technical

Amazon EC2 latency from Australian soil

Submitted by alex on Thu, 07/04/2011 - 10:58pm

Which of the Amazon EC2 Regions is best for users located in Australia. I've tested the latency of each, and here are the results.

Which of the Amazon EC2 Regions is best for users located in Australia. I've tested the latency of each, and here are the results.

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New URL, etc

Submitted by alex on Sun, 05/07/2009 - 4:44pm

As you can now see, I've moved my blog from blog.akb.com.au to www.akb.id.au. If it isn't obvious, the id.au domain name space is for identities of those is Australia.You can grab them for around $30 from any good registry, Jumba, TPP Internet, etc.

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When was my old seagate drive manufactured

Submitted by alex on Sat, 20/06/2009 - 3:10pm

I recently had my 1TB hard drive (of which was +750GB full) die on me last weekend, after only 12 months of use. I decided to therefore go through all my old hard drives, that I had copied everything from originally, to see what data might have been left on them. I needed to know when I bought them though, and looking at the label on the drives showned something called a 'Date Code' for which there was a 5 digit number?

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Various things

Submitted by alex on Tue, 07/08/2007 - 8:54am

some personal notes over the past few weeks of work

some personal notes over the past few weeks of work

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Interesting Bug

Submitted by alex on Wed, 13/06/2007 - 1:21pm

Came across a bug in Firefox on a HTTPS host, where by if you reference a CSS file (i.e. through a link rel tag) that doesn't exist, you'll get a 'partially unauthorised content' message (i.e. cross through your padlock).

Whats interesting is that in IE6, the non-existant file it still treated as safe.

So which is the correct behavior? I would say Firefox. :)

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Getting a webhost for dev work

Submitted by alex on Mon, 26/02/2007 - 3:51pm

I've never had a need for PostgreSQL (MySQL has always done it for me), but I was forced into contact with it, when some work came along for a client needing upgrades done to their database application.

After considering installing PostgreSQL on my colo, and also on my desktop, I decided it might be quicker, and easier to get a host that already had it installed. (not only do you need the server running, but you also need an interface to manage the database, the libraries to be compiled into php, and so on).

So, I thought.. well, after having read some good feedback in various places like Whirlpool and doing some comparisons on cost/value about Jumba, I thought what the hec, lets get a reseller account with them, and see how it is.

The first thing that struck me, was the low cost/high value. A reseller account for one month is $19.95, which allows you to create 20 accounts each with, cpanel, unlimited mysql databases, emails, subdomains.. php5, mysql5, hosted on Australia soil ? Are we in heaven ? - No.. but the former is true..

The second thing that got me hooked, was the live support function and prompt reply to emails - the 'Managing Director' of the company is actually the guy that replies to your support emails, ha!

The third thing that got me hooked, was their offer to give me shell access, so that I could load my sql in by command line.. You know any hosts that offer ssh access? It's not advertised on their site, because - then you'll get all the kiddies trying to crack it.. but if there is a good enough reason for you to have it, I guess they hand it over - keep in mind the SSH access is in jailshell, and quite restrictive, but it still works enough for you to do your normal everyday tasks.

Jumba also have some pretty good prices on domain name registrations (cheapest .com.au I've ever seen, even better then TPPInternet).. so I'm now thinking about moving some of my other sites over to them. Like a wise (or lazy) man, I'll wait a month or two first to make sure things with Jumba continue fruitfully..

Jumba Hosting, recommended: http://www.jumbahosting.com.au/

I've never had a need for PostgreSQL (MySQL has always done it for me), but I was forced into contact with it, when some work came along for a client needing upgrades done to their database application.

After considering installing PostgreSQL on my colo, and also on my desktop, I decided it might be quicker, and easier to get a host that already had it installed. (not only do you need the server running, but you also need an interface to manage the database, the libraries to be compiled into php, and so on).

So, I thought.. well, after having read some good feedback in various places like Whirlpool and doing some comparisons on cost/value about Jumba, I thought what the hec, lets get a reseller account with them, and see how it is.

The first thing that struck me, was the low cost/high value. A reseller account for one month is $19.95, which allows you to create 20 accounts each with, cpanel, unlimited mysql databases, emails, subdomains.. php5, mysql5, hosted on Australia soil ? Are we in heaven ? - No.. but the former is true..

