YJL --verbose

Bottom text fadeout with solid background color using CSS

2012-01-27T08:04:00.000-08:00

I was making a webpage and wanted to make bottom of a text fade, which is a small portion of a long text. It should indicate perfectly that there is more text as if saying “click to read more.”

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Nullam dui nunc, tempus vel ullamcorper ac, aliquet iaculis purus. Donec fermentum ipsum nec odio convallis et venenatis felis bibendum. Proin sed quam massa. Ut nibh mauris, tempor eget suscipit nec, tempus ac lectus. Proin sed augue ante, in fringilla nunc. Proin adipiscing orci molestie mi vehicula viverra. Aliquam erat volutpat. Proin tortor leo, tempor quis luctus vitae, pharetra non quam. Mauris et nisl sit amet arcu pharetra tempus in vel enim. Vestibulum lacinia porttitor sodales.

<style>
.fade-text-container {
  color: #aaa;
  background-color: #333;
  border-radius: 0.5em;
  padding: 0.5em;
}

.fade-text-container,
.text-container {
  line-height: 1.5em;
  width: 320px;
  /* 10 lines => 1.5em * 10 = 15em ***/
  height: 15em;
  overflow: hidden;
}

.fadeout {
  position: relative;
  /* 3 lines => 1.5em * 3 = 4.5em ***/
  height: 4.5em;
  top: -4.5em;
  background: -webkit-linear-gradient(
    rgba(51, 51, 51, 0) 0%,
    rgba(51, 51, 51, 1) 100%
    );
  background: -moz-linear-gradient(
    rgba(51, 51, 51, 0) 0%,
    rgba(51, 51, 51, 1) 100%
    );
  background: linear-gradient(
    rgba(51, 51, 51, 0) 0%,
    rgba(51, 51, 51, 1) 100%
    );
  z-index: 1;
}
</style>

<div class="fade-text-container">
  <div class="text-container">Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Nullam dui nunc, tempus vel ullamcorper ac, aliquet iaculis purus. Donec fermentum ipsum nec odio convallis et venenatis felis bibendum. Proin sed quam massa. Ut nibh mauris, tempor eget suscipit nec, tempus ac lectus. Proin sed augue ante, in fringilla nunc. Proin adipiscing orci molestie mi vehicula viverra. Aliquam erat volutpat. Proin tortor leo, tempor quis luctus vitae, pharetra non quam. Mauris et nisl sit amet arcu pharetra tempus in vel enim. Vestibulum lacinia porttitor sodales.</div>
  <div class="fadeout"></div>
</div>

It’s two-level container, top one .fade-text-container contains the text .text-container and the fadeout effect .fadeout. Because the need of calucating the position of .fadeout, so I made two-level and so .fadeout can be placed at exactly at bottom of text. Using this method, I can set how many exactly lines I want to fade out.

There is one issue I am aware of, because .fadeout is on top of text, therefore the text under it can not be selected. It shouldn’t be a big issue, because normally you want visitor actually to click and to go to another page. You can set up a click event on .fade-text-container and redirect user to other page.

This method only works with background is solid color.

Filtering links in Blogger/YouTube/etc API JSON

2012-01-26T08:42:00.000-08:00

If you have used Google/Blogger/YouTube/etc API with JSON format, you may have seen the link array like

entry =
{
  "link":
    [
      {
        "rel":   "replies",
        "type":  "application/atom+xml",
        "href":  "http://example.com/link1",
        "title": "Post Comments"
      },
      {
        "rel":   "replies",
        "type":  "text/html",
        "href":  "http://example.com/link2",
        "title": "Comments"
      },
      {
        "rel":   "edit",
        "type":  "application/atom+xml",
        "href":  "http://example.com/link3",
      },
      {
        "rel":   "self",
        "type":  "application/atom+xml",
        "href":  "http://example.com/link4",
      },
      {
        "rel":   "alternate",
        "type":  "text/html",
        "href":  "http://example.com/link5",
        "title": "Example Title"
      }
    ]
}

Usually, you want the one which type is text/html and a link to normal webpage. I used to write a for loop, every time I need to get that one. I do mean every time, who knows how much time I wasted in writing the same loop code.

I finally came up a quick and better way using jQuery:

var link = $($.grep(entry.link, function(link, idx) {return link.rel == 'alternate'})).prop('href');
// breakdown
var link = $(
             $.grep(entry.link,
                    function(link, idx) {
                      return link.rel == 'alternate'
                    })
            ).prop('href');

Even its reasonably little longer one-liner, its much more clear than a for loop, and could be same clear for who is not familiar with jQuery. The only drawback I could think of is: it could be slower than for loop, though I haven’t tested.

jQuery accepts objects not just DOM, you can have some methods though you don’t have selector-like to filter, but in this case, $.grep is good enough for processing. The result will be an array of objects and I use prop() to extract the href attribute after the results are turned into jQuery object.

Certainly, you can use just match_results[0].href, directly access object’s href attribute. But you can not guarantee that match_results is not an empty array. If it is, you will get a Type Error, because your code tries to get undefined.href.

Using prop(), it will fail silently by returning undefined and you can check it or just leave it in <a/> if you don’t care.

