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Just over two days ago I sent a DMCA take-down request to nixforce.com for copying my content in violation of the non-commercial license that I offer, I have not had a response from them and they have kept mirroring my site.
I have just sent a DMCA take-down to tierzero.net which appears to be their ISP. The email address listed in the whois record for that ISP bounces as does the postmaster address.
It seems that I’m not the only person with this problem, Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho is also having problems with them. Any suggestions on how to deal with them would be appreciated.
One possibility that I will eventually persue is to file a DMCA request with Google, this can result in their Google Adwords account being terminated.
The first thing you need is to have meta keywords in the pages. The solution I discovered for doing this is the All In One SEO Pack, this automatically makes the categories of a blog post become meta keywords, allows adding arbitrary meta keywords when editing the blog post, and supports keywords for the entire blog. It also re-writes the titles to have the title of the post appear before the title of the blog in the <TITLE> tag which is rumored to be a good thing to do.
The next thing you want to do is to create a Google sitemap. A sitemap is an XML file that describes all the URLs in your web site which tells Google (and other search engines) the last change dates of all the URLs and the change frequencies (or how often they should be checked for changes). Note that the format is called Google Sitemaps because Google invented it, other web search engines also use the same format. To generate my sitemap I use the Google Sitemaps Generator which tells earch engines to index my main blog page daily and the category pages weekly (which is configurable). It also has an option to notify Google of changes by pinging the Google service.
Having multiple names for the same web page hurts you when it comes to search engines. Having two separate pages at the top of page 2 is not nearly as good as having one page on page one! To solve this problem I use the Permalink Redirect plugin to make sure that each page has only one URL pointing to it. This plugin also allows redirecting the feed URL to feedburner.com. Feedburner serves the feed data (thus saving you some bandwidth if you are on a slow link) and also tracks statistics on it which are interesting.
Under the Writing section of the Options menu there is an option to enter a list of URLs for update services that can be notified of every post. I use http://rpc.pingomatic.com/ and http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping. The Update Services entry in the WordPress Codex has more information on how this works.
Social networking sites such as digg.com can direct a large amount of traffic to your site if you write about a popular topic. The Share This plugin is the simplest way I found of adding social networking hooks to WordPress (I tried a few others that had both less functionality and less ease of use).
Finally before publishing a post, I often check the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. This often gives me ideas on how to make the meta tags and title match what people are searching for.
In response to my comment and post about the cost of driving to work there was a comment on the blog post I responded to suggesting that a small car is better value for money than a hybrid car.
The claim was made regarding a Nissan Pulsar, but to investigate this I decided to compare the Prius with the Corolla Hatchback, as far as I can tell the Corolla Hatchback is the nearest non-hybrid car to the Prius that Toyota sells (being similar in size, weight, and performance). Comparing cars of different make adds extra variables into the equation. Unfortunately the Toyota web site fails to provide specifications for the Prius and only provides a PDF file with minimal information on the Corolla, but it is enough for some minimal calculations.
A car company run by intelligent people would publish the specs on all their vehicles and provide a search form to compare selected models. The Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation has a good search method that allows easy comparison and ranking of items in their database (here is an example). It would be good if Toyota would permit us to compare models in their car range in a similar manner.
According to the Toyota web site the Prius uses 4.4L/100Km when driving in the city and the manual transmission version of the Corolla Hatchback uses 7.4L/100Km (7.7 for the auto). For the average 16,000Km that an average Prius owner drives that would save 480L of petrol which would save about $700 at current petrol prices.
The Corolla Ascent Hatchback (the cheapest of all Corollas) is $21,000 while the cheapest Prius is $37,400. If you compare the Prius with the cheapest Corolla then it’s a $16,400 price difference. If you save $700 per annum then it won’t cover the interest on a $16,400 loan or match the interest rates earned by a bank term-deposit if the $16,400 was invested. So it seems apparent that at current petrol prices (NB petrol prices are expected to increase) and with average Prius driving patterns a Prius will not be more economical than a cheap Corolla.
