iBlog - Ilia Alshanetsky - Stuff

Ontario Monitor Tax

ilia@ilia.ws (Ilia Alshanetsky) — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 19:24:41 -0400

I was buying 2 monitors for the office today, when a came to paying the bill I discovered a rather nasty surprise. It seems that the Ontario government has decided to apply a $12.03 per monitor recycling tax as part of their EOS program. It looks like our liberal provincial government is always on a look out to grab more of our money, so they can spend it on idiotic initiatives such as eHealth.

5 Letter Domain (ia.gd)

ilia@ilia.ws (Ilia Alshanetsky) — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 08:20:56 -0400

After reading about rev="canonical" and all the hoopla about domain shorteners, I've decided to see how short of a domain I could get for my blog to avoid having people needing to use things like tinyurl etc... to reduce the lengths of URLs. The goal was to get a 2 letter domain with a 2 letter extension, an easy solution seemed to be the .me extension (Montenegro), but alas I could not find a single registrar that would allow a 2 letter domain registration (ia or ai, my initials). It seems most registrars or resellers use generic libraries that no matter what disallow registration of domains <3 characters in length. The reason for this being that most (but not all) registries typically reserve 1 and 2 letter domains. So even when the domains are available, you cannot register them. Fortunately, after some whining on twitter, someone from iWantMyName did some targeted marketing at me . Their site allows you to search through about 5 pages of domain extensions, and for about 1/2 dozen domain extensions they do allow 2 letter registration.

The end result, I am now a happy owner of ia.gd (.gd being the extension for Grenada), it was not particularly cheap $49 as compared to GoDaddy where a common extension can be had for $7-$9 depending on a promotion at the time. However, GoDaddy's domain search system blocks 2 letter domains en-mass, even if they are allowed, so GoDaddy's #fail is iWantMyName #win.

IE8 X-UA-Compatible Rant

ilia@ilia.ws (Ilia Alshanetsky) — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 08:29:20 -0400

A few days ago, Microsoft had done a low-key launch of IE8, which means you need to make your applications compatible with 3 differently broken version of IE ;-P. The biggest challenge IE8 poses is that it runs in "strict" mode by default, which coincidentally breaks all of the previous IE6/7 hacks that had to put in place to make CSS and Javascript render in IE the same way they do in other browsers.

Fortunately, unless you wish to refractor your entire code to support IE8 strictness, MS did add a "compatibility" switch, via the X-UA-Compatible meta-tag or header, if you change its value to "IE=EmulateIE7" it makes it emulate the "strict" mode ala IE7, which at least in all of our code makes it render things properly. However, there is a "slight" problem, which I discovered while trying to implement this function.

According to the docs, you can trigger this behavior via the following meta tag:

CODE:

, unfortunately it didn't work and according to the IE8's developer tool the default strict mode of IE8 was still being used. No matter the value, be it IE=IE7 or IE5 or EmulateIE7, it would just be ignored. Eventually, I realized that perhaps the DTD is the problem, our pages use XHTML/Transitional DTD, (

CODE:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC
"-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

), which means custom meta tags are effectively spec violations. Which, as far as I can tell IE8 in it's strict mode happily ignores, Catch 22!. This is despite a nice note inside MSDN Blog that says:

CODE:

NOTE: The X-UA-Compatible tag and header override any existing DOCTYPE.

The solution, is to set the X-UA-Compatible value via an HTTP header ala:

PHP:



<?php



header('X-UA-Compatible: IE=EmulateIE7');



?>

This means the parameter is outside of HTML and will get properly captured by IE, in our case that solved all of the JS and CSS issues that appeared in IE8. For those of you using ExtJS date picker, this does solve the cut-off of the calendar window.

