Tech Blog

The message they got was:

I knew that the site and file were both available and a bit of hunting around I was reminded that IE used to have issues with Gzip encoding in the past - but I presumed that it was a thing of the past.

I also noticed that when downloading the file Firefox would not show a progress bar but would instead show a "indeterminate progress" bar.

Looking at the headers the it turned out that there was no Content-Length header but there was a header as follows:

To fix this I added some more exclusions to my mod_gzip rules to not zip some particular file types.

Now its working a treat. It would also be possible to do this only for IE - but most of the files we use on this are already well compressed to gzip compression doesn't help too much anyway.

Cheers, Mark

• Makes it practical for students to practice Oral and Aural skills
• Is efficient and effective for teachers, as they can listen to each student individually at a time to suit them
• Can be used for homework assignments or “High Stakes Assessments”

Learnosity are creating the next generation of language and assessment technology for use in schools and education worldwide. The current product portfolio includes:

• High availability web based systems
• Cross platform software (Windows, Mac and Linux)
• iPhone/Android native applications
• Telephony/VOIP and SMS applications

We need someone who can:

• Use Javascript or Actionscript to create great user interfaces
• Develop highly scalable web applications using ColdFusion, PHP or similar
• Cut code with the best in the world

You will also need to be:

• keen to continue learning new technologies
• able to have a conversation with non technical people
• enthusiastic and ready to push the boundaries

You'll need:

• 1-3 years of programming experience
• Experience in at least one Client side language (Actionscript or Javascript/jQuery)
• Experience in at least one Server side language (eg PHP, Java, ColdFusion, etc)
• Understanding of Object Oriented design
• Understanding of XHTML and CSS

It would be good if you have:

• A degree in Computer Science, Engineering or similar.
• been working with open source tools
• Experience with Adobe AIR or Flex
• been playing around with iPhone/Android applications
• experience with some of Linux/VOIP/SIP/Asterisk/Jabber/XMPP

This is a full time role and you will be working in a casual workplace with flexible hours in the Sydney CBD. Salary commensurate with experience.

If this sounds like the job for you, email a covering letter explaining why you'll be great and your resume to mark@learnosity.com - no agencies please.

It was all relatively painless and it's quite amazing how far Wine has come.

Installing Lego Digital Designer

Go to the Lego Digital Designer site and download the Windows version.

I got LDD 3.1.3 which was the latest version available at the time.

Now - to make it all work you need to install Wine and I used the latest version from the wine PPA team.

Add the wine ppa:

You'll then see:

Now to update the list of available software:

And then install wine and winetricks

Wine lets you run Windows software on other operating systems, in this case Ubuntu.

Wine tricks provides a simple way to install native versions of some of the libraries that are not 100% compatible - by looking at the Wine App DB I discovered that it had problems with missing font's (Tahoma) and scrolling which was fixed by installing Quartz.

Then install double click on the install file for LDD and it should be up an running in no time.

If you get a warning about it not being Executable you may need to right click on the application and select Properties - and then from the Permissions tab select "Allow executing file as program"

Son is now very happy with Lego Digital Designer :-)

This has been something I've been looking at, but haven't found a compelling reason for one over the other.

Proxy AJP is claimed to be faster as it is a "Wire protocol" but I couldn't find any benchmarks around this.

So I decided to do a very quick and dirty benchmark to satisfy my curiosity. This is not a scientific process, I just ran a simple railo testpage on the same machine with 50 threads of jmeter requests hitting it.

First I enabled proxy_http and ran it four times, then enabled proxy_ajp and repeated. The config is below:

Results:

The results showed that the proxy_http module was faster - i.e. more requests per second could be pushed through.

I'm putting this down to the fact that proxy_ajp has to convert the http request into it's binary format, while proxy_http really just has to pass it along.

In different scenarios and network configurations the results may be different, but for now I'm going to stick with the http proxy.

Proxy AJP has one other benefit, in that is passes along some extra flags such as whether the request is https or not, but for our purposes we don't need this.

Cheers, Mark

If you get them in the same column but need them in two columns here are two little formulae to do it:

Cheers, Mark

To do this I used a SSH sock proxy like I have previously blogged about.

So I fired this up so that I could review the site I wanted to look at. It worked a charm through firefox but there is no where to set up the proxy in jmeter.

To make it work you need to let the JVM know what proxy to use like so:

No jmeter will use the socks proxy on port 8080 on my local machine. Nice.

About Learnosity

Our service:

• Makes it practical for students to practice Oral and Aural skills
• Is efficient and effective for teachers, as they can listen to each student individually at a time to suit them
• Can be used for homework assignments or “High Stakes Assessments”

About the role:

• Create and implement test plans for each project
• Conduct functional and non-functional testing including UAT, Load and regression testing
• Review and sign off test reports
• Track, allocate and prioritise areas to be tested
• Manage the release process from development through staging and production
• Report and manage defect analysis process including logging, tracking and testing
• Produce high quality documentation and release notes
• Implement automated testing and build processes

Who we looking for:

Qualifications & Attributes

• Self motivated person willing to continually learn and improve themselves and processes around them.
• Tertiary qualifications at associate diploma level or equivalent in computing or a related discipline or an equivalent combination of training and experience.
• Minimum of 2 years work experience within a dot com or software development environment.

Knowledge & experience

• Ability to translate requirements and functional specifications into test cases
• Hands on experience across multiple applications of end-user technologies
• Understanding of Project Management concepts
• Strong skills and history working in a test and release management position in a dot com or software development environment
• Testing methodologies and procedures, including load testing
• Knowledge and/or experience of testing tools and techniques
• Release management procedures
• Highly developed written skills
• Excellent proven communication and people skills including client liaison and documentation
• Demonstrated ability to organise and plan work with care and attention to detail while meeting deadlines
• Ability to work independently and as part of a team

This is a full time role and you will be working in a casual workplace with flexible hours in the centre of Sydney.

If this sounds like the job for you, email your resume and covering letter to mark@learnosity.com - no agencies please.

• Automatically fixing file system errors
• Ignoring directories from updatedb

Automatically fixing file system errors

If you have a remote server, i.e. at a data center 10km or 1000km away this should prevent some panic when rebooting the server remotely.

Ext2/3 will do a filesystem check after a certain number of reboots or time. Most of the time any errors are fixed automatically, but certain errors by default require the root shell and the administrator to fix them. I've seen a few of these happen, but I have always replied yes to the prompts as I don't know enough about file systems to fix it I said no.

So, to prevent the need to rush to a data center and plug in a keyboard and mouse just to press the "Y" key there is and option to automatically assume yes.

On Ubuntu in the file /etc/default/rcS you need to change the following:

Ignoring directories from updatedb

To tell locate to ignore a directory you need to add it to the PRUNEPATHS line in the /etc/updatedb.conf file like so:

In the above code I have added the /srv entry to make it ignore all my backups which are held under the /srv directory.

Note: These tips were tested on Ubuntu linux, other distributions will have similar functionality but the file locations may vary.

Cheers, Mark

Where filePath is the local path to your working directory in which your file is located. And saveDirPath is the path where you want to save your diff file.

Diff files can be very useful when contributing to open source projects.

You can also get a list of files changed between revisions.

Marko

This will give something like:

If you want to get the revisions from a revision to the latest then you can change the 10 to HEAD - eg:

Cheers, Mark