Posted on

Transcoding and Content Delivery Automation Project is finished

Just finished up my project over at Disney studio’s.
Too bad it wasn’t a consumer facing product.

There was talk today that Accenture had helped create a less sophisticated version of a similar product over at WB.
And that the WB’s automation system had one a pioneering emmy?
Logically speaking, this Disney one is better, so Disney should apply for an award.

I was thinking “Award Wining” sounds really good.

Anyway, it was a great pleasure to work with Accenture, and Disney.
It was Disney’s brainchild, and I meshed in my Web Design experience to help with the UI.
But we all developed it as a team effort. Every individual helped with the design of a module or two.

I just marvel at the feat of collaboration there alone.
Will miss those guys.

 

 

Posted on

Constant Brute Force Attacks

So DirectAdmin has this feature where it scans the logs of process such email, ftp, etc.

This great security measure is abusing the h*ck out of my inbox.
And in turn all these constant emails about brute force attempts is making me  extra paranoid.

So looking for a way to turn on auto ban so I can at least temporarily block the abuser.
Found some interesting scripts online.

http://help.directadmin.com/item.php?id=404
http://help.directadmin.com/item.php?id=380

Posted on

phone-tracker

This is a great little tool created for people who are nosy, like me.

I always wonder what my loved ones are doing throughout the day. And I want to protect my family from exposure to unwanted influences.
Phone tracker lets a concerned parent or spouse have constant monitoring of the activity on a cell phone.

Record text messages, save images, save video, and receive alerts.
Track the persons movement by recording their location on a set interval.

Of course all this does use data. So preferably users should have an unlimited data account.
Check it out: Phone Tracker

Posted on

neal saves the day

My direct admin suffering has been resolved.
Neal replaced the exim Configuration file and every thing started moving forward out of the mail queue.

Thank you Neal.

Posted on

backbone.js + Laravel reminds me of Grails!

Wow. check out this awesome nettuts video that shows you how to use backbone and laravel to create CRUD operations on ‘data objects’ in the front end.
Laravel really reminds me of Grails. It has methods that seem very much so like the dynamic finders in Grails.

Anyway, I go where the market takes me, but I would be totally stocked to work on a backbone, require, and underscore js project.

Posted on

DirectAdmin Suffering

Having a horrible time today trying to get Email working from this Direct Admin box that I got.

I actually paid to have it setup by a consultant cause I didnt have the time to muck around with learning a new control panel software.

Neal with the deal down at the data center said he would configure the server for me 100%. And now that I am going through it, feeling some buyers remorse here, as I am looking at my /var/log/exim files trying to figure out why I keep getting this error in DirectAdmin > Mail Queue Administration when I hit ‘retry’ to send an email from the Queue.

2012-10-11 16:18:16 1TMRxY-0001y0-Rm Error in system filter: unknown filtering command “$h_subject:.” near line 46 of filter file

Want to guess what the logs files are full of?

This exact same error message with different timestamps and ids. Almost a Gig of completely useless Bullshizer!
At least tell me which file its in!

The consultant is of course, unable to help at the moment, and the internet has been no help so far. 🙁

I already greped out the exim.conf files as having the only instances of h_subject in the entire /usr/local/directadmin folder

root@da1:/usr/local/directadmin/data# grep -i -n -R h_subject *
templates/exim.conf:845: subject = “${if def:h_Subject: {Autoreply: $h_Subject:} {I am on vacation}}”
templates/exim.conf:862: subject = “${if def:h_Subject: {Autoreply: $h_Subject:} {Autoreply Message}}”
templates/exim3.conf:297: subject = “${if def:h_Subject: {Autoreply: $h_Subject:} {I am on vacation}}”
templates/exim3.conf:309: subject = “${if def:h_Subject: {Autoreply: $h_Subject:} {Autoreply Message}}”
templates/exim4.conf:845: subject = “${if def:h_Subject: {Autoreply: $h_Subject:} {I am on vacation}}”
templates/exim4.conf:862: subject = “${if def:h_Subject: {Autoreply: $h_Subject:} {Autoreply Message}}”

As you can see they are no where near line: 46.