My Bash script template

2012-01-24T08:41:00.000-08:00

A few days ago, I read Bash Script Templates and I think this might be a good idea to start one of my own. I later found two more posts about it, it's not easy to find one. Either search engine was playing with me or I was too dumb to enter perfect search terms.

I read them and got some concepts from all three of them. Some I like, some I don't. I mingled them altogether with my own thoughts. I created a new repository: template.sh, it could be a good idea for it to have own repo, so you may contribute to it easily.

It's still a work-in-progress, but it already has 177 lines (159 sloc) for first version. I have been thinking that a library could be a better idea, especially when I was writing the parse_options function. It could be working like argument parsing in C or in Python with their libraries, and the code would be more clean.

I had also thought of creating user interface, you can click buttons or be asked questions to enable/disable features, then a template will be generated. But that's a lot of works, not sure if that's worth. I didn't go that way eventually, but a simple file.

Please be aware that I haven't used it yet, so I don't really know if it's practical enough. If you run into trouble, please open an issue. Any feedback is welcome, leave a comment.

Arithmetic Expansion and colon builtin command in Bash

2012-01-23T10:11:00.000-08:00

I just did a system update and got configuration diffs like

-               i=$(($i + 1))
+               : $(( i += 1 ))

If you don't know : builtin yet, read first entry of "SHELL BUILTIN COMMANDS." I have been using it quite often with infinite while loop, e.g.

while :; do
  do_something
done

I never thought of putting something behind it, and that diff is quite genius in my opinion. However I will just write

(( i++ ))

I don't see there is a reason for using Arithmetic Expansion, Evaluation is enough and clear. Expansion will returns the expanded string, which cause command execution if you don't prefix with :, and you will get "command not found" error.

There is a good use of :, putting it after last command of a function or last command of a script, if they have chances to return non-zero and you do not care if that command runs into problem. This way it will clear out the returned value.

log.sh - Bash logging library

2012-01-23T07:05:00.000-08:00

As I mentioned in previous post about Call Stack, the thing is ready on GitHub, log.sh. It's a library for easy logging, here is a quick screenshot of the examples:

As you can see, it's colorful, little too fancy, I hope it didn't blind you. It's new , so I hope someone can jump in and improve it. There are some in it I didn't like, e.g. the templating.

It's easy to use, just source log.sh, then you are good to go. Please read more on GitHub.

Printing out Call Stack in Bash

2012-01-22T14:43:00.000-08:00

Yes, there is such same thing called Call Stack in Bash as you see in C, Python, etc. The information is stored in BASH_SOURCE, BASH_LINENO, and FUNCNAME. They all are arrays with same length/depth. The last item represents main script, the first item is the current function (or main script) of where these arrays are accessed.

Here is some working code, the first file test.sh:

#!/bin/bash
# Copyright 2012 Yu-Jie Lin
# MIT License

# Log Call Stack
LSLOGSTACK () {
  local i=0
  local FRAMES=${#BASH_LINENO[@]}
  # FRAMES-2 skips main, the last one in arrays
  for ((i=FRAMES-2; i>=0; i--)); do
    echo '  File' \"${BASH_SOURCE[i+1]}\", line ${BASH_LINENO[i]}, in ${FUNCNAME[i+1]}
    # Grab the source code of the line
    sed -n "${BASH_LINENO[i]}{s/^/    /;p}" "${BASH_SOURCE[i+1]}"
  done
}

source src.sh
# LINE 18
func2 () {
  func3 foo bar
}
# LINE 22
func1 () {
  func2 a b c
}
# LINE 26
func1 1 2 3

This is extracted from something I am currently working on, which will be released under the MIT License, so this small code is with same license. The second file src.sh is for being sourced:

func3 () {
  LSLOGSTACK
}

And the output:

$ ./test.sh
  File "./test.sh", line 27, in main
    func1 1 2 3
  File "./test.sh", line 24, in func1
      func2 a b c
  File "./test.sh", line 20, in func2
      func3 foo bar
  File "src.sh", line 2, in func3
      LSLOGSTACK

It may look vaguely familiar to you if you are also a Python coder, the code mimics the output of Traceback module.

The explanation of those three arrays can be found in man bash. I am also planning to print out BASH_ARGV for each frame, but that will be in that library I am coding.

RFC for HTTP Status Code 7XX: Developer Errors

2012-01-22T12:18:00.000-08:00

Go check out first on GitHub.

At first glance of the title, even it's a bit of weird, I was kind of believing that was a valid document until I read the code 701. Then, I started laughing. Here is a list of my favorites:

72X - Edge Cases
- 720 - Unpossible
- 721 - Known Unknowns
- 722 - Unknown Unknowns
- 723 - Tricky
- 724 - This line should be unreachable
- 725 - It works on my machine
73X - Fucking
- 735 - Fucking IE
- 736 - Fucking Race Conditions
74X - Meme Driven
- 742 - A kitten dies
76X - Substance-Affected Developer
- 761 - Hungover
- 762 - Stoned
- 763 - Over-Caffienated
- 764 - Under-Caffienated
77X - Predictable Problems
- 777 - Coincidence
- 779 - Off By Too Many To Count Error
78X - Somebody Else's Problem
- 781 - Operations
- 782 - QA
- 783 - It was a customer request, honestly

Someone really needs to get this into standard. ;)

Blogger Random Posts JavaScript function

2012-01-20T06:57:00.000-08:00

There are some Blogger gadget for sending reader to a random post, but they are gadgets, you need to put them into layout. Sometimes, it might not look good, especially you have a custom template.

