Author: james

Snapfish deleting photos

I started using Snapfish to store photos as the only main way to get an online album displying in my HP DreamScreen. HP decided against supporting Flickr, Picasa, or other established sites, opting to use Snapfish because – HP owns them. Fair enough, so I signed up and uploaded some content to show on my Hp DreamScreen device(s). Now, Snapfish have told me:

Please place an order by October 12, 2010 or you risk losing your photos. Lastly, remember you can also preserve your photos with a photo CD.

Thanks HP; you’ll delete my content since I havent purchased prints from you. How else can I display an album online to the display I purchased from you? Can I get an app for Flickr, Picasa, or perhaps access to boot and run my own code on here yet? The platform appears to be stagnant now for some time….

Subversion upgrades

Another nugget that took me a few minutes to go through, so a summary here: when upgrading subversion environments, you need to consider:

  • The version of the client tools (eg, svn from the command line, Tortoise, Subclipse, etc)
  • The version of the binaries in the web server (libapache-svn)
  • The version of the repository on disk

The repository on the server on disk generally does not auto-upgrade. Indeed, I just found that my personal SVN repo was still using format version 1! Version 1.4 uses format 2, and version 1.5 uses format 3. Thanks to this link its easy to see the format of a repo – cat $PATH/db/format.

Check the release notes to see the features that don’t work when the repo is not upgraded, and what version clients do and don’t work.

How to convert IPv4 to IPv6 in MySQL

If you original IPv4 address is in an unsigned long called “IPv4“, then…

select concat("0:0:0:0:0:0:", LPAD(CONV(substring_index(inet_ntoa(IPv4), '.', 1), 10, 16), 2, "0"), LPAD(CONV(SUBSTRING_INDEX(SUBSTRING_INDEX( inet_ntoa(IPv4) , '.', 2 ),'.',-1), 10, 16), 2, "0"), ":", LPAD(CONV(SUBSTRING_INDEX(SUBSTRING_INDEX( inet_ntoa(IPv4) , '.', 3 ),'.',-1), 10, 16), 2, "0"), LPAD(CONV(SUBSTRING_INDEX(SUBSTRING_INDEX( inet_ntoa(IPv4) , '.', 4 ),'.',-1), 10, 16), 2, "0")) as IPv6 from Log3NF.Access limit 1000;

Log3NF – IPv6 support coming real soon

A few years ago, I converted my earlier idea of logging Apache request to 3rd normal form into a fully fledged Mod Perl 2.0 Log Handler – embedding this into Apache. Its essentially a very simple Handler of less than 60 lines, and a stored procedure inside MySQL that normalises the data. Its been running on my personal server since February 2009, and in that time its collected around

  • 1.4 million hits
  • 27,000 unique useragents
  • 57,000 unique paths
  • 9 basic authentiation users
  • 13 HTTP methods
  • 50,000 unique referrer URLs
  • 13 HTTP Status
  • Recorded the transfer of 192,185.9637 Megabytes of (body) data; the average body response is 144 KB.

Wow. The log data on disk is 574 MB, or around 410 bytes per request – including the indexes (this is the size of the MySQL directory containing the data).

All well and good. Now time to get it fit for IPv6, and then improve the reporting. The reporting has two phases:

  • Live reporting from the 3rd normal form for data covering the last few seconds/minutes/hours/days.
  • Summary reporting per day or per month, per statistic, pre-calculated

Anyway, we’re about to pull in IPv6, again storing this as efficiently as possible, and then improve the currently very basi reporting interface…. stay tuned… and see the SVN repository for code…