Svilen's Tech Blog

In an absolute world

noreply@blogger.com (Svilen Spasov) — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 11:45:00 +0000

It's the first and last time I am playing blogger games ever and it's because Petya challenged me.

Hmm... let me see what should an absolute world be.

- only MAC computers available

- no managers/team leaders with unworkable requests all the time

- women with no timeframe restrictions for having sex

- free Mazda RX-8 with a full tank on every corder

- unrestricted joint and coffee shops (Deen Haag's affect ... )

And now it's my turn - Evgeni, Genadi show me your worlds. :)

SWFUpload & Sessions

noreply@blogger.com (Svilen Spasov) — Thu, 15 May 2008 08:40:00 +0000

Have you tried SWFUpload?

It's cool flash uploader which is ideal for uploading big files (over 5-10MB) and having visual status about how much it's left.

Everything seems fine from the demos, etc. but! Yeah there is one clause that I figured out by myself while trying to use the tool in Drupal.

If you want to use the SWFUpload in restricted areas with scripts that require sessions (e.g. cookie sessions) you will fall into the hole.

For solving the issue add session read from $_GET also cause under Safari/Firefox/MAC OS X; Firefox/Linux the SWFUploader won't pass any cookies the the "upload.php" script.

Example solution for drupal:

if (isset($_GET['fmauthsessid']) {

if ($_GET['fmauthsessid']) {

$_COOKIE[session_name()] = $_GET['fmauthsessid'];

$key = $_GET['fmauthsessid'];

}

else {

if (!isset($_COOKIE[session_name()])) {

$user = drupal_anonymous_user();

return '';

}

Put this in the beginning of sess_read() in includes/session.inc

More experience lessons will be comming these days.

Wanna send email to Hotmail.com from PHP mail()? SUX...

noreply@blogger.com (Svilen Spasov) — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 11:42:00 +0000

Hello everyone,

I know you've noticed that I am not quite often blogging, but I am and will try to post interesting tech stuff here.

Today's topic: Sending email to Hotmail account from PHP.

Sounds easy. Some of will say "just use PHP's mail() function with correct headers". Yeah, but not. :)

I read almost all posts on this topic around the net with no success. So finally I started trying and trying ... after the 5th or 6th hour (God bless I started in the morning of the day else I would probably throw my MacBook out of the window) I managed to send emails to Hotmail successfully!

Hints:

1) Do NOT put any "a href" tags in the email

2) Put ONLY email address in the TO: and FROM: headers of the email

If you do one of the above your email won't even be in the Junk!

3) Do NOT send email from address like: no_reply@domain.com or noreply@domain.com

or it will go to Junk! folders in Hotmail accounts

That's it! Enjoy! :)

Ouh, I forgot to mention that I wanted to send HTML emails. ;-)

Looking for Dedicated Hosting Provider?

noreply@blogger.com (Svilen Spasov) — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 10:44:00 +0000

As many of you may know I do use dedicated server for 3 years by now. I started with MegaNetServe and I was satisfied till the previous year (2007) when they started to have frequently network downtimes with no reason or at least they didn't gave one.

Now I moved to Aplus and I can strongly recommend you them. Becides a value dedicated server you can get Plesk Control Panel with licence for 30 domains for no additional costs, which is great!

Plesk can save you a lot of time configuring the whole machine's services.

No, I haven't experienced a long term partnership with them by guys from MySQL Performance Blog are very pleased with Aplus for years.

Try them - www.aplus.net! ;-)

You will thank me later. :)

Why not Microsoft?

noreply@blogger.com (Svilen Spasov) — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 08:28:00 +0000

It's simple. Because of this. :))

Very nice M$ car indeed.

PHP advice

noreply@blogger.com (Svilen Spasov) — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 18:02:00 +0000

As a PHP developer some of the important things in my work are tools. Yeah, tools read more about them here.

Then you might want to take a look at these PHP optimization tips. Believe me you won't regret. :)

How to play .flac files in iTunes

noreply@blogger.com (Svilen Spasov) — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 00:47:00 +0000

Everybody that knows me personally is aware that I am an Apple fan, expecially Mac OS X one.

I bought my first Mac laptop 2 years ago and an year ago I had a need to play FLAC music files on my laptop.

Yes it was possible, but as much as I searched for a good OS X music player I couldn't find one better than iTunes. That's why I needed iTunes to play FLAC files.

Finally I found it! :) Although Apple are not going to make it cause they want us to use their ALAC format.

So here's how you can make it work for you:

1. Exit all iTunes and Quicktime applications

2. Download xiph-qt-0.1.8.dmg, flac_import_0.5b1_p0.1.dmg, set-OggS-0.1.dmg

3. Drag XiphQT.component (xiph-qt-0.1.8.dmg) to /Library/Components/

4. Drag FLACImport.component (flac_import_0.5b1_p0.1.dmg) to /Library/QuickTime/

5. Drag Clear OggS.app and Set OggS.app (set-OggS-0.1.dmg) to your Applications folder

6. Drag you FLAC files and drop them on Set OggS.app. A window will popup to show that all FLAC files have been "converted".

