The problem with google analytic when you run your own server

On my website www.ribalba.de I run google analytic which lets me see how many people look at my website where they come from and what they are looking for. Not that it really matters but I am just interested in why people would want to read about me. Assuming I should only be interesting for about 50 (+/-) people in the World. But I also run some analyzers on my web server log files and it turns out that the main thing my server is doing is serving files I have outside of my wiki (which I use for my site) they are files that I just have in folders and that can be accessed through directory listing turned on. But these are never accounted for in analytics. So if I direct my browser to http://www.ribalba.de it will be saved in analytics but when I goto http://www.ribalba.de/geek it does not. So in some respect analytics is giving me a wrong picture. Further image downloads from my server are not displayed. So not really useful as you are forgetting a huge junk of data and so your analysis of your site is bound to be wrong.

wrong start data => wrong conclusion

Maybe Google should offer a method by which I can upload the log-files after logrotate has run and so the file is not used anymore. So always take with a grain of salt what google is trying to tell you.

libnice for CentOS

Some guy on the CentOS mailing list needed libnice so I built it. It can be downloaded from:

http://www.ribalba.de/geek/port/

The source package is in the src folder and the builds in the respective directories.

I hope this helped some poor sole :)

Just for your inforamtion:

GLib ICE implementation

libnice is an implementation of the IETF's draft Interactive Connectivity
Establishment standard (ICE). ICE is useful for applications that want to
establish peer-to-peer UDP data streams. It automates the process of traversing
NATs and provides security against some attacks. Existing standards that use
ICE include the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and Jingle, XMPP extension
for audio/video calls.

Why being nice pays off

I have lived in London for little more than a month now. My daily routine includes getting the tube to Uni and on the way I pick up my morning reading normally a Financial Times, a Guardian and a bottle of water. I do this pretty much every morning. So I spend quite a lot of money for this if you take it time 365. At my tube station I can choose between two news-agents that sell papers. As I am coming from the right I naturally always went into that one. And I never though much about it. It is owned by a family (it seams) and the people that work there are not rude but they are not friendly and helpful. After going there for a month they still didn't know what I was getting. In the morning when I am quite grumpy the last thing I really want is someone to be grumpy back at me. But I just accepted it and continued buying my stuff there. Four days ago I came from the left so I thought why not try the other shop. And what a difference, I was greeted really friendly and I had a little chat with the guy behind the counter. The next day I went to the left one agin and the same guy was friendly again. Now after just four days he already knows what time I normally go to university and of course the papers I buy. It never occurred to me that in a world where prices are pretty much fixed friendliness is one of the last selling points. Location might be important too, but these two shops only differ in the staff. They have the same stock and same prices and pretty much the same location. So the reason I choose the left one is because I am treated in a friendly way and people remember me. This might sounds stupid but I bet you have all done it. If someone treated you in an unfriendly manner you would say to yourself "I am not coming back" and if someone knew your face after entering a shop three times you felt sympatric with that guy.

So what can we learn out of this for IT. In the IT ecosystem prices are quite fixed too and location is becoming even more irrelevant. So maybe friendliness is a major point. Maybe your costumer will chose you the next time because you remembered him, like I take the little hassle of walking one minute more every morning just to be treated nicely. If you are a freelancer this is really important, in my opinion, as at the end of the day you are not much more than the news agent competing at a train station. Just you are competing with 100000 other shops and not one.

CentOS Pulse #0906 - The CentOS Newsletter

Hi all,

With a little delay, issue #0906 of the CentOS Pulse newsletter has
been released. It covers topics like the CentOS 5.4 release, a very
funny featured article and a interesting event review and much much
more.

You can read the newsletter at:

http://wiki.centos.org/Newsletter/0906

More information about the newsletter and how you can contribute is
available from:

http://wiki.centos.org/Newsletter

Enjoy Reading!

Didi

And another email address

I am collecting email addresses. I have 8 different locations emails goto and then 25 different forwards to one of the 8. But one of the coolest address I have so far is:

which of course is just a forward but still quite funky

The problem in how I read mail

So I get quite a lot of mail every day, like a lot of us do. But there is no way that I can read all of them at once or even start answering them. I normally filter out the really vital stuff every morning and evening and then when I get time I read the rest. When I need to answer something and I don't have the time to do this I flag the mail with a little star. Now when I get time I start answering the mails that I have put a little star on. I further use my mail as a TODO list. So I send myself a mail with what I have to do and add a star. So I end up with a list of stuff I have to answer or do. Now there is a flaw with doing it this way. Think about it. .....

