IRL Geek

Here I go again on another i2Fest with my project  - QRier (which I won’t release it in public due to heavy exploitability-!!! of the app)

Well the first day was typical. Many school students, some professors and… noone else.

Anyways the Internet went down and due to my project being a web app, I couldn’t show anything. I am completely dissappointed from the organising this year, and many volunteers there agreed with me.

I hope that the 2nd day will get better…

Τελείωσε επιτυχώς και το φετινό WordCamp! Φέτος ήταν αρκετά αλλαγμένο σε σχέση με το περσινό.

Ας κάνω λοιπόν μια γρήγορη λίστα με το τί μου άρεσε, τι με άφησε αδιάφορο και τι δεν μου άρεσε.

Τι μου άρεσε:

• Η ευρύχωρη αίθουσα. Μετά το περσινό στρίμωγμα ήταν λογικό οι διοργανωτές να ψάξουν κατι μεγαλύτερο. Και το βρήκαν
• Οι παρουσιάσεις της Ζαχαρένιας, του Βασίλη, του Γεράσιμου, του Δημήτρη και του Θάνου
• Τα μικρά δωράκια που έκαναν και φέτος την εμφάνιση τους!
• Ο άφθονος καφές που υπήρχε στο break
• To networking που φυσικά επακολουθεί μετά απο κάθε event

Τωρα θα γίνω λίγο δυσάρεστος, θα πω τα πράγματα που με αφήσαν αδιάφορο

• Η παρουσίαση του Γιώργου, κυρίως για το HTML5 (την ένιωσα τελείως εκτός κλίματος)
• Η παρουσίαση του Φώτη (σορυ σειρά, αλλα με έχασες κάπου) και του Αποστόλη (μου φάνηκε αρκετά generic)
• Η παρουσίαση του Γιώργου ξανά για το WordPress στα Windows (μου φάνηκε αρκετά παρόμοια με την περσινή)

Και τέλος θα γίνω πιο δυσάρεστος, τι δεν μου άρεσε

• Η μικρή προσέλευση του κόσμου. Μετά την περσινή επιτυχία, περίμενα περισσότερο κόσμο, τελικώς ήρθαν νομίζω ακριβώς ίδιος αριθμός με πέρυσι. Ο λόγος πιστεύω ήταν η τοποθεσία του ξενοδοχείου που φιλοξενήθηκε το event (εκτος πόλης), το Λιμάνι Αλλιώς και το OpenCoffee που έγιναν ΤΑΥΤΟΧΡΟΝΑ.

H τελική γεύση που μου άφησε το event ηταν πολύ θετική τελικά και ελπίζω σε κάτι μεγαλύτερο πλέον. Το community των “open events” δειχνει να δυναμώνει σε αυτή την πόλη και ελπίζω σε καλύτερες μέρες!

Today I was invited to give a presentation about SEO, Social Media content streaming and Mobile sites with WordPress

The presentation was part of the Xinis Educational Festival and with me was Basilis Kanonidis talking about WordPress theme and plugin  creation.

My presentation (in Greek)

According to Murphy’s Law, your Hotel Management Software will crash on the most busy day of the year.  Apparently it was not a crash which was easy to fix with some 1000 reboots of the server. Anyway, the crash was an error followed by a warning, followed by an error, followed by a warning…

As I browsed through the Error logs of the system (I am not  a techincian on the hotel, therefore I can only investigate, not solve problem) I found that there was an activity log that was “full” and had to be backed up. The activity log apparently was used to monitor EVERY SINGLE CLICK in the system. The information held in the log was like this:

[username][date][time][workstation][activity][database query][explenatory text of what the query meant]

This shouldn’t be a problem, and it is rather logical keeping logs for some time, the problem here was that the log was NEVER reset! It kept records from 2006! This resulted in an enormous log of useless information (legally the hotel is not obliged to keep this kind of log) which was gathered over the years. The result was a file with size of 50GB! Occupying the whole hard disk where it was stored!

How much is this? The database containing the clients’ data (the usefull ones) was just 2 GB (also there there is the reastaurant charges, EVERYTHING that moved in the hotel from 2006). In comparison: A bit more of the WHOLE Wikipedia’s Database as of March of 2009!

After the initial shock, I contacted the technician responsible (who of course was on vacation) and asked him why there was so much logging. His answer was another shock:

“I have no idea. We bought the source code and rebranded the software. Frankly, we do not have examined the full behavior of the program.”

The solution was simple: “We have to delete the log file” – No shit, Sherlock.

Here’s my solution to them:

• Keep a log within a reasonable amount of time (e.g. a year) Most of the employees found there had either retired or left the hotel
• Keep the usefull data, like who logged in from where, and edits of the database. Keeping a record from just viewing the client’s profile is idiotic.
• Clear the log if it exceeds some disk space.
• Test run your f#*%ing code.