Dale's Weblog

Statistics for this month.

For some odd reason the router decided to wipe the stats for bandwidth usage this last month. Although I had a look at it a day before that happened.

Uploads was about: 1050MB
Downloads was about: 3.5GB
So uploads were up a far bit since the month before (~800mb last month).

Traffic for this site:
(dalegroup.net)
Unique visitors: 851 (889 the month before)
Number of visits: 1377 (1273 the month before)
Pages: 23637 (5593 the month before)
Hits: 29623 (11659 the month before)
Bandwidth: 149.27 MB (90.10MB the month before)

So on a whole the site traffic was up a lot. Take a look at the page numbers!

Now for forums.dalegroup.net
Unique visitors: 334 (267 the month before)
Number of visits:894 (703 the month before)
Pages: 8611 (8134 the month before)
Hits: 61354 (60903 the month before)
Bandwidth: 109.19 MB (89.27 MB the month before)

So again the forums had more traffic too. I’m very happy with this ;)

I don’t think we’ll get the same traffic this month, with trials and stuff although we’ll see. I’ll have to find reasons to make people want to come here more often!

Anyway our first Trial is tomorrow, English! What fun. Good luck to everyone.

Enjoy 8)

MSNbot

Something I just read:

<i>"With the way msnbot is crawling sites right now, it probably won’t be long until microsoft fully unleashes it’s searching powers, probably in time for some form of integration into longhorn."</i>

Sounds very possible. last month msnbot did 185mb traffic on my forums alone. Where as google did less than 1mb. Maybe google bot’s searching is just better? Time shall tell.

Finally! Eaten by a cookie or two.

YAy. I’ve been working on a php script (just love this trial period, so much spare time! ;)), which I just got working. I’ve been writing a script that stores sessions (you know, php sessions? like what runs phpbb) into a database. The only problem was that when doing this you need to completely rewrite the session handling script. You can no longer use $_SESSION. But it’s finally done (sort of, need to work on a few small things). Current it’s about 80 lines of code (bit more than the one line you used with the $_SESSION function). My main problem was writing cookies, now stupid me forgot that you need to write cookies BEFORE you output anything to the browser. Why I didn’t remember this is beyond me, but I forgot. I would have just spent the last hour pulling my hair (or what is left of it) out over this. Argh. All over one echo statement. ARGHHHH. Anywho it’s fixed now. I am happy.

Oh and just incase you think I’ll COMPELTELY insane and inhuman I was in fact in the city for the WHOLE day and I didn’t need to check me email. Thank you every much. *thinks to self* I am in control of my internet use, I am….no really. :)

So bla!

Hey does anyone know how CVS works? I need it for a project (or job or something that involves more than one person coding).

AnywhO! Hope you enjoyed my little rant and remember, setcookie() works the same way as header() you can’t output to the browser (unless of course you turn buffering on, but that’s crap and IIS sucks).

When is mysql AB going to release a new version of MySQL Control Centre? This version is just soooo old.

Night Night :-)

EDIT: oh while I’m here. Terminate is doing a test run of "their"* shoutcast server tomorrow night at 9pm. I’m looking forward to this. Make sure you play something good! ;P

*their: really meaning one or its or something. Terminate really isn’t as large as the dalegroup corp**.

**when I say dalegroup corp I’m talking about dalegroup.com.

Oh god time to go to bed.

Windows XP Sp2

Well it is finally here (for people with access to the microsoft beta testing area). It will be released to the general public sometime next week. The service pack is ~270mb and provides many many fixes to windows XP (home and pro). It is recommended that you install it asap (if you’re running XP of course, it doesn’t fix the bugs in linux…).

More details about SP2:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/winxppro/maintain/winxpsp2.mspx
Changes to Functionality in Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/winxppro/maintain/sp2chngs.mspx
Order Windows XP Service Pack 2 on CD (Free)
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/updates/sp2/cdorder/en_us/default.mspx

Find the zombie eating robot!

Arghhh.

There is a link on this page to my zombie eating robot. The first person to find it has skill or far too much time on their hands! :p

Happy searching.

ohhh *goes back to maths*/.

Apache logs files

Well I’m sitting here, internet has gone offline. *sigh* But anyway. My apache log file was really getting far too large. It was taking up 467 MB (489,697,280 bytes). Pretty phat. So anyway I’ve finally changed over to a new log file. I’ll let my backup take place tonight. I’ll do a CD backup tomorrow and then delete the old one. Now that log file was just for my main site. The forums log is about 100mb (but that was changed over more recently).

