Posted on: April 30th, 2009 by Famous Phil

Lately, I’ve noticed a lot of commotion about this swine flu.  When I first saw this term about a week ago, I thought the pig flu and I immediately thought, avoid pork unless its cooked really well (which comes from pigs).  I then thought that pigs were spreading this to one another.  Apparently it is something much bigger, so a week later, I read a little bit about it, and now I think its time to input a few comments about it.

My second thought after seeing this was the swinely (spelled wrong) pig races.  At the fair every year, I always end up watching some pigs race for some swinely pig race attraction or something.  This is probably how I first learned of the word swine, but I never looked it up in a dictionary, so I decided to today.  The dictionary provides me with a few terms, but the one I’m looking for is ” the domestic hog, Sus scrofa.”

So, apparently the swine flu is a common flu in the pigs and it managed to mutate itself and migrate to humans.  The symptoms are similar to that of the human flu virus that comes around every year.  So I’m not entirely sure why everyone is making such a big deal over this.  Its definitely being over reported, and it has only taken lives in Mexico where people there cannot afford or have proper medical care.  The normal flu can also kill if not properly treated.   So I’d say if you think you have flu symptoms, go see a doctor and take antibiotics to treat it.  Like any sickness, this is the best method to prevent it from getting worse and leading to a possible early death.

My hope is that the news will start reporting other stuff soon and stop flooding the people with this insignificant news like this instead of telling us what is happening to our troops overseas.  We’re still in a war afterall

Tags: antibiotics, media, medical care, news, pig flu, pig races, reporting, swine flu, war
Posted in Student Life
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Posted on: April 28th, 2009 by Famous Phil

A good place to introduce this topic is by stating that I consider myself a “good” system administrator.  I consider myself above average when it comes to Windows Server administration, and “average” when it comes to Linux server administration.  Normally, regardless of platform (Linux or Windows), I usually know enough not to get myself into trouble, yet rectify the problem that is presented to me.

Prior to last October (2008), I have solved a wide array of problems consisting of Apache malfunctions and complete Server Hard Drive failures requiring data recovery, to simply having to unblock a person’s ip address from the firewall because they tried to login to the server incorrectly too many times.  I never really messed a server up so badly that I couldn’t undo what I attempted to fix in the first place.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: administration, blunder, delete, disk space, hosting, Linux, mysql, var, var/lib/mysql, windows
Posted in Hosting / Server Administration, Personal
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Posted on: April 27th, 2009 by Famous Phil

So, I was thinking that I should drift a little bit to my personal life and talk a little bit about my public speaking skills which seem to be severely lacking.   Of course, this idea came to me in the shower like most of my better (or worse??) ideas do.

About 3 to 4 weeks ago, I decided that I wanted to become a Teaching Assistant (TA) for the Computer Science Department (CSE) for the entry level course that teaches students Java (The programming language distributed by SUN).  I went through the interview fine and was asked to give a 10 minute presentation/lecture on what a Constructor is at the level a CSE115 (entry level course) student.

I didn’t know too much about the constructor other than it is the part of a class that instantiates that class.  I went into that lecture knowing a lot about the constructor but I did not rehearse anything.  I also know what I expect out of public speakers as an active listener, therefore, I went in with no power point and rather wanted to just experiment in the Java compiler and explain what everything was line by line from real code.  I wrote a bunch of partial examples in Java prior to my presentation to make sure that I would be prompted to not miss anything important.  Although I doubt I missed anything important, I know that I definitely did not explain anything well.  I would have done much better just reading off a slide and a note sheet (which I hate when public speakers do).

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Tags: computer science, constructor, cse, java, lecture, lecture series, presentation, public speaking, random numbers, university at buffalo
Posted in Personal, Student Life, Uncategorized
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Posted on: April 26th, 2009 by Famous Phil

I’m going to do a short blog for a change *laughs hard*

John was showing me some videos last night on youtube as usual.  One of these videos appealed to me for some reason.  Its called “who started the flame war” from college humor.  It describes the internet perfectly too!

*Warning, there is some content that may not appeal to younger audiences*

I’m going to leave the analysis to you, but I agree with what it says about the internet forums / comments in general.

Tags: comments, flame war, internet, we didn't start the flame war, youtube
Posted in Student Life, Technology
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Posted on: April 25th, 2009 by Famous Phil

The other night, I was working on installing a new RSS feed reader that is similar to Google Reader.  I first found out about Google Reader from a friend (Chris) here at my University over a lunch.  I then looked at it and discovered that it is much better than going to each and every blog site and reading the posts on each blog directly.  This reader basically gathers all of the full text blogs and puts them in an email interface format, making it extremely easy and painless to read a bunch of RSS feeds while on the go (for me, on my windows mobile smart phone on the bus going to class or during dinner when I’m too lazy to get up and return to my room).

