Using Apache2 as a reverse proxy

It was years since I'd done this, and I'd forgotten everything about it but niq's article gets it all across nice and concise.

Google App Engine

Staking my place (I'm always well-behind-the-curve!) I just tried to sign up for the Google App Engine trial, after reading about it here, but its already full :-(.

However the docs make interesting reading, and at least I'll have time to figure out how to use it and what it might be used for as I wait for the program to expand.

@Work right now I'm thinking about things like code escrow, how to convince client's lawyers that they don't need to own the hardware, and business continuity. That all puts a different flavour on my view of stuff-like-this, I wonder what kinds of SLA's & other protections Google will offer commercial customers?

Iomart responded

I received an email from Iomart in response to this posting about problems I'd had which, amongst the expected said this:

Customer Service is extremely important to us and as you can imagine the extended maintenance was disappointing from our own internal viewpoint, however it was at the same time unavoidable and we did everything in our power to restore services as quickly as possible.

Which is fine as it goes, but if they actually read the post they will see that my anger is directed at three things:

1/ We were not expecting to be affected, this wasn't "extended maintenance" for us it was unplanned downtime. Iomart advertise 100% uptime, how can they do that if they don't even know when things aren't working.
2/ Even if we had been expecting this we were not given enough time to come up with contingency arrangements.
3/ We couldn't contact anyone for several hours after we discovered the problem, and neither did they contact us to tell us that there even was a problem, therefore clearly not doing everything in their power, and it took several more hours to finally restore our services.

My correspondent also said:

is there anything we can do to perhaps help you find alternative solutions or ease the frustration you have clearly experienced with the maintenance on Sunday 27th January.

Which is nonsense because the two things which might have made a difference are clearly not going to be on Iomarts agenda,
a) compensate our clients who lost tens of £000's of revenue
or b) turn the clock back and warn us at least 10 working days before this happened.

Now don't get me wrong, I know that things can and do go wrong at times, I'm not complaining that things went wrong, I'm complaining that we weren't in the loop.
Customer service is about making your customers priorities and concerns your priorities and concerns. In this case Iomart's priorities and concerns were clearly their own.

Oh and if anyone from Iomart should choose to respond to this post, please use comments, and if anyone does choose to email me, don't try to be clever and use an address you discover, use the one advertised, find it using the "contact me" link, that's what its there for.

serendipity

Went to collect my teenage daughter from her guitar lesson today for the 1st time, so I got Nikki to show me where it was on google maps. I took a good look at the satellite view so's I'd know exactly which house to go to, and how to get to the right street. Neither of us knew what the address was, and even if we did we're satNav luddites. Imagine my surprise when I got there to find the same maroon car parked in the same place in the drive as was in the satellite photo.

Put the Internet Down...

... and walk away with your hands in view...

I just read this.

Google Language-ism ... WTF

Well, I never. You'll never guess what...
I've been disgruntled at the fact that I hadn't got the new version of GMail, nor the IMAP option. In fact I set up a gmail account for handling bounces that used to come into our office, and I was dissapointed to see that this account gets the new look + IMAP while my long serving account still didn't have it.

Guess what?
This morning I installed firefox 3 beta and it made me think that I should have a go at finding out why my gmail account isn't upgraded.

Guess what?
I read this on the help forums...

I'm in the UK and simply had to set my account to US English, which is mildly annoying, but it works.

Three questions spring to mind, Why Google? Why? and Why didn't you tell us?

I hope the answer to the first two aren't that you're language nazis, I'm going to spell licence and colour and analyse and optimise the way I always have no matter what functionality you withhold from me. Actually I'm going to use IMAP and perform daring feats of spelling without the aid of a safety net.

Sadly Firefox 3 beta2 doesn't have an "English UK" spellchecker either, its only a beta after all, so if I lapse into american-ism its because the fiendish plot is succeeding.

What does an IT director do?

That was the question I jokingly asked twitter the other day, @sgala said "make IT happen".
How right he was!

In one week I've:
Tried to support my guys while they launched a new client store http://shop.ghost.co.uk/, or should I say officiated at its birth. Thankfully after a lot of to-ing and fro-ing between anxious client and harassed project manager it snuck into action last night.

I've had to rebuild and redistribute PC's in the office to keep the wheels of industry turning while I sort out my purchasing budget.

I've fixed some annoyances with the internal DNS server and a certificate problem that had stopped us from using Outlook when we weren't in the office.

I've set up a dead letter email account in M$ Exchange for diverting bounces to, first time I've touched Exchange. It isn't Apache James.