Currently the Commonwealth Bank of Australia offers 6.05% interest on term deposits of between $10,000 and $25,000. This means that $700 per annum would be the interest on a term deposit of $11,500. If we compare the Corolla Ultima Sedan at $32,000 with the Prius at $37,400 the difference in price is less than $11,500 – but the cars have incomparable sets of luxury and safety features. The Prius i-tech appears to have a super-set of the luxury and safety features of the Corolla Ultima Sedan but at $46,900 is again going to cost more for the average Prius driver.
The Prius is a very quiet car to drive, there is almost no engine noise (when driving at speeds where the Petrol engine is operating there is usually more noise from other vehicles) and no gear changes (handy if passengers are consuming hot or sticky drinks). It has a good set of safety and luxury features and is also a prestige car (no-one will say “oh wow, you’ve got a Corolla”). If you assign a dollar value to these features then a Prius may be the most economical car that meets your requirements!
Finally, let’s keep in mind the fact that petrol prices are steadily increasing. If you save $700 by driving a Prius this year then you may save $1000 next year. There is also the option of converting a Prius to a plug-in hybrid which will be a useful option if petrol prices hit $10/L! Also the amount of money saved will depend on the use of the car. If you are running a courier or taxi business then a Prius will probably be a lot more economical than a Corolla due to the greater distances travelled and the travel in the slow city traffic that the Prius was designed for.
PS All prices are in Australian dollars and concern products on offer in Australia, I would like to see comments from other people who perform the same calculations for their countries.
Update: If this interests you then you may want to read other posts I filed under the Environment and Cars categories.
In this post I recommended that job seekers not publish their CV. In a comment Gunnar suggested having a special CV for conferences. I think that Gunnar’s idea is good and have started writing my conference CV at http://etbe.coker.com.au/conferences. When I complete it I will make it part of every submission for speaking at a conference.
The LCA 2008 call for presentations is now open. One of the most interesting, noteworthy, and slightly controversial items is the suggestion that people submit a video. I think that the video submission is a great idea, either a video or testimony from audience members from past presentations should be required for all submissions (NB I’m not involved with organising LCA2008 so my opinion means little in this regard). The reason is that I have attended many presentations which fell far short of their potential due to poor speaking skills. I’ve been to great presentations by people with strong accents, by people with speech impediments, by people who are incredibly shy, and by people who just don’t have a clue about public speaking. However my observation is that if a speaker has more than one of these disadvantages then the presentation is likely to fail. I have previously written at length about how to give a good presentation to a technical audience (such as is found at LCA).
Dave Hall blogs about Should I do a presentation at LCA 2008. He mentions lack of a web-cam as a disincentive, but I am happy to lend him my digital camera (which makes really high quality movies) to solve this problem. In fact I have considered recording some short Linux talks at the SGI office during lunch breaks (Dave and I both work for SGI).
Dave also mentions a nightmare scenario about a laptop not working with presentation hardware. My post about getting laptops working for presentations will hopefully help some people in this regard.
I’m not sure if I’ll make an offer for LCA this year, I haven’t been doing much cutting-edge work recently. Maybe I’ll just offer some talks for mini-confs, I could probably get several offers accepted by mini-conf organisers if I try.
Mark Greenaway expresses surprise that someone could spend $8000 per annum on petol.
I own a 1999 VW Passat 2.8L that does 12.8L/100Km (based on my average driving habits – I record the amount of petrol purchased and the distance driven). I spend an average of just over $60 a month on petrol, so I’m approaching $800 per year.
I catch the tram and train to work most days (probably drive to work less than 10% of the time) and use my car very little apart from that (most places that I drive to are close to my house).
If I was to exclusively drive to work then that alone would make my petrol expenses approach $8000 per annum. If I was to shop at locations that weren’t so convenient or do recreational driving then the petrol expenses could be significantly greater.