>> 2012-10-11 06:32:36 1TCkRY-00053G-Pw Error in system filter: unknown
>> filtering command “$h_subject:.” near line 46 of filter file

And I really don’t know what to do from here. I guess I can try commenting it out.
But as it stands right now, due to this faulty Exim and DirectAdmin configuration, I am not able to send or receive emails from the box.

———-

Quick update: Neal fixed it!

Posted on

nodejs and express, my first app

So I was working on my ubuntu servers this weekend.

Trying to get some extra work in. Work that shouldn’t feel like work. I was thinking about how natural/intuitive asynchronous event driven applications design might be with a language like JavaScript. I was sort of redesigning the BPM we worked on at Disney in my head.

Defacto server side engine for JS right now is node, so with a few commands I had my first web app launched.


sudo apt-get install nodejs
sudo apt-get install npm
npm install -g express
express --sessions --css stylus --ejs myapp
cd myapp && npm install
node app

So if you point your browser at http://localhost:3000/ you will see the hello word app.

Now one of the first things I noticed is there is a templating system at work here called EJS.
The good news is that, at first glance, it looks pretty much like PHP!

/routes/index.js

/*
 * GET home page.
 */

exports.index = function(req, res){
  res.render('index', { title: 'Express' });
};

/views/index.ejs

<title> <%= title %> </title>
<ul>
<% for(var i=0; i<supplies.length; i++) {%>
   <li><%= supplies[i] %></li>
<% } %>
</ul>

Okay so the templating system looks easy enough, next thing is I need a way to do job scheduling functionality. Basically need a nodejs clone of the quartz job scheduler in grails.

I did a quick google and saw there is a github project for this.
And this pretty much where I ran out of steam in my investigation.
And I concluded that “I will look into https://github.com/ncb000gt/node-cron later.”

Honestly, I think a technology solution presented on this platform can be rather elagent!
I’ve been pushing unified front and back end language and synchronization for long time in my casual conversations here and there. None of my employers have had a project like this for me in the past.

If I can find a decent IDE, I just may try something out.

Posted on

Screwed by Google Maps App Update

It finally happeend. I was predicting this.

See, when companies launch the first version of their app, its just to get a user base,
to penetrate the market. And at times revenue generation is left as an after thought for the next version release.

Fravia, may he Rest In Peace, one of the reasons why I became very adept at internet searching, said “never install app updates”.

And today, I wish to logic that I had backed up and saved the previous apk of google maps.

Cause they injected ads into the new release. Which is the only notable difference!

Ads, the bane of my existence. The reason I pay for premium channels, pirate content, and can recite useless taglines. My brain is crammed with marketing bullshizer.

I thought I was rid of them in part thanks to Chrome’s and Firefox’s ad blocker plugin.

But here it is, staring me in the face, “Bankruptcy Center” advert for my search to the nearnest LA Fitness.

Thanks for nothing Google. Good job on screwing the pooch on this one.

I guess with Apple’s horrible map system, Google can afford to do anything and still keep their user base.

We’ll its either time to dust off that Decompiler, or hunt down a previous apk off the intertubes.

Posted on

Buy Samsung.

Do you love the iPhone? Buy Samsung! Apple says that Samsung products are substantially the same as theirs, with a bigger screen, better performance, more features, free apps, and lower price!

Posted on

TIL: Grails Exapndo Object

TIL: On our development team, someone used POGO’s to define a payload to a REST API.

Were coming from a JavaScript perspective, having every object be dynamic, there is no need to define any structure before hand.
So I started googling dynamic objects information for Grails.

I found a great slideshare on it that explains how the Expando object, utilizes metaprogramming techniques, to create a dynamic class.
While in some languages you may find a keyword usually ‘dynamic’ which makes the object flexible at run time, in grails you have to declare and Expando object, or inherit form it.

Its mentioned on the bottom of this page here:
http://groovy.codehaus.org/Collections