7. Add your "converted" FLAC files to you iTunes

8. Enjoy! :)

Hope it will work for you, too. :)

The End of PHP4

noreply@blogger.com (Svilen Spasov) — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 15:27:00 +0000

While thinking of installing a new PHP5 on a one of my new Windows servers (don't ask why Windows :) I went through the php.net's announcements "PHP 4 end of life announcement".

Zend Team will shut down PHP4's development - Finally! :)

Now I hope all hosting provider out there will switch their f*****g server to PHP5 and we all will bless them for this. :)

Go ahead!

За Б. Шопов :)

noreply@blogger.com (Svilen Spasov) — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 19:04:00 +0000

Да започваме да, яицазимитпо лъгуг, говорим на,яицазимитпо лъгуг, марсиански. яицазимитпо лъгуг, край.

MySQL on road

noreply@blogger.com (Svilen Spasov) — Fri, 03 Aug 2007 12:30:00 +0000

As I am on the MySQL topic these days I found (why I wasn't already...?!?) this mysql performance blog.

Once again I convinced myself that using MySQL in all kind of projects is good choice ... and read this post. It is clear that using different servers for different services, e.g. separate Web server from MySQL server, is a very very good decision and we will work on this for databg.svilen.com. Plus installing and using Sphinx full-text search engine.

Wish me luck. :)

Back To MySQL

noreply@blogger.com (Svilen Spasov) — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 21:52:00 +0000

As I am working very hard this summer I decided to blog more from now on...

So while moving to the latest project I have in my task list I decided to code it back with MySQL as backend DB. I started converting all PostgreSQL tables/data and it turned out that it was a simple task. Time consuming but simple and I convinced myself one more time that simple is better e.g. MySQL is better. :)

What do you think?

Jobs vs. Gates

noreply@blogger.com (Svilen Spasov) — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 10:58:00 +0000

Recently I bought a new MacBook. It's incredible. I admire Apple how they make their products. Those guys have thought almost of everything that man can want from their new notebook. :)

It has a remote control, too. So very much cool. :) I will post some photos tomorrow or so, but before that look at this funny video about Bill Gates & Steve Jobs :).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHO8l-Bd1O4

PHP & XML

noreply@blogger.com (Svilen Spasov) — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 16:39:00 +0000

Have you ever tried using XML in your PHP applications?

It's not so easy task using PHP4. I definitely understood that yesterday when I tried to use the PHP's internal XML parser.
Why TF (The Fuck) it doesn't returns a multi-dimentional array build on the XML's data?
Insted of this PHP's XML parser returns an one-level array with all the tags. Gosh that's awful. :)

Finally I have to made my own class to handle XML files. I'm sick of sucking PHP software. :)

CC Fraud

noreply@blogger.com (Svilen Spasov) — Fri, 05 Jan 2007 18:06:00 +0000

Finally, it catched me, too. :)

Yesterday while I was checking my online bank account I found out that there were some transactions from Microsoft Adcenter, which weren't mine!

Oh, god! Microsoft?

I've immediately called Microsoft Adcenter's Support and they admitted they fault.
"What the fuck?" will say one of my colleague. Is Microsoft credit card verification system so bad?
Or they don't have such at all. :) I guess it's the second reason.

At least how can someone use my credit card and they hadn't check him by phone before making a charge to the credit card.
Bad, bad for them.

Hope Google's Anti-Fraud System is better. I'm using Adwords. :)

Freelance Projects

noreply@blogger.com (Svilen Spasov) — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 01:52:00 +0000

So working as a freelancer is not so ugly. :)
Finally I have enough free time for my friends and family.

These days I had to add new MSSQL db layer to my framework. All went fine and I did it in no time.
hm... wasn't thinking that using my frame will save me so much time.

Tomorrow I am going to code some project for google adwords api. Should be interesting. ;-)

My Framework

noreply@blogger.com (Svilen Spasov) — Wed, 25 Oct 2006 09:02:00 +0000

As I decided to leave my ex-company I started to freelance.
Now I'm working on my own framework. I tried Zend's framework, but unfortunately it work only on PHP5 platforms and PDO enabled modules for DB access.

I need something universal. Some of the projects are hosted on PHP4 platforms that's why I can't use those different PHP5 frameworks that have come up these months.

Anyway, I always prefer to use my own code. :)

work on new payment system

noreply@blogger.com (Svilen Spasov) — Tue, 22 Aug 2006 15:09:00 +0000

I am working on a new payment system for my current company.
It should work with multiple payment gateways (e.g. Worldpay, Paypal) and be easily extensible.

Till now I've coded a couple of PHP classes and all seems fine, although there are some hindrances.

Hope I will release it soon :)

http://databg.svilen.com fully automated

noreply@blogger.com (Svilen Spasov) — Tue, 22 Aug 2006 14:59:00 +0000

After moving http://databg.svilen.com to a new server, collocated in Bulgaria, I started coding the automated crawl and update scripts.

Finally all is done and set. Now this search engine is working all alone, without any support from me. :)

Hope users will like it more and more since the database will be fully updated once a week.

