Temptation Of Saint Aqualung // work

Checklists

Thu, 06 May 2010 03:52:00 +0400

They are totally useless. Unless you have to perform a certain task. If you don't list every little thing you have to do to achive your goal, you may miss a teeny-tiny part, like updating fstab after moving directories. And end up screwing with the server all night long instead of 10 minute job.

BTW, if you use pygrub with Xen, extra won't work and you won't be able to boot domU in single mode, for example. You'll have to specify kernel and ramdisk and comment out bootloader instead.

Back to RentACoder

Wed, 27 Jan 2010 19:27:00 +0300

I've stopped freelancing for a while again, and now I'm back to it one more time.

I missed it. I left RAC over 2 years ago becase of several reasons. Most important are:

No challenge

When I stated there, it was all new and exciting for me. Finding clients, persuading them to hire me, working on real things I only tried on localhost before... But them I gained enough experience and improved my skills. Most projects looked boring for me. Others were too cheap (I know, a gig's a gig, but working for $20 overnight isn't so pleasing anymore).

Stability

I was working for two guys I met on RentACoder, Leif and Matt. They paid me enough so I didn't have to search for more projects. Also I found a full-time job which also paid off pretty well. I had enough money and enough work and also some free time: why would I need too work more.

Concurrency

Well, my skills are good. My rates are acceptable. But by the end of 2007 RAC was invaded by thousands of cheap Indian coders. I just couldn't compete with their rates. No offence to good coders from India: they had even harder time fighting both their cheap inexperienced colleagues and a stereotype about cheap coders...

But recently I moved from my parents house and could really use a couple extra bucks. And also I suddenly had much more free time (I still have no explaination for that!), so I though: Why not? And RAC was much better this time: more interesting projects, less scriptkiddies (I made 8 bids in first two days and won one) and decent prices. I'm glad and excited.

It's good to be back.

rsyslog

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 17:02:00 +0300

It's unique. What's it's uniqueness, you ask me? I'll tell you what is it. rsyslog's man page is more clear and easy to understand and to start with than documentation at it's website.

Heartbeat

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 11:01:00 +0300

We've grown enough to need high availability solution, so the first thing I've tried is Heartbeat. It turned out enough for now (although, I'll have to update a few init scripts), and I'll write a mini-howto on running Heartbeat inside OpenVZ container as soon as I have enough time for that.

For now, just one hint. If your node doesn't come up when it should, and /var/log/ha-log contains the following:

Setup problem: Couldn't find utility /bin/gawk

then it's most probably not really about gawk (it's very hard to find Linux system without gawk). It may also mean that you don't have which installed, while Heartbeat's scripts use it to find a real path to gawk. It's not that common, too, actually, but, for example, some OpenVZ templates do not include which package.

So, yum install which (or vzyum $VEID install which) brings you happiness.

Ubuntu is so Ubuntu

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 14:49:00 +0400

Note to self: stop using alphas!

This shit costed me a lot of neurons and hell of a time. I though I went crazy ot supid at some point.

I even googled for 'netmask calculator' after I calculated it in head and then on a piece of paper.

Both ip addr and ifconfig output wrong broadcast address.

% uname -a

Linux amiheev 2.6.31–11-generic #36-Ubuntu SMP Fri Sep 25 06:37:23 UTC 2009 x86_64 GNU/Linux

inet 192.168.200.21/26 brd 192.168.200.31 scope global eth0

inet addr:192.168.200.21  Bcast:192.168.200.31  Mask:255.255.255.192

One Month In Office

Sat, 24 Nov 2007 15:59:00 +0300

As I have already mentioned, I got a “normal” nearly full-time job recently. I work in a web hosting company (Russian) now. And I promised to write an artcile about how is it after a month of been employed. So, here st it.

I'm few days late, though.

It is hard to distinguish pros and cons right now as I'm all into this new job. It's new, it's interesting, it's (somewhat) challenging, it fits me perfectly. Hm.. Okay, let's state that was a pro.

On the other hand, it's in office. It means I have to be clothed (and I mean clothed, so robe and slippers ain't an option) to work, I have to move myself from home to office in the morning... That turned out pretty hard, I've never been and early-riser, so I didn't have enought sleep first two weeks and still I feel that if I could sleep more, I'd feel better.

I can't make coffee or tea in the office as I used to make them. Actually, there's no way to make fine coffee there (can't stand instant coffee), the tea I make there is acceptable, though.

It's harder to take a break in office, and you have to go through from morning to lunch and from lunch to evening. It's okay now, though, as I even forget about lunch sometimes (that will surely pass later). Opposed to this, it's easier to concentrate: “home freedom” gives you too many chanes that you'll reading blogs or playing Chromium rather than working. I was sick a couple days ago and had to stay home and tried to work from here as I used to do all those years. And what? Routine tasks took two times more than they usually take when I'm in the office. And I missed our issue traking system and lots of things I just got used to already. And most of all I missed the ability to turn my head and ask co-worker a question instead of emailing it.

BUT. I have weekends now. I can do anything (or nothing, which I prefer) after 6 AM. And I know what will I be doing next day. After three years of freelance it feels marvelous! I guess I'm getting fat-old-stability-loving-guy.

Also, I can learn now. First, new work means new challenges, and I have to improve some of my skills, which were pretty weak before. I never had time and need to get beyond just general understanding of perl, bash, sed and awk. I barely understood how MySQL replication actually works. I knew nothing about PAM, NSS and postfix.

