Techknowlogick's Blog

Another web app within a week

techknowlogick — Thu, 18 Nov 2010 00:42:06 +0000

This week’s web app comes in the form of a notepad application. This twist is that I am using google storage as data storage. It was an interesting battle working with the Google Storage API however I ended up being able to work things out. I had a fun time adding in jQuery into it so that it auto saves the text file so that the user needn’t do anything.

You may find it at http://write.techknowlogick.com/

Single Serving Sites

techknowlogick — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 04:56:32 +0000

I just built a single serving site that uses the textCAPTCHA service in less than an hour. It determines if you are a human or a robot by asking a very simple question. You may find it at http://tklk.me/

Updated User Page

techknowlogick — Mon, 18 Oct 2010 22:04:18 +0000

The final look of the user page

Evolution

techknowlogick — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 00:18:04 +0000

Host-A has gone through many more designs than have been visible on the site. Mostly because I haven’t felt completely ok with what happened.

What Host-A looks like now

The first redesign

This one was canned because like the current design it was really dark. Not many people trust dark web design because the layman believes it is a “hacker” site.

Next one. This time it is lighter.

This time I just didn’t feel like it was that great.

Black and white version of The new version of Host-A

This one actually was mostly able to function, it just needed a few more tweaks, but I just didn’t like it that much.

Finally we have what Host-A will soon become.

All that needs to happen now is to put all the parts in place, and then I can make it live. (it might take a while as I have to re-code the entire backend of the site)

3 Months In

techknowlogick — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 00:56:28 +0000

Close to three months ago I (and some others) took over complete control of Host-A. One of the things that I’ve enjoyed most about it is taking support emails. It may be surprising, but helping someone who has been having trouble, and finding out why the site is acting up for them is fun.

Stress

techknowlogick — Sun, 22 Aug 2010 20:46:03 +0000

Owning and operating your own company is really stressful. When I was handed complete ownership of Host-A.net I didn’t realize how much stress it was going to be. Now I worry about mirrors going down, hard drive failure and much more. It has been just over a month since the reigns have been handed over and we have had 3 major problems. One being a major hard drive failure on the main server, how we managed to fix that was to redirect all the traffic to one of the mirrors, unfortunately for this system users couldn’t upload any files.

The second major problem was when I switched the servers from PHP4 to PHP5 (a long needed upgrade) I forgot to install some extra package, like GD. We rely on GD to make the CAPTCHA image for when users sign up so we didn’t have any signups for a while. Also I the php5-mysql package was not installed, this is pretty major because it means that the site can’t talk to the database and no one can get at their files.

Our third major problem, probably the biggest, was all my fault. I was working on a function for the admin side of things to be able to remove certain users and their files. Yes this may lead to some power abuse, but I will deal with that when the time comes. For the record I can delete any user that needs to be deleted right now and that this function will only make it easier. What happened was when I was testing it everything seemed to be fine, except that I noticed it taking a little too long. So I do a quick “ls -l” on the directory where all the users files are, not just the single user that I was trying to delete for this test case and I noticed that everything was disappearing quickly. I was able to “pkill” the task before it deleted all of the files, luckily it only deleted 50% of the files and we back up to a few mirrors nightly. I switched all the links going to the main server to the secondary server so the users could still get their files and started to rsync the files that were deleted back onto the main server. Let me tell you 60GBs is no small thing to transfer over the internet.

In conclusion, we haven’t expected all problems that could happen or even will. There probably will be more in the future, but we have a great team in place to be able to deal will all sorts of problems.

Becoming a man

techknowlogick — Sun, 22 Aug 2010 19:58:02 +0000

Much like how the Jewish people have their coming of age ceremony to show that someone is now a man, I have just gone through something similar. I was on the phone the other day and I was talking to this woman on the telephone, and she was distracted by some people in the background, so she yelled at that them saying to “quiet down because I have a lovely man on the phone who I need to talk to”. That right there makes me a man.

Starting

techknowlogick — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 08:38:32 +0000

So today I took complete control over a site I have been helping out with. It is weird. I feel in complete control of over 16K people’s files. With one movement I can end everything. but I won’t ever do that on purpose.

