My Mind Leaks

My Mind Leaks plugged out Bluehost and plugged in Webfaction

2010-01-14T11:40:21Z

I wanted to write about my migration to new hosting. I write this post to say that why I’m leaving Bluehost and why did I chose Webfaction. Loyal Bluehost hosters dont get furious, this is my personal opinion on why I switched. Now, this blog is powered by Webfaction. Moving a blog to a new hosting provider is as exiting as moving to a new city. Today I completely moved my blog from Bluehost to Webfaction. Believing Change is always constant, I keep on looking for some kind of change. Now, it’s time to change my blog’s hosting provider.

So, why did I change?

There is a strong intention for moving out from Bluehost. Despite a fairly a good service and good customer support, Bluehost is still failed to cater my needs. Bluehost supports PHP, Ruby, Python, Rails etc., but not good enough web frameworks except Rails.
I wanted Python and Django web-framework. Though you can still build Django framework with some spoof [http://www.bluehostforum.com/showthread.php?t=715], it’s still makes you feel like you are doing the olden days “Content-Scraping“, i.e you are forcing the system to get you what it is not supposed to give you. Also, the fcgi script which is inserted between the python process and web request is not sure how it can handle the loads.

Also, when I first took the Bluehost, I was impressed with the following items

Unlimited Space
Unlimited Bandwith
Lots of tools, scripting language etc.,
Wordpress

But, after a quite an amount of time, when I look back and see, I haven’t used those features to full extend. So, I’ve jotted few questions.

Am I really making use of the ‘Unlimited’ marketing terms?
Does the hosting provider solve my programming needs? Am I using all the tools he gives?
Will I be able to host self-developed apps?
What about the system Performance? Am I compromising with Unlimited ‘blah-blah’?
Are the hosting service ready to setup the web framework I am asking for?
At-last, am I happy with my current hosting provider?

Am I really making use of the ‘Unlimited’ marketing terms?

To my perspective the Unlimited bandwidth and Unlimited disk space is kind of a marketing strategy compared to the real usability perspective. Its real hard for a single blog to fill a more than 200 GB if he writes 10 posts per day, 365 days for 50 years and each post is of size 1000 KiloBytes.

So, for a blog having a unlimited diskspace is just a too much. For bandwidth, a site with 200,000 hits per month viewing 1000 KiloBytes of data on an average would just occupy ~200 GB of bandwidth. Hence I’m satisfied with Webfaction, as my blog is not a top hit blog to get 200,000 hits per month.

So, Webfaction have given me a satisfiable and stomach full of disk-space and bandwidth to survive with.

Does the hosting provider solve my programming needs?

Yes and No. Yes Bluehost gives a set of tools like PHP, Python, Ruby, MySQL / PostgreSQL. Really appreciate it. Except rails, they aren’t providing any web frameworks namely Django or any other framework etc., Also, power programming includes, access to most of the tools via shell. Having access to most of the utils like gcc, emacs etc., provides a good interface to develop any utilities and use them as CGI service. Even though you have PHP, still I was not given access to configure the PHP to solve my programming needs. And, I failed to love Bluehost for not providing one of my cool tool ‘wget’.

Will I be able to host self-developed apps?

Yes only if you have developed the application in PHP / Rails. No other programming language framework was supported by Bluehost. You can write script, but not a full scale application except PHP / Rails. Now, looking at Webfaction, I could host applications developed in the following frameworks.

CherryPy
Django
Drupal
Pylons
Python (Apache with mod_python or WSGI)
Ruby on Rails
Static/CGI/PHP
TurboGears
WordPress
Zope

So, I have enough framework on my plates to play with it. Bluehost again fails in this. They provide excellent blog support ( Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla, Wiki ), but no frameworks.

What about the system Performance? Am I compromising with Unlimited ‘blah-blah’?

In the beginning, I was never worried about the performance of the system provided, due to the magic-sweet-googly-woogly word ‘Unlimited blah-blah’. That magic word makes the customer, forget about few important aspects of the service, i.e PERFORMANCE. Bluehost provides a standard Quad-Core machine, on a sharing basis. Webfaction provides a slice of CPU & Computing Memory whatever the load be. So, you always get that processing speed irrespective of your neighboring host apps processing in the same server.

Since, Bluehost aren’t able to provide slices / VPS kind of service, I believe they are reluctant on providing web frameworks or application frameworks, which deeply affects the performance.

Are the hosting service ready to setup the web framework I am asking for?

Yes, Webfaction openly welcomes to ask for any specific tools which they can install and make their customer happy. Bluehost, has most of the tools already built in, but they should expand up their services to provide web frameworks.

