Unfinished Website

CSharp Cassandra Client

admin — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 05:02:03 +0000

I was surprised to see how hard it is to find a csharp (C#) cassandra client library. There were 50 step processes and incomplete libraries galore. But somehow I finally ran across hectorsharp. It met all my needs and is working like a charm. Throw in the JsonFx library for parsing my JSON returned from Cassandra and I’m good to go.

Pulling All Database Table Sizes from PostgresSQL

Tommy Unger — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 22:06:58 +0000

I was surprised that I didn’t easily find a query which gives me all of the table sizes for all of my Postgres database table. I did find this nice bit:
SELECT pg_size_pretty(pg_total_relation_size(table_name))

But I wanted to take it a step further and get the list of the largest tables in my database. This query worked like a charm:
SELECT table_name, pg_size_pretty(pg_total_relation_size(table_name)) FROM information_schema.tables WHERE table_type='BASE TABLE' AND table_schema = 'public' ORDER BY pg_total_relation_size(table_name) DESC

Finally, I wanted to know if any of these tables had a column name containing the text “org id”.
SELECT t.table_name, pg_size_pretty(pg_total_relation_size(t.table_name))
, case when cn.table_name is not null then ‘Yes’ ELSE ” end as “has_col”
FROM information_schema.tables t
LEFT JOIN
(select distinct c.table_name
from information_schema.columns c
where c.column_name LIKE ‘%org%id%’) cn on cn.table_name = t.table_name
WHERE t.table_type=’BASE TABLE’ AND table_schema = ‘public’
ORDER BY pg_total_relation_size(t.table_name) DESC
;

Configuring MySQL service on Windows to use a different my.ini file

Tommy Unger — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 19:41:18 +0000

MySQL 5 conveniently comes with a windows installer which works flawlessly to get the novice user up and running on the ubiquitous open source database. However, another way to put mysql onto a windows box is without the installer by just downloading the zipped binaries.

Once you’ve unzipped the binaries, you have a few steps to take:
Step 1. Run mysqld –install – This will setup the mysql daemon as a windows service. It will look in your windows base directory %WINDIR% for a my.ini file. (On windows the my.conf file is called my.ini, and I have no idea why this is)

Step 2. Open regedit. And change this key
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\MySQL\ImagePath to this:
“\bin\mysqld” –defaults-file=”\my.ini” MySQL
or this, if you just want to use one of the default medium sized instance ini file:
“\bin\mysqld” –defaults-file=”\my-medium.ini” MySQL

Email Spam and an argument for gmail

Tommy Unger — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 23:39:55 +0000

This post Survey: People really do click on spam ads really got me thinking about a few things. First, my history.

Back in some year, let’s say 1998 or maybe 1997 I got my first portal email address (had an aol address and a college address before that). It was tommy_unger@yahoo.com . Yes, I’m putting the email right out there for all of the bots to parse, and I expect the spam onslaught continue. The address is absolutely worthless because it is 99% spam! Much of it in foreign languages (arabic or persian or something from that part of the world seems popular these days. Then of course there’s the cryptic meaningless text, or just “Hi, come to my website so we can have sexy time”. My 8 month old son could probably detect spam better than Yahoo’s algorithms.

Then, finally, came gmail. I signed up with a better address. Same name as above without the underscore, and low-and-behold, I see about one spam message a month. I remember seeign a video a few years back about gmail’s spam detection and it seems right on the money. What I also like is that gmail also rarely(maybe never) has the false positive case where they dump an important message into the spam bucket.

So, back to the article I began with… It mentions:

few users ever click the “report as spam” button on their email client; most just delete spam messages as they arrive (and fail to help train their spam filters in the process)

I’ve got a hunch that gmail has higher rates of this “report as spam” click than the other email clients. I also have a feeling that yahoo mail’s “report as spam” button is just a black hole that ever gets used to clean up anyone’s spam.

Combine gmail’s possible higher “report as spam” click rate with a probable much better algorithm and/or system and you get a much nicer web mail experience in my opinion. So, thanks yahoo tech blog (you still do content well, of course), for reminding me why I love gmail.

Launched a little family blog

Tommy Unger — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 03:52:20 +0000

Where are the Ungers? helps people keep track of us. Highlights include video, geocoding (using google) of locations, iphone and other phone pictures, and much more.

Microsoft Product Names

Tommy Unger — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 03:53:06 +0000

I’ve come across the longest product name I’ve ever seen for a Microsoft Software Product. Ladies and gentlemen, I present:
Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 Speech Server Developer Edition
or, as they say around Redmond: MOCS2SSDE

It’s always been a hobby of mine to keep track of what Microsoft is naming its products. It’s always in such sharp contrast with apple’s naming conventions, “iphone”, “imac”, etc. Microsoft seems to think the more it throws into the name, the more likely people will buy it. Well, I don’t buy it. If only MSFT would just come out with a spreadsheet that looks like this in their annual report:

Class	Product	Revenue	Profit
OS	Windows Vista Consumer	1,000	500
OS	Windows Vista Business	2,500	1,200
OS	Windows Server	2,500	1,500
Office Suite	Consumer	2,500	1,500
Office Suite	Business	12,500	6,500
Hardware	xbox	11,500	-11,500
Games	Halo, et. al.	5,500	-1,500
Who knows?	Enterprise Business Server Small Business Professional Platinum Edition	1,500	-111,500

As a sometimes shareholder of MSFT, maybe I just don’t dig deeply enough into things. Maybe it’s all out there already. But, if it’s not out there already, this sheet would go a long way to helping me figure out what’s going on in Redmond.

