Cheesecake. Nuff said.

So what do you do when a upgrade goes smoothly, you combat a few memory hogs, add in a few system tweaks, and just have a good upgrade window? Simple. You make a no bake cheesecake. Mmmm cheesecake. It’s in the fridge now on it’s last bit, since it’s late and when it’s quite electric mixers are insanely noisy, and folks are sleeping - I did the mixing by hand - I feel so old school.

All in all though, things did go good, did a run down of sites, even found a few dead ones, I should do a audit and clean up each server before years end, but honestly, smooth - looks like folks have been doing fair keeping things up-to-date, now if I can provide some easy tutorials to get things rolling in the “Bot Proofing” of apps, that would be even better! I have been looking at reCAPTCHA as an option, in some apps, there is plugin support, so should be pretty simple, but between that, and getting dead beats finally off, things can push forward, and by Feb. (if not sooner) I do want to try and be migrated to the new server, 8 cores, 8gb ram, mmmm tasty.

So I am counting down the time before I can go dig in, with as cold as it is, I could probably go eat it now and it’d be cold, I think it’s colder outside than inside my fridge (31F), there was a 3/16in layer of frost on my car, chevy heaters though, top-notch, from 31->198 (coolant temp) in about 5 minutes, very nice, very toasty, and makes for a quick get away at 5am (hey I was out of milk!).

Anywhoo - Happy Saturday to ya, and if anyone wants to get me something for Christmas (hint, hint) keep an eye on my Amazon Wish-list, I am going to expand it soon and add in some apartment things, starting to plan, and get some of the expenses out of the way now (cooking goods, furniture, etc.) - so aside from the movies/games/books on the list - watch for more goodies for the home, as I would LOVE to have my own place by my Birthday in Feb. I mean hit 28, have my own place again - would indeed be nice. Happy Saturday Folks!

Fridays off? Nevah.

So for a while I actually took Friday’s off, not anymore lol. So much to do as this year wraps up, and I want to make sure it goes smoothly, so Christmas day I don’t wake up to a pile of coal waiting in my email from customers - so today was some more dry runs of PHP5/APACHE2 configurations, also tested out the new feature for SPF/DomainKeys in the cPanel interface, the latest build offers the functionality, but it seems to have some glitches when it comes to domains with more than a single domain in the account (ie: accounts with Parked/Add-on Domains) - however it is workable.

Testing seemed fine on SPF/DomainKeys until the dreaded multi-domain account hit it, and the wrench was thrown into the gears, but another side effect is external DNS, there is no mechanism within cPanel to simply display the new DNS entires involved with SPF and DomainKeys, thus someone who is doing their own DNS, will have issues with true deployment, so a bug report was opened on cPanel’s bugzilla requesting the enhancement to display the records which need to be added.

All in all a semi-productive day, wish I had gotten some code time in, but the night is still young, though I may crash out soon and wake back up for the PHP5 run on Shepherd tonight, going to start it around 1am - but since I am going to archive the old build, that means while it builds that things like PHP and such will be broken for a bit, but never had a build take over 30m, and since mail, spam filtering, etc. on Shepherd will continue there is that chance, but I am hoping that with the early hour, (thus in most cases decreased load) I’ll see a quick build, some quick testing, then hit the sack.

Anywhoo - off to break and watch a flick, not sure what, saw Chuck & Larry last night, not horrible, tad too much swearing, but Ving Rhames - hilarious. Well played indeed. So enjoy your weekend, and if I don’t get a chance to post before Christmas, have a safe and happy Christmas folks!

– AT: New anti-fraud checks in WHMCS from MaxMind were officially tested with a new order this evening, did great! Very very happy, glad to see it work so smoothly. Okay going for real this time.

Blah.

Well - I was just talking with my dad as he talked to my sister, her house was broken into - they opened all the Christmas presents, took their laptop, all their gift cards they had gotten, and left things like their Wii - but took the high-dollar tequila bottle which was a gift. Odd indeed. They found things like their clothes drawers and closet - a bad feeling indeed. So sad stuff.

