Big fan of Radio 1

In my last job in the UK I used to travel by car on the M1, at the time this was quite a novelty for me as I had always taken the tube to work. Now of course I drive everywhere, (there is no public transport to speak off).
Anyway, what I used to enjoy the most was listening to Radio 1 and Capital radio on the way, and it was not until last week that I though about trying to listen to it while at work.

I knew that they had a live Internet feed, but for some reason I just didn't think of it. Until now...

So for the past week I have been listening to the Chris Moyles breakfast show and Scott Mills, (if you missed scottcam last week you missed radio history).

Anyway, that was my little happy moment at work.

Things here are not going as strong, the political situation has become 'less than favorable', (this is my bosses polite way of saying that the country is heading the same way as most, (all?), African countries.
The wife and I are keen to say here a little longer while the financial storm that is currently hitting the US and UK calms down a bit, but I don't know how long this will last really, (my contract is fairly vague about political instability).

6:15 AM - 10/4/2008 - comments {0} - post comment

register_shutdown_function(...) doesn't work with ob_gzhandler(...)

[I have decided to start adding some entries about the re-factoring of journal home, either it will help someone else or someone will be able to offer some comments]

I am busy doing a lot of changes to the code of Journalhome.com to ensure that it runs better than the current software, (that is no longer supported in any case). My aim is to speed up the whole delivery of the page to the browsers.
Some of the tools used to speed up the delivery of pages is compression with things like ob_gzhander and ob_start

The problem with that is that some code that I want to be executed at the very end of the script, (as the script is completing) it does not seem to be executed.

In php when you call ob_start('ob_gzhandler'); it tells the php compiler to take all the output, (everything going to the screen), and, instead of sending it to the screen we will send the string to a function called ob_gzhandler who in turn will return a compressed string.

Normally the way it works is:

Code =//=> PHP compiler=//=> Send to the browser (as soon as code want it to go, we cannot get it back) =//=> Do do some completion code

With ob_start( ... ) it is a litte bit more complex

Code =//=> ob_start( ... )  PHP compiler=//=> ob_end_flush(...) =//=> Send to the browser, (all at once) =//=> Do do some completion code

What this means is that the created page is sent out as one big string to the browser.
In practice, a page is almost always sent as one big chunk of string, but we cannot really control the string that is sent out. So we can call a function to 'handle'  the string and do what we want with it.

Code =//=> ob_start( 'ob_gzhandler' )  PHP compiler=//=> ob_end_flush(...)  =//=>
                                                                                             ob_gzhandler( $str ) { // compress it }  =//=>
                                                                                               Send that to the browser, (all at once) =//=> Do do some completion code 

The problem with that is the function ob_gzhandler(...) does not seem to allow the "Do do some completion code"

The problem is almost certainly with register_shutdown_function(...), because as the manual clearly says, if any of the registered function call exit() then the processing will stop completely and no other registered function will be called.
So I can only guess that ob_gzhandler(...)  itself registers a function that calls exit(), (of course this is only a guess).

The other bigger problem with that logic, (and kind of backs up my theory), is that it seems to allow _some_of the registered code to be completed. This makes sense as the shutdown functions are called in the order they are registered so the ones registered before ob_start('ob_gzhandler'); will be executed but not the ones after.

For example...

<?php
function foo()
{
  echo "This should be called last";
}

ob_start('ob_gzhandler'); // replace with ob_start(); for it to work
register_shutdown_function('foo');
echo "This is called now<br />";
?>

This works as expected with PHP 5.x and later, but not with php 4.x, (well not with php 4.4.x that I am using).

<?php
function foo1()
{
  echo "This should be called second to last<br />";
}

function foo()
{
  echo "This should be called last<br />";
}

register_shutdown_function('foo1');
ob_start('ob_gzhandler');  // replace with ob_start(); for it to work
register_shutdown_function('foo');
echo "This is called now<br />";
?>

This will also not work with all flavours of php4.x but it will work with php5.x

As I am planning to move to php 5 this is not a problem but I am trying very hard to make sure that he new code works on both 4.x and 5.x, (simply because I want the code to be open source.

The 'fix' I have is to remove the compression altogether with php < 5.x

<?php
function foo()
{
  echo "This should be called last";
}
if( phpversion() < 5.00 )
{
  ob_start();
}
else
{
  ob_start('ob_gzhandler');
}
register_shutdown_function('foo');
echo "This is called now<br />";
?>

Obviously this is not a perfect solution as the code is no longer compressed, but for those that will be using php4, (that is no longer supported btw), then it will have to do.