And I can actually learn: read books and manuals on things I do not use in my work. Just because I've got free time now. Finally I'm reading Dive Into Python and I like this language and will try to build my next own project with Python.

I don't have to pay attention to my time management anymore. No need to explain anyone, why do I have to work when they want to see me. Less interference between work and my (yet inexistent, though) private life.

And the last thing for now, I guess, is pro office work again. I can get enough resources when I need. I cat ask for a test server, so I don't have to manage virtual machines and virtual network. I can ask for software, though I never needed it yet and I doubt that I'll be need of something non-free in future.

Uhm. The very last: I know now what is TGIF really about, and I don't like it very much actually.

You see, there are much more pros for me now. Actually, this job is a good balance between freelance and what is usually ment by office work.

Encoding Mail Subjects Properly When Sending Mail With PHP

Fri, 02 Nov 2007 14:01:00 +0300

It is one of the most common bugs in Russian web applications. Nowadays coders do not forget to add Content-type header to mail messages, but many of them forget (or don't know) that this header affects he messag body only. They think, if they specified proper encoding for body, mail client will use it for Subject, too.

Which is totally wrong, of course.

I am speaking about Russian developers, because I only receive mail in Russian and English, and English messages for obvious reasons do not suffer from this problem. I'm sure that other languages suffer as much as Russian do.

So, enough dull talk. What should proper mail Subject be? If encoded if consists of the parts separated by special characters:

=?{original text encoding}?{encoding method}?{encoded subject}?=

So, if you want, for example, to send mail in UTF-8, your message subject should be converted like that:


$subject='=?utf-8?B?'.base64_encode($subject).'?=';

Do not do other people's mistakes.

(Use their experience to make your own ones.)

Major Changes, or The Song Remains The Same

Wed, 31 Oct 2007 21:34:00 +0300

I've been saving this for one of those Fool's Days, but it actually came true. Remeber me “complaining” about not getting office job and been stuck to freelance?

Right! I got the job. The very same one that I didn't get in August. The guy they hired instead of me then didn't appear to meet the requirements, so they contacted me again. Oddly enough, I received another proposal at the same time. I even talked to the second company, took their test job, finished it and sent back (they didn't reply, however), but it was something about Windows, AutoCAD, Visual C++ and lots of other things I don't really want to mess around with. I've forgotten my umbrella at their office, by the way :-)

So, now for almost two weeks already I work in a local web hosting company. Our (wow, apparently, it feels pretty cool when you say say “we” talking about your company) website is completely in Russian, because we are targeting Russian customers only, though, with got one client from Greece, as far as I know. In fact, there are only two people busy with hosting here: we are a part of bigger company. I'll tell you more about the company later as there's just not too much to say right now.

I promise to summarize my impressons about working in company and freelancing when it will a month since I started working: at November, 19.

And I'm not going to quit freelance. I'll just freeze it for a while and get back to it later, in smaller amounts, of course.

As new job consumes significantly less time and there are more interesting and challenging work here, I hope I will post articles more frequently hereinafter. I'm still what I am – a web developer and Unix admin, so more work – more experience – more articles.

See you soon.

The Hell of Non-Self-Documenting Code

Sat, 06 Oct 2007 05:17:00 +0400

There were a lot of buzz about self-documenting code a while ago, and there will probably be much more. I'm not that big fan of it (neither am I a fan of anything but music), but it is really helpful sometimes.

Do you hate lack of documentation as much as I do?

Plenty of languages are more self-documenting than they seem to be. On the other side, the thing that seem self-documenting, aren't always like that.

Take php. Imagine there's a torrent tracker software written in php:


function announce($passkey, $info_hash) {

//plenty of code here

Â Â Â Â return bEncode($resp);

}

Pretty obvious, isn't it. Sure. But.

But what?

It is so obvious only if you use some framework to route HTTP requests to your classes and methods. It that case yes, any (awaited) GET parameter has a corresponding function argument, and you can easily see what is passed to /announce.

But what if the application is built like “old-style”: one atomic action – one file? I have to admit, that this style has it's advantages, among some weaknesses.

The worst thing about it is that you have to document it. If you don't – you forget what should be submitted to this particular script. Or, if you remember, a serial killer who reads your code, doesn't know what input does this piece of code wait for.

Use MVC frameworks if you are too lazy to write comments. Please!

GetAFreelancer Introduces MasterCard Debit Card Payments

Tue, 11 Sep 2007 01:52:00 +0400

I have never taken GetAFreelancer (GAF) too seriously. Most projects there are “clone a site”, “data entry”, “register XXX gmail accounts”, or just the projects that aren't interesting or too cheap for me.

Yesterday GAF did something that a) makes me treat them as a more serious company; and b) lets them attract more possible service providers and, consequently, buyers. The concurrency is good for a professional (I already have a draft of article about that, will post it sooner or later), so I guess, I'll pay more attention to jobs listed there.

But let's get back to the point of this blog post. GetAFreelancer announced that they partnered with Payoneer and will now provide pre-paid MaterCard debit cards for their payments. I couldn't find any commission charges mentioned on their site yet, though. Probably there'll be just regular payoneer commission on every withdrawal.

Anyway, that is great news. While RentACoder promises to start iKobo (another pre-paid debit cards system) payments for more than a year without any result, GAF intoduced this kind of payment. Probably that will finally make RAC move.