Server migration to LogicWeb

Due to JTLNetworks being clueless about how to reliably deliver e-mail, I've severed my use of their services and moved to LogicWeb. But, Blogger.com has also changed how their service works, so all of my old blog URLs are going to result in 404 errors for a bit.

The new URL for this blog is now:

http://techblog.tgharold.com/

(So far, I'm a lot happier with LogicWeb then with JTL. Mostly because LogicWeb gives me secure IMAP storage of e-mail over SSL.)

Why I don't trust JTL Networks

Here's an example of the spurious error messages I get from the ever-so-helpful people over at JTL Networks.

For the record - they've been ignoring my requests to have this error looked into and addressed for over a year now. Very very poor customer service and technical support over there.

Return-Path: <>
Received: (qmail 26238 invoked for bounce); 13 Jun 2010 23:45:18 -0000
Date: 13 Jun 2010 23:45:18 -0000
From: MAILER-DAEMON@apache.org
To: announce-return-133-@httpd.apache.org
Subject: failure notice

Hi. This is the qmail-send program at apache.org.
I'm afraid I wasn't able to deliver your message to the following addresses.
This is a permanent error; I've given up. Sorry it didn't work out.

<tgh@tgharold.com>:
69.36.9.168 does not like recipient.
Remote host said: 556 Address unavailable.
Giving up on 69.36.9.168.

Backfilling

Going to do a lot of backfill posts based on what I've been working on in the past year. Most of it has to do with CentOS 5, PostgreSQL, LVM, Software RAID, with a smattering of other issues thrown in.

Now hosted at JTLNetworks

I ended up picking JTL Networks for my linux hosting. Now I'm in the middle of making sure that everything is correct in DNS and that the site is configured properly.

The old hosting company (HostOnce) is being a pain about closing down the accounts and allowing me to transfer my 2 other personal domains. But, frankly, their hosting service and my needs have been rapidly diverging for close to 2 years.

As always, getting setup at a new hosting provider involves a bit of trial and error. One thing that I've done is setup a separate FTP account for my blogs so that the blog software cannot write to directories other then the blog folders. (Those sub-accounts also use different passwords then my primary FTP account.)

Toshiba introduces 200GB 2.5" drive

Toshiba has now released a hard drive based on the perpendicular recording technology. It's 200GB, 2.5" form factor (useful for notebooks / laptops). Areal density is 178.8 gigabits (per square inch).

In comparison, Hitachi has demonstrated 230 gigabits per square inch (see also PCWorld where current drives top out at 120-130 gigabits/sq inch while perpendicular should allow areal density of 230 gigabits/sq inch). Back in 2004, Toshiba demonstrated a density of 133 gigabits per square inch, which was done using the older recording technology. Back in 2002, Seagate announced drives that had areal densities of 100 gigabits/sq in. Seagate expects areal densities to hit 500 gigabits/sq in over the next few years, compared with today's current density of ~110 gigabits/sq in.

So it looks like perpendicular recording will definitely allow hard drive sizes to double and possibly quadruple over the next few years. That means we can reasonably expect 1TB drives in the short-term with the possibility of 2TB drives down the road.

Evaluation of new web hosting plans

Since my current web host is giving me the runaround about some firewall issues (I'm no longer able to use FTP PASV mode to publish to my site), I'm evaluating new hosting plans. My criteria are as follows:

$6-$12/mo
1GB of space
25GB of traffic
PostgreSQL support

The last item naturally leads me to look at PostgreSQL hosting providers for North America.

A 2 Web Hosting - Either the "Discount" or the "Small Biz" packages include oodles of disk space for a reasonable price. In addition, the Small Biz account would allow me to combine multiple domains into the same hosting account.

pgHoster - The plan that I would want is $15/mo, which is a pity because I'd love to pay a company that prominently promotes PostgreSQL.

VirtuosoNetSolutions - The basic package is ~$60/yr for 3GB/50GB or the eCommerce 5GB/100GB for ~$110/yr. Both packages allow additional domains to be hosted from the same account.

JTLnet - This looks like a good plan. The Linux '06 promo package is $10/mo for 2GB of space, 24GB of traffic, SFTP transfers.

Rearranging the site

Moved some files around today, so it's possible that there will be some broken links and such for a bit. I think I've finally settled on a page design, and am mostly pleased with the color scheme. The CSS still needs to be tested out in some older web browsers to see how it holds up under the weight of some real content.

Print CSS is still broken, hopefully I'll get a chance to fix it this week.

I've also checked all of the internal web links using Xenu's link-verification tool. However, some of the pages are merely place holders until I brainstorm content to fill them.