7:22 AM - 8/6/2008 - comments {3} - post comment

Moved to new server

12:02 PM - 7/10/2008 - comments {2} - post comment

Server move is back on track

The server move is now back on track and we should be moving to a new server, (in the UK), in the next few days.

In the past few days we had some problems with the current provider and/or some sustained IP attack.
I am investigating things on my side just to make sure. But nothing has really changed on our side so I doubt there is really a new problem.

I have reverted about 50 spam accounts a day so it is not impossible that they somehow found a way in or that they felt the urge to 'teach us a lesson'.

1:14 PM - 7/3/2008 - comments {0} - post comment

Sham elections in Africa

[warning: a little political rant]

I have been in Africa for a little over 2 years now and I am amazed at the so called democratic process that is going on here. I know that what we do in Europe is not always pretty, but at least people don't die for voting one way or another.

First there was a sham election in Kenya, where the result was nowhere near free nor fair, but rather than re-doing the election, (and/or sending someone to jail for it), they chose to have a government of 'national unity'. In other word, 'we don't care who you voted for, we will choose your leaders for you'.

Now the elections in Zimbabwe are also a sham, the whole world knows that it is a sham, yet African leaders at the AU summit in Egypt are still patting Robert Mugabe on the back and telling him well done and even applauding him for his abuses.

The South African president Thabo Mbeki would rather be seen dancing, (yes, dancing!), with the Zimbabwean dictator rather than actually doing what 90% of the people that voted him in office are telling him to do.
Because Mugabe was his buddy during the apartheid years he his more than happy to excuse the murder and beating of hundreds of Zimbabweans. He would rather excuse the blatant crimes of his friend rather than saving hundreds of lives and doing what is right, it makes you think, how little does life matter to African governments and African leaders?

Mbeki is happy to close his eyes to the very oppression he claimed he was against. It also makes you think really, what was the ANC really fighting for all this time? To defend the rights of the African people'? because if it is then they are failing the African people miserably over and over again, (how many people must die in Sudan before someone calls Omar Hassan al Bashir and politely asks him to stop doing what he is doing?).

And when the Zimbabwean dictatorship falls, (because all dictatorships eventually collapse), he will probably be welcomed with open arms by many African leaders.

As I said, European governments are not always much better, but at least we can vote them out of office fairly quickly and we have no one to blame than ourselves.

10:14 AM - 7/1/2008 - comments {4} - post comment

Life without the Internet

For the past week, (and a bit), my Internet at home has been disconnected. There was a small misunderstanding between the wife and I and that resulted in the account been canceled, (personally, I blame the wife).

Needless to say I am like a drug addict on week-end, unable to check my emails, visit my favourite forums, nothing! I find myself looking after the garden or doing tasks I have neglected many years ago.

When I get to work I do my usual sweep of Spam Blogs that were created overnight and check a few emails, but it's not the same.

As you can see on the homepage, JournalHome is still supposed to move to a new server, in fact I have already purchased a brand new web server. But as I cannot do the move we just have to wait where we are for the time been.

So please bear with me while I wait to be reconnected, I am still around and I still reply to emails when I can, just not as fast :)

4:09 PM - 5/13/2008 - comments {0} - post comment

We are moving

It's that time again, JournalHome has outgrown it's current home, (that and the current hosts proved somewhat less than willing to help with their problems).

Anyway, we are moving to a server that is about 50% larger, more memory, more drive space and so forth.
I will also be working with the new host to help identify any problems that could be causing down time, (and slowly but surely I will address them all).

I will close the site as soon as the move starts and it should only take a couple of hours.

BUT: Moving to a new server means that I need to update the name servers, (the thing that tells your browser where the new server is), and that can take up to 24 hours to be updated all over the Internet.

So, as long as you see a 'we are closed' sign, it will mean that it is not completely updated.

As always, all your images, files, and posts will be backed up before any move is made.
I have been doing a daily back-up for over a year now, so this is nothing new for me.

Let me know if you have any questions.

12:52 PM - 4/2/2008 - comments {0} - post comment

Election day in Africa

As some of you might night know it is election day in Zimbabwe, everybody expects Robert Mugabe to steal the election. They even have dead people still on the voters roll or an 'extra' 3 million ballot papers than there are voters in the country.

Everybody knows that the elections will not be free and fair, here in South Africa everybody you talk to tells you that the rampant crime and unemployment is partly due to the catastrophic collapse of the Zimbabwean economy, (I think the inflation is still running at 100 000%).

