Hardware platforms

Ever needed to filter certain F5 platforms within your installation scripts? If so, check out the following document at the tech part of f5.com

You’ll see a listing of all the hardware platforms like this:

Platform: C36
Models: BIG-IP 1500, Enterprise Manager 500
Form Factor: 1U
Host Board: Tyan 5112
Processor: Single Celeron 2.5GHz
SSL Card: Yes

Now combine the Platform code with a small bash script like this one:

HW=$($AWK -F= '/^platform/{print $2}' /PLATFORM )
case "$HW" in
  C62*)   HARDWARE=3400;;
  C36)    HARDWARE=1500;;
  D44)    HARDWARE=2400;;
  *)      HARDWARE=UNKNOWN;;
esac

And you can tweak your scripts to only support certain hardware.

WordPress language issue under php5

If you’re experiencing this, check the following thread
…

You need to edit gettext.php file

Find entry:

if ($magic == ($MAGIC1 & 0xFFFFFFFF)) { 
$this->BYTEORDER = 0;
} elseif ($magic == ($MAGIC2 & 0xFFFFFFFF)) {

Replace by:

if ($magic == $MAGIC1) {
$this->BYTEORDER = 0;
} elseif ($magic == $MAGIC2) {

eBay scamming

After two and a halve months I brought myself to the conclusion that I’m not going to see the object I bought (for the moment, an “expensive imaginary” wii) or the money I paid for it. Was I naif to believe friends who told me that their was protection from eBay, maybe, … One thing is sure, I learned a great deal from this experience:

• If you don’t receive (notice about) the shipping within one week, file a dispute indicating that the object was not received.
• When in doubt, don’t wait to long to file a complaint. You can file a complaint (with eBay) after 10 days, but you have to do it within 60 days. I believed in the other guys story for too long, and I got passed the 60 days.
• Do NOT do transactions without paypal or wiretransfer. They aren’t “supported” by eBay, and they will just waive your claim away.
• Always do insured shipping, never go for economy class. Apparently the postal offices have a lot of thieves within their ranks.

Those may be obvious to the eBay veterans, but it wasn’t to me (as an eBay newbie) until this situation. What I can say is be aware of the risks when dealing on eBay. Not everyone is as fair as yourself. Here I have to say that (apparently) some nationalities have a tendency to be more a scammer. These statements are mine personally, and I’m aware that I’m judging a lot of people who might not deserve this. Yet… I never had any issues with English, German, Dutch or Flemish people. On the two occasions where I had problems, it were both French speaking persons. Once the object was broken (Wallon person), and this time I failed to receive anything (French person – Gérard Loriot – Limeil Brevannes).

To close this, I leave you with a helpful link on the matter. It can be found at here, credits to AuctionBytes.

New theme

I know, yet again… The priamos one wasn’t ideal. The dkblog was nice, but had image probs. The priamos wasn’t as clear as I wanted it to be. When posting code (like with the ant), it showed up totally wrong sometimes. So here we have a new one. How long will it last? 😉

Ant : tar & compress a file structure

The following code may be handy for you… It can be used to tar/compress a directory structure.

Checkout the CoreTasks section in the ant manual for references.

What is a bounce rate?

As I’m “playing” with the Google Analytics lately, I found myself wondering what the mysterious item called “bounce rate” was. So after a bit of googling, I found a good article about it.

Summary

In a nutshell bounce rate measures the percentage of people who come to your website and leave “instantly”. Thought about from a customer perspective rather than I came, I saw, I conquered, the action is I came, I saw, Yuck, I am out of here.
…
Bounce rate measure quality of traffic you are acquiring, and if it is the right traffic then it helps you hone in on where/how your website is failing your website visitors.
Definition:
It is usually measured in two ways:
* The percentage of website visitors who see just one page on your site.
* The percentage of website visitors who stay on the site for a small amount of time (usually five seconds or less).

Interesting AdNetworks for European publishers

Working with an ad network gives you certain advantages:

• They take care of the advertisers. Which enables you to have more time to work on your website, or whatever…
• The money generated from all the advertisers comes as a bundled payment. This is more friendly on the expenses of your (bank) transactions.
• Most (if not all) ad networks provide a clean interface where you can see the statistics about your sites & ad programs.
• Networks want their publishers to generate revenue (as they take commision), so they are (mostly) very helpful in supporting your stake.

The top misconceptions about GPL & OpenSource

• OpenSource is free.
  Not always… OSS (OpenSource) doesn’t have to be free, it means that the source code should be available. Some of the first words in the GPL are, “When we speak of free software, we are referring to freedom, not price.” Many believe that the spirit of OSS is to be free, yet it is allowed to charge money for distributing it. Just look at RedHat & Novell who’re making a living off distributing GPL code.

New theme

Got tired of the old theme, so the quest for finding a new one started. The result is what you’re viewing at the moment. A theme called “priamo”, credits to Fiamo & FamFam. The last theme-change dated from 31/5/2007, so I guess I get tired of themes pretty fast… 😦

Running your dual boot windows inside Vmware Server within Ubuntu

I guess I’m a linux evangelist… Ubuntu is my main operating system, yet (for work interoperatibility) windows is sometimes needed. At that time, I mostly have multiple workspaces open, along with a lot of processes running. Doing a reboot to windows would mean a loss of time & productivity. Or just too much work, as everyone is kinda lazy by nature…

So my research began… First I used VmWare convertor to run my windows inside my linux. Yet having two windows machines, meant twice the space/maintenance. After browsing thru the options, I saw the option to boot straight from a physical disk/partition. After some experiments, I got it working. Below you can find a small guide on how to get it done.