Recursively remove subversion (.svn) directories

Tommy Unger — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 19:50:02 +0000

I don’t care if this is a nerdy post or if it’s duplicated all over the internet. I just want to put it out there for reference. Here’s the linux/unix/cygwin code for recursively removing subversion directories.
rm -rf `find . -name .svn`
I found the example here, but you can never have too much duplicate content floating around the internet.

Google Analytics Sample code for a Third-Party Website

Tommy Unger — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 08:35:48 +0000

I’m very surprised at how there appears to be just one lone example/sample showing the use of Google Analytics for a cross-domain, third party website, or e-commerce implementation. Or maybe I’m just a bad googler. My scenario involves hosting content which includes a subscribe or buy now link that takes the user to a third party e-commerce site where the actual order is processed.

Here’s what I found. I searched for “google analytics cross domain” and this came up as the second It should be first) link:
google analytics cross domain. Ok, that’s the API, but without knowing a few tricks I couldn’t get it to work.

So then I tried, “google analytics third party”, and once again, it’s not the first result, it’s the third. But I found a decent example with google analytics third party

The only thing missing is highlighting of the important code. Here is my new and improved example for adding google analytics code to your third-party e-commerce or other external partner site. I’ve included a small wordpress modification which can also come in handy.

Add the proper onclick code to your anchor links.
onclick="pageTracker._link(this.href); return false;"
Just for the heck of it, I’ve don’t this with my Wordpress bookmark links by modifying the functions.php in the theme directory:
function AddTrackingGA($content) { $link = "pageTracker._link(this.href);return false;"; $content = preg_replace("/]+)>/sim", "", $content); return $content; } add_filter('wp_list_bookmarks', 'AddTrackingGA');
Or, if you like, just add
to any anchor () tags that go to your third party (soon to be)tracking enabled site.

Put this code on your own site (or modify your current tags to add the bold code). And of course, don’t forget to change the _getTracker call to your tracking tag.

Put this content on your third party, e-commerce website. Place it on all pages which you have access to on the third party site. In my case I put it on the subscription form as well as the thank you for your successful subscription page:

That’s more code than I typically like to throw around in a blog post, but that will have to do.

Finally, I’m impatient and want to verify things are working. Because of Google’s rather difficult 24 hour latency, I like to verify that my Google Analytics tracking code is actually working. There are two tools that I use typically to confirm that Google Analytics is working. I like Fiddler for Windows which is a robust http and web traffic proxy sniffer that gives me every detail about my browser’s requests and the server’s responses. Or, the les robust, but still effective LiveHTTPHeaders plugin for Mozilla Firefox can give you a similar confirmation. That confirmation is a request for a little gif hosted by google-analytics.com that looks like this:
http://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmwv= … … …

If you see that request in Fiddler or LiveHTTPHEaders along with your website requests and third party requests, then you have successfully installed Google Analytics in a third party, multiple domain scenario.

A new beginning for something I’ll never finish

Tommy Unger — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 07:56:06 +0000

I’ve been developing websites for over 10 years now. Fortunately, my earliest work is safely hidden away. I’m sure it include blink tags and animated gifs. I could probably even put an email directly on the site without getting spammed. From the first “web page” in 1996 it was probably another year before I really made another web page, but I really don’t know. I don’t know if I was hooked yet, but it wouldn’t be long before I was captured by the ease, simplicity and power of publishing on the web. I blame the never finishing part on the ease. So, for the first few years I would just spend most of my time surfing and seeing what was out there.

My first own website highlights came in 1998 was serving up mp3s from my dorm room at Georgia Tech. At the peak, I was the number one search result on Altavista for “beatles mp3″. The moment I saw the high rank, I took things down before I got kicked out of school. Thanks to radiohead mp3s, the only artifact left from that site is having a great friend in Rome, Italy whom my wife and I visited on our honeymoon.

As far as a record of my earliest “work”, I found this one, but couldn’t get anything to load, although apparently it was just a bunch of random quotes with a dollar sign background: abysss.com 1999. Yes, I added and extra s. I always seemed to be the last to go after the good domain names. Why didn’t I just get youtube when I could?

This is by far my single [greatest] unfinished website: gtwreck.com. If web.archive.org didn’t exist, I wouldn’t even have a record of this site. There are elements of twitter in some of the earlier iterations. I look back at these iterations and just wish that I could have kept things going. Now, with unfinished website, there are no more excuses. This website will always be unfinished and hopefully it will always be up.

The main things I hope to do here are to bring my prior work back from the dead and more importantly showcase my latest stuff. All with the caveat that it’s never finished. Oh, and hover over that lightbulb to see the light.