With the above mentioned items, I’m satisfied with the Webfaction’s service and happy to host with them. More over their monthly billing support was one of the good feature to attract customers. Their pricing is also very comfortable for people who have limited fund to run and still get good performance, disk space, band width and more. Webfaction, seems to be happy welcoming customers and make customers happy even when they leave Webfaction, which is most important. But, still Webfaction is still lacking few things, like Little Knowledge base, No UI for file manager, Cron Jobs etc.,

Some alternatives to Webfaction

Does pretty links & SEO URL really sensible for search engines?

2010-01-08T18:19:24Z

After done with the moving to a hosting provider, next I was trying to overhaul my blog with the link structure. Puzzled on where to start from. People enter into my blog via URL. Hence decided to tweak the URL. So, it’s time to decide upon what link structure I should chose. And before that, is this link structure is really a necessary stuff to tweak up? If you ask with a SEO expert, he/she would pour a rain of tips, problems if you don’t make the links looks SEO optimized. And mostly Google oriented optimizations. But sometimes, I used to think, Is Google going to rely-upon this tiny URL part in the entire web indexing operation. If you look into any of the blog which has a content juice, you wont find a proper URL structure. I will give you a lots of example.

Before that what is an URL, and why everyone in this world is so much bothered about it?

People who use web knows very well about URL. And there are quite lots of topic around how to build a better URL. CMS software provides plug-ins, tools to build good URLs. So, why is that these folks worried much about building a great looking pretty URL? I don’t want to talk much on what is URL, Wikip can give you enough information about URL. I will just quickly discuss about the part of URL and which one I’m speaking about. Consider this URL,

http://www.mymindleaks.com/blog/archives/object-oriented-programming-–-encapsulation-is-not-just-hiding-data.html

An URL has the following parts.

http -> protocol
www -> subdomain
mymindleaks -> domain name
com -> Top Level Domain ( TLD )
blog/archives/object…data.html -> page / filename
.html -> file extension
And if you find anything after “?” -> CGI params

Check out here to what I’m talking about in a visual stuff.

Now, in this post, I’m talking about the 5th part, “/blog/archives/object-oriented…data.html“. which is the page / filename part of the URL.

A quick research on URLs and Page rank.

Can anyone fool Google by writing an url as “10-tips-to-make-you-rich” and the entire content of the URL teaches you “10-tips-to-spend-a-lot”??? Will the Google still fetch the URL “10-tips-to-make-you-rich” when someone tries to search for “how to become rich” ?

When I tried checking the PageRank of the few famous blog over internet, via http://www.prchecker.info/check_page_rank.php , I could infer the following.

Site	Page Rank
Peter Norvig - http://norvig.com	6 / 10
Xahlee - http://xahlee.org	5 / 10
John Chow - http://johnchow.com	5 / 10
Problogger - http://problogger.net	5 / 10

This results makes you wonder? Even me. Professional bloggers like Darren Rowse’s Problogger, John Chow, who have million of hits, lots of articles on tweaks, blogging, money making have a less PR rating compared to the simple-plain-old but content ful Norvig or Xahlee’s blog. If you look at Norvig’s blog, you might find URL which aren’t descriptive like [ http://norvig.com/paip.html -> Paradigms of AI Programming]. The Xahlee’s blog have unicode chars in his blog and his blog topic is bit diversified ( computers, math, and little bit of decent porn, yeah ). Google isn’t that dumb folks.

Even my blog has pretty URLs, and I’ve spent relatively quite amount of time in thinking about URL for my blog., but that’s all purely to give the reader a better idea of what a post is all about. To me, a URL is just a tiny part that makes the user understand what is all the content is about without reading through the content. Relying on this probably might give you a fraction of what SEO’s call, the page rank juice.

Firefox bug reports – Some interesting facts

2009-06-29T06:21:10Z

Today I was curious to know about the list of bugs that has occurred for the Firefox browser over all these time. And the count of bugs received and fixed made me surprise about the development at Mozilla. Bugs are important players in any development projects. Hence bugs determines the robustness of the software. But still if a strong developer team available, then more robust the software as all the bugs will be fixed and hence more robust is the software.

Below diagram displays the defect segmentation based on the operating systems. I’ve grouped all the outdated and less used Windows OSes ( Win 95, Win 98, Win NT etc ) as Windows ( others ), Similarly for Mac Os and Linux and Unix Versions. You can see that Windows XP based Firefox browser has a huge number of defects. I’m amazed with the huge number of defect logged for Firefox in Win XP. This actually shows that there is a huge user base for Firefox in Windows XP and software is much less stable compared to other operating systems ( though this is an hypothetical assumption ).