I've installed JIRA and provided some initial training to project managers and developers, but there's still a long way to go. At least we're starting to get most of the immediate tasks and all of the new stuff into some kind of workflow.

I've set up the tomcat/IIS ajp "thing", and set up a proxy in IIS, for JIRA. I've never touched IIS before either, and boy was it wierd compared with the king of webservers Apache httpd.
I've chaired a meeting with my managers, and another with the same folks for project status updates.

I've been to a sales meeting at a potential client's printing works, we got lost on the way there but it was interesting and hopefully worth our while.

And last but not least I've been exercising my sysadmin and dba skills (how that will make my SLC former colleagues laugh!) getting tough on slow performance by optimising httpd and applying new indexes to speed up worst offending queries. Now http://www.allsaintsshop.co.uk/ and http://www.qubeshoes.co.uk/ are flying along in fine fettle for the peak of the christmas shopping season.


So Santiago, you were right it seems like I have just made IT happen. :-)

Bugger off! email is still great.

Enterprise 2.0 is the term for the technologies and business practices that liberate the workforce from the constraints of legacy communication and productivity tools like email

Bollocks to you, I say, email is still a great productivity tool. We're just starving it of attention, and innovation, because we can't be bothered solving the problem of spam.

IM is not email 2.0, and it is high time we figured out what email 2.0 should be.

Today's news..

Just spotted these two in my morning trawl through the blogosphere...

Is Microsoft Building a Flickr Competitor? In which we discover just how much of your plans you can give away in a job description.

And WiFi T-Shirt possibly the geek-most shirt I ever saw. Apache should mod these for a hackathon shirt.

Imagine what a crowd would look like, you'd see the signal fading out as it crossed the room, the inverse square made flesh. Would we, as geeks, congregate round the person with the strongest signal? The Alpha Geek?

Kind of reminds me of Natalie Jeremijenko's feral robots project in which toy robot dogs, you know the things, were fitted with sensors to detect stuff (like bad stuff coming out of landfill) and their movements mapped as they homed in on hotspots.

*How* much mail did I send???

Can't really believe it, but according to this cool new mail search thinggy (via ben) I've so far sent 2751 messages to the James lists since 2001.

That's a lot of email, how the hell have I managed it!

Captivated

Not often these days that I get captivated by a website anymore, there's an element of "been there, done that" creeping into my cynicism. But this...

...which I found thanks to Sacha, had me hooked. To see it out of its iframe (or if you can't see the image) go here, but it works quite well in the iframe.
I once drew a site, including navigation, on a couple of bits of paper, complete with dymo tape "buttons", scanned the whole thing then sliced up the image. I'll see if I can find any trace of it...

See both sides

Metrofunk apparently launched Metrofunk today. The press release describes it as...

the world's first invite-only social network devoted entirely to nightlife, fashion, film, and music.

Oh how Way Cool it sounds! However when you read how you will benefit from having an account they say...

specially created to allow trendsetters to easily build a viral online promotional empire

Not only that but also this...

you will have the ability to send a mass message out to everyone in your entire promotional network with a single click

Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose, or as Yoggi Berra said, "its like deja vu, all over again"

57 channels and nothing on

MySpace are planning to reveal an API for external developers, says the bbc.
They also say "Facebook already has more than 6,000 applications running on the website" and imply that MySpace's move is a result of facebook's competition.

I gave up using facebook 'cos I couldn't see the point. In fact I only started to use it in the first place because I thought with all the noise there was that I must be missing something, but as far as I could see, 6,000 applications or not, it doesn't really add value to my life, on or off-line. I have accounts on all sorts of social platforms, but the only benefit I can see is that it makes it easier for people to find me, and read my blog :-) I suppose that if I hadn't already built up an entire personal domain of on-line presence these things might offer a handy ready-made presence, but 6,000 applications I ask you. I wonder how many of them are "hello world" or variations on the virtual drinking theme?

Ahoy there buckko another year be over

Would ye believe that it be international talk like a pirate day agin? Yarr it has came round right smartly me hearties, like a handspike.
Scurvy Land Lubbers Google baint hoisted the jolly roger, but sea dogs flickr have:

scoes woes - or "I own the internet"

Most of the reports of SCO's defeat in court I've seen have mentioned the share price, as did Fitz, but Ars Technica also makes this point

"SCO's biggest windfall since the start of its legal fiasco has been UNIX licensing revenue collected from Microsoft and Sun, much of which is rightfully owed to Novell under the terms of the 1995 Asset Purchase Agreement."