Now that I have this position of power I also have many more responsibilities. I have to release new things, make sure ads are solid, things are still running, finances are in order, among other things.

I have now entered the world of web apps. Needless to say my site isn’t up to snuff with others. It soon will be.

More updates about what it takes to start a website that people actually use to come.

The Final day of the host-a server being at this location

Human Nature

techknowlogick — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 02:23:24 +0000

Hobbes and Descartes both have views on how humans are different from animals. Starting on page 32 of Descartes’ Discourse we can find his argument on why we are different. He starts off with saying that we have the ability of genuine use of language. This is saying that we can actually understand that words have more than one meaning, and that we can have conversations about things. Where as to animals words are just signals. For example, apes have a sound for when snakes are coming to let the others know, and they also have one for “danger from the sky”, but they can’t talk about that snake that is coming they can only signal that is coming. Descartes’ second reason why humans are different from animals is that we have “rational flexibility”. By that he means that we have a “capacity for genuine learning” (Quote from Prof. Borman, Friday May 21st). In layman’s terms, we can actually learn things. In comparison, animals find out what things are through repetition. An example of how using these two points separate us from animals is the example of my dog. In regards to point two, where humans can learn things as opposed to animals, my dog had to be repeatedly told what “Treat” was until she understood that it meant she is going to get a treat. That leads me into point one, where humans understand language and animals don’t, that my dog can’t go over to the other dogs and talk about how wonderful her treats are, this is because “treat” is just a signal for her that she is going to get a treat.

Hobbes’ view on the difference between humans and animals has some of the same points as Descartes’. As an example, for both of them language is the big one that separates us from the animals. One of the main differences between Descartes and Hobbes is that Hobbes wants to show that humans are not social; where as for Descartes being social does not matter. Hobbes’ first point is that we as humans compete, he also says that animals compete, but for humans we are specifically after honour and dignity, which in turn leads to war. Hobbes’ second point is that the individual desires of social animals line up exactly with what is good for the group, but for us, humans, our individual desires are for power and superiority. If by chance our individual desires benefit the group in any way Hobbes would say that is purely coincidence and we are only doing that so we can become more superior to our peers. An example of this is philanthropy, the only reason why we do it is to support our individual desires and use it as a sign of power, and not just for the reason of contributing to the group. Hobbes’ third point is that we as human have reason, and that reason allows us to criticize others. At this point in the argument this point by itself does not help the argument much, but when we get to point five, we can see why Hobbes included it. Now, point four, Hobbes’ states that humans have language, and we use that language to lie and manipulate. The fifth point, where Hobbes wraps up his argument, declares that we can be offended, but animals can only be injured. Now we look back to point three, and we see that language allows us to criticize others, and with point five it is shown that we can be offended. In class it was joked that if a dog was hit he would not go and carry a grudge and make a plan to get revenge, but if a human were in that position, we probably would.

If I were to choose whose position is more adequate I would have to choose Descartes’ view on the matter. This is because I don’t agree with Hobbes on the basis that humans are just out to become more powerful, and Descartes does not even touch on power in his argument. Instead, Descartes argues that reason, learning, and language separate us, not for the reason Hobbes put forth, but as an alternative so that humans can be social.

One hour sites

techknowlogick — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 05:22:31 +0000

I become bored very easily and so I must find something to counter that. One thing that I have found to be very helpful is to practice coding. When I am in the mood I feel that challenging myself to make a fully functional site is a great way to sharpen my skills.

My latest project of this nature is Hashle. Hashle is an interesting take on a pre-computed hash DB. What it does is instead of just running through all the possible combinations of letters numbers and every othertype of character, Hashle takes input from the user and adds just those hashes to the DB. This is important because who would use “fsdfshgfh5g756dc45fsfbae” as a password, it is just impractical to calculate all of those passwords that have a very little chance of being used, whereas users can input words that are will most likely used. Also users are more likely to try typing in their password to see what their password would look like as a hash.

If you don’t already know what hashes are you can check out this wonderful video made by the IPTV show Hak.5 here.