Here is the bugs segmentation based on components of the Firefox. Bookmarks & History, Tabbed browser tops in defects. Developer would be much interested in this chart as it involves a kind-of technical details. Also, I didn’t include the General defects which counts more than 19,000+, because of the charting technicalities. The other bars becomes very smaller if you plot the General defects. It was a small in-sight for me when I saw “Session Restore” is a seperate component, which got a revamp recently in the Firefox 3.5 beta release.

If you are more curious in such things, try digging the Bugzilla database and find more interesting fact and do ping me.

Note: I’ve taken the “Unverified / Unreported ” bugs into consideration for this statistics purpose.

Firefox 3.5 beta “Restore Session” has got smarter

2009-06-20T00:52:08Z

Firefox 3.5 beta has improved a lots features and added few stuffs too. One of the thing which impressed me is the “Restore Session”. In the older firefox, once you session crashes, and you re-launch the firefox, it will popup this.

And it will open up all the browser tabs in your previous session, which is very annoying sometimes.

Now the revamp in Firefox 3.5 beta has made an improvement in the Restore session. Now it got smarter and lists down all the websites that you were browsing in your previous session. And you can deselect the website that you dont want to launch in the current session.

This improvement will actually help you to get rid of the site which caused you the crash previously.

Know it: Terms of Service

2009-06-07T19:15:20Z

Source: bigocean

You are living a life in Internet and you are using a lots of web-application, services via Internet. But still there are much better services comming up and we tend to subscribe and start using it. But, are you ever read the Terms of Service ( shortly ToS ) of the service you are using it? Facebook has faced serious concerns over it’s change in ToS. Many of it’s users are not happy with it’s change in ToS. So the question is, why does a Infrequently read ToS bothers much? Whats in there in the ToS.

Ok. Lets begin with knowing about what is terms of service.

What is Terms of Service ( ToS )?

Terms of Service are the rules written by the Web-service providers ( eg: Google, Yahoo, Facebook ) to make the usage of the application in a reasonable way. Example, if you look at the point 8 in Google Docs ToS ,

8.3 Google reserves the right (but shall have no obligation) to pre-screen, review, flag, filter, modify, refuse or remove any or all Content from any Service. For some of the Services, Google may provide tools to filter out explicit sexual content. These tools include the SafeSearch preference settings (see http://www.google.com/help/customize.html#safe). In addition, there are commercially available services and software to limit access to material that you may find objectionable.

Now this restricts users who are about to upload the illegal / sexual contents. Now this forces the users to use the service in a resonable way.

Why the companies using it?

Companies are using ToS service for the following reasons

1. To provide reasonable service to it’s customers.

Online services company runs web application for massive user base. The companies should provide reasonable amount of service to their users. They promise this in the ToS.

2. Proper utilization of service by users

Companies running those web application will be spending for Server, Bandwidth, and other computational and non-computational resources.So, the user should access those resources in a reasonable and optimal way.

Eg: Google will not allow you to upload files of size more than 500 KB or Presentations upto 10 MB.

So by enforcing this rule, the companies make sure that they are able to provide good service to everyone. Think, if the google allows to upload files of size 2 GB at a single shot, not all the users will have the same bandwith to upload the files, hence will convert into slow servers, unhappy customers, then loose business.

3. Protect themselves from legal issues

Companies will write up the ToS in such a way that they are most protected via the legal issues that might face from it’s customers. Recently Twitter has been sued due to it’s fault on it’s service ( but twitter has responded back accordingly )

How to keep track of the Terms of service?

So, if you have ever seen a ToS page of any service it runs for miles and sure anyone wouldn’t have enough patience to read/glance it even. A online service TOSBack tracks about 42 companies ToS and it’s changes. You can check what does a company tells in it’s ToS and what it has changed recently. Based on this you can use the service accordingly.

Screenshot of TOSBack displaying difference in YouTube’s ToS

Google Book Tip: Manage Your Library via Barcode

2009-06-07T18:14:33Z

I Came across an interesting tip for Google Book. If you are having a lots of book and you arent not able to type in all your ISBN number and need to keep track of them using Google’s book service. Here is a quick tip.

Google’s Software Engineer Matt demonstrate a tip using a USB powered bar code reader.

Just login into your Google account.
Google Book
Goto My Library
Click Import
Power your USB bar code reader
Scan the bar code behind your book
And thats it. Done.

Google Book service recogonises the ISBN number and adds the book into your library.