Anyways, I am not a real fan of using everything Google when I have an alternative that runs in ssh and doesn’t require an additional login (or saved password).  I found 2 alternatives that run in ssh, one is snownews and the other is newsbeuter.  Both of these programs are extremely simple and do exactly what google reader does, but they run in the SSH window like Pine or Pico does (Pine is an ssh email client, and pico is an ssh text editor).  Snownews is not really good at reading rss feeds because it looks at the description tag of RSS 2.0 feeds which only puts a brief outline of the feed on the screen.  Newsbeuter is much better and places the full content of a post on your screen like Google Reader does.

So, what does newsbeuter look like?

Here is the Main Screen, a main listing from a single rss feed, and a single blog post from an rss feed:

Newsbeuter is a great program, I’m willing to put up with no images, videos, and sometimes some gargled text to save time.  As you probably know, I use public keys for ssh and and to get to this reader from my pine email takes a matter of seconds and no mouse movement.  I’m slowly working on getting my instant mesengers to ssh, however we will see if that ever materializes.

So now onto my rant about partial vs full text feeds.

When I was configuring newsbeuter, my main concern was, “would it read a full feed that is in the rss file, or would it just show the description cropped by [...] like snownews did”.  Because I compiled this on my server from source, I didn’t want to waste effort installing dependancies (a compiling problem) if it wouldn’t work in the end.

Luckily, it did read full rss feeds, except for John’s blog. I asked John what was different about his blog, and he told me he turned off full text rss feeds.  His reasoning is, rss feeds make it very easy for someone else to post dynamic changing content on their own websites.  While I totally understand this concern, I really wonder if it will kill off readership to his site, which I know he might eventually want to make money off from some day.   I know for sure that I want famousphil.com to eventually make money for itself although I’m still debating how to put ads on it without hurting the design (which will be changing in a month or two again to make it easier to read).

I have looked at several blogs debating rull text vs partial text feeds (they aren’t hard to find), including the following:

1. http://econsultancy.com/blog/018-rss-strategy-full-text-vs-partial-text-round-2
2. http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/004717.html. Although this site says the problem was fixed, I think it grabs my true feelings about partial feeds
3. http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/cartoon_partial_text_rss_feeds.php “So nowadays those sites only get my attention when the teaser looks absolutely irresistible — and that’s a bar that’s high and rising.”  Thats how I feel (although I have yet to move many of my favorite feeds into newsbeuter.

For me, I will probably keep his blog on my feed list and look at his teasers.  I will probably not actually read any more than his teasers though (mostly because I don’t have time to go look at these other sites that feel too smart to post a full feed).  I don’t use other people’s content for my blogs normally without citing then adding significant material onto their blogs, therefore, I don’t consider myself a blog theif either.  I do however visit other sites if I feel like leaving a comment

Finally, with wordpress, if you use a “more” tag, this material will not show up on your blog feed.  I will likely begin using this a bit (only after my site becomes eye friendly) because I do have long blogs and sometimes that material is an aid, but not necessary to know everything about my blog.  If people want to read the aiding material, then they can then visit my site.

As for this blog, always expect a full feed, if there isn’t one, I will do everything I can to help.  Comments are appreciated as always   If you host with me, feel free to use these programs I mentioned as they are installed on the main server

Tags: blog, content, description, feed, full, newsbeuter, partial, pico, pine, rss, snownews, ssh
Posted in Hosting / Server Administration, Mobile Technology, My Site, Personal, Technology
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Posted on: April 25th, 2009 by Famous Phil

After a lot of googling, I had trouble finding any information on this topic from anywhere, so this is a topic worth blogging about.  Lets introduce the topic, shall we?

So, as long as I can remember, I have gone to many forums on the internet and other sites that require the user to login to do posting or other actions that only registered users can perform.  Naturally, I have signed up with these sites to gain access to either 1. contribute my knowledge, or 2. access the content that I need.  On all of these websites, when logging in, there are 2 options (in general), 1. “login and don’t save your login”, or 2.” login and remember me in the future so I don’t have to login again”. There are also a few sites that have a drop down saying how long you want to remain logged in for with options 30 minutes, 1 hour, 6 hours, 12 hours, 1 day, 1 week, 1 month, or never log me out.  I like those sites the best because they generally have 1 hour as the default session time which clearly notifys me about how long I can post before I’m logged out and will lose my post data.

