Monthly Archives: April 2010

SSH tunnel on OS X

Posted by on April 16, 2010 No comments

Many companies nowadays provide a SSH tunnel to connect remotely into servers. This is a great feature as you will have your internet connectivity wherever you are and still enjoy the benefit of select tunnels.

On OS X and Linux this is really straight forward. The example below establishes a SSH tunnel via tunnel.company.co.za into an Oracle server hosted on the network at 10.0.0.10:

ssh -C -p 22 -l myuserid -N -o ConnectTimeout=5 -o TCPKeepAlive=yes -o NumberOfPasswordPrompts=1 -o ControlMaster=no -o PreferredAuthentications=publickey -i /Users/Me/.ssh/id_rsa -L 15211:10.0.0.10:1521 tunnel.company.co.za

Explanation of the above:

  • -C: Uses compression over SSH
  • -l myuserid: Connects via userid “myuserid”
  • -o ControlMaster=no: disables the reuse of connections. Setting it to “auto” increases performance as it allows multiplexing, but might introduce problems. I play safe here.
  • -o PreferredAuthentications=publickey -i /Users/Me/.ssh/id_rsa: connect to SSH via certificate
  • -L 15211:10.0.0.10:1521: tunnels from local-port 15211 into remote port 1521 at 10.0.0.10

There are different opinions on ControlMaster (read some experience here). Some users say, that setting it to “auto” is reliable and will improve speed significantly. If you want to use it, do the following:

  1. Create a directory: mkdir ~/.ssh/cm_socket
  2. Add -o ControlPath ~/.ssh/cm_socket/%r@%h:%p to the arguments


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The Friday Picture: Fat kids

Posted by on April 16, 2010 No comments

The Friday Picture will provide you with inspirational and (de)motiviational guidance to make the approaching weekend so much more appealing:

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MTN: The death of the internet

Posted by on April 12, 2010 1 comment

At bidorbuy we pay special attention to performance, as a slow website will irritate our users and will in the end result in lost sales. Over the last few months we have pretty much emptied our bag of tricks and tweaked on many different places and the development team did some amazing work in performance tuning.

The Yellow company still amazes me – not just because they decided again to remove my international roaming option, but also looking at their website. Truly shocking how a company of such size can run a site like this.

A special lesson for the MTN-IT division:

  • Your main page loads 530 KB of plain Javascript (thats 12 JS files). Add to this another 172 KB of stylesheets.
  • While the sheer amount of JS and CSS speaks books about bad site-development, at least an easy fix would be to gzip the JS and CSS
  • Most browsers will block rendering due to JavaScript being in the header – so move it to the end of the body
  • Minify and combine those shocking JS and CSS
  • Your ETags are configured wrong and truly do not serve any purpose – in fact if your server environment is clustered, none of those images will ever be cached properly
  • Fix your 404′s/410′s (such as /images/headerBG.gif)
  • Specify image width/height on your images
  • 41 % (or 74KB of your 180KB) of your CSS is not even used on /Pages/MTN.aspx
  • You have two redirect chains, each taking 400ms
  • You could save up to 30% on your images if you had optimized them properly
  • Never include CSS after a JS, as this will block the parallel download of CSS
  • Don’t include the same CSS twice (i.e. # ../HtmlEditorCustomStyles.css and HtmlEditorCustomStyles.css?rev=wLUP2n6…)

The above are the basics in web-performance management, but again it could be worse, as of writing the meerkat-competition is unreachable.

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James Gosling resigns from Sun

Posted by on April 11, 2010 No comments

Perhaps the end of Java as we know it? James posted the following at his new blog:

“…Yes, indeed, the rumors are true: I resigned from Oracle a week ago (April 2nd). I apologize to everyone in St Petersburg who came to TechDays on Thursday expecting to hear from me. I really hated not being there. As to why I left, it’s difficult to answer: Just about anything I could say that would be accurate and honest would do more harm than good. The hardest part is no longer being with all the great people I’ve had the privilege to work with over the years. I don’t know what I’m going to do next, other than take some time off before I start job hunting.”

