leinadium » misc

from tech to home renovations

admin — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 21:08:24 +0000

We just bought a great house on a beautiful piece of land. After a minute or two to enjoy it, we’ve decided to do home renovations. First up is the basement!

Interesting article about the IE8 User Agent

admin — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 06:55:20 +0000

Interesting article at http://showmeanalytics.com/2009/07/one-visit-two-user-agents/ that explains why some visitors to our sites have continously switching user agents (from ie8 to ie7 and back again).
We were actually kicking them off for a while.

Response.Redirect not working properly on IE8 ASP

admin — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 12:14:52 +0000

just noticed some of our users are having trouble when logging out. The Response.Redirect call does not work in IE8(Vista).
Found another user showing this on http://www.vistaheads.com/forums/microsoft-public-internetexplorer-general/348183-ie8-reponse-redirect.html
Looks like an IE8 bug (and not the first).

Use collaboration tools like Twitter to improve productivity for your business

admin — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 17:22:30 +0000

I work 6 timezones and thousands of kilometers away from head office. Permanently. Our start-up company has employees in 5 separate locations and it takes some solid collaboration to get things done when you don’t meet face-to-face everyday. People often ask me what kind of tools I use to keep in touch with my partners and employees to make sure that things get done.

Recently, I attended techshow in Chicago and sat in on a “collaboration tools” dinner. I quickly realized that my work-from-home setup was interesting to others and have decided to share the tools I’ve found to be the most useful for my situation and how I’m using them.

Skype - all employees have skype accounts and we regularly chat and talk using skype. I also use a localized skype-in number so that clients and colleagues can reach me directly without having to pay long-distance fees. Add to this that skype is now available as an iphone App even allows me to continue these conversations while I’m out to lunch or strolling my daughter.

Action Method – this is quickly turning into our #1 organization tool. Simply enter somebody’s email to delegate a task, prioritize tasks and have discussions and reference files at your fingertips. Action Method also has a great iphone App which allows me to check on projects when I’m on the go. Action Method is a great example of how a beautiful user interface can make the difference. In the past, we used Sugar CRM but I found it to be too cumbersome, particularly for smaller todos. Too many fields to fill out in an old fashioned interface.

Twitter – of course. I can’t overemphasize that twitter has become a fantastic productivity tool for us. Every employee gets a company twitter account with protected updates (visible only to company employees) and is highly encouraged to twitter what they are currently doing and problems / questions they have. The advantage? When I get up in the mornings I can see what people in 5 separate locations are doing and what happened while I was sleeping (6 hour time difference). This used to take 30 minutes of calling, emailing and waiting during morning meetings. Now it takes 30 seconds to see what everyone is doing and even more – what they want me to know! Did I mention Twitter makes a fantastic productivity tool?

Mantis – a bugtracking tool to track all the problems that users are having on our websites. Easy to use, simple layout and gives me a good overview of critical bugs as well as feature requests.

Cerberus - Great tool to keep track of communications with customers. When your support team is geographically dispersed it’s important to know who said what when to whom. I’m very impressed with the templating features and the spam protection. We set up a two level support system in a matter of days.

ok, and I sometimes still use email but often take the written text and plug it into one of the abovementioned tools because it gives me the opportunity to manage the responses better.

Avoiding dDoS attacks. A study in progress

admin — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 21:23:18 +0000

Situation: Our datacentre got hit by dDoS attacks 4 times in the last month.

Each time, our servers were unavailable to the public for over an hour, the first time even something around 5 hours.

So now I’m looking for ways to distribute our server infrastructure geographically – and also looking at cloud servers.

Our infrastructure is a mixed linux / windows environment.

First visits:

http://www.rackspace.com/index.php

http://www.gogrid.com/

After browsing their website I’m impressed. F5 Load balancers are included in the setup and there are a lot of starting images to choose from. Another advantage seems to the price.

