Stuff - 4

Recently I had opportunity to obtain a Gmail account (thanks James). For those you living under a rock it's the latest fad as far as free e-mail is concerned from the same people who brought us Google. The biggest attraction of Gmail is the 1,000 megabyte storage box and saner(?) monetization model that will rely upon the same text ads you may have seen near Google's search results, rather then big bulky banners and/or popup variations. At this time the system is in beta stage, so to get an account you first must be invited by an existing member, but only some members can invite (I am not one of them, so don't bother asking). While my initial plan for this account was to use it as the handler for mail comming to my @php.net account, which now a days comprises mostly of spam and windows viruses. Rather then have my server perform slow analysis on some 2-3 thousand messages, I'd let Google's Gmail do it for me.

Since most of the e-mail going to that account ended up being removed by spam filters, which seem to be quite good the account ended being rather empty, which seems rather wasteful.

So, I've come up with a quick utility to make use of at least a small portion of the available space for backup purposes. To accomplish this task I wrote a small PHP script that can be used to backup files to Gmail and then quickly retrieve them back if and when you need them. I trust that Gmail servers are fairly reliable, and this offers an excellent offsite backup that is extremely fast (I can max out my connection on download 300k/sec) and accessible from anywhere internet is available. Given that you do have 1gig of space quite a few things can be backed up .

If you want to try it for yourself here is the script itself:
Plain Text Highlighted PHP Source

P.S. The script can probably be optimized to run a little faster by removing regex and making cURL use Keep-Alive, but given that most of the time is spent retrieving the file that is not a big concern at the moment.

A friend of mine gave me a good idea of making a wrapper around the sendfile() syscall that can be used for very quick data transfers between socket and file descriptors. This syscall in some instances can replace 3 other syscalls (seek, read, write) when you need to write a portion of 1 file into another file. Another words a very neat functionality that I could see myself using in my own applications, such as the message file compactor for FUDforum who's entire job is to seek and write data from one file to another. Further tests have shown that this syscall can also be used to create a much faster copy() that compared to PHP's current copy mechanism is about 2x faster, not a bad improvement if I do say so myself.
However, when it came to testing the code in my primary development box it just would not work, neither would any sendfile example I could find on the net that dealt with transferring data across two files. After much searching on Google, IRC and reviewing the relevant kernel sources I've discovered the problem. It appears that as for Linux kernel 2.6.X sendfile() syscall can only be used to transfer data from a file descriptor to a socket descriptor. The so called "misfeature" of allowing data transfer between two files has been removed, while I could not find any reported problems about it in 2.4.X kernels where it can work with 2 file descriptors. The frustration is further escalated by the fact that sendfile() man page does not acknowledge this little tid-bit of information and only the very recent version even documents the EINVAL error code returned, ARGHH!!!
I am still quite curios as to why this functionality was removed, since even after much searching I was not able to find the reason for it, only the fact that it was removed sometime in the 2.5.X kernel series.

Sitting at the airport enjoying the "cheap" Dutchie wifi at a mere $10 per day waiting for my flight that is about 3 hours off. The conference was quite a bit of fun. I got to meet a number of PHP guys who I have not seen before as well as meet old friends and acquaintances. The city itself is quite interesting and nearly everyone speaks English so communication with the locals is quite simple. One surprise was the fact that Dutchies don't seem to wear the traditional wooden shoes (perhaps it makes riding bicycles too hard?), the only time I've seen them was in the various tourist shops. The other was the fact that I have only seen about a dozen tulips in the country, which supposedly world renowned for this particular flower, oh well.

P.S. The two talks I gave will be put online as soon as I return to Toronto.

I am an avid user of Joe, a console text based editor whose roots can be traced to WordStar. It was the editor I've started my *NIX experience with and it never gave me a reason to consider more popular alternatives such as VI or Emacs. One of the things Joe lacked was syntax highlighting that the developer had been promising to add for what seems like years. Well, the wait is over! This morning while doing a the morning news crawl I've discovered that Joe 3.0 has been released with UTF8 support and the long awaited syntax highlighting support.
Continue reading "Joe 3.0!!!"

I always thought of Canada being an progressive country with ties to various economic markets that make it easier for it's citizens to engage in cross-border commerce. Alas this seems to be only true when dealing with our neighbor to the south, the US. In preparation to my upcoming trip to Netherlands I went to my bank to get some (small amount) of Euros. However, after speaking to the teller and the bank manager I quickly found out that my home branch does not carry any foreign currency other then US dollars. Calls from the branch to other nearby branches of my own bank as well as other banks have yielded the same response, "no Euros". So, how can I get some Euros? Well, I have to order them and wait no less then 5 business days, before getting my hands on this rather unusual currency. The explanation for the delay that Canadian banks often do not have any currency on hand and need to go to currency exchange house to buy the currency themselves, unless someone miraculously decides to trade in their Euros for Canadian Pecos.
More over I cannot choose what denomination of bills will I get, meaning that they could easily give me 2 $100 bills or 20 $10 etc... which is not an ideal situation while traveling. In my experience most small stores will refuse to accept large bills for fear of forgery, meaning that I am likely to be in a situation where I need to exchange my bills for something more portable upon arrival.
Keep in mind that this is happening in Toronto, Canada's largest city by far, not some small backwater village in the middle of nowhere, where perhaps no one had even heard of Euros. It seems that there is no requirement that even small quantities of foreign currency be kept on hand in the unlikely event a Canadian would decide to travel to a country other then the US.

There is not much I can say about the movie without spoiling the experience of seeing it, another words GO SEE IT! If anything the continuation (Kill Bill was originally a single movie that Quentin broke into to parts to avoid the Titaniasque style movie that just never seems to end) is better then the original. Through out the movie you can see a variety of influences ranging from anime, westerns and of course martial arts of all sorts, there is even a short appearance by a lone zombie!!!
While the movie is great, if you had not seen the first one you should probably watch it first before seeing the volume 2.

If Porsche can have an SUV, I can have a blog!

While this is not technically the very post, it is the first official online rant by your's truly. Well, that's not entirely true either, since I rant on a regular basis on internals mailing list about wide variety of topics. But let's ignore the facts for a moment, they only tend to get in the way of things.
Anyhow, on with the introduction.
I finally decided to get of my lazy ass and design a site for myself. Rather amusing, given that I've been
directly and indirectly involved in the design of hundreds of websites in the past. For the moment only the blog is online, however I will add other tidbits in the near future.

The biggest difficulty was lack of a good (short) domain. Despite having a fairly rare name, that I tend to spell differently that some of my namesakes (Ilia vs Ilya) this had proven to be quite a challenge. All common domain extensions were taken with the expiry date no where in sight and when they did approach the said date they were promptly renewed . When I turned to country based domain extensions, to my great surprise I discovered that the vast majority of possible options were too reserved. In fact, ilia.ca is owned by some fella from Vanier (Ontario Canada) who is using an e-mail address name virtually identical to mine. For some strange reason, even though his last time does not begin with an 'A' his e-mail login is iliaa@sympatico, while mine is ilia@sympatico (HA! I got my account 1st). That said I tend to use iliaa quite frequntly since ilia often tends to be taken .

After a bit of research, I've come to a conclusion that to get ilia.[extension] I'd have to resort to using some strange country code like .cn (China) or (.tw) (Taiwan) or even stranger variants such as .co.nz. Fortunately, I remembered about the newly added .ws (WebSite) domain extension, which to my great surprise was not yet taken by some domain squatting bastard (See: http://ilia.com, http://ilia.net, http://ilia.org/) and grabbed it for myself. Which is what made the page you are looking at possible.