ein wenig gebastelt:

Und da ich gerade so schön dabei war:

Vielleicht gefällt es ja dem ein oder anderen :)

Es handelt sich um Derivate des Logos der Hochschule Bonn-Rhein-Sieg: ©; Verwendung unter Bedingungen der H-BRS; Verwendung der Derivate (Logos*) unter Namensnennung

We are recently encountering spreading spam activities from the TurkTelekom network in our community sites. This becomes really anoying so we need to deal with this the one way or another.

Our first approach to handle this was to block the TurkTelekom network by a simple reverse dns lookup, but unfortunately, the spammers are now using IP address spaces without reverse dns delegation that are sill residing in the TurkTelekom network according to RIPE. I am not a fan of blocking whole providers out of our community sites but since our abuse requests went unnoticed and there is not really a big chance to hit a real user, I am currently taking into account to use the RIPE database for this job. At ftp://ftp.ripe.net/ripe/dbase/split/ RIPE makes available recent snapshots of their database, so this should not be too hard. If you are experiencing similar activities while not aiming at the turkish market, this might also be an option for you.

Let’s see how this hare and the hedgehog game will end. If it will at all.

Hello folks,

as some of you may have already noticed, I am currently participating in the CreepTD open source towerdefense project I stumbled upon months ago. At the moment I am preparing version 1.0 which will include a traversable path tree, animated graphics and new game modes. It will still take some time to complete 1.0, but if you are also interested in getting involved, I have created the Developer Central covering all neccessary information (including a PHP library for map parsing, validation and compilation) to get you started once the new version has been released.

I am currently planning to make CreepTD 1.0 and further development my Bachelor Thesis. I would be very excited if this would be possible, because it would provide me with the optimal time frame dedicated to the game.

Creep on! :-)

A picture is worth a thousand words. Let’s take a look at the following graphs taken from Alexa:

Facebook keeps growing while implementing more stuff that has previously been available elsewhere.

The german antagonist to Facebook is one of the biggest losers.

The same as StudiVZ but targeted at elementary students.

We all know: MySpace is out.

Wer-Kennt-Wen is fading away.

Jappy.de did well for a while, however it’s also weakening slightly since 2011.

Kwick, a southern germany community.

Lokalisten, another german social network – even pushed by big television channels.

And last but not least: Google Plus.

Da frag’ ich mich doch, was schlimmer ist: ISDN oder soetwas. Read the rest of this entry »

For several years, I wasted a few minutes from time to time to suggest our community at the open directory project (DMOZ) but as you can imagine, I had no luck. I am not a dumb person, I know how an appropriate title and description have to look like, our community is well known and therefore is a very good candidate for the directory. I even applied for becoming a volunteer editor of the german WWW/Communities category a year or two ago because I thought they might need help there – but I had no luck, too. So, what person do I have to sleep with or give a bunch of dollars to get my site listed there? Is this the sense of a web directory that praises itself to only contain quality links? There is so much garbage in there but our quality community is rejected. Maybe it is time to burn the ODP because it did not serve any purpose for a long time.  This efficiently prevents us from being listed where our competitors already are.

Howevery, I am still looking around to get some backlinks.  While roaming around the web I stumbled upon several (50+) much smaller web directories and added our community there. Most of them accepted the entry, some bugged me for a backlink, others seem to be dead and a few do not even allow new links to be added. The problem seems to be, that Google does not care of this webdirectories and the links listed there – I assume they filtered them out already. I basically agree with Google’s decision but this becomes another factor for us: We do not have the same chances today like our competitors had in the past.

Another reason why there are so few links to our sites is that our community is its own litte ecosystem (with blogs, profile etc.), so that there is hardly a reason for someone to link to it from an external ressource. Members find anything they need inside and the only noteworthy intersection are “people finders” where links unfortunately cannot be seen by search robots because they are “login only” or do not even convert URLs to links. This efficiently prevents us from getting the rank we deserve.

In addition Microsoft’s Bing crowns it all by neigher understanding our sitemap files that are a perfect implementation of the sitemaps standards nor crawling our sites adequately. There are about 200 pages listed in Bing for “rockz.com” of about 1.000.000, for “schlach.com” there even seem to be some hundreds of sitemap files mistakenly indexed as real content instead of any content. This is so ridiculous and prevents us from being found by customers at all.