For me, I am not fond of such thing, so you won’t see this on my blog, but it’s easy to code. Here is a quick result:

Blog ID

And the code

<script>
/* Simple Random Posts function for Blogger
 * Copyright 2012 Yu-Jie Lin
 * Licensed under the MIT License
 */
function blogger_random_post(){
  // You can replace the value with your blog ID
  var blogID = $('#blogID').val();
  // for example:
  //  blogID = "3803541356848955053";
  var BLOGGER_POSTS_API = "http://www.blogger.com/feeds/blogID/posts/summary";
  // appending necessary parameters
  BLOGGER_POSTS_API += "?alt=json-in-script&max-results=1&callback=?";
  // replacing blogID with value
  BLOGGER_POSTS_API = BLOGGER_POSTS_API.replace('blogID', blogID.toString());
  $('#btn-blogger-random').text('Tossing dice...');
  // retrieving posts count
  $.getJSON(BLOGGER_POSTS_API, function(data){
    var posts_count = parseInt(data.feed.openSearch$totalResults.$t);
    // index is 1-based
    var index = Math.floor(Math.random() * posts_count) + 1;
    // retrieving post link
    $.getJSON(BLOGGER_POSTS_API + '&start-index=' + index, function(data){
      $.each(data.feed.entry[0].link, function(idx, link){
        if (link.rel == 'alternate')
          // redirecting
          document.location.href = link.href;
      });
    });
  });
}
$(function(){
  $('#btn-blogger-random').click(blogger_random_post);
});
</script>
<label>Blog ID <input id="blogID" value="3803541356848955053"/></label>
<button id="btn-blogger-random">I'm Feeling Lucky &raquo;</button>

It is not quite efficient for retrieved data from Blogger API, it makes two requests, one for posts count, another for the random post’s link. Blogger will send a huge list of labels if your blog has a lot of labals. However, it is still not too bad.

It only requires jQuery library and you can pretty much put that button anywhere you like with CSS. Even use an image or text line, etc. That’s something gadgets can not give you. Of course, you need to know one or two things about webpages.

If you are interested in putting this into your stuff, feel free to leave questions in comments if you have any problems.

Updating td.sh, Bash time duration library

2012-01-18T13:06:00.000-08:00

More than a year ago, I wrote td.sh. It is very helpful to me, I use it to show the uptime and the Portage tree's freshness. I recently moved it to GitHub, even it's only one short script, less than 100 hundred lines, 19 of them are MIT License text. It deserves its own repository.

It's fairly easy to use, you just feed it the number of seconds.

After moving to GitHub, I added a few features because there was a picky alignment issue from me. I have a script which records Unix timestamps, it calculate those timestamps to current time and show the ages using td.sh. They are not aligned and it looks really ugly as you see in the first case below.

$ ./td.sh 1 2 60 61
1 second
2 seconds
1 minute
1 minute 1 second
$ ./td.sh -p -P 1 2 60 61
 1 second 
 2 seconds
 1 minute 
 1 minute   1 second 
$ ./td.sh -p -P -a 1 2 60 61
 0 days  0 hours  0 minutes  1 second 
 0 days  0 hours  0 minutes  2 seconds
 0 days  0 hours  1 minute   0 seconds
 0 days  0 hours  1 minute   1 second

Now it looks great. Also I updated the test script:

$ ./td-test.sh 
Passed:          0            => "0 seconds"
Passed:          1            => "1 second"
Passed:         -1            => "1 second"
Passed:          2            => "2 seconds"
Passed:         60            => "1 minute"
Passed:         61            => "1 minute 1 second"
Passed:       3599            => "59 minutes 59 seconds"
Passed:       3600            => "1 hour"
Passed:       3601            => "1 hour 1 second"
Passed:       3660            => "1 hour 1 minute"
Passed:       3661            => "1 hour 1 minute 1 second"
Passed:      86400            => "1 day"
Passed:     172799            => "1 day 23 hours 59 minutes 59 seconds"
Passed:     259199            => "2 days 23 hours 59 minutes 59 seconds"
Passed:   31622401            => "366 days 1 second"
Passed:          1 -P         => "1 second "
Passed:         60 -P         => "1 minute "
Passed:         60 -P -p      => " 1 minute "
Passed:         60 -P -p0     => "01 minute "
Passed:         60 -p -a      => " 0 days  0 hours  1 minute  0 seconds"
Passed:         60 -P -a      => "0 days 0 hours 1 minute  0 seconds"
Passed:         60 -P -p -a   => " 0 days  0 hours  1 minute   0 seconds"
0 failures of 22 tests.
1652 conversions per second via function calls.
183 conversions per second via script executions.

If you compare the performance, it's down about 10% after the new features added, but I think I can live with that.

Watching SOPA progress as a soap show

2012-01-18T06:39:00.000-08:00

SOPA is serious problem, please allow me stating that first before you are trying to scold me for taking this so silly in the post title.

You should've read one thing or two about SOPA already. But from what I have experienced, many people still do and not even heard of "SOPA" and they are US citizens.

