Code Emitter

Es grenzt hier jedes Mal aufs Neue an eine Geduldsprobe. Obwohl Windows Update, Security Essentials und alle sonstigen Programme laut Optionen komplett von automatischen Updates entkernt sind, schleift der “Intelligente Hintergrundübertragungsdienst” permanent irgendwelche Daten vom Microsoft CDN an.

Das heißt in Verbindung mit ISDN:

Ich habe das Notebook nun eine Woche lang nicht verwendet und musste gerade eine geschlagene Stunde lang einfach nur WARTEN, weil der “Unintelligente Vordergrundlahmlegungsdienst” gefühlt einfach nicht aufhört, das gesamte Internet mit 64kbit runterzuladen. Der einzige Grund, dass ich hier nun schreiben kann ist, dass ich den Dienst komplett gekillt habe. Das ist vom Spaßfaktor in etwa damit zu vergleichen, als würde man mit DSL fünf DVD-ISOs auf einmal runterladen…und das mit drei Familienmitgliedern gleichzeitig. Ich mein, ich weiß ja, dass ich hier keine Updates mehr ziehen kann, ich weiß, dass ich bei jedem neuen Programm zuerst sämtliche Updatefunktionen zum Teufel jagen muss und ich weiß, dass immer wieder irgendwelche dämlichen Programme das ignorieren werden. Aber stundenlang warten zu müssen, nachdem man den PC eingeschaltet hat, weil das Betriebssystem sich selbstständig macht, setzt dem Ganzen nun wirklich die Krone auf. Vermute mal, dass das irgendwelche 20MB Sicherheitsupdates je nach Dringlichkeit einfach trotzdem zieht, egal was ich da eingestellt habe - mal davon abgesehen, dass der Dienst nun wirklich alles andere als “intelligent” oder “Hintergrund” ist.

Das Resultat:

Jetzt ist nicht mehr nur das gesamte Internet sondern auch noch mein Betriebssystem mit meinem ISDN-Anschluss, den ich leider Gottes hier verwenden muss, gänzlich inkompatibel. Mein Gott, wie schlimm muss das erst für jemanden sein, der nicht weiß, wie man den Müll deaktiviert. Viele werden’s zwar nicht sein, aber die Wenigen tun mir echt Leid.

Es dürfte nun übrigens auch bald 10 Jahre her sein, dass hier mal von DSL die Rede war. Armes T-Deutschland.

Da frag’ ich mich doch, was schlimmer ist: ISDN oder sowas. 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 an uber-bug!

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!

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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.

Webseite von AdScale

Wir sind per Definition stets auf der Suche nach Vermarktungsmöglichkeiten für unsere Chat-Communtiy, so dass wir uns am 16. Januar letzten Jahres gar nicht zu arg über eine Spam-Mail ärgerten, in der uns “Deutschlands erster Echtzeit Marktplatz für Online-Werbung” nähergebracht wurde. Die Sprache ist wie erwähnt von AdScale, einer zumindest vom Prinzip her guten Alternative zu Google Adsense und Konsorten.

Nach dem inzwischen zweiten größeren ernsthaften Anlauf, AdScale als Alternative bei uns zu integrieren, möchte ich nach einem Jahr und sieben Monaten Testzeit nun ein kurzes Resumé für alle diejenigen ziehen, die ebenfalls mit dem Gedanken spielen auf AdScale zu setzen. Read the rest of this entry »

Sorry for the lack of updates recently - I have just been busy with a lot of everyday life and the following projects. Short and sweet:

Only a few days ago we started Rockz.com (”Me rockz, you rockz, we rockz.com!”) on top of our virtunity|cs plattform as a sister project for schlach.com but using a much more common name. Say hello! :)

We also launched our very own corporate website at virtunity.com - so feel free to take a look at it, too.

Bye for now! :)

Seit rund 14 Tagen läuft die Community nun bereits auf dem virtunity-System und ich muss wirklich sagen: Eine solch reibungslose Umstellung hätte ich gar nicht erwartet :-). Hat sowohl technisch wie auch logistisch dank der Mitarbeit vieler fleißiger Teammember prima geklappt.

Die Resonanz war zudem erfreulich positiv, das kann man sich so wirklich nur wünschen. Ich denke, dass wir alles in allem den Puls der Zeit und die Erwartungen unserer Nutzer auf einen gemeinsamen Nenner gebracht haben, der sich sehen lässt und absolut einzigartig im Web ist.

Es ist wahrscheinlich gerade die Klasse, die das gesamte Projekt ausmacht. Es ist keine unüberschaubare Massenveranstaltung, jedes Detail sitzt am richtigen Fleck, irgendwie kennt man jeden nur um ein paar Ecken und jeder, der etwas verbessern möchte, findet beim Team und mir immer ein offenes Ohr und ist einfach ganz nah dran. Das ist einfach “Gemeinschaft, wie sie sein sollte” :-).

Jeder, der ein wenig Zeitvertreib sucht oder sich bei den Platzhirschen zu Tode langweilt, sei hiermit natürlich auch herzlich eingeladen. Let’s rock!

Press says that in november, most big german social networks suffered from a drop in in active users. For me it seems that the initial hype is more or less over now and those people, who did not use the web for linking, tagging, sticking and other needless stuff in ugly but big social networks before the hype, got finally bored by the big barren ones and are now leaving for good.

Don’t let me lie, but if anybody out there got a fresh web 2.0 community ready to party, head for relaunch now and make this misery an end! ;-). Hah, yey, I mean us!