Temptation of Saint Aqualung

People are strange

Fri, 04 Apr 2008 09:50:00 +0400

They so damn are! Aftraid to enter their name when registering a domain, but post every single bit of thier personal information into their facebook profile. And even place a marker on their home, their office and the place they usuallys stop by to drink a couple of beers in some google maps app.

It's Spring, Baby!

Wed, 02 Apr 2008 02:12:00 +0400

Today, on the 1st of April, I, Aleksei “rusty_angel” Miheev, declare: the spring is finally here. There are lots of signs around. Those are the most notable:

I saw the first butterfly this year
We turned on air conditioner in our office. And shut the windows, too. It's heaven here now.
I've opened (again) bicycle season with a short 5-something miles ride
I realized how long it's been since I woke up not alone
I quit drinking and eating meat

Once A Freelancer - Always A Freelancer

Sun, 30 Mar 2008 12:22:00 +0400

Well, yes – I'm back. I've always been here, but there really weren't that much time, so I couldn't sit, organize my thoughts in a way suitable for a blog post and write it. Later I got some time, but lost that habbit of blogging in English.

However, recently this blog was approved to TLA, and now I somehow feel obligated to start writing again. Right, I wouldn't mind getting a few extra bucks.

OK, so what's up? I still work in that web hosting company, I've got some of my projects hosted there, they are mostly local audience-oriented, so I won't mention them here now.

And I got back to freelance, too. It's casus inoperabile, I guess. It's my life, really. Freelance is much more challenging and.. just interesting. There's always something I do for the first time.

For example, recently I was optimizing a slow torrent site (yeah, I stuck to torrents), and I did it well, it's running smoothly for a about month already instead of crashing every night, but I didn't change a single line of code anywhere but /etc/my.cnf. Before that I always searched for weaknesses in scripts and queries (and there always were some), but this time I only tuned mysql. It feels just great! The company that hosts Matt's (he's a really great guy) server just doesn't believe that, so Matt had to ask me to describe what exactly did I do for them.

Also, I had first real-life experience with PostgreSQL recently. I used it a little in past and liked it, but GOD, it's custom aggregates are awesome! And tsearch was a big disappointment: it has everything I was trying to implement by myself for some time already. It's great. just great.

There isn't just work here now. I'm finishing my education this summer, so I'm wokring hard on my diploma project. I hate it. Really. I'm not into those things at all, I'm a system programmer, I have nothing to do arc furnaces. Writing a research paper on those things is painful. But I can't stop half-way, and neigher I can stop three months before the end after six years. So I just do it.

That's all for today. Real stuff would be later. See you, guys.

Friday

Sun, 02 Dec 2007 00:32:00 +0300

No matter, how bad restaurant is, Jack Daniels is always Jack Daniels. Thus, friday evening was damn good

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.

Sick, or One Year and Keep Running

Thu, 22 Nov 2007 11:24:00 +0300

Well, yes, it's Novemeber, time for me to catch some cold. So I stay at home instead of been in office, take pills, drink a lot of hot tea with lemon (I hate tea with anything but water!!!) and... keep working.

I am trying to set up MySQL authorization/authentication with PAM and NSS. There'll definitely be an article on this, as I couldn't find enough information on this. There is a bunch of HowTo's available, and the task doesn't seem to be too hard, but I have problems with it now. Either those howtos aren't enough up-do-date or pill made me dumb.

I didn't tell you the best part yet. I didn't tell you anything good at all, actually. This site is one year old now! I ordered hosting from BlueHost.com on Nov, 20 last year. Now I have my VPS and I was busy moving the blog here from BlueHost and transferring the domain to GoDaddy, so it could have been unavailable for some time. Also, I missed November, 19 when I promised you to report about the first month of non-freelancing. This article would follow today later.

Right now I am accepting congrats. :)

This year shown me that I can be interesting, that I have things to write about (hope, next year will give more such things), that I can get a PR4 for a new domain, and hit the Reddit's top. There are things to remember, definitely.

Thank you for been with me all this time.

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.

RentACoder To Enable Withdrawal With Payoneer Debit Cars, Too

Tue, 30 Oct 2007 20:21:00 +0300

Remeber my posting about GetAFreelancer.com introducing Payoneer cards withdrawals which came synchonously with almost the same article at MDLog:/sysadmin? (BTW, I've already ordered and received the card, but didn't have a chance to use it yet).

RentACoder may follow GAF and introduce the same payment option. There is no official information at www.RentACoder.com yet, but just today I came across an Uncle Edik's interview with Ian Ippolito, the RentACoder CEO, where he states that RAC already partnered with Payoneer.com:

Do you plan to add a new funds escrow option for RentACoder? I took part in the voting about introduction of the iKOBO option. Will it be someday possible to use a pre-paid debit card instead of checks? The reason I ask this question is that I can say for sure that a pre-paid debit card is the best option for Russian-speaking coders.

Yes... we will be adding Payoneer (a debit card like Ikobo) as well as bank deposit and some other options.We have already signed a contract with Payoneer. I hope to rollout a beta in 3-4 months and rollout to the general site in 5-6.

So far so good. I will hold my RAC payments for a few months and hope that's true.

And here's a Russian version of the same interview.

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

    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!