I did manage to get out of the house, but nothing out there, just can’t seem to get going the last few days, I think I may have the flu, as I have been dragging or feeling sick for the last few days - that or I am pregnant, ya just never know. Well back to staring at my wall.

220pm

Soooo… it’s 220pm on Thursday, and this so far has been a fairly unproductive day, mainly because I went to bed at 8/9am (not sure when, but somewhere in there) so really haven’t had much of a day, woke up at 1:45pm and realized “Well so much for Thursday” and started on emails waiting for me. A long night last night though, couldn’t sleep, and got tired of laying staring at the ceiling, so I played some Orange Box, looked at code briefly but I really didn’t want to focus on tiny mindless things, so I didn’t, but I have my plan down for the skeleton of the admin area I’ll work on tonight, I want to make it so the client can see some live editing from the admin standpoint, and from that editor I can bring around the submission and customer editing tool.

Some good news today though, I got my ear loops from Jabra, so now I once again have a headset! No longer taking my phone in my pocket, back to a thing attached to the side of my head to answer calls, which makes driving a LOT easier! They did indeed send 2 so I have one extra which will probably last till the headset explodes or falls off a cliff.

Christmas is this next week, and I don’t really feel it. I’ve gotten some Christmas cards, and I plan to go see some Christmas lights, though just can’t get into the mindset that it’s truly the end of the year already and were celebrating Christmas?! But I do need to pull out my keyboard, practice some Christmas tunes as Christmas day I am playing some piano at the old folks home my mom works at, so need to re-awaken the piano part of my brain, some songs I’ll get, probably google some chords, but shouldn’t be too bad.

Anywhoo - this has taken 8 minutes to write and I keep getting more distractions, so I am going to call it done, and go find something mellow to eat. Happy Thursday to ya all.

Fraud is a Pain

One thing as of late which has become the ever-growing thorn in my side is fraud. While I have gotten a lot of orders over the last few months, 99% of them turn out to be fraud. So instead of just relying on my own instinct on them I am evaluating MaxMind to see what it can do, so far I have thrown some data at it from the past fraud orders and gotten the usual response “This order is very high risk, and we suggest you not accept it.” so far it’s hit everything right on, and I have tested it with my own information, and gathered some from friends - each time “Low Risk” with a score of 1.98 as the average, mainly because of folks using Gmail and such.

So I am going to give things a whirl for a bit longer, this would help greatly especially if things are going to amp up. Security has always been big with me, I don’t want to give someone instant access to the servers just because they paid for it, thus why I check orders by hand and don’t rely on instant provisioning (which I can do) - a 2-4 hour window tends to be a short enough delay, that folks don’t get too frustrated, and it gives time to above and beyond anything else, let me live and breathe!

From the looks of it, I have 1 order to cancel as fraud, and another to process and get online, what really irks me is the person who submitted the fraud order searched for “Christian Hosting” thus found FH - sad sad stuff, but such is the game it seems, but hopefully if this testing works and I get a few more orders in, this thing can earn it’s keep, as it looks good, and so far tests everyone pretty accurately, so we shall see.

Anywhoo - trying to stay awake today, tired, woke up at 4:30am after going to bed around 9pm, just trying to stay awake and see if I can’t manage to keep myself on a semi-regular schedule for the holidays! (One can hope!) Good Tuesday to ya all!

Craving Chicken…

Ever just have that desire for something? Well I have one right now and it’s chicken, I dunno why, I had Nacho’s for dinner, but that didn’t seem like enough, so at 3am I think I am going to head towards JNB and snag the chicken club. Mmm.

So some updates (aside from the fact that I love chicken) my dad is doing good, he got the results back from his CT scan which basically told the Doc that my dad fought too much in his youth. He found that my dad basically had deformed/damaged cartilage in his nose which was making it hard for the sinus infection he has to clear, so aside from some anti-biotics in his future, they are talking about a 3hr procedure to fix the issue and put in some tubes - which from the sounds of it would make his breathing issues as of late go away. So good news there.