Power your USB scanner, scan the bar code of your books and import into your library.

Once you have build your library, you can make use of Google book services to work on them. You will have benefits like

One big advantage of having your You don’t have to go manually search for all the respective books for the pages. Google Book will search for the text in your library and will list down the pages where you can find the

Google Book Tip: Search your home library

2009-06-07T18:07:35Z

Source: sbj

Have you ever used Google Books? If yes, have you unleashed the power of Google books? For those who aren’t aware of Google book,

Google Book Search is a tool from Google that searches the full text of books that Google scans, converts to text using optical character recognition, and stores in its digital database.

Source: Wikipedia

You dont need a seperate account for Google Book. Login into Google Book ( http://books.google.com) then you are done. You can search millions of books and the texts with the Google Book.

Search your home library:

Ok, now how does it helps to search my book library at my home. Simple, add all your books you own in your home library, tadaaa…done. Type in a search text in your book library, it will tell you which book does your search query has it and what is the page number of it. Simple and Powerful.

How to create a replica of your home library in Google Books:

Login into Google Books
Goto My Library
Left hand side, you will find Import Books Link
Type in all the Book’s ISBN number you need to import
You are done.

Now type in the phrase / reference you want to search. Google will get you the Book Name & Page number. Either you can read it on line ( if the entire book is permitted to read for free ) or You go fetch it in your book.

Mailplane – A better gmail client for mac

2009-04-29T01:58:57Z

I came across this Mailplane application for Mac recently and I started liking it as soon as I used it in 5 minutes. Probably will buy one copy for me. Mailplane provides a GUI interface for Gmail. Consider this as Microsoft Outlook for Gmail, but without modifying any thing that gmail provides. Right from the Look & Feel, the settings, the options of the web Gmail can be availed via Mailplane. The main feature is you can manage multiple Gmail ids at one place and switch between them by a single click.

Features in Mailplane:

Looking at the extra features in Mailplane, it allows you to send any file to this mail application using the “Right Click > Send to Mail Plane”

Mailplane apart from managing multiple Gmail ids, it has extra features like dropping any file in to the MailPlane, which would just create a new Conversation in Gmail and attach the file instantly.

iPhoto integaration is also breeze with Mailplane via the built in plugin, which would instantly attach the photo to your mail.Go to iPhoto, Select the photos that you need to send then “Share > Email“, which would open the Mailplane and load all your selected photo into the Mailplane app.

Also you can send document to MailPlane by printing it to the Mailplane app.

Even Mac can get viruses too – iWork 2009

2009-04-28T13:15:36Z

Mac is Immune to Virus. This is globally acclaimed status until the iWork’ 09 worm infused into the Mac. So this tell you none of the OS in the world is immune to virus analogous to no human is immune to any virus. But the difference is, until we are healthy and cautious no external objects affects our body. Same thing for OSes too. Mac doesnt accept any executables to run without users notice, unlike PC. Though a nice writeup from ‘the How-to-Geek’ Even Mac’s can get viruses, ‘the How-to-Geek‘ mostly writes on the PC tips, tweaks and tricks, so there is no wonder that he writes about the Mac when Mac fails ( no offense here ).

The trojan is installed as a “Start up” service in in /System/Library/StartupItems/iWorkServices, a location reserved normally for Apple startup items.

Screenshot: A clean iWork installation will not have the 'iWorkServices' in the startup folder

Though the fix for this trojan has not been around, it’s true that the trojan turns the infected Macs into Zombies. But still Mac is much better than PC in stopping the viruses. It’s true that Mac cant claim that it is not affected with virus, but still it holds a proud position of having lesser viruses compared to the PC’s large virus base.

So, Mac users though you download the pirated software, make sure that you run through the anti-virus softwares.That keeps your mac health and of course you too

Fix for “Code execution has been interrupted” in Excel vba macros.

2009-02-27T02:21:20Z

In excel, while executing macros you may get the error message “code execution has been interrupted”. Generally this error message should appear only if you hit “Ctrl +Break” to stop the execution and view the code. But there may be certain instances, where you may get this error message even without pressing “Ctrl + Break”. If you hit “Continue” button, the code will execute for a while but again you may get the same error message. At one point of time, you may need to click “continue” button many times to execute a macro. There may be plent of reasons behind it like new software installation, key settings etc..

Problem Solution:

The solution for this problem is to add the line of code “Application.EnableCancelKey = xlDisabled” in the first line of your macro.. This will fix the problem and you will be able to execute the macro successfully without getting the error message “Code execution has been interrupted”.

Thanks: This tip is given by one of my collegue Vijayaragavan..