How I (finally) got my stupid PHP to work

/configure --with-apxs2 --with-pear --with-gd --enable-pdo --with-pdo_sqlite --with-zlib --with-mysqli --with-mcrypt=/opt/local/var/macports/software/libmcrypt/2.5.8_0/opt/local --with-mysql=/usr/local/mysql --with-pdo-mysql=/usr/local/mysql --with-curl --enable-calendar --enable-gd-native-ttf --with-ttf=/usr/X11R6 --with-freetype-dir=/usr/X11R6 --with-jpeg-dir --with-xpm-dir --enable-soap

-_-

Hope these are all the extensions needed

And so..

So today, I (finally) audit (so to speak), the server logs. The Boss™ charged me to pull out pictures from The Product™ so after doing it, I was just looking through the server logs.

And discovered an oddity.

The timestamps were wrong. -_-;

I was going zomfg?! And did a quick check. As expected, it was logging everything under CST. /sigh.

So I call over CK, erm oei, you know your program logging the date and time wrongly or not?

Then he said he just follow server time. Which is a fair assumption, after all, if a program can't depend on OS time, then how? But hah! He didn't check! Even though I set the server time to SGT already, for some reason Java does not inherit it (not all the time) and will run at CST, which was the server's original configuration.

So, since astartes, the logs have been going under CST time .. urgh. Grr, did you not try and see? Urgh.

So well, if who's going to fix it in the end? .. most likely me. Cos I can apparently write scripts /eye roll

.....

Also I found out that his migration was incomplete -_- Logged images weren't completely copied over from the old directories to the new ones.

Looks like I'll have to do that too -_-

/sigh

....

Grr..

Told bvo about it before, about this dude, we'll call him CK, who has been rather .. irritating. -_- There was once, where I was doing work, and up he rolls, and asks me some question.

I go.. .. erm .. Well, definitely there's a way to solve this problem, but I'm not sure how .. er .. *click on FF* *google abit* errm...

He sits there for abit, and then rolls back to his place without saying anything. Leaving me to go wtf?

He also has this bad habit of coming up to my place and just stand there and stare at my screen. Leaving me to go .. erm .. yes? Wth are you doing staring at my screen? I don't stare at yours, don't stare at mine. Got pretty thing there izzit? Usually I just endeavour to ignore him.

So today, I'm reading stuff and thinking about stuff, and he suddenly IMs me. Where is XYZ (where XYZ is an object (programming stuff lah))? I'm :@ immediately. I mean... the source code is THERE. The API is THERE. Not that obvious, but it's THERE. And you have CTRL+F or even better, import the whole thing into an IDE and it'll probably hot link the definition to the declaration. Or just install grep, windows version and look for it yourself. WTH are you doing asking me a question wherein you can easily find the answer yourself!?

I hate answering questions like that.

But .. well I just answer it, and I get silence back. Not even a word of thanks.

Are CKs all like that? So annoying. Want very much to just /ignore the person, but not possible lah.

GRRR.

Edit: Yes.. I know, information sharing and stuff. But this is not even a hard question. You're a programmer. I'm sure you have tools, or at least know how to LOOK. It's not difficult. Even windows search can search for words in text files. So stupid. Grr. Next time maybe I should just reply with www.google.com, or best, "Dunno".

Stats stats and more stats

Have been hit by the stats fever recently. On hindsight, damnit I should have put it in way earlier, that way I can get even more information on The Product™. But I guess, better late than never, right? Just TODAY. Yes today, dumbass, it finally hit on me to set up a conversion goal for Google Analytics.

Hopefully I'll have some results in soon. Google Analytics if fun actually, looking at all the data amassed. I've added one to my blog too, sadly the visit rate is so low, heh, less than 10 so far! Tsk. Looks like I must blog about more interesting things huh, to get readership up =p

One stat that GA doesn't seem to have is the time of a visitor's visit. I have numbers, I have time.. but mysteriously, for the life of me, I couldn't find an entry for time of visit... Sigh, had to cross reference with Apache's logs.. seems like the most time people visit The Product™ (assuming SG time I hope..) is 20-01 .. guess I'll try, if I can, to run The Product™ around these times and hopefully catch a few people...

