Trash Vs Treasure - HitMyServer Blog

Captcha

Jeff K — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 10:08:19 -0500

I recently got back from my deployment and have been surfing the web more and more. What the heck happened with captcha? The original idea was to defeat bots from signing up and causing trouble. It worked ok. As bots got smarter captcha started making it harder to read. I have come across 3 in the past 2 days that I got wrong because I couldn't read what it was showing.

It might not affect to many people on a message board but if you have a signup form for your business that uses captcha, make sure people can read it.

Quote: Email from IonCube

Jeff K — Sun, 21 Aug 2011 04:08:59 -0500

Hopefully you have had time to install and start testing, but if not and you need further time to evaluate then simply download and install a fresh evaluation when you need to.
- IonCube email

Do You Need That Email?

Jeff K — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 16:08:57 -0500

Do you really need 2 gigabytes of emails? Apparently I didn't. Let me set the scene for you. I am currently finishing a deployment overseas with the Army. We use Microsoft Exchange for our email system and am limited to about 50 megabytes of space. 50 megs is a lot for text files. However, working on the admin side of the Army we scan a ton of documents to email. That 50 megs goes quickly and sometimes in less than day.

The solution to that was to move your emails into a separate .pst file. This works really good as long as you are on the same computer each day. Even if you aren't, you can store it on a file server right? Technically yes you can. However, it goes against policy which I recently found out.

The past few weeks I have jumped between 6 different computers trying to find a place to work. I had my .pst file stored on our file server so I could access it anywhere on the network. This was 2 gigs of emails since the beginning of the deployment. Did I need each and every one? No, but I keep most for future reference even though it probably wouldn't happen. Two weeks ago I missed a notice telling everyone they need to remove their .pst from the file share by a certain time. I didn't see that notice until after the deadline and only found out about it when Outlook was telling me it couldn't find it. Umm.. Where are my files? Luckily for me, backups were made before deleting them all so I can still get them on DVD.

Since then I have been running around with know .pst file to store all my emails. The sad thing is I am doing pretty good staying under 20 megs let alone 50. The secret was to get rid of the crap you don't actually need.

My personal email has about 86 MB of emails in it (519 messages). I try to stay on top of clearing it out but it doesn't always happen in a timely manner. Going through it now I am deleting massive amounts of emails that I know for sure I won't need.

You can't always clear out your inbox but remember, you don't need to save each and every email. The less emails you have means the faster you can find the important ones.

HitMyServer on Github

Jeff K — Mon, 09 May 2011 09:05:52 -0500

CVS, SVN, Git, etc. - There are so many version control systems out there. Which one do you pick? For a while I used Subversion (SVN) and it worked. It was integrated into the program I use coding PHP and set me on the right track. Then problems arrived as I was hosting my own SVN repositories. I was running into permissions issues, files locked here, files locked there. It was a nightmare. Most of it was probably due to my lack of understanding what was going on. So I stopped using version control all together. A while later I started up again and everything was going fine until I started running into the same issues. At one point I ended up wiping my entire working directory on accident (Backup your code!).

Then I heard about git. It is suppose to be easy to use and was the "new thing". I gave it a try and have yet to run into any problems. I really like git. It was easy to setup on the local side as well as the server side. My development environment is pretty old and doesn't integrate into git so I use the command line and isn't a big deal.

This is where GitHub comes into play. At times I like to browse my code when I am not on my own computer. A web based git browser was definitely what I was looking for. There are numerous free ones out there to include GitHub. I played with the free plan of GitHub by uploading Summit and looking around. It is a solid system. Not only can you browse your source code, you can make commits right from your web browser as well. The issue tracking is pretty simple to use and well done. If you want private repositories then you need to use one of their paid plans starting at $7.00 a month..

They call their system social coding. You can fork other projects, explore all the public repositories.watch them for changes and so on. I have yet to dig into the social coding experience but it is an interesting touch.

HitMyServer.com on Github ( github.com/kreitje )

There are some decent products out there if you want enhanced features and browsing your source from a web browser.

- Github.com
- Gitorious.org

Disclosure: This post is because I like Github. Nobody paid/sponsored this posting. None of the links are affiliate links. Do they have an affiliate system?

Bugger

Jeff K — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 07:02:11 -0600

Today we uploaded a project called Bugger to our labs site. Did you know we had a labs site? It's new too. Bugger is an issue tracking package that we will be using for our products. It's not complete but when it gets close we will be releasing it as a HitMyServer product.

It's really basic and we hope to keep it that way. If you find a bug in one of our products please submit it to our issue tracker so we can fix it right away.

*Current Features*
- Virtually Unlimited Projects (and issues)
- Comments within the issues
- Specify your issue types per project. Such as Bug, Feature Request, Todo
- You can tag your issues. Tags can bee given a CSS class to help distinguish them.
- Multiple tags per issue
- Upload files to issues and comments
- Guests can posts issues and comments
- Users can register and post issues and comments

HostsEdit - WTH?

Jeff K — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 02:12:13 -0600

HostsEdit, what the hell?

Currently I am running XAMPP to develop a web app on my local machine. The best way to test it on a simulated "live environment" is to modify your /etc/hosts file to point a domain name to your local machine.