Ok the problem is that GMail orders the newest message first. So you see the latest message on the top. Now when you start working of your TODO list you start with the newest item. As you never manage to answer all messages you are always left with some at the bottom. You are answering mails like a stack. Which results in that you will have mails at the bottom that are really old. And as long as you don't work of the stack to the bottom they will age continuously. So there is really important stuff in my TODO list I just forgot about and never did. I should have really just checked the dates once :)

Howto send mail through Gmail using your UCL address

Following my previous post on how to receive UCL mail with Gmail now here is how to send mail using Gmail but with your UCL address. You have to go to settings (top right) and Accounts and Imports and then click on the button with "Send mail from another address" So here is the data you need.

Email address: yourlogin@live.ucl.ac.uk

Then you have to click on send trough SMTP server and enter the details

SMTP Server: pod51002.outlook.com
Port: 25
Username: yourlogin@live.ucl.ac.uk
Password: you should know this

And you don't click on enable SSL. I am sure you can do this with SSL somehow but I don't have time to figure it out :)

Then Google will send you a confirmation code which you have to enter. Please check in your spam folder as this is where my confirmation went. But after that you can just send mail like you are using outlook.com

Getting your UCL email into Gmail

I really don't like outlook.com or this web interface to live.ucl.ac.uk So I though why don't I collect all the mail in my Gmail account so I can read it in alpine. It is quite easy to set up.

• You first sign into Gmail and then click on "settings" (top right) then you select "Accounts and Import"
• Then you need to click on the "Add pop account"
• Enter your UCL address and click next step
• This will fail and you will be asked to add your data manually

Following data is important:

• Email address: yourlogin@live.ucl.ac.uk
• Username: yourlogin@live.ucl.ac.uk
• Password:
• POP Server: outlook.com
• Port: 995
• And use SSL

This is pretty much all you need to receive mail. I further add a tag so I can search for uni mail quicker and leave the messages on the server in the case Gmail goes down.
But that's it. Quite simple actually.

To see how to send mail trough Gmail using your UCL address see my other post: Howto send mail through Gmail using your UCL address

Need money

I have been accepted to the

2nd IEEE International Conference on
Adaptive Science & Technology

in Ghana to present my paper on Objects in the Cloud. Now I have been looking at flights and etc and on the bottom line I can't afford it. I find this quite sad that in the conference atmosphere you always need someone behind you that can sponsor you (University, Company, etc). I mean I do get expenses for many conferences when I talk but a few don't even think about setting up a grant for poor students like me. I think they are missing out and creating a rich elite which is never good. Sorry for this rant but I am quite sad that I can not go :)

Trac with lighttpd on CentOS

I spent a few hours today trying to figure out how to get trac working with lighttpd on CentOS with the standard packages from rpmforge. Like always this seams to be quite easy but then you spend ages on the little things.

First of all you need to install trac via yum which is quite easy: yum install trac
This is assuming you have lighttpd already installed

So here is the section you have to put in your /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf you will also have to enable a few modules at the start most notably mod_fastcgi but please always check that you have all the modules enabled.

$HTTP["host"] == "trac.mypage.org" {

url.rewrite = ( "^/$" => "/root")

server.document-root = "/var/www/trac"
alias.url = (
"/trac_prefix/chrome/common/" => "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/trac/htdocs/",
)

# rewrite for multiple svn project
url.rewrite-final = (
"^/trac_prefix/[^/]+/chrome/common/(.*)" => "/chrome/common/$1",
)

$HTTP["url"] =~ "^/trac_prefix/chrome/" {
}
else $HTTP["url"] =~ "^/root" {
fastcgi.server = (
"/root" => ( # if trac_prefix is empty, use "/"
(
# options needed to have lighty spawn trac
"bin-path" => "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/trac/web/fcgi_frontend.py",
"min-procs" => 1,
"max-procs" => 1,
"bin-environment" => (
"TRAC_ENV_PARENT_DIR" => "/var/trac/",
),

# options needed in all cases
"socket" => "/tmp/trac.sock",
"check-local" => "disable",

# optional
"disable-time" => 1,

# needed if trac_prefix is empty; and you need >= 1.4.23
"fix-root-scriptname" => "enable",
),
),
)
}
}


There is nothing special with the paths and the rest if quite standard. The one thing to note is that I couldn't get trac to live properly in the root directory. As soon as you select a project it will error => So we rewrite the url to add "root" to the end. The rest should be pretty straight forward. There is no authentication in this example but this will follow in a further post.