We had maths today, it was an interesting test. Bit different to the trial papers I had been doing, although it wasn’t too bad. Tomorrow I have a *day off* and should be doing business studies. We’ll see if that happens :p

Mmm this adsl outage is a largish one. *ho hum*

I better internode don’t have an outage :( I really like internode, but iinet is pretty kewl. I spose I could move. If they bring in static ip addresses I think I will.

hehe I like my smoothwall box:

ERROR
The requested URL could not be retrieved
——————————————————————————–
While trying to retrieve the URL: http://info.winamp.com/winamp/ivw.php?
The following error was encountered:

Connection Failed
The system returned:
(101) Network is unreachableThe remote host or network may be down. Please try the request again.
Your cache administrator is webmaster.
——————————————————————————–

Generated Mon, 09 Aug 2004 09:06:33 GMT by fx2 (squid/2.5.STABLE4)

mmm. I think I need to do another upgrade on my CMS. I want to have multiple user support for posting, well it current DOES to that. But everyone with access would be able to delete/edit my news posts. Not a hard fix. Shall look into it. I’d also like to cut the news post when it reaches a certain number of characters and then you get the option to "read more". So I’ll have a look into that too.

Back to basics with dales blog

I’ve decided to do something a bit different. My site has always tried to be more than a blog, and "skillful". I’ve never been good at web design so my sites always look bad :p
What I have done is written a site that is just about my blogging and although it connects to the same news system (and therefore the same news) it is meant to be has JUST a blog.

I quote maddox
<i>"I’ve chosen a black background for most of my text because it’s easier on the eyes than staring at a white screen. Think about it: your monitor is not a piece of paper, no matter how hard you try to make it one. Staring at a white background while you read is like staring at a light bulb (don’t believe me? Try turning off the lights next time you use a word processor). Would you stare at a light bulb for hours at a time? Not if you want to keep your vision."</i>
http://maddox.xmission.com/c.cgi?u=faq
The site is basic, but so is google and they get millions of hits a day. So shutup. Although I’ll have you know that the site is completely CSS driven and Is Valid XHTML 1.0. So it’s well coded.

Anyway. Hopefully people who don’t have internet working (josh), get internet working soon (feel free to give me that screen too).

And the link for this site!
blog.dalegroup.net
It really couldn’t be any different.

On the topic of dark sites, I also tried this colour scheme as I like ucosty.net/matthew’s site which is dark.

Back to basics with dale's blog

I’ve decided to do something a bit different. My site has always tried to be more than a blog, and "skillful". I’ve never been good at web design so my sites always look bad :p
What I have done is written a site that is just about my blogging and although it connects to the same news system (and therefore the same news) it is meant to be has JUST a blog.

First test of blog posting system

Okay. Josh recommended that I split the two news on each page. This page will be for rants etc and the other page will just be for general site news.

I had problems porting my news posting system over to this page. Now I don’t know if you remember ( http://forums.dalegroup.net/viewtopic.php?t=1266 ). But I was talking about how you can’t send cookies after you have sent information. Well I do infact sent cookies after I send information. I just didn’t know it! :S

Free Styling

Well I’ve had some comments that the site is a bit too black. So I’ve now setup multi styles. Currently there is just the standard black style and a simple white style. I should hopefully add more onto this later.

My god IE is the biggest piece of crap. If you click on one of the news headers it takes you to the page but it has issues displaying the style for the news entry (comments are fine). You have to select the text (or where the text should be) and then is appears. Arhhhh so dodgy. I really hope IE7 fixes most of these types of problems. But hey, get a real browser. Firefox, mozilla or something that isn’t made by microsoft.

Trolling

I’m sure we’ve all done it at some stage in our life. There have been quite a
few times where I would have turned into a "troll" as such. One example
was when msnplus decided to install spyware on my computer, since then I never
used that program. If you’re going to provide a free "service" or "product"
then there should be no reason to fill it with crap. Oh oh please donate to me
because I’m poor and cannot continue programming without your support, bull crap.
Get a job. But anyway, back on to trolling.

ISA here I come

I downloaded a trial version of ISA 2004 about a month ago. I didn’t really have any time to play with it, so I’m doing a fresh install of Windows 2003 on one of my spare boxes and I’m going to install it. It would be good if it had a web interface (unsure if it does), like the smoothwall one (I’m currently running smoothwall for routing and firewalling). I think ISA does bandwidth throttling and has an outbound firewall, so that would be good. Smoothwall doesn’t have any of this. Although you need to remember that smoothwall is free, and well ISA is far from it :|

Smoothwall Express 2.0 Vs. ISA 2004

Okay well I’ve played around with ISA 2004 for a bit and have made a quick conclusion. First problem (and really the only) I had with ISA is that for some reason it doesn’t automatically "dial" my ADSL connection. If I manually dialed the connection it worked fine. That is a bit dodgy because it means you’ll need to redial if the connection is dropped or the computer is restarted. Now I’m thinking that is more my fault in not knowing how to set it up although I followed the document from Microsofts website explaining it although it still didn’t work. A work around would be to have the modem handle the PPPoE connection and not ISA. Although ISA isn’t really meant for a small dodgy ADSL link, we’re talking about E1 2mbit links with lots of static ip addresses: p
Another downside is that it doesn’t come with a web interface, although I’m told you can get plugins for this.
Now to ISAs funky features.