Normally, On sites without this dropdown, I choose option number 1.  My reasoning is that it is an extra mouse click less (I hate using the mouse when I absolutely don’t have to, and this is my biggest reason), and 2. since my login isn’t stored, there is no possibility that anyone else can access my area if my computer was either stolen or accessed without my authorization.  My third reason is, I typically forget that tab will take me to that box where I can tap the space key.  I usually type in my password then immediately hit enter without thinking.

There are appropriate session lengths for sites.  For example:

1. Bank sites and sites that display confidential information such as paypal, ebay, amazon, walmart, etc should have shorter session times.  A shorter session on these sites can protect you if you walk away from the computer for a while and leave it unprotected (which I occasionally do).  Then there is the fact that these sites generally don’t require you to type in data that would take more than 5 minutes to enter without first confirming with the server some of that data.  Therefore, it would make no sense to keep the session longer.
2. Webmail services such as Yahoo Mail, GMail, Hotmail, and other services should expect that you will login and could possibly write an email that will take you more than an hour to compose.  Normally if a post is going to take this long, you should write it on your computer then copy and paste it, but many people don’t do this (I for sure don’t and I don’t know many people that do this either).  In addition, if you pay for these services, they have separate account management interfaces which have shorter time outs and require an additional login.  Therefore, webmail generally has a very reasonable time out for good reasons, and they still maintain approrpiate levels of security.
3. Most forums (except for 2 that I’m aware of) have session time outs that last longer than 30 minutes.  I feel that 30 minutes to post what you want to say is appropriate for a forum.  I usually end up writing for 20 to 25 minutes of time for each post that I make.  Usually if I have a feeling I will be much longer, I will write on my local machine and copy and paste it to post later.  I do this for a few reasons, 1. I’m afraid my browser will crash, and 2. I’m afraid that the session might time out (if over 30 minutes).  I’m the kind of person who won’t post unless I take the time to make my post very meaningful, and I feel strongly about sharing that knowlege.
4. Most blogging software programs that I know about (including my own wordpress) save drafts every minute which keeps my session active, therefore, making it need a lesser session time.  I’m not sure what my session time is limited to, but I’m positive that I will never lose my post due to a time out or an internet connection issue.

So now is the time for a quick rant that ties into the topic I’m writing about.  For 2 forums that I visit somewhat regularly (1 I have a lot of posts on, the other I don’t), and on 5 occasions, I have written a long post that has taken about 25 minutes of my time in each instance and I have lost all but 2 due to time outs.  Normally when this happens, I get mad and just leave.  Thats mostly the reason why I blog here now on my own server and not elsewhere. Anyways, these 2 sites have session time outs of less than 15 minutes (I think its 10, although its hard telling).  For me, I consider 30 minutes the minimum session length that is reasonable for a forum for people like me who post a lot of information in a single post.

These forums must have an easy option to increase the session time limit, so what is the big deal in increasing it?  By increasing it, you give your users more time to make a single post without fearing a time out (and losing a long post), and you won’t make posters who post a lot of content mad (Like me).  People who make large posts generally can help to increase SEO scores and make your site more popular, thus increasing advertising revenue. So I see it as a win win for increasing the session time out and spending the 5 minutes to find that option.

Anyways, I approached one of these site’s administrators once and mentioned this (and in recent times, have asked other close friends), and have gotten the same basic response: “Learn how to check that keep me logged in box!” Although it isn’t that hard, I normally forget that I can tab to it (mostly a systematic habit of hitting enter immediately after the last character of my password for that site), and using the mouse to do it is a waste of 5 seconds and hand movement because I’m usually too lazy to move my hand over to the mouse from my keyboard *chuckles*.  In addition, that check box will just get unchecked the next time I enter firefox because I have Firefox wipe out my cookies / history on exit.

Another point that I would like to make is that I use Norton Ghost to restore my computer to an original state that I made immediately after installing Windows.  I do this about once a week, so if Firefox doesn’t automatically remove my cookie I set, this certainly will.  So that extra effort for me is pointless.  This probably doesn’t affect most people, but for me, checking that box is pointless.

Basically, I join sites because I want to, and if I feel that admins of these forums don’t feel that something this simple can be fullfilled, then I feel I should take my content elsewhere (or just save the time and put it elsewhere in learning other stuff).  I’m not sure how many people would agree with me, but I’m the kind of person who is set in my ways and am somewhat resistant to change in habits that I have formed years ago.  Perhaps this is bad for me because I am a computer science student and should embrace change, but this is just how things are for me.  I consider some changes good and others very bad.

