tech notes and general nonsense
Here’s my first plugin for 2012. It’s a plugin to show the agoda seach widget inside your post. If more applicable for travel websites who are also Agoda Affiliate Partner.
I had a major database problem in one of my sites the other day (more on that later). Though I was able to rectify that with my backup, I wanted to restore my VPS from it’s daily backup using the control panel of ComfortHost. Unfortunately, I cannot access the main site and neither the panel site. That’s odd since my VPS is still up. Since the control panel is down, you cannot raise any ticket.
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There are times when you inadvertently upload large files from your phone to your cloud storage like Dropbox. And when you’re on an area with weak 3G/HSPA+ coverage, it will take forever to upload the file. The other problem is… it will drain your battery. That’s exactly what happened to me last night. What’s more annoying is that I can’t cancel the Dropbox upload. At least, I don’t know how.
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In case you are looking files using ls or find command and only want to get the first file found, the command would be like.
ls -l /any/path/filename*|sed -e 's/\//,/g'|awk -F "," '{print $NF}'|head -1
Of course, you can also use it in find command.
find /any/path/ -name "filename*" -type f|sed -e 's/\//,/g'|awk -F "," '{print $NF}'|head -1
[Read more...]
Apparently, there’s no native shell command to show the seconds portion of a unix file timestamp. The nearest to this functionality is stat. However, it’s not always available in unix systems. I’m using HP-UX and it’s not installed on our server.
Instead, I needed to use a one-line perl program shown below.
perl -e .foreach(@ARGV){$t =localtime ( ( ( stat ( $_ ) ) [9] ) ); printf(.%-20s %s\n.,$_,$t);}. filename.txt
My perl knowledge is limited to its name. I have nothing beyond that. That’s my way of saying ‘I don’t know what it is.’ But it works!
Source:
http://www.unix.com/shell-programming-scripting/41325-command-get-file-timestamp-including-seconds-aix-5-3-a.html
After the unfortunate incident last week with NordicVPS, I decided to look for a new VPS host. As usual, I went to lowendbox and get the reviews in webhostingtalk. It’s there where I stumbled upon a promo from SpotVPS. As it turns out, SpotVPS is a low-cost VPS offering of ComfortHost.NET.
And who are they? Here’s what they say about themselves.
ComfortHost.NET have been here since 2004 offer high quality web hosting solutions. All SpotVPS nodes are fully owned hardware and are colocated. All servers used by SpotVPS have been bought with internal cash. Our only monthly cost for these servers are the actual colocation. We are financially healthy and profitable since day one. We are NOT going out of buisness any time soon. We are in it for the long run!
ComfortHost on http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1110770
Here’s the plan that I got.
$6.99/mo Ultimate Plan
Memory: 2048mb (2gb)
HD Space: 50gb (50,000mb)
Bandwidth: 1,000gb (1TB)
Monthly Price: $6.99/mo
Setup Fee: FREE!
FREE GIGABIT PORT – FREE WEEKLY BACKUPS – FREE HARDWARE RAID
Location: Orlando, FL at DimeNOC
Test IP Address: 72.29.87.105
2GB RAM for $6.99. That’s sweet. Want to try it yourself? ORDER NOW
Word of caution,though. This plan (and all other dirt-cheap vps that I know of) comes with very limited support. You are usually given your VPS, IP and OS install and you have to do the rest. I installed mine with NGiNx, PHP, MySQL and it’s already up and running for 7 days straight now.
Here’s the result of the test I made on my VPS.
[root@vps ~]# dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=64k count=16k conv=fdatasync
16384+0 records in
16384+0 records out
1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 14.9939 seconds, 71.6 MB/s
[root@vps ~]# wget cachefly.cachefly.net/100mb.test
--2011-11-24 18:10:35-- http://cachefly.cachefly.net/100mb.test
Resolving cachefly.cachefly.net... 205.234.175.175
Connecting to cachefly.cachefly.net|205.234.175.175|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 104857600 (100M) [application/octet-stream]
Saving to: `100mb.test'
100%[==============================================================================================================================>] 104,857,600 66.8M/s in 1.5s
2011-11-24 18:10:36 (66.8 MB/s) - `100mb.test' saved [104857600/104857600]
I’ll try to come up with a review together with my other hosting providers. 
I’m a long time client of NordicVPS and it is really sad that their service level is going down the drain lately. First, it was the billing and payment issues. Lately, the unscheduled downtimes.. and now 4 hours on, the whole nordicvps site is down. For the month of November, I already experienced at least two long downtimes (5 hours and more). Sadly, a few of my money sites are hosted on my vps with them. Apparently, they have problems with their German servers.
However, speculations is rife that the reason the servers are down is because NordicVPS hasn’t pay yet. Here’s a screenshot of one of the posts in Webhosting talk.
I really hope that it’s not true.
My friend, Crixus, experienced more than a week of downtime and his tickets still unanswered. Admittedly, his site is up now but he’s planning to move elsewhere. He already paid 6 months in advance.
I’m thinking of moving to another unmanaged VPS hosting, too. It’s a painful process again given the number of domains I have in my NordicVPS account. I think I still have some credits with them, too. I’ll try to do it slowly. My concern is, most of the sites I host there have pagerank and if I move it to another server, the PR will be gone.
Sad, really sad.
**** UPDATE ****
Server is now up!!!!
However, the train has left the station. Time to wind down this server. 
I wish Sean and his team good luck.
When developing themes or doing anything that requires colors, it’s important that you know the hex codes of the color you want to use. They are the 6-number codes that represent a specific color which you use on your CSS.