The $1000 a year I spend on public transport doesn’t seem so expensive!
The Sydney Morning Herald has an article about the increase in sales of hybrid cars due to fuel price increases. In that article they note that Toyota representatives claim that Prius drivers travel more than the average 15,000 KM per annum.
Recently the RACV magazine published an article based on the CNW report (the bogus report paid for by Exxon which claims that the Jeep Wrangler is better for the environment than the Toyota Prius). In response to this I reviewed all adverts for second-hand Prius and Wrangler’s on www.drive.com.au to determine how much these vehicles are driven.
I counted a 2006 model as a 1yo car for the purpose of the average. On the 29th of April when I looked at the web site there were 90 Prius and 127 Wrangler on sale for which both the model year and the distance driven were published. Of these vehicles the average distance driven per year for the Prius was 15995Km, and the average for the Wrangler was 11,658Km.
Someone who purchases a Prius instead of a V6 car (such as my VW Passat) can expect to save at least 7L per 100KM (based on the assumption of 12L/100Km for a V6 and 5L/100Km for a Prius – this is a conservative estimate, the savings could be greater). That would be a saving of at least 1120L of petrol per annum for the average Prius owner, giving a saving of >$1500 per annum with current petrol prices. Over the 20 year life of the vehicle the average Prius owner can expect to save at least $30,000 on petrol at current prices – but we do expect petrol prices to increase…
I often want to write blog posts about HTML code and about source code in various languages. One problem I have is that the characters I want to use have special meanings (EG < and >), another is that I indent source code to make it readable and I don’t want the spaces trimmed from the start of lines.
I initially wrote a simple Perl script to replace characters such as < with HTML codes. I then had to extend it to escaping quote characters because WordPress tries to get smart and change quotes in a way that might look nice when dealing with plain text, but is just a pain when dealing with code.
The next problem I had is that when I used the <PRE> tag around some text to preserve the white-space WordPress would double-space the text (IE insert a blank line between every two lines of code). This was annoying when reading it and in some situations would change the meaning of the code! The solution I have found to these problems is to use the below script and not use the <PRE> tag. Also I tried using the <CODE> tag, but it made no difference to the end result as far as I could see.
The below script is what I am currently using. It is working well with shell scripts, HTML, and XML so far.
Update: The way that -- is munged by WordPress to — is something that I find particularly annoying. I already had this in the script but forgot to mention it in the post.
Continue reading putting HTML codes and other special characters into a blog entry
In my last post about Heartbeat I gave an example of a script to start and stop a cluster service. In that post I omitted to mention that the script goes in the directory /usr/lib/ocf/resource.d/heartbeat.
To actually use the script you need to write some XML configuration to tell Heartbeat which parameters should be passed to it via environment variables and which nodes may be candidates to run it.
In the below example the type of web means that the script /usr/lib/ocf/resource.d/heartbeat/web will be called to do the work. The id attributes are all arbitrary, but you want to decide on some sort of consistent naming scheme. I have decided to name web server instances web-X where X is the IP address used for providing the service.
The nvpair element contains a configuration option that will be passed to the script as an environment variable. The name of ip means that the environment variable will be named OCF_RESKEY_ip. Naming of such variables is arbitrary and a script may take many variables. A well written script (which incidentally does not mean my previous blog post) will have an option meta-data to give XML output describing all the variables that it accepts. An example of this can be seen by the command /usr/lib/ocf/resource.d/heartbeat/IPaddr2 meta-data.
In the XML the resources section (as specified by --obj_type resources on the cibadmin command-line) describes resources that the Heartbeat system will run. The constraints section specifies a set of rules that determine where they will run. If the symmetric-cluster attribute in the cluster_property_set is set to true then resources will be permitted to run anywhere, if it is set to false then a resource will not run anywhere unless there is a constraint specifying that it should do so – which means that there must be at least one constraint rule for every resource that is permitted to run.