To cut the long story short: It seems that SEOs overwrought the search engine operators for years and caused a total overregulation so that today’s websites do not have the ghost of a chance to catch up to others that already exploited the possibilities in the past. The only factors for getting a good rank today are having a cash cow or friends somewhere in the press business.

Knowing this you can skip all the unnessecary parts I have been through. Go and invest your time into something valuable, go and find the cow, good luck!

Years ago I discovered a very comfortable way of uploading PHP files after editing them, a VBScript named “vbsFTP”. Copied into the “SendTo” folder and updated with some connection information, any file inside the base location on my harddisc could be uploaded to the corresponding remote location with just two clicks whilre preserving the local directory structure (C:\MyLocalHtdocs\a\b\c.php -> /var/www/htdocs/a/b/c.php).

However, this script is using the FTP protocol and ftp.exe integrated into Windows, so that I’m very sure, security comes short.

While installing new servers the last few days, I decided to doom the FTP servers from our brand new debian boxes and came up with my own VBScript that is using PSCP.exe (file copy over SSH, capable of private key authentication) from the Putty package instead:

Installation instructions:

1. Get the script (and PSCP if you do not have it yet)
   
2. Save the script to “C:\Documents\YourWindowsLoginName\SendTo” (XP) or “C:\Users\UserWindowsLoginName\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\SendTo” (Vista)
3. Open it, edit the configuration section at the beginning and save
4. Make sure the local and the remote directory exist, then switch to the local directory, create or select a file, click right and select “Upload”.

That’s it! The file will be silently uploaded in the background. For creating directories you will still need to do so in the old fashioned way or you add the “-r” parameter in front of “-i” or “-pw” – but I’d not recommend that (may take a long time when accidentally clicking on a big directory). Of course you can install several copies of the script at once.

Happy coding!

Today I moved our main MySQL database from one server to a fresh new one and of course I had to configure the new mysql daemon for heavy load and much more memory like I always do.

Nothing exotic so far. However, MySQL (5.0, Debian Lenny) comes with a default InnoDB whatsoever with empty InnoDB data and it is now the second time for me, that the InnoDB engine was silently disabled by the MySQL daemon after changing the configuration to something usable. The only way to solve this issue is, to delete all the empty default InnoDB files from /var/lib/mysql and restart the database server. From then on, InnoDB shows up in “SHOW ENGINES” again.

But the clue is: When importing InnoDB tables, there is no error, no warning, no notice that InnoDB is disabled and all tables silently fall back to MyISAM while killing every single foreign key and not using the tweaked InnoDB settings (because there is none) at all. What a mess.

As you can guess, I will have much fun for the next few days switching hundreds of tables back to InnoDB and recreating every single foreign key after tidying up the unreferenced mess. Hooray!

I have to revise everything I said about varnish before. Meanwhile it is too hard to count the number of times, that I had to restart my instances in the last few weeks and especially today. While packet loss keeps increasing inside the Hetzner network, varnish more and more shows up as a real problem, refusing to serve images randomly with increasing frequency.

I used Varnish till today to cache images hosted on S3, but I am finally so absolutely disappointed (mostly because our users are also with us just because of varnish), that I decided to go back to good ol’ lighttpd with a proxy and caching solution I wrote in PHP (like I did before). The initial reason to switch over to varnish was, that I searched for an uncomplicated way of proxying the images to save bandwidth costs including that I do not have to touch the servers every week like I did before, but unfortunately I ended up touching them twice a day just to restart Varnish. I don’t even dare to think about the traffic peaks caused by this and all the hours I lost while logging into several servers.

I guess this is a clear case of “if you don’t do everything yourself”. However, I completely rewrote my own caching solution, made it completely independent of the backend systems and implemented a SQLite database into every instance so that it’s possible to let it clean up itself once a day via a cron job and generate some basic statistics. -> “Minimal Image Proxy 2″ was born and is already running on our image servers. It’s 3,2kb zipped.

Sigh. Finally I am really looking forward to get some peace of mind and significantly lower traffic bills from Amazon now. And it definitely feels really good again to replace troublemaking programs by a hand-crafted beautiful piece of specialiced software.