Why? Squid takes the Accept-Encoding header serious. Especially, if the backend sets a Vary header like Vary: Accept-Encoding.  This is fine if two requestors send headers which cause the Backend System to respond differently, like “deflate” and “gzip”.

In this case, you want Squid to keep the two variations of Responses within its Cache. What you do not want is to keep identical responses cached multiple times like for “gzip,deflate” and “gzip, deflate” (keep an eye on the space after the comma). By default Squid does treat such variants as separate encodings and therefore store an identical copy of your Backend’s Response in its Cache.

With this problem being the major impact, there is another downside: Your backend has to serve all this variations which is totally unnecessary!

This code change allows Squid 3 to normalize the Accept-Encoding Header and keeps a maximum variation of 3 in its store (no encoding, gzip and deflate).

File: client_side_request.cc of Squid version 3.2.0.6

static void
clientInterpretRequestHeaders(ClientHttpRequest * http)
{
    ...

    // *** NORMALIZE ACCEPT-ENCODING HEADER ***

    if (req_hdr->has(HDR_ACCEPT_ENCODING)) {
        String aeh = req_hdr->getStrOrList(HDR_ACCEPT_ENCODING);
        req_hdr->delById(HDR_ACCEPT_ENCODING);

        if (aeh.find("gzip") != String::npos) {
            req_hdr->addEntry(new HttpHeaderEntry(HDR_ACCEPT_ENCODING, NULL, "gzip"));
        } else if (aeh.find("deflate") != String::npos) {
            req_hdr->addEntry(new HttpHeaderEntry(HDR_ACCEPT_ENCODING, NULL, "deflate"));
        }

        aeh.clean();
    }

    // *** NORMALIZE ACCEPT-ENCODING HEADER ***

 if (req_hdr->has(HDR_AUTHORIZATION))
        request->flags.auth = 1;
 ...

Continue to this blog-post in case you are interested in patching Squid Version 2.7: http://letsgetdugg.com/2009/12/06/squid-headers-normalization-patch/

Happy Caching! ;-)

I will not go down the road for self running monitoring services like nagios or cacti and so on. I’ve been there, there are good and bad things about all of these tools but at the end of the day or are bothering too much with details and configurations false alerts and flapping states of services and so on…it’s really hard to keep the configuration of these utils up to date and you are the only one who can change it due to the lack of fancy web-configuration interfaces and reporting and so on. So please bare with me, this is NOT about those possibilities! Maybe someone else could come up with a post or a comparision of such tools!?

I wanted to go for a nice and fancy online monitoring tool. Something which is easy to configure and maintain, browser based configurations and reporting as well as email and sms notifications out of the box!

First of all, there is website checking and there is service monitoring. If you want to get informed as soon as a smtp service stops, your ftp server goes down or if you even have some services operating on non-standard ports, you need to look for a service monitoring. If you just want a website check to make sure that your website is running and responding with whatever content, you might want to go for website monitoring only which basically checks just if your website can be (down-)loaded. Depending on your services, you might want to monitor certain DNS entries, check the validity of your SSL Certificates, perform a content comparison of the content of a specific website and maybe even check whether your mail exchanger is listed on any DNS Blackhole List!

Second, you might be interested in multiple locations (ideally, spread over all continents) that check the availability and response times of your services or website, if you have visitors from other corners of the world. If you have regional/local visitors or consumers only, you probably should look for a local/regional monitoring service instead of a global service provider. Don’t get overwhelmed by the amount of monitoring locations offered though! Not the number of locations is important but the coverage and reliability. With 3-5 locations (one per continent – North America, South America, Europe, Afrika?, Asia/Pacific, Austriala) you should be more than happy! Having 10+ locations all at the same place does not add any value (but even costs sometimes)!

Third, do you want to be informed as soon as possible if something goes wrong or do you just want to know whether your hosting company had an outage you did not recognize by yourself? If you have money involved and an outage means loss to you, then you surely want your staff to be notified asap to fix the issue. This means you want your service to be monitored with an interval as short as possible (let’s say every minute). Most of the monitoring service providers will charge you more the more often you want your services to be monitored!

Forth, the supported channels of alerting and notifications. While I could not find a provider which is not supporting email alerts ;-), SMS is rather expensive or not supported!

Last, there are different reporting capabilities you might want to consider while evaluating. Website availability or performance reports as well as the history of service outages are important things which could help you prove your customers or your boss that you achieved your availability targets (99,98%) and so on! Is export of your desired format possible to keep historical data? How long is performance data kept and available to you? Do you like the look of the reports and graphs?

I listed the cheapest http check I could find, the most frequent http check plus a real world scenario. The real world scenario I came up with consists of the following monitoring requirements which i thought is realistic and would be provided by most of the monitoring solutions!
Real World Scenario: 3 Servers(Hosts/IPs), each running 3 Services (1 x http, 1 x https ,1 x ftp if available – if not available 3 x http) and monitoring from 3 locations (if available – if not available from as many as available). Regarding the SMS notifications, i judged the capability to send SMS worldwide not only regional and not via email@whateverprovider as not all providers support this, and it can be achieved by the email functionality itself.