A great loss for the Java community, but from the sounds of this, it appears he had quite a big fallout at Sun.

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bidorbuy launches PayPal payment integration

Posted by on April 9, 2010 No comments

It has only been 2 weeks after the official PayPal launch and we have soft-launched the PayPal payment integration on Tuesday, 6th April 2010. As far as I can tell, bidorbuy is the only South African online auction place having launched PayPal integration, allowing users to conduct payments through PayPal.

The PayPal functionality works for both international as well as South African accounts and will be rolled out to the remaining sellers over the next week.

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The Friday Picture: Easter

Posted by on April 8, 2010 1 comment

The Friday Picture will provide you with inspirational and (de)motiviational guidance to make the approaching weekend so much more appealing:

Easter is a holiday featuring fertility symbols such as eggs, rabbits, and maidens dressed in white that pagans celebrate, named in honor of the godess of fertility known as Eostre, Astarte, Ashtoreth, Isis, Vishnu, Venus, etc. depending on when and where the pagan is from.

Nowadays, most of the pagans pretend that Easter has something to do with Jesus so they can pretend to be Christians. They’ve already given Christendom such a bad name doing things like this that it isn’t even worth their effort to pretend to be Christian any more, so they only continue the custom out of habit.

I prefer honest pagans and Real True Christians to those who pretend Easter has something to do with Jesus.

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jQuery revolution @ bidorbuy

Posted by on April 2, 2010 No comments

Over at bidorbuy.co.za we are really introducing a number of firsts in the online auction market. We obviously want to create a user-experience for our buyers and sellers to enjoy their time on our site as well as improve productivity.

Over the next few weeks we will introduce many new features to improve usability. A few weeks back we implemented a jQuery-based search-recommendation which provides users with guided searches and search-recommendations – although noticeable, the new feature is not intrusive.

Another cool feature (it is surprising that we never had this in the past) is to introduce an image-gallery for sellers which will really improve how they can list items. The current image system is truly cumbersome and users are not even able to view images they previously uploaded. The new gallery truly rocks:

Based on jQuery with lazy loading of pages, image transitions, keyboard support, sorting and filtering. The gallery will seamlessly integrate into the seller-tools as well as the current listing functionality. We will also introduce a number of really cool UX features over the next few weeks which will make your auction experience a truly awesome journey :D

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South African Post Office: We steal

Posted by on April 2, 2010 1 comment

I finally managed to understand the South African Post Office’s mission statement: “We will enable the nation to efficiently connect with the world by distributing information, goods, financial and government services; leveraging our broad reach and embracing change, technology and innovation“. Till now I was always of the impression, that the distribution of goods was intended for the recipient of such parcel or postal item.

Our national postal service is not like that. Their workers steal wherever an opportunity presents itself and every person with a postal address in this country will have experienced missing mail or parcels.

Many international eCommerce shops have subsequently stopped delivering via the South African Postal system and I prove a case in point: On 21st February 2010 I ordered 10 items (all PS3 games) from the UK. All items had been dispatched within a couple of days. Out of the 10 items I have only received 4 (all arrived within 2 weeks). The remaining 6 (or 60%) have disappeared. All items have been sent via registered mail and can be tracked to be delivered to South Africa and thereafter disappears.

In another case my overseas bank sent a new ATM card via registered mail in November 2009 and the item is untraceable once it passed South African borders.

There are common rules and etiquette when it comes to privacy of correspondence and documents cannot be read or opened by anyone other than the receiver; for instance, in the United States it is a violation of federal law for anyone other than the receiver to open mail and mail-theft is a federal crime.

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The Friday Picture: Fingers

Posted by on April 2, 2010 No comments

The Friday Picture will provide you with inspirational and (de)motiviational guidance to make the approaching weekend so much more appealing:

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