The Geek Brewery

Last June 1, 2009, Air France Flight 447 fell into the Atlantic Ocean. The fleet used was an Airbus 330, the same equipment used by Philippine Airlines for medium to long haul domestic and international flights.

Similar aircraft to the Yemenia Air Flight 626’s aircraft. An Airbus A310 used by Yemenia.

Several hours ago, Yemenia Airlines Flight 626 (Yemenia Air Flight 626 or Yemenia Air Flight 627) carrying 154 people including 11 crew was reported down in Indian Ocean the coast of Comoros, an island nation in the Indian Ocean. The fleet used was yet another Airbus, specifically an Airbus A310. This is the second fatal crash of an Airbus this month. (more…)

Last Friday, we had our Globe Broadband connected at the apartment. Globe Telecom deployed a PROLiNK Hurricane 5200 as our ADSL modem. Since we wanted to share the Internet connection throughout the room, we bought a Linksys WRT54G2 wireless router.

Configuring the PROLiNK Hurricane 5200 to work with Linksys WRT54G2 wasn’t that easy. Here’s a rough guide on how to do it. This guide must work with other models (such as Hurricane 9200) and other brands, but the steps will differ. (more…)

Globe Telecom uses a transparent proxy on it’s http.globe.com.ph access point. This means when you open a website, it passes thru their server for caching or whatever purpose it might server before it reaches your cellphone or computer.

URL of image when not cached.

I’ve noticed though that they replace the URL of images inside <img> tags with another URL on their server for caching. This, in turn, causes some problems with web applications that requires authentication and generates images on the fly such as StatCounter. This replacement/caching process is only done when Globe Telecom detects that you are using a web browser on a computer or on a mobile phone (I curl-ed this website and the output did not have any URL replacements).

URL after caching. Notice, the cached and compressed image is in Globe or a third-party partner’s server.

As a workaround, you can spoof your User-Agent by modifying the headers of your requests. You may do this in Firefox by:

1. Going to about:config. A warning will have to scare you but just continue.
2. Then, find the general.useragent.extra.firefox setting. Using the filter above may help you find it.
3. Once you find it, double click the entry and change it to whatever you want. For it to work, it should not contain words like Mozilla, Firefox, Safari or other web browsers. I’ve changed mine to MikkoFox.

Have fun browsing without cached images.

The Long Short Story

Some three days ago, I was complaining to RapidVPS that my websites were loading really slow. I logged on to my server thru SSH and checked the server load. To my amazement, it was on it’s 300+ mark. Way above my 1.00 average. The servers running my account could have been boiling by that time.

It was around 7 hours after my first ticket when they responded. They gave me a very surprising surprise. RapidVPS permanently suspended my hosting account after it sent mass-mails to tons of people, thus spiking the server load which was detrimental to their services. They said my data was too risky to host. Up to now, I don’t know how it happened. As far as I knew, I did not have any cron job on that account. Someone might have sneaked in to my server and ran a really bad script using my account.

So I was forced to host a 503 (maintenance) page thru DreamHost to avoid search engines to remove my pages from the index while waiting for the backup of my files to be sent back to me. It took me around 36 hours to get a reply. By the 40th hour, I got a link to a tarred file of my backups. I immediately logged in thru my A Small Orange (ASO) account thru SSH and wget-ted the file. Sadly, I can’t untar the file on my ASO server since I only had very limited web space. Tandandandan.

What I did was I sent a request to A Small Orange to untar my files and copy the files for The Geek Brewery to the root of conradmiguel.com. I also asked them to import my SQL databases. Within five minutes, I got a reply. They were willing to help me out even if it was not part of my subscription. A Small Orange, FTW! (more…)

Happy Independence Day to the Philippines!

The Philippines gained it’s independence from United States of America Spain last June 12, 1988. This means we’re celebrating our country’s 111th year of independence!

Google is also celebrating Independence Day with us. Thanks to ate Aileen Apolo for plurking about the Google Doodle for the day!

Hello folks.

I have upgraded this blog to WordPress 2.8 codenamed Baker, thanks to Twitter’s (follow me) trending topics option. I upgraded my blog manually by uploading the latest WordPress tar file on my website’s root folder and untar-ing it on my server thru SSH. It was my first time to access my web server thru SSH as I only had my shell access activated today.

The upgrade process went smoothly. Since I already had access to my web server’s shell, I was able to fix all security issues especially the permissions stuff. The process of changing the permissions was smooth, I just used issued the chmod 755 /wp-includes /wp-admin -R command.

One of my favorite features introduced in WordPress 2.8 is the syntax highlighting (they call it CodePress). It’s easier to identify functions, html tags, attributes and parameters now. One thing I don’t like in CodePress though is that it doesn’t produce a tab (the whitespace) when the TAB button is pressed, instead it shifts its focus to the next clickable element just like before. An autocomplete feature for CodePress would also be a very great idea.

Other new features are the theme browser, improved screen options and some speed optimizations.

The only problem I encountered was when making a post, specifically saving it (even as a draft). It dumps the following error: Fatal error: Call to undefined method SearchSpider::_weak_escape() in /some_path/here on line 478. After Googling the problem, I learned that it was caused by the Search Unleashed plug-in. I had no other choice but to disable it.

I was looking for related articles on my post UP Diliman start of classes, moved when I saw this article from Inquirer.net.

Share your insights? What can you say?

Earlier today, UP Diliman Chancellor Sergio Cao announced that the start of classes for 1st Semester of Academic Year 2009-2010 will be moved to June 16, a week later than originally planned.

The move was a precautionary measure against the spread of A(H1N1) virus. Yesterday, a suspected A(H1N1) case was confirmed NEGATIVE by the Infirmary (UP Health Services).

Student’s registration will also be extended.

Ubuntu 9.04 indeed was the fastest version of Ubuntu I had in my laptop. Before, boot time gradually increased as each version is released. But Jaunty Jackalope broke the trend, it was faster than it’s predecessor Intrepid Ibex.

But the release had a very noticeable annoyance, the Update Manager pops up a couple of times if you don’t have an updated system. It was unlike before when Update Manager only issues a notification on the notification area.

Fortunately, there’s a quick fix for that. Just go to your terminal (Applications -> Accessories -> Terminal) or press Alt-F2 and paste this:

That quick fix just fixes the annoyance, no side-effects or whatsoever!

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