I'm on Twitter

ilia@ilia.ws (Ilia Alshanetsky) — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 16:46:47 -0500

At the PHP Quebec conference I've succumbed to peer pressure and decided to sign-up for twitter. So, for those of you interested in following me (damn stalkers ) my twitter id is @iliaa

"How to Increase Fuel Mileage on a Car" - According to WikiHow

ilia@ilia.ws (Ilia Alshanetsky) — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 14:18:25 -0500

In a moment of boredom, yesterday I happen to browse to WikiHow. At the bottom of their site I noticed a rather curios button, advertising that their site is "Carbon Neutral", since this was the first time I've ever seen something like that I was naturally curious, so I clicked the link to learn more. This took me a short article giving a pseudo-scientific calculation of how much carbon is consumed by their site, down to their share of train travel. If you are curious you can find the breakdown here wikiHow:Carbon Neutral. One curios thing I noted was "Jack riding bike to work: 0 lbs of carbon!", last time I checked strenuous physical activity, increases heart rate, which in turn causes the person breathe-in more oxygen and subsequently expel more carbon dioxide. This means that if Jack drove a car, rode a bus or train, he'd actually contribute less carbon to the environment and leave more oxygen for the rest of us .

Anyhow, on that page they also had a reference on how/where you can buy "Carbon Credits" to offset impact on the environment, allowing you to equalize your environmental karmic balance or something, what will they come up with next! And best of all it can be done in 7 easy steps, which sounds simple enough for me to follow and actually remember. Step #1 starts with identifying sources of carbon dioxide production in your daily life, ok sounds simple enough. Let's see; mammals those filthy carbon producing critters, need less of'em; gotta eat more of them to save the environment, especially those endangered ones like Tigers and Pandas... mmm... Panda stew... **drool**. Oops, sorry got distracted there for a second... Definitely gotta eat less plants, they actually scrub carbon dioxide and therefor are carbon negative, so no more salad, ok, can do. To all you vegetarians, quit killing the environment by your uncontrolled destruction on carbon reducing greenery and start saving the environment by eating Rhinos, Gazelles, red wolves and spider monkeys, especially the spider monkeys!

Step #2 involved cars, first they suggested that I drive less, well that's not gonna happen. Then they tried to wean me off driving entirely, fat chance! You gotta wonder why would they say I should drive less and when I say NO WAY IN HELL, they actually have the audacity to try and convince me to stop driving entirely, completely illogical I tell ya! But, they also had a good suggestion of improving your car's fuel efficiency, which immediately got me interested, I mean save money on expensive gas and save the environment, JACKPOT! So how is that actually done? Apparently there are 26 steps, holy cow! That's like 25 too many for me, but I persevered and read them all anyway, there is nothing I wouldn't do to save mon^H^H^H the environment. The best ones I have decided to share with you all, so you can too do you part to save the environment and for your convenience I've simplified it to 5 easy for consumption ideas, so you don't have to suffer through all 26.

1) Lighten your load. An extra 100 pounds increases fuel consumption by 1-2%.

Roger that, no more driving other people or car pooling, those fat bastards can drive their own cars! Making me damage the environment by reducing my fuel efficiency, some people just have no respect for the environment I tell ya.

2) Avoid braking wherever possible. Braking wastes energy from fuel that you have already burned.

Good idea, you should start drifting corners, do engine breaking and run lights whenever possible to avoid slowing down and loosing precious inertia & kinetic energy.

3) Tune up your engine. A properly tuned engine maximizes power and can greatly enhance fuel efficiency.

Wow, I didn't know that tuning the engine would make it use less fuel. Go and have two stage turbo installed on your car immediately, and get another 300 bhp of environment saving goodness.

4) Learn to watch and predict traffic signals. Stop-and-go driving is wasteful.

Useful tip. You should immediately start work on developing telepathy and telekinesis. Since this may take some time, while you are hard at work evolving your mental prowess you can use MIRT that will allow you to control traffic lights without the use of super-powers.

5) Don't circle in a parking lot. Look for a spot in the empty half of the parking lot.

This is probably the one I disagree with the most. Basically, to save the environment you need to park in the empty part of the parking lot right near the entrances typically that are typically empty and usually reserved for pregnant women, elderly and the disabled. I suppose to save the environment we all need to make sacrifices, and become heartless environmentalists.

I'd like to thank WikiHow folks for all these useful tips and the frigid Canadian winter that inspired this rant... COME BACK GLOBAL WARMING, COME BACK!!!!