Rar on Mac OSX

I just downloaded a .rar file onto my Mac and of course it didn't understand it. So off I went to google and looked for something that could extract it. I found a lot of proprietary stuff but nothing really I liked. If you are looking for a funky GUI what you probably are if you are using a Mac you should have a look at http://wakaba.c3.cx/s/apps/unarchiver.html which seams to be a good choice. But I didn't want another program that would integrate itself everywhere and in the end might cause my computer to crash every 25 min. (The Windows application syndrome). But all this looking around took me about 15 minutes till I had the feeling to have looked at all the options. Then I fired up a good old shell and had a look what fink had to offer. And after 1 line I could unrar my file
$ fink install unrar
That was it. I still love the command line, even if I have a funky desktop.

CentOS Pulse #0905 - The CentOS Newsletter

Hi all,

With a little delay, issue #0905 of the CentOS Pulse newsletter has
been released. It covers topics like the CentOS 4.8 release, the
Spanish CentOS community, wireless networking and contains an
interesting interview with Tru Huynh.

You can read the newsletter at:

http://wiki.centos.org/Newsletter/0905

The project team considers the CentOS Newsletter an important tool to
communicate directly with the community. It is run by the community to
collect interesting bits from the wiki, mailing list, forums, SIGs and
other sources, and put them into the spotlight.

More information about the newsletter and how you can contribute is
available from:

http://wiki.centos.org/Newsletter

Happy Reading!
Marcus + Didi

The Centos Newsletter Rss Feed

This feed will inform you about new releases of the CentOS Newsletter.

Hahah

I was at HAR and of course I was drunk and then this happened:
http://loupgaroublond.blogspot.com/2009/08/didi.html

A little clip of your host

Hey. I was interviewed at Linuxtag and the result can be seend under:
http://www.linux-magazin.de/NEWS/Video-Das-war-der-Linuxtag-2009
goto minute 11:15 and see and see me giggle :)

I will not be going to LA

I applied for a ticket for Michael Jackson's funeral. But today I got

Thank you for your registration.

Sorry, we regret to inform you that your registration to attend the Public Memorial Service for Michael Jackson was not selected.

Hundreds of thousands registered, but only a few can be in attendance.

TV it is

A webOS that seams to work

I am always looking for a good WebOS that I could use from a few thin clients. Listing to Stallman talk about Cloud computing I had a look at eyeos which is definatelly worth a look. It seams to work but still quite slow but definatelly moving into the right direcion.

Horrible ad

I was just watching the news and then I saw this ad:

http://www.bsa.org/flash/leads/leads.swf

A rough translation is:
Man: "You know, overtime is a part of your job"
Woman: "But you could at least say thank you"

Man: "You didn't work THAT good"
Woman "what, 20% more trade is nothing?"

Man: "In this economic downturn you should be happy that you still have a job"

Woman: "You too, the software is not even legal"

Person: "There are good reasons to report illegal software"

How can people air this? So basically, if you are not happy with your boss tell on him. That will really make you keep your job. Because if your company is doing bad, because it has to pay a massive settlement you will really get that raise. FFS did those people not go to school. But I suppose the people from the BSA are too stupid to realise what they are doing. But of course the software companies might go out of business if they don't get any money, but don't do it like this. I would really like to talk to one of these people.

A funny pic from LinuxTag

As many people know I like to drink and I like CentOS.

Mailing list error

For the last day I was complaining about that I could not post on the libdbook mailing list. I could not figure out why. But this morning it became clear to me. I had changed the default send-to in my gmail. The libdbook mailing list didn't know that mail and didn't let me post. DAAAAAA. It didn't help that the list didn't reply with "unknown email", it send a "list not found" error. So it is not that easy to change your email.