More CSS 4-panel layout using DIVs (attempt #2)

1) Removed the "Main" DIV tag from the previous attempt. (Go look at BlueRobot.com's 2-panel layout.)

2) Decided that I liked the look of CSS Layout Techniques: for Fun and Profit where the side-bar menu is on the right, which allows text to fill the width of the window once you scroll down past the end. That looks more natural then a left side menu with a fixed left margin. Internet Explorer 6 also seems to like that layout a bit better. (BlueRobot.com's 2-panel right menu layout)

HTML and CSS (see what it looks like, short-body version):

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<title>CSS 4-panel layout example #2 (June 2004)</title>
<style media="screen" type="text/css">
body {
background-color: White;
color: Black;
font-family: verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif;
}
#TopNav {
background-color: Fuchsia;
padding: 2px;
}
#SideBar {
background-color: Gray;
float: right;
width: 15%;
}
#BlogBody {
background-color: Orange;
padding: 2px;
}
#Footer {
background-color: Purple;
clear: right;
padding: 2px;
}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<div id="TopNav">foo foo foo foo foo foo</div>
<div id="SideBar">sidebar<br>sidebar<br><br>sidebar<br>sidebar<br>sidebar<br>sidebar</div>
<div id="BlogBody">
blog body blog body blog
</div>
<div id="Footer">footer-copyright</div>
</body>
</html>

Bugs:

1. [IE5/Windows]: It's possible that this layout will not work properly on Internet Explorer 5 for MS-Windows. I suspect that IE5's quirks won't really matter in this particular layout, but I have yet to test it.
   

CSS 4-panel layout using DIVs

You'd think it would be simple, right? Oh, young grasshopper, you have much to learn! Actually, it's not all that bad, just tedious to get a layout up and running. Took me about 2 hours of trial-n-error, and looking at some of the sites over at the CSS Zen Garden. Finally, Michael Pick's blog entry about the CSS Zen Garden proved to be the most useful as I teased apart his DIVs and his CSS file. Mike's page was already close to the layout that I wanted and his CSS file was pretty simple.

My goal for this blog's design is a navigation bar across the top of the page, a footer at the bottom of the page, a side-bar containing links to the various archive pages, and a main body that is 80-85% of the page width. This is somewhat similar to the diagram under section 9.6.1 (Fixed positioning) of the W3C.org CSS2 Specification, except that I don't want to use fixed positioning.

First, start with the following HTML file (see what it looks like):

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<title>CSS 4-panel layout example (June 2004)</title>
<style media="screen" type="text/css">
body {
background-color: White;
color: Black;
font-family: verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif;
margin: 0px;
padding: 0px;
}
#Main {
background-color: Blue;
}
#TopNav {
background-color: Fuchsia;
margin: 0;
padding: 2px;
}
#SideBar {
background-color: Gray;
clear: none;
float: left;
margin-top: 0px;
padding: 2px;
width: 14%;
}
#BlogBody {
background-color: Orange;
height: 200px; /* must be larger then height of SideBar to fix IE6 glitch */
margin-bottom: 10px;
margin-left: 15%;
margin-top: 10px;
padding: 2px;
}
#Footer {
background-color: Purple;
clear: both;
padding: 2px;
}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<div id="Main">
<div id="TopNav">foo foo foo foo foo foo</div>
<div id="SideBar">sidebar<br>sidebar<br><br>sidebar<br>sidebar<br>sidebar<br>sidebar</div>
<div id="BlogBody">
blog body blog body blog body blog body blog body blog body blog body blog body blog body blog body blog body blog body blog body blog body blog body blog body blog body blog body blog body blog body blog body blog body blog body blog body blog body blog body blog body blog body blog body blog body blog body blog body blog body blog body blog body blog body blog body blog body blog body blog body blog body blog body blog body blog body blog body blog body blog body blog body blog body blog body blog body blog body blog body blog body blog body blog body blog body blog body blog body blog body blog body blog body blog body blog body blog body blog body blog body blog body blog body blog body blog body blog body blog body blog body blog body blog body blog body blog body blog body blog body blog body blog body blog body blog body blog body blog body blog body blog body blog body blog body blog body blog body blog body blog body blog body
</div>
<div id="Footer">footer-copyright</div>
</div>
</body>
</html>

Yes, those are very ugly colors. But it does make it very easy to see where the various panels have ended up on the page.

Bugs:

1. [IE6] If the content of the "BlogBody" DIV does not contain enough text to make the height of the DIV more then that of the "SideBar" DIV then the body panel will not display properly. The work-around is to specify a CSS height value that is larger then the height of the "SideBar" DIV. I'm going to play around with the design some more and see if I can get rid of that issue (and get the side-bar to be the full height of the page).
   