By the way: I am not affiliated with any of the providers compared below and i have absolutely no knowledge about their reliability or customer service whatsoever! I just used the informations I found on their websites to file this comparison table! Please use the comment section below to share your thoughts!!!

So let’s take a look at the monitoring or checking capabilities first!

Let me add some remarks regarding the comparison table:

• In case of “some” within the dns column – this means, a basic hostname/ip lookup is performed, but no real dns queries like CNAME, SOA, A, MX, etc. sometimes a domain expiry date is checked as well.
• In case of “some” within the tcp column – this means, some static ports are available for checking like FTP, SMTP, IMAP, etc. but no custom ports can be defined. “ftp” means that obviously only FTP is supported
• In case of “some” within the content check column – that means, that just one single word or other limited comparison is supported. In case of “?” – I just couldn’t find an answer on the providers website!

Now, let’s take a look on the amount of locations and the notification/alerting channels supported and the SMS costs!

Remarks:

• In case of “some” within the sms column – target countries not clear or unclear offer!

Last, the pricing!

Remarks:

• A free service is not a trial to me and therefore I did not list such!

Please leave feedback, if you know any more online internet website or service monitoring providers which I did not consider or with any other feedback or information which is missing! Thank you!

From then on it went crazy. I accidentally wanted to know about dropbox as a company and clicked on “Our Team” on dropbox.com – bang!!!
“Error (5xx) – Something went wring. Don’t worry, your files are still safe and Dropboxers have been notified. Check out our Help Center or forums for help. Or maybe you should try heading home.”

still safe? lol!

The dropboy client is annoying me with a “Reconnect Now” button – of course i am not offline but they are. So i cannot login or register.

I googled a bit on the net and i found a link to a dropbox status page: http://status.dropbox.com/
Awesome!

At first, some broken image links appeared and it’s being stated that the web is running normaly – yeah, sure, check error 5xx above! ;-)

Some minutes later, the images appeared finally, and also the web is stated as being down correctly!

But then – there was the “500 Internal Server Error” and nothing was working anymore! :-(

So honestly, I am not sure about dropbox…just because it happend exactly during my registration. Something was warning me! I will use TrueCrypt in combination with dropbox to secure my files for starters…Not that Zuckerberg buys all my data and posts it on Facebook! :-))

OK, everybody makes mistakes, that’s ok! Systems go crazy and everything can go down. No big deal. I even like the status page a lot! That’s a cool feature for sure! The dropbox ops seem to be nice guys and after the site went available again, one could even read, that they really are aware of the problem and they’re working on it…A couple of hours are a lot if you need something urgently though!

So I will try my luck today again and if they have issues again, I think I will go for my own SparkeShare!

Our finished Animation looks like:

Step 1: The Container which holds the Line

<div
  id="thinLine"
  style="background-color: #000000; width: 100px; height: 1px;">
</div>

Step 2: Let’s Draw the Animation

function ProcessThinLine(tick, delay) {
 tick= tick+ 1;

 var currentPosition = (100 / delay) * tick;
 $("#thinLine").width(100 - Math.round(currentPosition)); // 100 -> div Width

 window.setTimeout("ProcessThinLine(" + tick+ "," + delay + ");", 1000);
}

Step 3: Initialize the Animation to run 5 Minutes

<script type="text/javascript">
 $(document).ready(function() {
  ProcessThinLine(0, 5 * 60);
 });
</script>

Done

Before we are searching for a new (free) Sync Service we need to think about 3 Topics:

• Privacy
• Availability
• Multiple Browsers on Multiple Machines and Multiple OS

Built in Solutions like Firefox Sync, Chrome Sync, Windows Live Sync or Mobile Me will store all Bookmarks in their Data Centers.
We can talk about Encryption and Downtimes of these Servers but at the end of the Day, Mozilla, Google, Microsoft or Apple will have all your Bookmarks.
And it’s also not possible to Sync across multiple Browsers.

One Solution is to use DropBox with an Bookmark Synchronization Browser Plugin.
DropBox is available for Windows, Mac OS and Linux and it’s “integrated” in your local File System.
So if DropBox is offline you can’t sync – but you can access your Data.

Availability, Multiple Machines and Multiple OS are solved Requirements. Privacy will be forced by  using TrueCrypt with DropBox or the Browser Plugin is capable to Encrypt the exported file or you simple trust DropBox.

SyncPlaces is a Firefox Plugin to Synchronize Bookmarks.
To get it working with DropBox select File as Connection Protocol and enter your DropBox Path as JSON Output.

This DropBox / Browser Plugin Solution has one Disadvantage.
There is currently no “Local File System” Sync Plugin for all Browsers available.

One way is to Encode your complete H.264 Video with a MKV Container to an H.264 Video with a MP4 Container.
But why to Re-Encode an H.264 Video to an H.264 Video only to change the Container Format?