The list below shows the codes for web safe colors. I kept this list on my usb drive and always had seach from the net numerous times as I don’t bring my usb drive with me all the time. Take note that most of the monitors and browsers can now display millions of colors and shades. Go somewhere else to get all of them hehe
| 000000 | 000033 | 000066 | 000099 | 0000CC | 0000FF |
| 003300 | 003333 | 003366 | 003399 | 0033CC | 0033FF |
| 006600 | 006633 | 006666 | 006699 | 0066CC | 0066FF |
| 009900 | 009933 | 009966 | 009999 | 0099CC | 0099FF |
| 00CC00 | 00CC33 | 00CC66 | 00CC99 | 00CCCC | 00CCFF |
| 00FF00 | 00FF33 | 00FF66 | 00FF99 | 00FFCC | 00FFFF |
| 330000 | 330033 | 330066 | 330099 | 3300CC | 3300FF |
| 333300 | 333333 | 333366 | 333399 | 3333CC | 3333FF |
| 336600 | 336633 | 336666 | 336699 | 3366CC | 3366FF |
| 339900 | 339933 | 339966 | 339999 | 3399CC | 3399FF |
| 33CC00 | 33CC33 | 33CC66 | 33CC99 | 33CCCC | 33CCFF |
| 33FF00 | 33FF33 | 33FF66 | 33FF99 | 33FFCC | 33FFFF |
| 660000 | 660033 | 660066 | 660099 | 6600CC | 6600FF |
| 663300 | 663333 | 663366 | 663399 | 6633CC | 6633FF |
| 666600 | 666633 | 666666 | 666699 | 6666CC | 6666FF |
| 669900 | 669933 | 669966 | 669999 | 6699CC | 6699FF |
| 66CC00 | 66CC33 | 66CC66 | 66CC99 | 66CCCC | 66CCFF |
| 66FF00 | 66FF33 | 66FF66 | 66FF99 | 66FFCC | 66FFFF |
| 990000 | 990033 | 990066 | 990099 | 9900CC | 9900FF |
| 993300 | 993333 | 993366 | 993399 | 9933CC | 9933FF |
| 996600 | 996633 | 996666 | 996699 | 9966CC | 9966FF |
| 999900 | 999933 | 999966 | 999999 | 9999CC | 9999FF |
| 99CC00 | 99CC33 | 99CC66 | 99CC99 | 99CCCC | 99CCFF |
| 99FF00 | 99FF33 | 99FF66 | 99FF99 | 99FFCC | 99FFFF |
| CC0000 | CC0033 | CC0066 | CC0099 | CC00CC | CC00FF |
| CC3300 | CC3333 | CC3366 | CC3399 | CC33CC | CC33FF |
| CC6600 | CC6633 | CC6666 | CC6699 | CC66CC | CC66FF |
| CC9900 | CC9933 | CC9966 | CC9999 | CC99CC | CC99FF |
| CCCC00 | CCCC33 | CCCC66 | CCCC99 | CCCCCC | CCCCFF |
| CCFF00 | CCFF33 | CCFF66 | CCFF99 | CCFFCC | CCFFFF |
| FF0000 | FF0033 | FF0066 | FF0099 | FF00CC | FF00FF |
| FF3300 | FF3333 | FF3366 | FF3399 | FF33CC | FF33FF |
| FF6600 | FF6633 | FF6666 | FF6699 | FF66CC | FF66FF |
| FF9900 | FF9933 | FF9966 | FF9999 | FF99CC | FF99FF |
| FFCC00 | FFCC33 | FFCC66 | FFCC99 | FFCCCC | FFCCFF |
| FFFF00 | FFFF33 | FFFF66 | FFFF99 | FFFFCC | FFFFFF |
By the way, I only realized now that my little blog site lacks color. Too bad I only realized this after making this post.
If you don’t have DBArtisan or other more advanced SQL Editor, you can use the query below. Take note that you’ll need necessary rights to be able to run it.
select spid, status, blocked, open_tran, waitresource, waittype,
waittime, cmd, lastwaittype, cpu, physical_io,
hostname, hostprocess, loginame, program_name, net_address,
net_library, dbid, ecid, kpid, nt_domain, nt_username, uid, sid,
memusage, last_batch=convert(varchar(26), last_batch,121),
login_time=convert(varchar(26), login_time,121)
from master.dbo.sysprocesses
--where (blocked!=0 or waittype != 0x0000)
If you only want to see those that are blocking or locking, uncomment the last line. One thing that’s lacking here is the list of tables and database objects that each process id is using. That’s important if a user is running stored procedures and you need to know . I’ll provide that later as honestly, I don’t know yet which table holds that information.
I actually contributed this at SQL Reviewer as I don’t see a lot of websites that discusses this. For further reading, you may go to the MSDN website.
In case you are maintaining a pl/sql program developed by someone else and that program writes into a file, then basically that file is written to a folder/directory. And since the directories are saved in codes, you have to find the meaning (or location) of those codes. The code below will help you display the information required.
SELECT * FROM ALL_DIRECTORIES;
The query above will display all the directories accessible to the current user. They are folders in the server where you can write your output files. For some reason, I forgot about this twice already and had to scour the web to find it. The problem is, I also forgot the keywords. So, I’m writing it now.
To register new directories, you can follow the example below.
Example
create or replace directory mydir as 'c:\mydirectory';
To use, run the code below.
declare
f utl_file.file_type;
begin
f := utl_file.fopen('MYDIR', 'myfilename.txt', 'w');
utl_file.put_line(f, 'just another line text 1');
utl_file.put_line(f, 'just another line text 2');
utl_file.fclose(f);
end;
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