But the really scary and alarming thing about it is the fact that the South African government still claims that everything in Zimbabwe is 'free and fair'.
They don't seem to think to mind the extra ballot papers, the dead on the voters roll, I was watching sky news and they are saying the same, why is South Africa praising the election process that everybody can see is flawed. I mean, even the previous president of Zimbabwe, (then Rhodesia), is on the voters roll, he died last year!

10:23 AM - 3/29/2008 - comments {2} - post comment

Moving to a bigger server... again

8:52 AM - 3/19/2008 - comments {2} - post comment

Load shedding in South Africa

Those of you who don't know, there has been quite a bit of load shedding going on in South Africa.
To cut a long story short South Africa has been running out of power since 1994, (they felt that building new power stations was not needed), so 13 years latter there isn't enough power anymore.

Seen that it takes 5 to 10 years to build a new power station I wouldn't expect much economic growth from them for the next couple of years. They even went as far as closing most of their mines, (in case you wondered why the price of gold went thru the roof).

I know it is easy to blame the power company, (Eskom), but in fact the government explicitly told them not to build new stations.

So now we enjoy daily power outages of between 1 to 2 hours, the mines have been ordered to run at 80%. As this is going to last a few years I can only imagine that it will get worse and worse.

1:23 PM - 2/1/2008 - comments {5} - post comment

Lost contact with America for a while.

I was busy doing some normal maintenance on JournalHome for a while when I lost contact with the servers.
Apparently two undersea cables, (called SEA-ME-WE 4 and FLAG, I am told), were damaged, I was unable to do anything with the server for about 8 hours.
Hopefully this did not affect most of you.

In other news, my current contract has been extended, (yesterday was my last day), I was supposed to return to the UK in June after a bit of traveling around, but we will now stay here until at least December.
Truth be told, I don't mind staying for a while longer, but I am not looking forward to returning to Europe in winter. As you can imagine I have been very busy trying to finish my current project on time, (we didn't), so now things should relax a bit.

10:29 AM - 2/1/2008 - comments {1} - post comment

Small update

Over the past few weeks I have been very busy at my real work but that doesn't mean I didn't keep an eye on JournalHome, I have deleted over 50 spam accounts :), sometimes it makes you wonder why they even bother.
But you can help me by reporting as many blogs as you can, I will investigate all of them.

I have also been busy developing the next generation of JournalHome, this is a complete rewrite of the current version and will hopefully be a lot more flexible than the current version, (one of the nice thing is that it will allow you to use wordpress templates).

But I will have more on that in the next year.

That's it really, just to let you know that I am still around and still working in the background.

Drop me a line if you see anything wrong or if you have any question.

10:58 AM - 12/21/2007 - comments {0} - post comment

So close, yet so far...

Last night England played South Africa in the Final of the rugby world cup. And South Africa won it. Honestly I don't think that England ever really had a chance against the South Africans. But it would have been so nice :).

Yesterday the whole of South Africa came to a stand still, the shops closed early, the road were quiet.
For those of you who don't know rugby, it is like the Super Bowl week-end, or the soccer finals, (well, almost like soccer).

In other news, I have been been very busy at work, my contract is coming to an end soon(ish). So I haven't been able to dedicate as much time as I would have liked to JournalHome.

But I still patrolling as much as I can, I still delete around 10 accounts a day. I have no idea why they keep coming back, surely they can see that it is not working. But I gave up trying to understand spammers a looong time ago.
Please remember to report any sites you think is not a 'real' blog.

I am fixing a few bugs that were sent to me, but like I said, I am very busy at the moment, but I will get to it, I promise.

9:57 AM - 10/21/2007 - comments {2} - post comment

Add the BlogRush Plugin to JournalHome

I added the BlogRush to the slow growing list of plugins. You can see what it does on my own blog, it list 5 'related' blogs and my blog is placed on other peoples blog. So their visitor might come and see my blog, in other word it is another way of getting more visitors.

There is a big divide when it comes to blog rush, some say that it is the 'next big thing' while others cannot complain enough. the recurring theme is that your title must be extremely interesting for other users to click on it, (and visit it), otherwise your click through rate will be pathetic.
The other problem is the very limited number of categories, they never quite match your blog.
I myself could not find a valid category, so I had to put 'news' as a category.

Lastly they are still in beta, so a lot of things might change soon, so now you will notice that they have no other colors, (in fact no options are available).