Automatic text to URL

Okay I’ve just spent about 15 minutes fixing up the backend code (more to do later). Now the main news entry is passed through htmlentities so there is no chance of breaking my lovely XHTML. I’ve also found a nice text to url ereg_replace piece of code. I understand WHAT is it, but I don’t get all those extra slashes and crap. I mean I get the \\1 etc but not the rest. I’ll learn about "regular expression" later this week. I’ve also fixed up the word wrapping for comments. Soifsomeonedecidedsthattheywanttopostsomethingwithoutanyspacesitwontscrewupthelayout.

Move to a new database

Okay. Let’s hope this working, seeing I can access the admin panel that is a good start ;)
I’ve just moved the database. Before the content of this site was in the same database and tables as my "main" site. And as I’ve said before I’ll be working on this one more and it will just be easier to have it separate. I’ve also setup a different awstats page for the site too.

My life in a database (why blog?)

In the last few years blogs (shorten for web log, an online diary of such) have really taken off. It’s the new craze, the epitome of cool. You’re just not "hip" if you don’t have one. Okay it’s not quite to that level of cult hood, but it is getting here. What I am trying to understand is why are they so popular? I mean there is only so much *generalization alert* one antisocial computer geek can write! What is so interesting about the content anyway? I mean "I decided to do some coding on XYZ" isn’t exactly stimulating material. Although I think it goes deeper than that. Everyone wants to know what everyone else is thinking. "What do they thing about ABC?". I can see that being one of the main draw cards for blogs. They’re like a personal diary that can be read by anyone around the world. But then you have this commenting thing!? I mean really, I wouldn’t want someone going through my personal diary and writing comments about everything. "Haha you like that, you’re sooo lame". I mean geez. But that is what a blog is, an online personal diary that is there to be criticized and made judgment on. Yet people seem to like this. Is it for attention? I’m thinking that it is very likely. For example: "My god today was a bad day, I just failed my exam." And then you get 15 comments going "awww it is okay, I’m sure you’ll be fine". Is that what blogs are about? Selfish desires. I suppose it would be different depending on who you spoke with.

Core replacement + Power outage

Busy day yesterday. I decided to try out a dual Pentium3 motherboard. I have two P3 650s although one of them was in core, my router. So the router got a bit of a downgrade yesterday. From a Pentium3 650MHz and 320mb ram (way overkill) to a Pentium2 333MHz and 128mb ram. So anyway I built up this dual box. Dual Pentium3 650, 640mb ram and some really crap 4gb hdd. I really need some hard drives :p
So I was running it last night to make sure it was/is stable. The only problem with it is that it will crash on starting windows if there is no keyboard plugged in. Bit weird, but my Black IBM box does that too. Something to do with an old BIOS and ACPI. But anyway. It lasted all last night running Prime95, so I think it is stable.

The weeks run down.

It has been a very eventful week, so I thought I may as well rant/blog about it. Let’s see.

School was meant to start again yesterday (after the trials) and for most people this did not happen. To start with the athletics carnival was cancelled, although SACS being the organised school that they are (please note Kylies dead fish could organise better than these people) decided that it would be great not to have anything planned if for some reason it was cancelled. The fact that it had been raining quite heavily 2 days prior to the event didn’t seem to spark any movement on their part. So most people rocked up in their sports clothes with no books/pens etc. I being the diligent student that I am (no sarcasm indented) found out that it was cancelled and came in uniform and had ALL my books (aren’t I good ;)).

Blogging for the masses

RE: http://blog.dalegroup.net/index.php?newsid=81

People either really like blogging or are just sheep (no offense of course! ;)). Arghhh too many to keep up with! :p

Moving!

I’m moving. Yes that is right, moving! Moving to the next room. I’ve decided I NEED more space and therefore I am taking dad’s office. I’ll be moving most of the stuff that I use frequently in to the office and use my room for sleeping and studying. I’m very muchly looking forward to this. I get to redo my network setup and fix up some things while I’m at it. Very happy about this.

Getnews goes to work.