I have heard of it a while back, but only really paid attention little before the boycott of GoDaddy, a nice episode. They stood by SOPA at first, then softened but calling customers. Finally, they changed side.

Microsoft and Apple are another episode. They were considered as supporter since they are behind BSA. But recently, they claimed against SOPA.

Sony, another one episode. They changed side, too, but it's after Anonymous threatened to take them down alongside other singers, such as Justin Bieber, Lady Gaga, Kim Kardashian, and Taylor Swift. I am not sure what they would be going to do with them.

I don't agree such action (threat, illegal action). It's using wrongdoing for wrongdoing, no matter how you justify your threat, it is wrong after all.

The same goes to SOPA. I can understand those big companies (music and film industry, even tech companies) want to protect the profit which should go into their pocket, but the reality is the money is lost to piracy. Whoever thinks they should not make not much money is wrong or they make enough money, therefore SOPA is bad is terribly wrong. How so? because their products are not necessity to your life, no one points a gun at your head to force you buying.

Free market is free (as in some sense), any company has right to name their product's price. You don't like, then you don't buy.

I would not say SOPA is entirely bad, but the bill can not justify its goal. It overdoes, too powerful. It will be abused eventually as people have foreseen it and I believe it will certainly happen.

Whoever started the bill either has own agenda or clearly does not understand the nature of piracy on the Internet and the Internet. Yes, you block one pirate website, that's just one of a million of websites, which owned by one pirate of one million pirates.

It's as if telling (blocking) your citizen not going to a marker on a sea map, but there are like 100 marks around that one. And the pirate will set up another two new markers! SOPA does nothing about piracy.

You gotta catch the pirate!

Since GoDaddy boycott, many companies have changed sides. It sounds great as if we have achieved something, but the truth is it's just what they are saying.

Moreover, I feel who swings is who you can not trust. They react to what people like not what they believe and that kind of people is dangerous.

People tend to forget. Watch them as hawk if you can.

I am interested in seeing famous singers and actors coming out against SOPA. Unfortunately, I haven't read any on Entertainment section. Come on, you guys, it's great to build up your public image. TMZ, send agents for their comments!

I also wonder why YouTube hasn't posted or changed its website. Maybe it has strong tie with music brands? Well, just speculation, don't quote me. I do use the question mark.

Now, 18th, January is the blackout day, let have some to checkout. As you can see, I put a script on. It looks like

The script was written by me, it seems to have slight issue, it only blacks out the first viewport, you can scroll down to see the rest of page. It should be open source, so it can get fixed quick.

The WordPress hosting:

Straight to the point! You can also see a WordPress plugin and this super fancy stop-sopa:

Well, I think that's overdo. But that's the creativity.

After fancy one, the Google's pathetic, barely noticeable link:

Where is dat creativity, Google? You can do better than that.

And the Wikipedia's:

It's the best one I have seen so far. News is all over about Wikipedia blackout, probably lots of people use it. By the way, don't forget to check out Twitter's Dick Costolo's comment on Wikipedia's blackout decision, that's another episode.

Reddit:

Nice countdown. It seems to really blackout, not using script to overlap.

Flickr, lol:

I don't quite get the point to darken photo as in per photo basis. You might as well as just put a Google-link-like to save the manpower for coding this.

FSF.org:

01000100010010010100011101001001010101000100000101001100

Not a screenshot but the page title. Gotta be nerd as in DIGITAL domain!

Craigslist:

It has Craigslist's spirit, don't you think? I love that PS.

Well, that's pretty much all I have seen on the Internet. Will this blackout day works? Could the bill be stopped? I am not sure, but one thing I am 100% certain:

No matter what will happen on January 24 and in February, the piracy will still be around.

One-liner text using jQuery TextFill plugin

2012-01-16T11:53:00.000-08:00

I recently found out the text in my Lightweight YouTube Player Loader will be almost unreadable if you make the frame too small. The problem enabled me seeking for a solution.

And here are the quick tests I came up with:

[textfill] The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog

[textfill-min] The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog

[ellipsis] The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog

(You can drag the bottom-right trianble handler to resize)

There are three tests above, the first two are helped by the jQuery TextFill plugin by Russ Painter, which I just helped to set up a repository on GitHub. Both have maximal font size at 40px, and 4px and 24px as minimal font size, respectively. The last one uses only pure CSS text-overflow: ellipsis to achieve the goal.

I personally like the middle one, the text resizes. I can see some people may not like that because it may generate different text size in one page, but when you have huge header style, pure ellipsis will not be readable unless you remember setting up title attribute, so hinttext can show the full text.

The fancy non standard <marquee>-like scripts may be good in some cases, but it requires timer for constant updates. I prefer the static style.