As with everything on JournalHome, it is really up to you to decide what you want to do. I myself am not sure it really will help as much as they claim. People will abuse it and the 'real' users will loose out. But what do I know.

6:28 PM - 9/20/2007 - comments {1} - post comment

FeedBurner RSS vs JournalHome RSS

I created a new plugin, (well to be fair I converted an existing one), to enable you to redirect all your RSS feeds from JournalHome to FeedBurner.
They offer you a bunch of stats like the number of registered users and so on.

As a small example if you go and see my own RSS you will be redirected to the Feedburner of JournalHome.

On the subject of Syndication, I have made some small changes to the RSS/Atom pages of JournalHome to make them even more compliant to their respective standards.

So now all you need to do is activate the FeedBurner plugin, (be sure to create an account with them first), and enter that value on the plugin page.

Feedburner will ask you to choose the Feed you are going to use. Be sure to choose the one that applies to your weblog, (and not the one that applies to the entire website).

Also remember that you must have RSS enabled in your weblog settings.

2:38 PM - 9/19/2007 - comments {1} - post comment

Import wordpress blogs.

9:30 AM - 9/16/2007 - comments {3} - post comment

At work today and the 2007 rugby world cup

I have been quite busy lately at my 'real' job and now I have to work on a Saturday to catch up with some work.

Unfortunately the company chose Saturday, (been a quiet day), to do some renovation about 10 meters away from my little cubical. If I wasn't happy to be here in the first place I am now. But I guess I cannot blame them either.

I also watched the rugby world cup opening game last night, it is hosted in France. I must admit that I have never seen such a odd ceremony, there was no theme to it, the people were running around, (I guess you could say they were dancing). I am not much of an artist so I should not complain, but I'd like to believe that I am also not too stupid, and if I did not understand the message they were trying to bring across then I guess it was a failure.

The opening game itself was a shocker, France should have won the game, (been the hosts and all), but, well, they didn't.
The referee was bad, but at least he was equally bad for both sides. I think he made some crucial mistakes that might have cost France the game in the end, (but what do I know?).

I am going out to some dinner/drinks with the wife's friends tonight. They are more like work colleagues of hers, so those kind of dinners can be quite boring, (especially for me as I wont know anybody).

Those of you who, (like me), use the Windows Live Writer, they have released a new version of the writer. 

7:58 AM - 9/8/2007 - comments {2} - post comment

Happy Blog day!!

I was looking at the twitter site, (the twitter plugin is down BTW), and I saw a notice that apparently today is blogday. If you use your imagination you can see 3108 could look like blog, (if the '8' is dropped a little).

They claim that it is the third one, but I must admit that I never heard of it until now.

So happy blog day.

FFMG

2:09 PM - 8/31/2007 - comments {4} - post comment

Now protecting all the email addresses.

As  some of you know, it is possible to actually have your email address on your templates, (the flag <%Email%>), but unfortunately this was been abused by some unscrupulous bots that go around harvesting those email addresses.
It was also a problem for the profile page, (mine for example would should you my email address).
But now I have added a protection for all email addresses, I am using a captcha from http://www.captcha.net/.

As JournalHome is getting busier and busier, (slowly but surely), I am having to spend a lot of my time dealing with various abuses like email harvesting. I think no one will really mind this small change as it should mean a lot less spam. And also, for the life of me I cannot see why anyone would want to leave their email addresses unprotected.

So now in your email links, (on your templates), simply put a normal link <a href='mailto:<%Email%>'> and I will replace it with something a lot stronger.

NB: If you just put the code <%Email%> in your template then it will not be protected, (if you want to do that just tell me and I will make changes to accommodate).

As always, let me know if you find anything.

FFMG

6:47 AM - 8/31/2007 - comments {1} - post comment

Turned strong Captcha on.

 As some of you might have noticed we have all been receiving a fair amount of spam lately. So I had to turn the more stringent captcha that should hopefully make our friendly spammers life a lot more difficult.

I will leave it turned on for the next few days until they move on. I do understand that it is not nice to have to enter such complex images/text but in the long run you will agree that it is for the better. 

I am going around deleting most of the obvious spam comments but there will still be one or two left to delete.

Let me know if you come across any problems or if you think I should protect any other pages.

On slightly separate note, the statistics page has been turned back on and is counting everything as usual again. Sadly this means that the stats for the last few days are off a little, (especially yesterday and parts of today). Everything should be 100% by tomorrow GMT.

FFMG

12:19 PM - 8/29/2007 - comments {0} - post comment