*** For those of you without sense of humor, possibly lost due to environmental damage, this is a joke ***

Fun Extract from Microsoft Silverlight License Terms

ilia@ilia.ws (Ilia Alshanetsky) — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 13:24:40 -0500

If you bother to read the the MS Silverlight TOS you'll find this interesting bit which I found quite amusing:

"IMITATION ON AND EXCLUSION OF REMEDIES AND DAMAGES. You can recover from Microsoft and its suppliers only direct damages up to U.S. $5.00".

Wow, how generous! This is then followed by:

"It also applies even if Microsoft knew or should have known about the possibility of the damages."

Its good to know MS legal machine is working well, best of luck up holding this in any "sane" court.

U.S. Agriculture Tax on Travel

ilia@ilia.ws (Ilia Alshanetsky) — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 10:33:42 -0400

I just got my confirmation for my flight to San Francisco to ZendCon happening in early October and noticed something interesting on my invoice for the flight in the "taxes area".

Taxes, Fees and Charges
---------------------------------------------------
Canada Airport Improvement Fee 20.00
U.S.A Transportation Tax 15.54
U.S Agriculture Fee 5.15
Canada Security Charge 7.94
Canada Goods and Services Tax (GST/HST #10009-2287) 26.01
U.S.A Immigration User Fee 7.21

Why would an airline ticket include the U.S Agriculture Fee, is there a tax on the air above the US farmland or something?

Moving to Flickr

ilia@ilia.ws (Ilia Alshanetsky) — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 22:08:51 -0400

After a few years on Gallery 1.X, which with a few tweaks worked quite well for me, I've decided to make the transition to Flickr's pro account. The conversion was largely made possibly by a tweaked gallery2flickr script that allowed me to move albums over without loosing any data in a process, which is always a good thing. It still took some time, but in the end I am quite happy with the results. Flickr has some very neat features in comparison to Gallery such as geo-tagging, very convenient interface for tagging and labeling photos, which at least in Gallery 1.X was rather frustrating.

My new gallery can now be found at http://www.flickr.com/photos/iliaal/

Phantom 5.0.37 MySQL Release

ilia@ilia.ws (Ilia Alshanetsky) — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 22:16:46 -0500

I spotted Edin's blog post about PHP 4.4.6 now being linked against MySQL 5.0.36 on Windows and decided to see what is new in that release in comparison to the 5.0.33 I am currently running.

A quick visit to the MySQL's downloads page revealed a distinct absence of said release however. There are however release notes about MySQL 5.0.37, which lists some compelling fixes. Unfortunately, this release is nowhere to be found as well, even though the release notes claim it was released on 27 February 2007.

A simple question comes to mind, WTF?

Has O'Reilly Gone Crazy?

ilia@ilia.ws (Ilia Alshanetsky) — Sun, 21 Jan 2007 15:00:56 -0500

Sometimes the things you'll find on a bookshelves of your local book store can be quite unusual and downright weird. Consider the following super-hero themed series of books on Windows products by O'Reilly.

MySQL 5.0.33 Community Server

ilia@ilia.ws (Ilia Alshanetsky) — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 13:15:03 -0500

As you may already know or soon will find out MySQL had released a new version of their community server, 5.0.33. First all congratulations to developers, any release is a lot of work and finally pushing it out the public is definitely an achievement.

There are however some interesting and in my eyes less then positive developments pertaining to this release. As you can see from Kaj's announcement as well as the state of the MySQL's download page pre-compiled binaries are no longer offered. The only files available for MySQL 5.0.33 are sources for *NIX and Windows platforms.

While this is not an issue for *NIX users where lack of binaries will be resolved by distros and if not, the compiler is always available and compiling MySQL is big issue, it does pose a major problem for Windows users who generally do not have access to a C/C++ compiler. This means that all the people who develop on Win32 and then deploy on *NIX machines will need to stick to older versions of the database for the dev environments or rely on someone other then MySQL to provide binaries (which may result is less then stable, trustworthy packages going around). This also may affect adoption rates since many companies insist (and rightly so) on using same version of DB on production and development.

Interestingly enough the "For maximum stability and performance, we recommend that you use the binaries we provide." statement on the download page still remains. I guess the suggestion is that if we (the users) want stability we need to go for the Enterprise edition.