Here is the nearly complete code:

<script src="https://raw.github.com/jquery-textfill/jquery-textfill/master/jquery.textfill.min.js"></script>

<style type="text/css" media="screen">
#textfill-tester {
  background-color: #aaa;
  color: black;
  width: 400px;
  height: 200px;
}
#line-textfill-nomin {
  background-color: #faa;
}
#line-textfill {
  background-color: #afa;
  width: 100%;
}
#line-ellipsis {
  background-color: #aaf;
}
.line-textfill {
  font-size: 36px;
  height: 1.25em;
  line-height: 1.25em;
  white-space: nowrap;
  overflow: hidden;
  text-overflow: ellipsis;
}
.line-textfill * {
  vertical-align: middle;
}
</style>

<script>
function init_textfill_tester() {
  $('#line-ellipsis').attr('title', $('#line-ellipsis').text());
  $('#line-textfill-nomin').textfill({maxFontPixels: 36});
  $('#line-textfill').textfill({maxFontPixels: 36, minFontPixels: 24});
}
$(init_textfill_tester);
</script>

<div id="textfill-tester">
  <div id="line-textfill-nomin" class="line-textfill">
    <span>[textfill] The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog</span>
  </div>
  <div id="line-textfill" class="line-textfill">
    <span>[textfill-min] The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog</span>
  </div>
  <div id="line-ellipsis" class="line-textfill">
    <span>[ellipsis] The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog</span>
  </div>
</div>

I haven’t decided if I want to make text resize, but mostly just too lazy to update the code. ;)

International Peace Day Concert

2011-09-21T12:20:00.000-07:00

The following Justin.tv channel The Bedford Live is one of my favorite channel. And today, it is hosting a special event:

21 September is International Day of Peace and Peace In Our Lifetime are holding an annual "Global United Party for Peace".

It just began...

Blogger Stats is now OUT OF CONTROL!

2011-09-20T18:01:00.000-07:00

I think I have ever CAPS my title (I control myself not to CAP all), but this is really out of control!)

141 (27.81%) out of 507 pageviews are spams and this is just yesterday.

I am going to post on help forum.

Unexpected coffee for x11grabr

2011-09-17T11:35:00.000-07:00

I was cleaning up the subscription videos and recommendations on YouTube. After I finished I noticed I got a new comment on this video, so I checked my reader and immediately notice the $.

This is the second time I received money and the first time I didn't ask for it. It just came unexpectedly.

To be honesty, I don't consider x11grabr is at the stage for donation and I personally don't think putting a donation button will really get me some extra money. I did recall once someone asked how can send me some money for something I wrote, but I gratefully turned down the offer.

I feel no shame to admit most of my code is actually at garbage grade as in term of WINE, therefore I don't really want to receive donation. I would feel bad for it. Who doesn't like money, I do also, but I just don't feel right to receive the money.

Since the money is already in my account, I guess there is some button to return the money but I won't do it, that is another reason I won't do it. If this generous gentleman asks me for my Paypal email first, I would thank him and ask him for comments/suggestions instead of sending me money. (I am guessing my email isn't so secret after all.)

As of x11grabr, it has been almost two weeks no pushes to GitHub and actually not much on my computer. I did try to fix the A/V out-of-sync issue by using ffmpeg/libav as library, so x11grabr can output a container with time code, that should be able to fix it.

However, I didn't have much progress, I can generate a Matroska (MKV) with still a rawvideo (bgra pix format) from XImage's data, but the video just doesn't get right. There is something I don't use correctly. Unfortunately, I don't know what it is and to tell the truth, I don't exactly understand how to use ffmpeg/libav to generate a media file correctly.

I believe I have actually thought about to pause the development until... well, I am not sure. The project has been watched by three people and now the money. I feel I would need to continue one way or another.

I have asked at #libav on IRC and that's how I knew I should generate a media file. I could just ask again, but I don't really like using IRC.

A couple days ago, I wanted to post on ArchLinux's forums as a community contribution project announcement as well as a help wanted thread (I don't use Arch anymore, but Arch does have the best community in my opinion), but didn't do it.

Anyway, I would need to clean up my current working copy, so if I still can't figure out on my own, then I can ask for help with cleaner code.

Right now, I don't have any mood to do anything.

(If you already know how to resolve the A/V out-of-sync issue as well as generate media file using ffmpeg/libav, or you just want to join the project even you are learning like me, please shoot me an email or message me on GitHub)

Googlebot noticed your site, https:///, uses an SSL certificate which may be considered invalid by web browsers

2011-09-16T14:19:00.000-07:00

Thanks for the notification!

Here is the email I just received:

Dear Webmaster,

Your site, https://<mydomain>/, uses an SSL certificate which is not recognized by web browsers. This will cause many web browsers to block users from accessing your site, or to display a security warning message when your site is accessed.

To correct this problem, please get a new SSL certificate from a Certificate Authority (CA) that is trusted by web browsers.

Thanks,

The Google Web Crawling Team

Where <MYDOMAIN> is yjl.im. At first glance, I thought this was new kind of phishing but it's real, the message was also on Webmaster Tools.

First of all, I believe I have never written down http://yjl.im/ anywhere, needless to mention the one with HTTPS. So, I guess Google is very kind to check that for you. If it isn't not this email, I haven't thought about to check it.

And here is a screenshot of the certificate:

The naked domain has URL forwarding to www.yjl.im. I use my registrar's free service, so I have no control of it. If Google App Engine could operate on naked domain, I wouldn't need that.

I don't understand why their servers listen to HTTPS, that makes no sense. Anyway, I might turn off URL forwarding or see what my registrar would say about it or just forget the whole thing...