The better Solution is to Pass Thru the Video and Audio Stream and only change the Container.

Option 1: The Subler can do this for you.

Simply create a new File, add your Videos and Save As .m4v

Option 2: The MKVTool can do this for you.

Simply select the Pass Thru Options and your 1080p Video has a new MP4 Container in Seconds.

so, again – it’s apple who seems to release the forth generation of the popular iphone. this year, they were not able to keep this a very big secret…

last week the internet was flooded with a ton of exclusive leaks about apple’s new iphone 4g handset expected this june. this was all thanks to gizmodo, a us based technology news site who purchased the prototype handset from somebody who found it in a bar in san francisco a few weeks ago. read the full story here: http://gizmodo.com/5520438/how-apple-lost-the-next-iphone

apple iphone 4g closeup

original article: http://gizmodo.com/5520164/this-is-apples-next-iphone

nowadays, apple tries to get them into a lot of trouble – they claim that selling a stolen device is not allowed and so forth…let’s see…

previous rumor mockups (very nice lookin’ though):

rumor mockup apple iphone 4g

tested with garmin 775T successfully!

if you want to embed gps data into wordpress, there is a beautiful easy way to do this! check out the wordpress plugin at xml google maps!

use this wordpress plugin to visualize gpx data from a gps tracker including speed data and altitude information! parse kml files automatically and display the track  / route data on a google map – it just looks brilliant!

find some examples on the author’s page: www.matusz.ch

so far, so good! but: there is more! geotagging devices became affordable these days – to hook up a gps tracker to a digital camera (there is even cameras with built in gps – nikon P6000 i guess), enriches the pictures with the location information! cool right? why not persist this info forever directly in the picture – after years, one might not be able to remember where a picture was taken!

btw: playing around with decoupled (from the cam) gps loggers or trackers is a mess! the synchronization of gps data and pictures requires a syncing software and works by matching timestamps – not exact, not real-time, not recommended!

now, photographer might want to display the photos (if geotagged) on a google map – why else geo tag it, right? and here it coems: there is an integration of xml google maps plugin with another wordpress plugin available: nextgen gallery! and this is really awesome – just upload pictures with gps info to wordpress nextgen gallery and find this on your blog:

wordpress xml google maps plugin nextgen integration

example of nextgen integration with geotagged pictures: kateus

wordpress xml google maps plugin home: wordpress.org

read on:
blog.econsultant.com
www.bestwpthemez.com

here is the case:

the iphone:
apple iphone 3g 16gb white (bought 2008) with sim-lock (to one provider) was never jailbreaked or unlocked and always updated. latest firmware: 3.1.2 and baseband 05.11.07.

the goal:
just unlock it! so it’s more worth when selling, jailbreak yes or no, does not matter actually!

i looked around and found blackra1n.com and so much informations about this (baseband downgrade to 04.26.08 necessary with fuzzyband and much more outdated nonesense…)

here is how it works:

1. plug in your iphone to your pc or mac (and close itunes and/or other popping applications)
2. download blackra1n from blackra1n.com
3. run blackra1n
4. click “make it ra1n”
5. after your iphone rebooted, open the blackra1n app on your iphone
6. click Cydia (it should become the green check) and click install
7. after your iphone rebooted, open the blackra1n app on your iphone
8. click sn0w (it should become the green check) and click install

this is it. period. insert any sim card and have fun using your iphone and feel free installing other cydia or rock applications!

bottom line:
blackra1n RC3 dows it all for you – no need for downgrades or other stuff!

a screenshot of blackra1n RC3:

blackra1n RC3 iphone screenshot

firmware download links for 3.1.2:

• iPhone 3.1.2 download (iPhone1,1_3.1.2_7D11_Restore.ipsw, 241 MB)
• iPhone 3G 3.1.2 download (iPhone1,2_3.1.2_7D11_Restore.ipsw, 242 MB)
• iPhone 3GS 3.1.2 download (iPhone2,1_3.1.2_7D11_Restore.ipsw, 306 MB)

read more:
iphonejtag.blogspot.com
www.technonix.com
www.ihackintosh.com
www.redmondpie.com
www.technobuzz.net

ok, to be honest, this is a not rocket science. it is just another overpriced thingy – for the geeks inside us a must have. but it is kewl. it’s nice looking and it is doing its job. got one from a japanese store (loft) in bangkok for about 20 euros. pretty expensive. but if you do not like this – just go ahead, build your own box! the idea is simple and old. there are even already a couple of solutions out there, a few of them only integrated in a workdesk which is not that flexible!

in fact – some people might need a little kick in the ass to re-assemble their cable hell. after dedicating 45 minutes (unplug all that crap, which has beeing extended over the last 2 years, clean that stuff, coil up the unneeded lengths of cables and even remove obsolete devices (3!!), apply the new cablebox) you end up with something definitely better looking than before!

check out the cablebox to get rid of your cable salad!

bluelounge cablebox