Blogger.com changes

Blogger.com has added a comment system and some other enhancements to their service. I'll only be turning on the commenting system on a selective basis for any site news posts, but all of the posts in the Tech Blog will have comments turned on.

Right now, you'll need to be a member of Blogger.com if you want to leave a comment. (I may change that down the road once I test out to see how well Blogger.com has implemented anti-spammer measures.)

GeekMail folds up shop

GeekMail will be discontinuing service on April 9, 2004. According to the e-mail, it sounded like an internal business dispute gone wrong.

So now I have to go shopping for a new e-mail provider (since I don't want to host my own SMTP server). The e-mail notice suggests looking at FuseMail as a replacement service. However, FuseMail doesn't support any method of accessing the mail server over a secure/encrypted link (one of the main selling points of GeekMail).

GeekMail

So far so good with using GeekMail as my SMTP mail service, takes a bit of elbow grease to setup but has been good and reliable for the past month or so.

E-mail Services

I'm currently hunting around for a good e-mail service. The hosting company here doesn't provide an outbound SMTP server, neither do they provide security for the POP3 traffic. GeekMail looks interesting and is only $40 per year and I would be able to keep using my @tgharold.com domain name.

I've been googling for any complaint threads, and other then them getting blacklisted by SPEWs once (innocent bystander, and SPEWs makes it a point to wreak damage on bystanders), I haven't found any threads.

Links:

Finding the right email provider with IMAP support
Spamotomy (listing of hosting services)

RenByDate v2003.11a (a.k.a. QRen)

Finished up the first (re-)release of RenByDate which is a tool that will rename a file and allow you to insert things like the current year, or the day of the week into the filename. This is actually a re-write of QREN that I wrote back in 1991-1992 and uploaded to the CompuServe forums under the userID of 71750,3724 (and was also part of a larger package called QUTIL1). Back then, I charged $5/seat or $20/server for the package but now I'm re-releasing it under the BSD open-source license.

The old version of QREN was written for the MS-DOS platform (using the MIX C compiler) and used some MIX C specific call as well as not being able to handle longer filenames. During the re-write, I used MinGW and tried to re-structure the code to make for easy porting to other platforms.

Installation is as easy as copying the "renbydate.exe" file to a directory in your Windows PATH. None of the other files are required.

Using RenByDate is pretty simple: renbydate log.txt log_%Y%m%d_%H%M.txt will rename "log.txt" to "log_19921021_1455.txt" (if the date/time is currently Oct-21-1992 at 2:55pm). Or you can specify that it should use the timestamp of the file by putting the "-f" switch in. If you're using it inside of a batch file, you'll probably need to double-up the '%' signs (e.g. %%Y%%m%%d) because MS-DOS/Windows likes to interpret '%' signs differently then when you're using the command at the command prompt. As with the original version, it only handles single filenames and will choke on wildcards.

Download:
renbydate-2003.11a.zip - 10KB, Win32 (README.TXT and LICENSE.TXT)
renbydate-2003.11a-source.zip

renbydate 2003.11a - Rename files based on the current or file timestamp value.
    Copyright 1991-1992,2003, Thomas G. Harold, All Rights Reserved.
    For updates visit http://www.tgharold.com/ or e-mail tgh@tgharold.com.

Usage:  renbydate [-f] filename newname
    -f - Rename using filename time stamp
    filename - This is the original filename, wildcards are not allowed.
    newname - This is the new filename, with optional time/date codes

The following is a list of codes to use in the string. (case sensitive)
    %a - Abbr. weekday name              %A - Full weekday name
    %b - Abbr. month name                %B - Full month name
                                         %d - Day of month (01..31)
    %H - hour (00..23)                   %I - hour (01..12)
    %j - day of year (001..366)          %m - month (01..12)
    %M - minute (00..59)                 %p - AM/PM indicator
    %S - second (00.59)                  %U - week of year (Sun first, 00..52)
    %w - day of week (0..7)              %W - week of year (Mon first, 00..52)
    %y - year (00..99)                   %Y - year (0000..9999)
    %Z - timezone name                   %% - '%' (percent) sign

Note: In a windows batch file, you must double up '%' signs.

For the historically curious folks, they may wish to download the original QRen v1.0 zip file from 1992. Or you can see the contents of the old QRen Documentation, Site License, or Product List files.

Source files:

dbg.c
dbg.h
file.c
file.h
jdate.c
jdate.h
LICENSE.TXT
makefile
renbydate.c
usage.c
usage.h