Anyways, Your comments are appreciated (both good and bad).  I’d rather keep these sites anonymous because I’m not bashing their techniques or sites (in fact, both of the 2 that I have had issues with are extremely helpful when I read them), I’m just stating what is on my mind.  So if you think your site may be what I’m talking about, I’d rather not see it posted on a comment.

Tags: banking, forum, ghost, login, password, posting, save password, session limits, time, time out
Posted in Hosting / Server Administration, Personal, Programming, Technology
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Posted on: April 20th, 2009 by Famous Phil

So today I was reading through my comments to approve and disapprove suggestions / comments on blogs.  I usually get about 30 to 40 spam comments a week that I have to manually delete.  This time I got a funny spam comment that I thought deserves its own blog (no I didn’t approve it, rather, I promoted it!).  Just to be an “ass”, I thought I would also post this user’s IP address and email publically.  You may feel free to spam him

So here is the comment to a blog “Google features and what I utilize from Google“,

User: Afforsenerede
email: aninuebit@gmail.com
ip: 209.239.112.48
submitted on 2009/04/19 at 11:20am:

“Yooo..

I kno it has nothing to do with what you wrote, but have you ever heard of http://www.bluestickers.info/ringtones.php . They seems to promise free ringtones

PS. Dont be an ass, this is NOT spam ”

Why did I post this although it only deserved a deletion?  It is quite simple, I get enough spam email a day to know that when I post my email on a public site that is quite popular, I will get more spam to that address. My goal is to get this spammer a lot more spam to hopefully overwhelm him to where he has to increase his spam filter and possibly start flagging legitimate email as spam.

To get around spam, I implement a system to where my emails are filtered at the address level then forwarded on through more filters on other servers before being forwarded to a central email address that I have set up.  My central email address is not filtered because I rely on email to be filtered before it gets to my central email account.  This way if I notice a high volume of spam, I can simply increase the filtering on public addresses and start deleting legitimate email without too much worry.  People who know me probably know one of my lightly filtered addresses and can send the same email to multiple addresses to ensure delivery.

If the above confuses you, I simply have a bunch of public email addresses that I filter then forward to an unfiltered address that I look at email from.  Spam doesn’t bother me much anymore, especially since I use a text email client that doesn’t show pictures and makes deleting a message as easy as the “d” key (this is called pine).  Deleting 100 spam messages takes me about 1 minute now compared to about 5 minutes with a web based client like gmail or yahoo mail or hotmail.

Pine is a great program and all of my hosting clients may use pine on my server through ssh, I have compiled pine with password file support (.pinepass).  Pine is a bit tricky to set up, but I posted a little bit about the process on adminreference.

Finally, I would like to thank this spammer that goes by the name: Afforsenerede for getting me on this topic.  I will have a reply out to you soon   I also intentionally removed the link to that info site just to be a bastard .

Tags: email, pine, smart, spam
Posted in Hosting / Server Administration, Technology
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Posted on: April 16th, 2009 by Famous Phil

Today I discovered this blog on Matt Heaton’s blog (http://www.mattheaton.com/?p=179) about CPanel Backup.

Bluehost experiences the same difficulties that I experience when performing backups (likely much worse), and they are working on a patch using the linux kernel to determine the list of changed files instead of performing a hard disk scan for changed files.   I recommend reading his blog for more details!

I look forward to seeing this addon released because it can help all system admins perform quicker backups on linux!

Tags: backups, bluehost, CPanel, hosting
Posted in Hosting / Server Administration, Programming, Technology
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Posted on: April 16th, 2009 by Famous Phil

I suppose a good place to introduce this topic is that I am a computer science student at the University at Buffalo going onto my 4th year of studies.  I have formed many opinions of professors which are both good and bad, and I have an idea of who the good professors are and who are bad, but I have rarely asked myself why the professors fall into good / bad on my list… that is until a lecture yesterday by a possible future UB professor.

This person was well dressed and came in to lecture about Graham’s scan algorithm for solving the Convex Hull problem.  Our normal professor went over this algorithm the prior class and this made perfect sense.  Unfortunately, the candidate didn’t make much sense.  Unfortunately, if I didn’t already know the algorithm, and his power point slides would be a start to understanding the algorithm, nothing more.  This candidate had an Asian accent, although I understood what he was saying, I was still clueless, so I don’t blame the accent.