Servers and more servers

So today, BU shipped off an email instructing me to set up the new Server for The Product™. Egad, setting up yet another server.. So after lunch, I switch into server admin mode and start opening up my ssh connections to Astartes, the new server (I named her! ^^)

Whenever I go into "install" mode, I go into super multi threaded mode. Like when I finish installing XP on Resurrection and start installing drivers and software. Internally I immediately start to pipeline the entire process.

Graphics card? Check. Ok while installing that I'll install Winzip. While installing that I'll install WinRAR too.

Ok graphics card is done, install sound card. Install Java in the meantime too .. etc etc

Same goes for Linux servers. Redhat is my least liked distro, but it is my most used one -_-; After installing three servers with the same information, (well did 2 others in my old job but blah) I've come to the conclusion that all Linuxes are different beasts -_-

The first thing I do on Astartes is to check out the Apache (httpd) version. Hmm 2.0.54, *checks Gimli (the current server)* Ok. same version, Gimli's one is a tar.gz install though .. *thinks* .. well RPMs are fine I guess.. I'll just keep the 2.0.54 RPM.

*typeity type*
MySQL 4!? Wth.. *google* Ah, MySQL 5 rpm.
*typeity type* wget ....
Ok while that's downloading..
I need Tomcat ...
Oh I need stuff from Gimli too ... *typeity type*
*typeity type*
.. Damn php 4!? .. /sigh.. *googles for php*

Ok, need to configure httpd... Ok where the hell is httpd.conf. Nothing a locate can't accomplish.
Whoa.. wth. So many things inside this configuration file. Okay.. I'll just follow my little ol' documentation here.

Hmm .. I need jk_mod. Fine .. *google* Blah, no updated binaries. *downloads source*
./configure --with-apxs
It appeals to my inner geek somehow when I see text from ./configure to flying past the screen. True, no one can read what it's saying at that speed, but still it looks cool.

Finally installed and configured everything. All right, JKMounted the appropriate directories. Httpd should forward these requests to tomcat...

*opens the page in FF*
403.

.. Wth??

*peers at config*
Looks right ..
*types in direct url*
Page renders.
.. -_-;

After spending fruitless hours trying to figure why Apache wasn't forwarding the correct directory to Tomcat... I decided, screw it. Lemme just get a tgz version. Downloaded Apache 2.2 tgz and installed, copied the conf file from Gimli.. compiled the plugins .. and it worked like a charm -_-

DOWN WITH RPMS!
-_-

Bah. Well this post seems rather fragmented and techy .. heh. It happens when I install servers <_< nothing more exciting than seeing your scp file list.

Still need to set up cron jobs on monday .. zzzz
Actually I can do that now .. hmm ... guess will do it tomorrow.. If I remember the IP, heh.

Developing Websites

Well, since I'm handling The Product's™ webpage, it's my job to make sure it looks/works fine in most browsers.

Sadly however, it never seems to be the case. Many a time have I cursed the programmers of IE and wished I could take an M16 and stormed Richmond.

A webpage update cycle would be something like this, R designs the website L&F (Look and Feel), slices them up in good ol' Photoshop and ships them over to me. I add in all the logic and jazz that makes the website tick. Many a time, these "jazz" thingies cause things to go screwy.

*peer at website in FF* Hm looks good, font sizes are ok, table cells are fine. *fires up IE in VMware* argh!! *faints*

As GPB can attest, by his work of art - Bear out of Cage (or is he? View in IE and FF to see the difference!), web development is shitty. Browsers all render pages in their own quirky way. Code which works on browser A doesn't work on browser B. Formatting which looks good on A looks like crap on B.