Does this mean SCO can expect a letter from Novell's lawyers, can M$ and Sun take SCO to court for scamming them with the protection racket, or will SCO just get to keep the money?

If its the latter, then I'm afraid you owe me a fiver for using the internet. I'm currently in dispute with some other people about whether or not I really own it, but if you are concerned about the risk to your business should I be successful (and when I am I won't look kindly on anyone who gets on the wrong side of me at this stage) you can ensure that you are covered, legally, by paying me the modest one-off licence fee. Put your £5 in a brown envelope and leave it at Glasgow Central Station, under the bench beside the lift on platform 13.

Facebook Cache Phreakiness

Robert Scoble, facebook obsessive that he is, blogs about facebook's recent problem with cache headers.

In a nutshell, and facebook's own words:

This was not the result of a security breach. Specifically, the bug caused some third party proxy servers to cache otherwise inaccessible content. The result was that an isolated group of users could see some pages that were not intended for them.

Perhaps not a security breach, but IMHO a worrying lapse in security and wake up call for facebook QA.
I saw other peoples' message inbox, including their messages' subjects and the short snippet. Not their whole messages, but it was bad enough.
What's worse is that because it was a proxy cache issue I saw cached content for other people who used the same proxy, more normally referred to in the human world as my colleagues, and not just for some random facebook strangers.

The Numbers Racket

John Levine, chair of the ASRG and author of, amongst other titles, Fighting Spam for Dummies (Lol, I thought spam was *for* dummies!) blogs about ICANN's report on what they plan to do about registry failure.

Although I'm continually reminded at work about our need to design and plan for "business continuity", and even though I'm congenitally opposed to central registries *and* assigned names and numbers (I believe they are all a symptom of our failure to solve a problem of self-organisation, but don't get me started on that here.) I still managed to surprised myself by my failure thus far to put two and two together and work out that central authorities put an upper bar on an organisations ability plan for business continuity. No amount of nuclear bunkers, back up power supplies, and geographic dispersal will save you if the the assigned names and numbers racket gets messed up.
So that's me got another reason to feel uncomfortable about it.

subscribe by email

Two reasons for this post:
1/ to let you know that you can now subscribe to updates by email
2/ to see what the emails look like

I've been adding every feedburner feature I can get my hands on. I added the feed redirect to my blogger account so now feedburner captures stats on all the subscriptions and hits to the feeds for this blog, neat. I already used the rss to javascript thingy to publish the headlines on my home page thats pretty cool and seems to work well so I thought I try out *everything* else, like a kid in a sweetie shop. :) I'm not sure whether people will want to subscribe by email, but its cheap at the price (free as in beer) so I'm buying.

Talking about free beer, if you're a facebook user check out the boozemail application for some mindless virtual-drinking fun.

d.

I Told you so!

In the previous post I predicted that postmaster@xxx would be too busy to reply, I got his reply just now..

Thank you for contacting XXX's E-mail Postmaster.
Because of the large volume of postmaster e-mail traffic, this response is automated.

LOL!

We keep spending most our lives living in the living in the Spama's Paradise

I just got an email today which appears from its headers to be a bona-fide bounce triggered by spam with my @apache address on it. I also googled for some of the people on the list, and they do indeed work where where it says they do. So I think its genuine.

I've quoted the whole thing below, the scary part is summed up by this sentence "A list of all the people to whom these addresses might refer appears below" and sure enough right below the stuff I quote there's a list of people who's address might match michael@xxx formatted like :

name: Michael xxx
send_email_to: mikex@xxx
phone: 007-234-4354
address: 695 XXX Road
department: XXX-Housekeeping

For heavens sakes! I've spent years trying to explain why returning "mailbox does not exist" can be used by spammers to harvest addresses, and then I find out that people are still doing this. Priceless. I've sent a mail to the postmaster@xxx asking him if he's insane. I don't expect a reply from the current incumbent any time soon, he's probably fighting off a mail-storm.

The text of that message:

I'm sorry, but we had problems delivering your mail.
The errors we encountered appear below. If you have any questions,
contact the xxxxx Postmaster as postmaster@xxxxx.yyy.
Please include a copy of this message with your correspondence.
--------

The following addreses each refer to more than one person in our
directory. A list of all the people to whom these addresses might
refer appears below. You should resend to your intended recipient
using the address in the 'send_email_to:' field.

If your intended recipient is not on the list, then the person is
either not registered in the central directory or the address is
misspelled.