So what do I blame, the excellent slide show, the professor, or the overall teaching style?  I believe that I can blame none of the above, and rather blame the teaching techniques.  I have had many professors here at UB, and the professors that I have always understood use a chalk board and / or overhead projector (for writing).  These professors often set goals for each lecture and end up following through on every goal.  They prepare practical examples and work through them step by step in class.   This is a research university, so theory is a necessary evil in class.  I am the type of person that can understand the theory behind the answer only AFTER I see a practical example specifying a specific case of the theory.  Professors who tend to be good for me always go through an example, then provide the theory and background into why the example worked.

The professors that I rarely (in some cases never) have understood use a PowerPoint slideshow, premade lecture notes, and/or read directly off from a sheet of paper.   I also should add that these professors seem to rely on their notes and just end up reading off the slide, which makes class seem pointless and useless.   I now understand why many students end up not going to class (something that I still do, although it is normally useless).   These professors often forget to include practical examples, and prefer to refer their students to homework assignments that are nearly impossible to complete without first learning a lot of background information on their own.  At first, I didn’t go and learn the background information that these types of professors seem to expect, and this is what I blame many of my first year bad grades on.

There is one professor that has used both of these above methods. This professor has a slight egyptian accent, and this proves to me that accent does not hurt understanding the material.   The professor for the first 5 weeks of class used a projector and a writing tablet to give a lecture with PowerPoint / pdf slides.  He would often write over these slides with his tablet.  Unfortunately, the tablet wasn’t very good at allowing him to write, and this is why his written notes on the tablet were nearly impossible to understand.  I would end up following exactly what he said as he wrote on the slides to get decent notes.   He would also end up reading directly off from the solved example slides (Most of the time, this was the case and he’d never write on these slides).  His slides mostly focused on theory, there may have been a few practical examples.  For this part of the tested class, I did very poorly.  Then he switched to a chalk board (at the suggestion of the class).    The following lectures had many more examples and were much easier to follow.  He always made his thoughts known on each part that he wrote and went from step A to step B … to the final step instead of skipping steps.  I ended up doing much better on the test that focused on this material.

Another similarity that I have noticed (although not as noticable) is that the good professors don’t use the microphone that is provided to them.   I have found that the microphone (even for big 400 person lecture halls) often cancels and turns into white noise, especially in the middle of the lecture hall.   The students who attend lecture halls to learn typically sit in the front row and the people who sit in the back often are there just to be present and end up surfing the internet when they could easily sit in the front of the lecture hall if they wanted to learn (there ARE ALWAYS open seats in the front).  I prefer professors who don’t use a microphone and just speak up a little bit (or keep the same level like many professors that speak up AND have the microphone on).  I do understand that there are a few professors who cannot raise their voice (these are very soft spoken), and for these professors, I have found that the mic does help somewhat but they have to speak very quietly with the mic on.

So, you might ask, what made me write a blog like this, I must be mad at someone who can’t teach (*laughs*).   Well, that isn’t the case at all.  A few weeks ago, I was asked to give a 10 minute lecture on what a Java Constructor is.  I knew a little bit about what I said above (I am a certified peer tutor through the CRLA), but I didn’t give it any thought.  I thought that I would do a practical demonstration directly in a Java environment and play with the code until I ran out of time.  I figured that I would have a lot of thoughts to say during the 10 minute lecture.  I also had sample code written because I was afraid that I couldn’t squeeze enough material into that 10 minutes.  I have to admit that I was very wrong at doing this approach!  I should have either taken a piece of chalk or an empty compiler and worked with that.  I now know for the future to do that if ever asked to again.  I also know that I’m very nervous when I get in front of a group of people who I believe are much smarter than I am, and therefore, I’m sure that nervousness also aided in making me not state what exactly was on my mind.

Although I doubt many of my professors and teachers will see this blog, I really hope that someone who educates reads this blog and picks up some tips that I have found can make or break a good lecture on a good topic!

Tags: comprehension, computer, cons, education, lecture, professor, pros, science, teaching, understanding, university
Posted in Student Life
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Posted on: April 15th, 2009 by Famous Phil

You can purchase expandrive at: http://expandrive.com

I bought sftpdrive (the old name) about 8 months now after looking for a solution to hot edit php files on my web server so I could effectively develop remotely while having the local development feel.  Shortly after I got this program, I shared it with John, who then shared it with Jordan who recently blogged about it here.

I will leave the screenshots to Jordan, but I have never had a problem with this program.  I now use it for all of my development needs and it has never failed me.  The best part is that this program is easy, many programs that interface windows to linux are not easy!

So thats my pitch for expandrive   Hopefully they can make a few more hundred bucks off from this blog

Tags: expandrive, file transfer, sftp, sftpdrive, ssh
Posted in Hosting / Server Administration, My Site, Personal, Programming, Technology
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