In the below example I have constraint rules for the service giving node-0 and node-1 a priority of 9000 for running the service.
In a future post I will describe the cluster_property_set and how it affects calculations of where resources should run.
Continue reading configuring a Heartbeat service
A service script for Heartbeat needs to support at least three operations, start, stop, and status. The operations will return 0 on success, 7 on failure (which in the case of the monitor script means that the service is not running) and any other value to indicate that something has gone wrong.
In the second half of this post (not in the feed) I have included an example service script. It is a very brief script and does not support some of the optional parameters (monitor, validate-all, and meta-data). So this script is not of a quality that would be accepted for inclusion in a Heartbeat release but is adequate to demonstrate the concepts.
The XML configuration for a service can have an arbitrary set of name-value pairs, and they are passed to the script as environment variables. For example the below script expects that the XML configuration item named ip will have the IP address used by the service, my script receives this as a variable named OCF_RESKEY_ip. My script doesn’t use the address, it merely allows it to be inherited by the IPaddr2 script (which is part of the Heartbeat distribution) and that script assigns the address to an Ethernet interface.
The script is for testing Heartbeat, it mounts a filesystem and starts Apache (which is configured to serve web pages from the filesystem in question on the IP address supplied by the ip parameter).
For test purposes the script looks for a file named /root/fail, if this file exists then the status check will always abort. An aborting status script means that Heartbeat can not be certain that the node in question has released all resources that it was using for the service. This means that Heartbeat will have to kill the node via the STONITH service. Such test scripts are the only way to test that STONITH works, and I believe that it’s a necessary part of pre-production testing of a Heartbeat cluster.
Update: Made it display error messages in all cases and also reformatted it for better cut/paste.
Continue reading Heartbeat service scripts
In a Heartbeat cluster installation it may not be possible to have one STONITH device be used to reboot all nodes. To support this it is possible to have multiple STONITH devices configured that will each be used to reboot different nodes in the cluster. In the following code section there is an example of how to configure STONITH for two separate ssh instances. Of course this is not useful apart from as an example of how to configure STONITH. It would be quite easy to change one of those ssh configuration entries to use IPMI or some more effective method of managing machines. My previous post on this topic has an example of a simpler ssh STONITH configuration.
It is convenient that the ssh method for rebooting nodes is available both as a shared object (which is used by the following example XML) and as a shell script (type external/ssh). The shell script can be used to give the same functionality as the shared object (with reduced performance) but the benefit is as an example of how to write external plugins. For a client I have just written an IPMI module that works with machines that have two Ethernet ports. When a server has two Ethernet ports you want to send an IPMI reset command to both of them in case the failure which requires a STONITH was triggered by a broken Ethernet cable. Unfortunately I can’t release the IPMI code at this time
Continue reading Another Heartbeat 2.0 STONITH example configuration
Below is a sample script to configure the ssh STONITH agent for the Heartbeat system. STONITH will reboot nodes when things go wrong to restore the integrity of the cluster.
The STONITH test program supports the -n option to list parameters and the -l option to list nodes. The following is an example of using it with the ssh agent:
# stonith -t ssh -n
hostlist
# stonith -t ssh hostlist="node-0 node-1" -l
node-0
node-1
The hostlist tuple is the only configuration option for ssh. It is assumed that you have passwordless ssh logins allowed between root on all the nodes in the cluster so the host name list is all that’s needed.
The important thing to note about the constraint is that you are constraining the parent of the clones (which in this example has an ID of “DoFencing“) not a clone instance.
ssh is the simplest and in many ways least useful method of STONITH, but it’s good for an example as everyone knows it. Once you get ssh going it’ll be trivial to get the other methods working.
See below for the script to insert the XML in the CIB.
Continue reading Heartbeat version 2.0 CIB STONITH example configuration
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