IE6 and IE7 Testing Simplified

ilia@ilia.ws (Ilia Alshanetsky) — Fri, 01 Dec 2006 10:15:59 -0500

With the release of IE7 many web developers were faced with a need to test their applications on the different versions of IE, but had no means to do so since only one IE can run on Windows. Now there were different hacks available around it, but in most instances you ended up using portion of IE7 libs for IE6 emulation and thereby not getting quite the same behavior.

Today on IE blog a much better solution was offered by Microsoft (kudos guys). Basically they've allowed Windows owners (after genuine advantage check, which now can be done via Firefox as well) to download WinXP SP2 image with IE6 and run via a free download of "Virtual PC 2004". This means you can safely upgrade you WinXP box to IE7 and run IE6 via an image, thus giving you 2 versions of IE on the same machine this minimum amount of hassle.

Network Scanning with HTTP without JavaScript

ilia@ilia.ws (Ilia Alshanetsky) — Wed, 29 Nov 2006 19:50:53 -0500

The concept of doing network scanning via JavaScript is hardly new and is quite easy for anyone with even cursory knowledge of JavaScript. However, the assumption was that as long as you browse the web with JavaScript disabled you are safe from hostile sites from scanning your network. Alas, this was not to be, in a very interesting post Jeremiah Grossman shows how can this be done with plain HTML using no JavaScript what so ever.

His methodology relies on Firefox's quirk, whereby the page loading would wait for the <link> tag to be processed before rendering the rest of the page. This means you could use the link tag to reference local IPs and use a subsequent image to see how long did it take for the IP to respond. If the response was very quick, then you know the host has something listening on a given port and if it does not, well then the port is being blocked or filtered.

The problem with his approach is that to scan an entire network would be rather slow and require multiple iframes to perform the scan. Not to mention very noticeable, I decided to see if something can be done about this limitation.
Continue reading "Network Scanning with HTTP without JavaScript"

Microsoft Web Dev Summit Overview

ilia@ilia.ws (Ilia Alshanetsky) — Sun, 24 Sep 2006 12:59:14 -0400

Now that the Jet-lag has worn off (all-night flights suck, even when they are first class) I figure it would be the perfect time to blog about my recent visit to Microsoft's Web Dev Summit.

A few weeks ago I got an invite from Brian (who thanks to Wez he got through my spam filters) to come to Microsoft and see what kind of cool stuff they are doing and to give some feedback from the "enemy camp" so to speak on the stuff they are doing. I thought it'd be a great opportunity to see what's going on the other side of the fence and readily agreed.

So, last week, I caught a plane to Redmond where I joined a number of other PHP luminaries (Wez, Marcus, Frank, Laura, etc...) and a lone Ruby developer (Yes, they do exist!). Over the next two days we had a very tightly packed schedule of presentations from Microsoft folks on things ranging from IIS7 to LINQ. Despite the very tight schedule we've got a number of opportunities to have informal talks with Microsoft developers which in my experience were quite interesting. They have certainly seemed open to new ideas, which was a very welcome surprise and were more then willing to listen to constructive criticism (which in some cases we were more then willing to provide ).
Continue reading "Microsoft Web Dev Summit Overview"

mod_deflate for Apache 1.3.37

ilia@ilia.ws (Ilia Alshanetsky) — Fri, 04 Aug 2006 11:54:13 -0400

A new Apache 1.3.37 is out and I had to upgrade all my servers to it, in the process I've had to compile mod_deflate, a high performance compression module that works MUCH faster then mod_gzip. This is primarily thanks to the fact it does not use temporary files, but instead does everything in memory. Since the official mod_deflate package has been abandoned by its author, even though the code still works with a few minor tweaks. So, I've decided to post a patched version of this module for all interested Apache 1.3.37 users.

You can download it here: http://ilia.ws/uploads/patches/mod_deflate-1.0.21i.tar.bz2
MD5: 4bd8b6773d9cb843494faceae3c9c945

The package also includes a short README files that explains how to install this module on your server. For people too lazy to read the README, the instructions follow at the bottom of this blog entry .
Continue reading "mod_deflate for Apache 1.3.37"