Post for testing HTML support in Disqus comments

2011-09-15T18:26:00.000-07:00

I just replied to a comment and noticed that I could actually used <code/>. So here is the post for testing and for adding related text and CSS styles.

Also here is a list of what HTML tags Disqus supports.

Upcoming 561777 week, or weeks

2011-09-12T09:42:00.000-07:00

It will be like 5617, I know, I am sure about it. But look from the other side, I can do something I have been stalling. Yea, right, who are you going to kid? That kind of speaking is for foolish people.

Gonna loop this for one hundred times. Minimum. We will see how many times I actually listen to, hopefully this won't get my account suspended.

Somehow, this sad scene, which is also one of my favorite film scenes, makes me calm. Every time, this kind of 5617 pops up, I open my player load this video, switch repeat on, then keep it playing over and over again. I might have listened to this clip for one thousand times.

I wait until I get really sick of it. Yes, it's my favorite, it's like you eat 10 cakes in a row, you still puke no matter how delicious the cake is. When I finally have enough for this video, I shut the player down.

Then, I will feel. It's still the same. What do you expect? Everything changes? The world gets better? You think there is still hope? For whatsoever's sake, this is not some kind of Life Inspiration Speaker with some book has his or her photo on it which has big text reading "Change your life in ten steps."

This is that kind of 5617. They are just like you and me, 5617 still 5617 in their life. That's their job to make you think you can make change. The truth is it's you not them, nor what they say or write. 561777 people still 561777.

Just as you think the 5617 has finally come to the end, no, it's not. Another 5617 follows up, even dump a bigger 5617. Who knows what would come after this new 5617.

Anyway, who gives a 5617.

Frak 8vbd. Amen.

bzen2 - the dzen2 which bounces

2011-09-11T11:56:00.000-07:00

I just finish this bzen2.sh script, it is used to replace twmn. It's a good program but I recently found out it has strange memory usage issue and I can't quite find out what's the cause. If I leave it runs for hours and have music plays, so the notifications would pop up every a few minutes. After hours, it could uses several hundred MB of memory.

I don't want to report since I don't think I can commit to help find out the bug and the author committed the feature and then removed it. I asked about it, didn't get a response yet. Anyway, I would just drop it since I feel my Bash script does a little better, though it's not a daemon. Well, I don't really need a notification daemon actually.

Back to bzen2, the name is very clear, b stands for bouncing and zen2 for dzen2. So, it bounces and that's basically all it does. No options. All arguments after the command will be treated as a string and been fed to dzen2.

There is only one bouncing mode, which is below the cursor. Check out this clip:

(A/V is out of sync, an issue of x11grabr, haven't started to fix it. All music in the video can be found on Jamendo)

This script uses a simple C code to get cursor information, so it can keep dzen2 below the cursor. It also depends on xwininfo, xprop, and wmctrl for necessary controlling.

Sexy bouncing!

My most sincere gratitude to spammers and Blogger staff

2011-09-10T05:21:00.000-07:00

Thank you, spams! Thank you for bringing 60 poor people to my blog posts, I believe that they are real people and eager to find out what's going on and how to get rid of those.

Thank you for filling up my boring traffic source with your creative member profiles.

Thank you, you kindly Ukrainian people for spending time sending delicated fabric HTTP referrer header to Blogger server. It must cost you some bandwidth to send to a million of blogs or even more. On be half of all our bloggers, we thank you. I apologize if some come from other nations and I didn't give you credit. You can leave your information in comment, I will add as soon as I finish process the invaluable message in the folder named Spam in Gmail.

Also, thank you, you genius high moral programmers for building programs for those people. I know you guys build them not for money, because that's only a few bucks, that's all those people can pay you.

And how can I miss our beloved Blogger staff? They let us enjoy reading the amazing statistics. For the last few days, it's been a fantastic period of time. The number get higher and higher. Who knows, I might hit one thousand pageviews next month.

Lastly, for a comparison, just to show you how bad product Google Analytics is, can not detect HTTP referrer which web server receives. The following screenshot is made by increase the size of new Google Analytics report's embed, so you can see clearly. The line on top is pageviews, the other is visits. As you can see, Blogger Stats gives you 100+ more pageviews.

Don't use Google Analytics, Blogger Stats is better. No installation required, better (bigger as in number) results.

Love,
P.

Half way to join to 500 club

Now I know I will be screwed by new GAE pricing model

2011-09-09T14:52:00.000-07:00

Firstly: Hey, GAE team thanks for updating the side-by-side new price info in Billing History.

They just posted an update. (My TL;DR: Still prepare to move out if you have already decided to do so.) Believe me, there will be another flood coming, just see.

In my previous, I mentioned that I have an app which receives 2.5M pageviews per month. That is just roughly speaking. It has two versions, the newer one is just a simple JavaScript which is run on other websites.

Which is actually the reason of suffering running out of free quota. I had to cease using GAE processing or that app is easily capped. But the version is different than the original, the original processes and stores data. It's fairly simple but processing really uses a lot of resources. The original currently serves 80 to 100 websites a day, it still runs just didn't accept new websites.

It receives close to 200K requests a day, average CPU time is 23 (7 for API), uses 96% of overall CPU time. No errors. Since it uses 96%, I am pretty sure that I would redirect to new script, I think they are compatible. Not really sure, can't remember last time I updated either of them.