Also, in testing the website, I decided to install Netscape 8.1 (well it's on the VMware, not like it's going to taint my machine). The first impression of Netscape's home page was how shitty it was. To me, it looked totally cluttered and too texty, and surprisingly, the browser wasn't at the forefront of the page (unlike Firefox). Installation took ages (when compared to installing Firefox), and when I fired it up, I was surprised to see a splash screen. Wth? Browsers need a splash screen? To me, the time a browser needs to load should be too short for the need of a splash screen.

So anyways, after staring at the splash screen for a bit, Netscape 8.1 finally chugged open. I haven't used Netscape since the Browser War Era™ and the first impression I had was omg it's so cluttered looking. Well, it could have been the skin I chose, for I chose the "newer" looking one (which wasn't the standard template), but still, it looked so cluttered. Buttons and text everywhere.

Since I was going to test Java on it, I ignored all the ugly stuff and navigated to the website. Initially, I thought since Netscape was based on Mozilla (well, the dialogue boxes looked totally the same too -_-), it should be able to handle Firefox-like XPIs. Sadly, that wasn't true. Stupefied, I even took a gander at Java's website on it, and it too, failed to install the Java plugin for Netscape. The "Search for plugins" feature didn't work either. GG Netscape.

On a rather unrelated, but still somewhat relevant note, I was working on the website the other day, adding cookies and stuff, and was printing out an alert in javascript to find out if my code was working. It's a simple alert, it just goes alert(some state) which hopefully renders to true. When I tested it out in IE7, I had a shock (come to think of it, should I be shocked at anything about IE?).

Zomfg. Wth? Why does it render a simple alert box into such a hideous looking dialogue box? And this is IE7 on Vista, supposedly snazzy and leet with their uber Aero interface.

In contrast, let us look at Exhibit B, an alert from IE6 on XP, well granted this screenshot is taken from my home machine which has skinned XP to look like OSX >:D

Still, if you may observe the dimensions of the box, and the size of the warning icon. It is so much in proportion compared to the one from Vista. Seriously, who designed that crap?

... That's all for this episode. Stay tuned for more adventures in .. Developing Websites™ ... *da da dum*

Haiz

This has been a pretty busy month, STUN is a continual head banger, now that I've found out why it didn't work reliably (wag54g sucks), things are better now, but it's still pretty far, need to think of a reliable UDP protocol.

Simply put, TCP on UDP. Haha.

Not going to be easy, especially with flow control, acking ... sigh.

Been dabaoing work home too, there's just not enough time to do STUN, so I generally dabao home and do. Been feeling a bit slackish today though, guess will just play GoW. After all, did slides till 1am yesterday. Think need to add more slides, about the packets I send from client to server...

Bvo was saying she was reading the last three entries and she couldn't understand what I was writing, heh is my writing that bad? =p Don't explain enough? Heh guess should try harder.

R was asking today, oei why today like so sad one, yesterday was like sunshine liddat, today is like back to the usual haiz haiz self.. Which is true, been sighing alot. It's just in my nature to sigh I guess, heh. But there's a big stone in my heart and it's probably going to take some time to grind it down.

On the bright side, it's a security flaw in the H2H protocol, have to rework the protocol bit and patch the kernel, then I should be fine ...

Still feel sad, glad to have DA around, dear precious DA, always around when I need someone most. Although sadly these few months I've kinda lost contact with him, he's still around me. Hopefully he'll never leave, don't know what I'll do without my precious DA.

It's rawer than sashimi .. but it works!

After two weeks of getting STUNned, finally managed to let 2 port restricted NATs talk to each other!

For the uninitiated, STUN (Simple Traversal of UDP through NATs), is a protocol to discover information about a client which is trying to connect to a server using UDP. Coding up the STUN server (a very ultra basic one) wasn't extremely difficult, after using the API from jStun, sadly they didn't have server code =p.