Lucene Search

noreply@blogger.com (Svilen Spasov) — Mon, 14 Aug 2006 10:33:00 +0000

Zend Framework has one great module called Zend Search Lucene, which I'm going to try for a new project :) :

"Zend_Search_Lucene is a general purpose text search engine written entirely in PHP 5. Since it stores its index on the filesystem and does not require a database server, it can add search capabilities to almost any PHP-driven website. Zend_Search_Lucene supports the following features:

Ranked searching - best results returned first

Many powerful query types: phrase queries, wildcard queries, proximity queries, range queries and more [5]

Search by specific field (e.g., title, author, contents)"

Zend Framework

noreply@blogger.com (Svilen Spasov) — Tue, 01 Aug 2006 11:50:00 +0000

Playing around these days with Zend Framework I found very useful modules, except controllers, views and so.

People from Zend have made a very good RewriteRoute module.
It allows you to use URIs like http://mydomain.com/section/action/var1/key1/var2/key2, which are very good for SEO (Search Engine Optimizations).

Zend Db and it's submodules are great, too. They present the DB as an object (many table objects), which you can manipulate with their methods (insert, delete, select, update...).
I want to try them for obicham-te.com. Seems that this will make me work against time. We'll see :)

Obicham-te.com

noreply@blogger.com (Svilen Spasov) — Mon, 31 Jul 2006 13:01:00 +0000

Some time ago I wanted to build a dating website, so I registered obicham-te.com

The time has come! :) My friend and I started to examine what we would need about such a website.
Mainly we will use Mysql <-> XMPP Server <-> PHP driven website
Why XMPP? Because it's something new & interesting & easy to recreate in future.

We've choosen Djabberd (http://www.danga.com/djabberd/ - Perl XMPP server) & Zend Framework for base tools.

Till now I have excellent observations on Zend Framework and these days will start coding a XMPP module.

PostgreSQL Fulltext Search

noreply@blogger.com (Svilen Spasov) — Fri, 28 Jul 2006 12:27:00 +0000

After I decided that mysql's fulltext search is pretty slow I wanted to try PostgreSQL as DB for http://databg.svilen.com

In my current company we are successfully using PostgreSQL as a Database for our billing and hosting systems and it's perfect!

So there is a fulltext search extension for PostgreSQL called Tsearch2 (http://www.sai.msu.su/~megera/postgres/gist/tsearch/V2/)
It wasn't so easy to install it. :) Although everyone says it's almost as easy as playing with your *** :)

Anyway. Finally Tsearch2 is installed.
Test shows that PG isn't much faster and it has no query cache ?!?

I'm going to revert to MySQL unfortunately.

Load Balance

noreply@blogger.com (Svilen Spasov) — Wed, 26 Jul 2006 07:36:00 +0000

It's becoming harder and harder to handle databg's on one server only.
I started to look for some load balance scheme.

Seems that DNS load balance is the easiest way to achieve a load balance and most popular one.
I am going to try it and then will share my experience.

Free Data.bg Search Engine (http://databg.svilen.com)

noreply@blogger.com (Svilen Spasov) — Fri, 21 Jul 2006 11:31:00 +0000

After I tuned up the search engine of http://databg.svilen.com I made a full update of the database.
The new rewritten crawl script is doing fine. I am able to index all files for around 5-6 days.

Here are my advices about MySQL FULLTEXT SEARCH optimizations based on my experience with the Free Search:
1) try using defult "my-huge.cnf" as mysql config file. It is tuned for server with lots of RAM 1-2GB

2) play some with "key_buffer" and "key_buffer_size". These values are the most important. I've set them to:
key_buffer = 576M
key_buffer_size = 448M

3) turn on mysql query cache:
query_cache_size = 64M

4) try to avoid counting the results from a given fulltext search:
exp.: SELECT count(*) FROM table WHERE MATCH(filename) AGAINST('+keyword' IN BOOLEAN MODE) > 0;

5) remove any unnecessary characters such as dot, comma from the searched keywords. Remember that mysql fulltext index only words!!!

6) lower your index size as much as possible. Means that you have to leave only necessary indexes! This is critical as mysql tries to load indexes in RAM before searching and if you have less free RAM memory than your index file you get slow queries

7) use persistent connections!

8) use prepared statements if possible. PHP5's PDO supports prepared statements (http://bg.php.net/manual/en/ref.pdo.php)

That's it! :)

Although my server gets usually loaded, but I think it's because of the traffic. It's pretty much. WOW!

XGL (Linux) vs. Virtue (Mac OS X)

noreply@blogger.com (Svilen Spasov) — Wed, 29 Mar 2006 08:42:00 +0000

So what do you think?

Which one is better? :)

I personally prefer Virtue. Easier for install and includes everything you may what. Even the biggest idiot can install and use it. No need to know anything specific for your hardware or your system.

Have tried installing XGL? It's kind a mess. So many things you have to do ... compire, recompire... baf, stuff that not everyone knows and even what to know.

Buy MAC and make you life easier ;-).