In other news, had Teppanyaki on Friday with the gang, twas tasty (I had chicken then too) - afterwards myself, sis and bro-in-law, and sara went and saw “I Am Legend” and while I think Will Smith did a great job in his role, the story line needed some tweaking, sure sure it could of ended “sort of” the same way, but they lined up some plot possibilities then walked away from them, that and if you like dogs - don’t go. LoL. I don’t want to ruin anything for anyone who wants to go see it, it’s not a “Buy on DVD!” for me, but I may rent it when it comes out.

Coding news, slow going, but going. This week I am going to push forward REALLY hard, and try to just get things finally wrapped up on several fronts - I have a easy project Monday installing a cart, not a TON I have to do until they get me a finalized design on that end, but for the basic install, maybe an hour to get it fine tuned and happy - but the rest of the coding projects, should be fun to push forward and finish up, I want to have the customer sign-up and sign-in done by the end of the week and a skeleton of the admin done.

CentOS 4.6 upgrades came thru last night, final few go thru this morning on 4 other systems, so pretty smoothly, no problems reported. The next few days will be more server fun deploying PHP5 slowly across the board, I am going to do it on a server Wednesday is my current plan, and then another Friday after the clean-up I am sure will need to happen on the first server - also on that list above and beyond PHP5 is MySQL5, but I think on that front after the server migration will be the plan on that as I haven’t even visited that in testing.

Anywhoo - that’s the update - I hope to have Lunch with Mr. Poon this week, and I am trying to come up with something clever for this next Friday - so lots to do, only 120 hours to get it rolling so have a good week folks!

So much for sleeping…

So what do you do if you get woke up and can’t go back to sleep? Well last night I was dead tired, so I crashed around 10 or so, only to do my usual, early to bed, earlier to rise. 2am, I was up and about. So I did the usual, checked the emails, played some halo3 matches, and now I have a backup rolling with Time Machine, but I am not 100% sleepy again nearly 2 hours later, so I figured I’d blog a little and catch up on things.

This Friday marks the 7th (maybe 8th, possibly 6th) dinner night me and some friends have been observing - it started off just 4 of us hitting up Denny’s, then after a few times and fading pocketbooks, we did a nacho bar, that went over well, and grew to a lot more people, we thrashed Jakes house, and I am sure it smelt of beans for days after. Last week was light and mellow, my sister and bro-in-law + scott, sara, and me! We had Costco pizza, watched spaceballs, a good evening - this week we are getting fancy. Teppanyaki. No set guest list yet, hope to have that by tomorrow at some point to see what we need to do in the way of a reservation, but so far I have 2 for sures, 1 who asked about it, and 6 other invites out to folks - I am hoping the Poon’s will join us, but as it gets closer and closer to the holidays I am sure folks who are going out of town, or who have lots of family coming in, things will get busy, so I am already in the mind-set some folks will say no, which is perfectly alright.

I am thinking of going to going to CALM again this year for the lights, it was fun last year, got some fair photos, but like Scott, I need to get out there again, my camera is getting lonely, and my Flickr account even more-so, I think I may go Saturday night, going to check at Dinner on Friday to see if anyone wants to join me in the 40F weather for some lights fun who knows maybe more will come, and it’ll be a fun trip, or just me and my Mom her, beth and michael came last year it was fun.

The mailbox is finally getting some checks in, granted slow, but it’s coming along - so pretty happy, but if this gig with my brother pans out for server stuff, it’ll be a nice infusion to the budget, hopefully it’ll play into a bigger position, but if not, still some decent side work, and hopefully this Friday my $500 will be in, plus additional for another project, a nice infusion to the budget, I am hoping after the first of the year to nail down some more steady work, I have a idea in mind, and I am going to be praying about it, because part of me feels it’d be great, another part feels like it’d be a risk to great to take, but as usual, more on that later.

Anywhoo - 4am, little sleepy, so I am going to do… something not sure yet, but who knows - one could hope it’d be sleep, but with me anymore, I just never know. Night folks.