Here is the updated new pricing estimation:

Clearly, I will need to react. 300+ websites (200 from new script) use my stuff, I can't really just let their viewers see error message saying the BRPS is out of service.

But that's not all, this blog is also affected. Currently, it uses 26+ instance hours (I have no idea what that means). Basically, the app I uses to serve for this blog only provides static files and font files, though there does have some Python code running for HTTP header setting and checking if request font path is valid. I don't understand why it costs so much free quota, or it doesn't just new pricing has much lower quota?

I will need to look into this.

Still not ends here yet. Third app, it uses 24+. Crap! Wait, not yet. Fourth app, 30+. Darn! Get back to your seat, fifth and sixth apps, they have heavy cron tasks. 50+, two corpses.

That's all, thanks for reading.

<THIS IS A SEPARATOR IN ASCII SO IT WON'T SUCK UP FREE QUOTA>

One thing this personal post says very right, GAE has been in three year preview state. (I only skim it)

This is how I look at it. Three years is way too long and we get tired of it. In the beginning, you were very excited of new feature just being added, bugs got fixed. But as the version number grew, you didn't even want to download the new version, needless to read the changelog carefully.

You just want to the existing code to continue running as before. You don't want to use new API or even some experimental hooks, you just can care less how much improved performance you can get by using new stuff.

The old one runs well, why bother to update? Not to mention there might be bug in new thing, who knows when that would explode? Old is stable already, life is exciting already, I need no more surprise.

Free quota now is really free. I used to feel, it's not easy to use them all if your program is small. Now, it's like dining at 100$+ restaurant, you eat for atmosphere not the food for your stomach.

Oh, wait, just saw this: "Increased free Instance Hours: We are increasing the number of free Instance Hours from 24 to 28," does that mean I have one more dessert? Come on, ever heard a word "double?"

"We’re now giving you almost eight weeks before introducing the new pricing," then I will start tuning.

Starting on October 31st. Anyone with me?

<THIS IS ANOTHER SEPARATOR IN ASCII SO IT WON'T SUCK UP FREE QUOTA>

Edit: a couple of minutes after I hit the publish button, I received the following letter from GAE regarding the recent M/S datastore outage and my app brps.

Subject: Google App Engine application brps affected by unapplied writes

Dear Developer,

During the day of Aug 19th, 2011, Google App Engine experienced a
serving outage that lasted approximately 2 hours affecting Master
Slave application. HRD applications were not impacted. In the minutes
leading up to the outage, we received a number of writes from your
application that we were unable to replicate to the secondary
Datastore. This caused the secondary Datastore to be slightly out of
sync when we began serving traffic as part of the outage recovery
process. We call these type of writes “unapplied writes.” Rest
assured, unapplied writes do not impact the transactional consistency
and have not corrupted your application data.

During the recovery of the failed data center, we were able to produce
a log of the unapplied writes that occurred during the outage
period. As a service to you, these unapplied writes are now available
from within your application’s to make it easy for you to re-integrate
them. We have also developed a number of tools and example on how to
do so. If you are interested in better understanding this logged data
and how you can work with it, please visit the Unapplied Writes FAQ:
http://code.google.com/appengine/kb/unappliedwrites.html

The following application you own has unapplied writes:
brps

You can determine which entities are impacted by unapplied writes by
looking at the Admin Console Datastore Viewer. If you see any Kinds in
the Kind dropdown box with the prefix __unapplied_write__, this Entity
Kind has unapplied writes that can be re-integrated.

No action is required on your part; you can choose to ignore these
writes if you choose. We're making these writes available to you
because we want you to know that whenever possible, we take every step
we can to recover any data, complete or incomplete, that you attempt
to store on App Engine.

Additionally, if you have any follow up questions, feel free to fill a
production ticket on the public issue tracker:
http://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/entry?template=Production%20issue

Note that application using the High Replication Datastore for Storage
are not impacted by datacenter failovers, because App Engine commits
data synchronously to multiple datacenters before returning to the
applications.

We strongly suggest you to migrate to HRD to prevent future datacenter
failovers to impact your application.

We are about to release an improved HRD migration tool, if you haven’t
already we strongly encourage you to signup for early testing here:
http://goo.gl/3jrXu

We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you and thank
you for your continued support of Google App Engine.

The App Engine team

© 2011 Google Inc. 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043

You have received this mandatory email service announcement to notify
you about important maintenance for your Google App Engine
application.

IDGAD. Archived.

I have a 1,438,180 + 36,772*30 pageviews service, anyone wants to acquire it?

2011-09-09T11:53:00.000-07:00

Alright, this is a null-grade post. Nothing really important except the first part.

One of my favorite channel, Food Wishes, has just announced that they are acquired by Allrecipes.com. If you don't know either, well, I guess you probably a fast food lover.

Aside: There is nothing wrong with fast food, I don't get why some people so dislike them to emphasis their taste or healthy diet. It's how you make, not how fast food is cooked.

Anyway, I read the press release and just realized how big Food Wishes is. 2 million views and work independently, Chef John really does an amazing job.

If you have watched his videos, that number isn't really hard to imagine. His videos is so fun too watch, especially when he make some pun connection.

Back to the service I was talking about. (Was I?) Let's take a look at screenshots first.