The second thing that got me hooked, was the live support function and prompt reply to emails - the 'Managing Director' of the company is actually the guy that replies to your support emails, ha!

The third thing that got me hooked, was their offer to give me shell access, so that I could load my sql in by command line.. You know any hosts that offer ssh access? It's not advertised on their site, because - then you'll get all the kiddies trying to crack it.. but if there is a good enough reason for you to have it, I guess they hand it over - keep in mind the SSH access is in jailshell, and quite restrictive, but it still works enough for you to do your normal everyday tasks.

Jumba also have some pretty good prices on domain name registrations (cheapest .com.au I've ever seen, even better then TPPInternet).. so I'm now thinking about moving some of my other sites over to them. Like a wise (or lazy) man, I'll wait a month or two first to make sure things with Jumba continue fruitfully..

Jumba Hosting, recommended: http://www.jumbahosting.com.au/

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Firefox and Thunderbird

Submitted by alex on Sat, 03/02/2007 - 5:03pm

One of the really cool things, I've found (but is probably used by everyone duel-booting) is that with Thunderbird (TB) and Firefox (FF) its possible to access the same profiles in different Operating Systems without corrupting the data.

My notebook, has three partitions, Ubuntu Edgy, Windows XP (soon to be Vista), and a Work partition. The work partition is encrypted with Truecrypt, and I store my TB and FF profiles here along with all my other docs - the profiles are pretty damn important, i.e. all your archived mail, stored passwords, bookmark, etc. Anyway, so that's all encrypted, but regardless of whether I'm in Ubuntu or XP, truecrypt runs in both, and TB and FF can be setup via the profiles.ini to access a non-standard path. The reads and writes to the actual profile data is the same in both OS's!

Some things for reference:

One of the really cool things, I've found (but is probably used by everyone duel-booting) is that with Thunderbird (TB) and Firefox (FF) its possible to access the same profiles in different Operating Systems without corrupting the data.

My notebook, has three partitions, Ubuntu Edgy, Windows XP (soon to be Vista), and a Work partition. The work partition is encrypted with Truecrypt, and I store my TB and FF profiles here along with all my other docs - the profiles are pretty damn important, i.e. all your archived mail, stored passwords, bookmark, etc. Anyway, so that's all encrypted, but regardless of whether I'm in Ubuntu or XP, truecrypt runs in both, and TB and FF can be setup via the profiles.ini to access a non-standard path. The reads and writes to the actual profile data is the same in both OS's!

Some things for reference:

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Editplus and Regular Expressions

Submitted by alex on Tue, 28/11/2006 - 6:03pm

Was converting some excel stock data into csv, and then into mysql insert commands, and needed a quick way to do this.

I've always found Edit Plus to be a handy, light weight text editor.. at once stage in life even using it as my main PHP IDE (use ZDE now though).. However today I found out how to do a really cool regular expression search and replace.. Example below:

Say we had the line of data:
1/08/2006,265,87654321

and we wanted it to look like:
INSERT INTO `share_item_history` (`stamp`, `value`, `volume`) VALUES ('2006-08-01',265,87654321);

you could do:
Search: \n
Replace: \nINSERT INTO `share_item_history` (`stamp`, `value`, `volume`) VALUES ('

and then:
Search: \n
Replace: );\n

and then: ([0-9]*)/([0-9]*)/2006
Search: 2006-\2-\1

It could be done a lot more elegantly using more regular expressions, but I don't have time right now..

Reference to: http://editplus.info/wiki/Regular_Expressions.

Was converting some excel stock data into csv, and then into mysql insert commands, and needed a quick way to do this.

I've always found Edit Plus to be a handy, light weight text editor.. at once stage in life even using it as my main PHP IDE (use ZDE now though).. However today I found out how to do a really cool regular expression search and replace.. Example below:

Say we had the line of data:
1/08/2006,265,87654321

and we wanted it to look like:
INSERT INTO `share_item_history` (`stamp`, `value`, `volume`) VALUES ('2006-08-01',265,87654321);

you could do:
Search: \n
Replace: \nINSERT INTO `share_item_history` (`stamp`, `value`, `volume`) VALUES ('

and then:
Search: \n
Replace: );\n

and then: ([0-9]*)/([0-9]*)/2006
Search: 2006-\2-\1

It could be done a lot more elegantly using more regular expressions, but I don't have time right now..

Reference to: http://editplus.info/wiki/Regular_Expressions.

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