There are multiple ways to do this such as opening Terminal and typing "sudo nano -w /etc/hosts" making changes, hitting ctrl-x to save. I decided to take it up a notch and create an OSX application to do this for me. I launch the program, it reads the hosts file and I can easily save changes. It looks like a simple text editor and reality that's all it is.

When developing PHP apps you run into a problem of every configuration being different. So I also test it in a different environment meaning I have to use a different domain or make a change to my hosts file. I opted to make the change to my hosts file so it runs on the same domain just a different server.

While I have made a few OSX apps, I am not proficient in Cocoa therefore I put up HostsEdit as a free download. I will publish fixes and features to it as I build them.

HostsEdit

Great Read - Why I Sold Zappos by Tony Hsiegh

Jeff K — Sun, 27 Jun 2010 09:06:39 -0500

Over at Inc.com Tony Hsiegh wrote a good article about selling Zappos to Amazon back in 2009. While some companies sell to grab the money and go, Tony sold to keep the company the way it was.

Tony Hsieh built his online shoe retailer into an e-commerce powerhouse. But with credit tightening and investors eyeing the exits, Hsieh was forced to ask: Was selling Zappos really the only way to save it? - Inc.com

Read It: Inc.com - Why I Sold Zappos

Quick Review: Jing

Jeff K — Mon, 31 May 2010 11:05:03 -0500

Ever use Jing? I have seen other people use but had never used it in the past. So what is it? It is a screen capture program for Windows and Mac that can capture either a recording or just a screenshot. Who Made It? Jing was created by TechSmith more known for creating Camtasia Studio and SnagIt. TechSmith is a software company based in Michigan such about 30 minutes from me.

Pros:
1. It's free
2. You can select the area on your monitor to capture
3. Direct upload to screencast.com
��Free version is 2GB space, 2GB monthly bandwidth / Paid version is 25GB space, 200GB monthly bandwidth
�� Paid version can upload to several different sites

Cons:
1. Really the only thing I don't like is that the free version only allows you to save as a .swf. The paid version allows MPEG-4 which is much better and produces a smaller file size. If I used Jing enough to justify the $15/year cost I would definitely upgrade. Since I am mooching off of the kindness of TechSmith, the .swf format will stay until I upgrade.

What I used it for
I used Jing for both video capturing and a screenshot of an application I made for Mac that connects to a web server I am creating. Below is the screenshot.

THOUGHT: Email as Username Impractical?

Jeff K — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 22:04:36 -0500

With the last few projects built, I have solely used an email address for the username when logging in. With smaller internal projects it doesn't matter how you handle usernames, but it got me thinking about bigger projects. Are you a member of a social network / community that uses actual usernames instead of email addresses? How many of those have names like jeff10, jonny17, etc? I hate having several usernames and trying to remember which is which. Then, if my username is already taken, now I have to come up with a new one. While the idea of OpenID/OAuth is not necessarily to cut down on how many different logins' you have, I think it is effective in that area.

Since only one person/entity can actively own an email address, I like to authenticate users based on that. Now bob can continue to use his bob@aol.com address and not worry if he is "bob" or "bob1974". Using this approach there are 2 downsides:

a. If your email gets hacked and you used the same one for all your websites that's a lot of access the intruder has.

b. In a community your names are generally displayed so you know who you are talking about. If you were to display the email addresses then you are making your users easy targets for spammers (NOT GOOD!). In this type of website you could have display names but run into the problem of having 15 people named Mike. Therefore you would have to make them unique and your back in a situation of having usernames.

After thinking about this topic for a little bit I have concluded that if you are running a community site, it is impractical to use only email addresses, but for internal / non community websites it works out good.

Did this turn out to be a waste of my time? Not entirely. As I continue to do projects requiring authentication, I think I will take into consideration the pros and cons of using email vs. username.

For other developers out there, please do not assign random numbers as the username. There are a few big internet companies doing that and it's a pain. When I need to login to an account with these numbers assigned I always have to refer to an email or go through the "forgot your username" process. STOP IT!!!

Recent Internet Issues: Using external resources

Jeff K — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 21:03:14 -0500

Over sometime now, using external resources on your web page has been quite common. Whether it be using an analytic package, loading jquery from the Google servers, or even loading an image from a partner company, there is an issue.

The Issue

Since you are calling an external resource, you are relying on that service to be up. A lot of these places, especially companies like Google seem to have great uptime and are very reliable. However, I have noticed the "Waiting for ........." while waiting on a page to load. How many times have you waited on the content of page to load, only to have to wait on adsense to load before the rest of the content. In my opinion, this is not the fault of Google, or whomever external resource you use.

A Possible Solution?

So what is that I propose? I propose you load external resources at the end of the page and use either javascript or css to position it correctly. On kreitsoft.com I ran into this issue when loading my last tweet. So, I ended up using javascript to load the tweet into a div. The div is positioned using css. Twitter is notorious for having downtime in the past, and would it be fair to make a visitor wait on loading your last tweet? If I wouldn't wait on my own pages to load my last tweet, why should I expect others to wait?

This way, YOUR content will be loaded prior to waiting on your ads, tweets, or tracking software. While someone might want their ads to load quickly, I want the content of the page to load even quicker. If I see your page get hung waiting on a 3rd party resource you just lost a visitor and I will go to a different page.