Things I disliked right away: All servers are located in the San Fran data centre. This means that our european customers get the high latency version of our sites.

http://www.mosso.com/

http://www.voxel.net/products-services/order

http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/

http://groups.google.ca/group/cloud-computing/web/list-of-cloud-platforms-providers-and-enablers

lawtweet.ca

admin — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 21:04:55 +0000

just launched www.lawtweet.ca to get a better understanding of the Canadian legal community.

The first comment: Thanks for lawtweet.ca Meets a good need!

Thanks!

Looking to hire for for mysql / iis asp troubleshooting

admin — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 21:31:17 +0000

Hello,

I’m looking to hire someone to fix these errors on our servers.
090315 13:47:27 [Warning] Aborted connection 10269 to db: user: ‘abc’ host: ‘server.de’ (Got an error reading communication packets)

At the same time, the asp scripts on IIS6 give a connection error when trying to connect to the mysql server.

The error appears when going from an Windows 2003 IIS6 Server using
MySQL Connector/ODBC 5.1.5
to connect to a mysql box running Gentoo Linux mysql-5.0.44-r2

The errors appear sporadicallly and I’m looking for someone that has the skills on both linux and windows platforms to trace the error and help solve it.

Any takers?
Please respond.

vbscript to convert html into numeric entities for xml file (rss feed)

admin — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 19:20:35 +0000

After numerous failures getting through the http://feedvalidator.org because of some remnants left by word or other text editors, I implented the replacement function found at http://www.texaswebdevelopers.com/examples/sql-injection-protection.asp.

For the german text we work on it was changed slightly to include german umlaute.
Here’s the function:

FUNCTION htmlEntities(strString)
Dim strOutput
strOutput = strString

strOutput = replace(strOutput,Chr(10),”")
strOutput = replace(strOutput,Chr(13),”")
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”&”,”&”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”‘”,”'”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”§”,”§”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”©”,”©”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”®”,”®”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”¦”,”¦”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”‘”,”"”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”<”,”<”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”>”,”>”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”–”,”–”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”—”,”>”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”‘”,”‘”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”’”,”’”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”“”,”“”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”””,”””)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”„”,”„”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”†”,”†”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”‡”,”‘”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”…”,”…”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”¡”,”¡”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”¤”,”¤”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”¢”,”¢”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”£”,”£”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”¥”,”¥”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”¦”,”¦”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”§”,”§”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”¨”,”¨”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”©”,”©”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”ª”,”ª”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”«”,”«”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”¬”,”¬”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”®”,”®”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”™”,”™”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”¯”,”¯”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”°”,”°”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”±”,”±”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”²”,”²”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”³”,”³”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”´”,”´”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”µ”,”µ”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”¶”,”¶”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”·”,”·”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”¸”,”¸”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”¹”,”¹”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”º”,”º”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”»”,”»”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”¼”,”¼”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”½”,”½”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”¾”,”¾”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”¿”,”¿”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”×”,”×”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”÷”,”÷”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”‰”,”‰”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”‹”,”‹”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”›”,”›”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”€”,”€”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”"”,”"”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”'”,”'”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”&”,”&”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”<”,”<”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”>”,”>”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,” ”,” ”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”–”,”–”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”—”,”—”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”‘”,”‘”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”’”,”’”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”‚”,”‚”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”“”,”“”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”””,”””)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”„”,”„”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”†”,”†”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”‡”,”‡”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”…”,”…”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”¡”,”¡”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”¤”,”¤”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”¢”,”¢”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”£”,”£”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”¥”,”¥”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”¦”,”¦”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”§”,”§”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”¨”,”¨”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”©”,”©”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”ª”,”ª”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”«”,”«”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”¬”,”¬”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,””,””)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”®”,”®”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”™”,”™”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”¯”,”¯”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”°”,”°”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”±”,”±”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”²”,”²”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”³”,”³”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”´”,”´”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”µ”,”µ”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”¶”,”¶”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”·”,”·”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”¸”,”¸”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”¹”,”¹”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”º”,”º”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”»”,”»”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”¼”,”¼”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”½”,”½”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”¾”,”¾”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”¿”,”¿”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”×”,”×”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”÷”,”÷”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”À”,”À”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”Á”,”Á”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”Â”,”Â”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”Ã”,”Ã”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”Ä”,”Ä”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”Å”,”Å”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”Æ”,”Æ”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”Ç”,”Ç”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”È”,”È”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”É”,”É”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”Ê”,”Ê”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”Ë”,”Ë”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”Ì”,”Ì”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”Í”,”Í”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”Î”,”Î”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”Ï”,”Ï”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”Ð”,”Ð”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”Ñ”,”Ñ”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”Ò”,”Ò”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”Ó”,”Ó”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”Ô”,”Ô”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”Õ”,”Õ”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”Ö”,”Ö”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”Ø”,”Ø”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”Ù”,”Ù”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”Ú”,”Ú”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”Û”,”Û”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”Ü”,”Ü”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”Ý”,”Ý”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”Þ”,”Þ”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”ß”,”ß”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”à”,”à”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”á”,”á”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”â”,”â”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”ã”,”ã”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”ä”,”ä”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”å”,”å”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”æ”,”æ”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”ç”,”ç”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”è”,”è”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”é”,”é”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”ê”,”ê”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”ë”,”ë”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”ì”,”ì”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”í”,”í”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”î”,”î”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”ï”,”ï”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”ð”,”ð”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”ñ”,”ñ”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”ò”,”ò”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”ó”,”ó”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”ô”,”ô”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”õ”,”õ”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”ö”,”ö”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”ø”,”ø”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”ù”,”ù”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”ú”,”ú”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”û”,”û”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”ü”,”ü”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”ý”,”ý”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”þ”,”þ”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”ÿ”,”ÿ”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”Œ”,”Œ”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”œ”,”œ”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”Š”,”Š”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”š”,”š”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”Ÿ”,”Ÿ”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”ˆ”,”ˆ”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”˜”,”˜”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,” ”,” ”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,” ”,” ”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,” ”,” ”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”‌”,”‌”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”‍”,”‍”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”‎”,”‎”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”‏”,”‏”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”‰”,”‰”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”‹”,”‹”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”›”,”›”)
strOutput = replace(strOutput,”€”,”€”)
    strOutput = Replace(strOutput, “ä”, “ä”)
    strOutput = Replace(strOutput, “Ä”, “Ä”)
    strOutput = Replace(strOutput, “ö”, “ö”)
    strOutput = Replace(strOutput, “Ö”, “Ö”)
    strOutput = Replace(strOutput, “ü”, “ü”)
    strOutput = Replace(strOutput, “Ü”, “Ü”)
    strOutput = Replace(strOutput, “ß”, “ß”)

htmlEntities = strOutput
END FUNCTION

Apostrophe in eval() on asp vbscript

admin — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 13:47:09 +0000

Eval() stops executing when it hits an apostrophe in the evaluated expression sought.
Had to find this out the hard way after some messages were truncated by this bug.
Some further explanation:
http://bytes.com/topic/javascript/answers/712903-eval-apostrophe

I used this opportunity to replace all the eval calls in that particular function with the actual variable names.
Don’t be eval!

blogspot deleted my blog. Sniff.

admin — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 11:31:00 +0000

And then it was gone. After a healthy breakfast and a cortado I was faced with this when visiting my blog. It had been deleted by the good folks at google. No email, no message saying “Sorry”. Just gone.

It seems I’m not the only facing such difficulties (as a search for deleted blogspot blogs will show), but it seems that google sometimes does it to their own blogs (http://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-blog-accidentally-deleted-by-google/3186/)

What really irked me though was that they did not even send an email to the owner of the blog. Is this the right way to treat bloggers? Even more frustrating is the attempt to contact google for help. Their “help” pages on blogspot are a hellish circle of multiple choice questions that led me to read the postings of other helpless users on the blogpost help group.

The only choice I had was to host this blog myself. So here we go, a new site, a new url. Thanks google.