I do not edit it or use Firebug to make fun of screenshot. They are untouched, SOO<del>C</del>S. (Straight-Out-Of-Screen)

That's just v1.5 (I think I can call that), there is an old v1.0, which generates 36,772 requests in last 24 hours. Multiply it by 30, that would be 1,103,160+. (The real number should be little higher, because it's actually 23h-24h window) Sum up them, it's 2,541,340.

Holy smoky bacon with cheese, I have no idea my simple script serves 2.5+ million times a month. If that wasn't Chef John, I wouldn't have looked into it.

If I nuke the service someday, I wonder if I would hear some swears?

I wish this statistics was my blog's.

PS. that service is NFS, the question mark sneaks into title by itself.

Does Google hire teenage girl?

2011-09-09T11:03:00.000-07:00

At first glance, I did have such thought. Too shame it didn't have waves around it, or it would be really cute. xD

From Vimperator to Pentadactyl

2011-09-09T07:12:00.000-07:00

Once again, I switch to something better. But this time is different, it's not the Vimperator broken, well it is in some sense of interpretation. It's because the basis of philosophy. I would never expect myself switching because this kind of point of view. I always think people who so insist in using Open Source are like Saints. (Hope you get what I really mean in that)

Anyway, after I posted about encryption status in Vimperator, I stumbled on this wiki page, VimperatorVsPentadactyl. Now I see why they have been getting rid of us.

Right now, I have switched to Pentadactyl. Here is the diff of what I have changed. It virtually produces exactly same result as before.

A few things I have learnt:

Vim syntax file is generated by running :mks in Pentadactyl. It will put the file at right place for you.
Colorscheme extension is .penta.
guioptions not toolbars, since that's where it was. It also has option for statusline, so I don't need to hack the style anymore.
You need to define function in window in your ~/.pentadactylrc, i.e. window.func = function(){};. this !== window.
:if :elseif :else :endif is nice.

Pentadactyl intergates statusline with the Addon bar, so those addon button, you can see next to the statusline. I personally do not like this. But I like the loading indication, which is what Vimperator nuked. And the encryption status, also what Vimperator nuked. I now understand how many stuff Vimperator has erased.

I have known Pentadactyl long ago, at that time, Vimperator has made a lot of changes, so I decided not to switch. But, it doesn't really seem to change much, some of my code I didn't even touch.

Two things I have to complain is now I need to get used to C-V and C-Z after I finally got comfortable with inhuman Ins or S-Esc.

The latter is the worst keybinding throughout the computing history, though insert key isn't much better, that takes me eons to get used of them. They should've just tell those people, use your mouse to uninstall Vimperator, problem solved!

The second thing, the name is...

Time for the final step:

:extdelete Vimperator

Mission accomplished.

kernelroll

2011-09-08T16:35:00.000-07:00

This just... rickrolls!

Also checkout this one-liner using SystemTap.

I didn't compile the original, so I re-compiled my kernel to add required flags, just get my computer rickrolling! I did slight modification:

sudo stap -g -e 'probe kernel.function("do_filp_open") { p = kernel_string($pathname); l = strlen(p); ext = substr(p, l - 4, l) ; if ( ext == ".mp3" || ext == ".ogg" || ext == ".mp4" ) { $pathname = %{ (long)"/tmp/RickRoll.flv" %}; } }'

sudo stap    -e 'probe kernel.function("do_filp_open") { p = kernel_string($pathname); l = strlen(p); ext = substr(p, l - 4, l) ; if ( ext == ".mp3" || ext == ".ogg" || ext == ".mp4" ) { system("mplayer -fs /tmp/RickRoll.flv") ; } }'

To tell the truth, I don't know where to get the MP3, so I use YouTube video and it gets even better. Video player sure has no problems, MPD has no problem as well.

If you have an empty audio file for the media player and supply -loop 0 to mplayer... full screen + looping, FTW!

I didn't try these: Hijacking normal files like txt when editor opening (Don't really know SystemTap, but I think execname() is right way to check, right?) and replace with lyrics. Images, mehhay! I think this would replace all images you view on web when browser loads from cache.

All my playlists are rickroll'd.

Never gonna say good bye, well sang.

Same old story, fake forums profile pages referrer

2011-09-08T13:55:00.000-07:00

I have seen this type of spam long ago, but didn't mention it.

Blogger keeps adding new features just like other Google product/service. But leaves plenty of issues behind, you go open a issue tracker, 90% you will see lots of issues are damn old and unresolved.

As a normal user and someone who can code, I am really sick of it. It's not like you can fix on your end, they are server-side things. You can workaround, you can pretend you didn't see it, but you know the issues are still there.

Do they really use their own products? They must be aware of it.

There is no doubt that Google creates a lot of good stuff, but also no denial about this: they also close/kill/terminate/abandon good stuff.

Google, assign some developers for this kind of thing and old issues! Hire some relationship managers like Jen and bridge API users (the developers) and your developers. You don't need to deal with normal users since you have lots of so-called "experts" users on your help forums already.

But it's Google, I am just nobody, not someone who tweets would get hundreds retweets in an hour. Not someone who whispers would cause one hundred follow-up comments.

So, I would just suck it up and leave it rusty in the dungeon behind the red door.