The hard part however, was getting the clients to talk to each other. Went through a major refactor early in the stage of development as I was sending really messy datagrams to the server, either a discovery object or strings. Really bad. So I looked at it, and refactored everything to send serialised packets of a special datatype which I defined.

Once that was firmed up, it was time for P2P! .. The concept isn't hard, simply send UDP packets from client A to client B (and vice versa) until the NAT opens up but in practise mine never happened <_< I even ran Wireshark to look but it didn't seem to be responding properly =\

Finally today! Managed to do it, right now server communication and client - client communication are using the same port though, not what I envisioned earlier, but if it works, it works huh.

Still extremely raw and buggy though, as I said, it's raw-er than sashimi .. but it works!

RAWR!

Stunned by STUN

Sigh, is there no end to Stun?

Finally implemented a (buggy and nubby) STUN server. Had to rework the entire message passing side as I was just using nubby strings to pass messages. Now it's passing data via serialised objects. However, once I was done, I came to the rude realisation that it doesn't work on my Mac. Sigh, on hindsight, maybe should have realised it sooner ._.

Iptables, the firewall used by OSX, is symmetric, and therefore is unable to be STUNned. Therefore, my intranet client connection code cannot work if the initiatee is iptabled. Also found out that my server won't be able to send that client any messages. It's fine on a non iptabled machine, but not for OSX. Gah.

Sigh, now it's back to the drawing board. Not sure how to do it now, was thinking of a strategy where the clients connect to the server via TCP, then connect with each other via UDP.

Naturally, that won't fix the iptable problem, but if in the event the clients aren't able to connect to each other, at least I still have a TCP pipe connected to the server which will enable the server to do message relaying. Mai hiam bei pai?

Sigh having a headache now.. think too much liao. If Skype can do it .. but no .. Skype probably had networking engineers banging their heads against the problem.. there's only me here, and only a month max. Did a short peek at msn using my firewall, it's not true p2p. Cop out! It all goes through the server.

Sigh.

A rose by any name would smell just as sweet

Amazingly, I have to start blogging for my work. -_-; Never thought it'd come to this, so now I have to think of a name. Kinda hard when you try to... Want it to be different from my usual avatars and thought it should be related to the subject material: Games.

So how? Hmm... I've had some ideas, but they are all either taken (in the blogger universe) or sound weird. Ideas ranging from gamechic, gamechiq, t9b, onegreenmushroom (sadly, greenmushroom was taken), player1, 1UP..

So far the leading contenders are t9b and onegreenmushroom. Thought of milk&nuts, but it loses meaning without the &.

Send help!

Of STUNS and Stunners

Packet of Work for the week: Create STUN server.

And STUN clients.

Gah. So far the STUN server is up, after much teeth gnashing. A very simple barely interactive client set up, after even more teech gnashing.

So right now I have 2 clients, one is Resurrection, behind your typical linksys router, and the other, my work comp, which is behind some Symmetric NAT thingy. Which is BAD, as STUN supposedly doesn't work on it :S

So far what I've managed to do is to get both clients to talk to each other through the server, "talk" being a rather grand term here as the server is merely getting a message from a client and echoing it to all the connected clients.

Been trying to go to the next step but it's not really working. Always get ICMP unreachable and Address binding exceptions.

Gah.

Egads. How huh. I already port+1 liao leh, why still liddat!?

-_-;

More teeth gnashing tomorrow. I will not be defeated by such a problem!

Need to ninja another client for connection too .. sigh!

Once there was a screw

Once there was a screw, who was as shrewd as can be.
It left me one morning like a shrew, and left me in a spew.

shwup!

The new version of shwup is out!

Shwup is a Java based application which allows you to let the world (fellow shwuppers) see your pictures! You don't need to worry about them keeping your pictures too as it never gets saved to their harddisks. Also, it will react with any music you are playing (somewhat like a visualiser).

New features this month consists of an anonymous chat feature and bluetooth, just to name a few.

Check it out at www.shwup.com

Requires Java5 and above.

Send to your friends! <_<