Getnews is what I call the script that handles my news system. I’ve just given Alec access to the first "public" release of getnews. Found here: http://soolie.dalegroup.net

There is still much to do and the site isn’t really "live" yet. But it is working. We shall see how getnews (and my Content CMS) handles being used by someone other than myself. I’m hoping everything goes well :)

I’ve also moved into dad’s office. Which is really cool. More things I could talk about but I’ve got to run. l8r.

Searching

I’ve implemented a search function into getnews. Currently, well it sucks! :p It can find some stuff but not everything. Also it only searches direct matches. I’ll work on it a bit more later.

Seti!

Since early 2001 I’ve been processing seti packets and FINALLY I have just reached 5000 seti packets! I’m going to find those aliens and make sure they sign up to the forums! :p

In other news I found my old GTA CD in my old cd player. It has funky music on it. Nice :)

Forgotten Files

I don’t *think* I made a post about this. I made a comments RSS news feeder thing a while ago for this site, I just forgot to tell anyone? I really don’t know. It has just been sitting here. So here it is (and always has been :S)!

I just love journalism.

It is really quite funny to watch the media deliberately beef up stories in an aim to increase emotion and sympathy just to get a better story. My crappy news reader (which I am learning to like ;)) decides to think there is a new item when ever the title of the article changes so I get all the Sydney Morning Heralds old titles a long with there "better" versions. It has happened on a number of different times. Let me find some examples:

School! AHHH

Okay it really only just hit me yesterday. There is like sooo little time left of school. I was looking forward to leaving but now I’m unsure. I’m going to miss it! :’(

So many people/teachers/friends that I may not see again for a long time. And then it the whole structure of everything changes and aaHH!!! I’m sure I’ll enjoy the "new life", but I am going to miss SACS. Even though they suck ;)

Wow like 4 weeks left of this term AND then the HSC. Scary. eep. It has come so quickly and like meh! Oh dear!

Anyway should be doing work or something.

Enjoy :)

mod_rewrite

Here google bot, now you can index me!

Let me try and explain what rewriting is:

Updates on mod_rewrite plus other things.

I’m currently waiting for the google bot to index this site and I’m very much hoping it does as that was the main reason for adding mod_rewrite. Quite a funky little module if you ask me.

Oh something random,

Trackback

I thought I would post my current view (and may change) on trackback. Now trackback is a way of posting comments on someone else’s blog site. What happens is instead of replying to a post on the site you are visiting you go to your compatible blogging software type in the sites (the one you’re wanting to add a comment to) trackback url and then your reply. What then happens is a small amount of your comment is sent to the site and posted where as the rest is stored on your website.

UNI

Well today was a very interesting day. I decided to go to the Sydney and UTS UNI open days. First place was Sydney. I rocked up there at about 10am and went to listen to the talk about Information Technology; well it was very bad/uninformative and boring. But I saw a friend from primary school (some of you may remember the house at Scotland island that I had the news years eve party. That was his house). Any who so it was nice seeing him there. Didn’t expect to see him, although it would be cool to go to the same UNI. But I don’t think I’ll be going to Sydney (more in a sec). So anyway I went to the quadrangle and talked to some of the lecturers and uni students, which was far more interesting than the talk. So that was nice. I so met up with Kylie there (max was with us too). I saw quite a few kids from school too.

Images

From the start of creating this site, I’ve said to myself that I wouldn’t put images on this site. I want quick loading times. But this won’t stop me from linking to them and well there is this one image that I wanted to show people. A very cute dog.

Now I wanted it so that style was the same as the site. So with a bit of help from mod_rewrite and some php code it can be done! Nice 8)

The first link:
http://blog.dalegroup.net/archive/blog/images/maxdog.jpg

I like the urls :)

Music

Well I don’t play games anymore so there must be something I can do with all my game CDs (the ones that I purchased) and there is! Some of the music (CDA) on them is really good! So I’ve ripped the music from GTA, Mechwarrior 2 and Fury 3. It is really surprising! I’m going to good through all my other games and look for some more. hehe! I’ll purchase games JUST for the music. Funny stuff.

Ah I remember back when I had my Pentium 133, ripping mp3s was a painful process. I think it worked out to be 20 minutes to encode a WAV file into a 128kbit mp3. Now it is just instant.

eep!

I just checked my awstats for my forums.
http://forums.dalegroup.net/cgi-bin/awstats.pl

Server Usage

Well I thought I should post something. So I thought I’d talk about the load that the dalegroup server experiences. Over the last few months almost all hosted websites have moved over to dynamic driven sites (powered by Mysql + PHP) and have been receiving more hits. The load on the server has slowly increased and is now at a level that is measurable :p

This month the server has transfer approximately 1.5GB of traffic just on web site stuff. So it is finally at a stage where I could call it somewhat significant.