Floogy Blog

One-click phpMyAdmin via Plesk

support@floogy.com (Shamus of Floogy) — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 07:43:00 +0000

Plesk users still clicking a half-dozen times to access phpMyAdmin, take some life back in two easy steps.

Step 1: Get the iOpus iMacros Firefox Add-on

Launch Mozilla Firefox and head to:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3863

Step 2: Create a Macro to do the work for you

Paste the below script and save as a new Macro. If you have a different VERSION BUILD then you probably want to leave the first line alone).

VERSION BUILD=6210326 RECORDER=FX
TAB T=1
URL GOTO=https://IP_GOES_HERE:8443/login.php3?previous_page=index
FRAME F=2
TAG POS=1 TYPE=INPUT:TEXT FORM=NAME:form1 ATTR=ID:login_name CONTENT=USERNAME_GOES_HERE
SET !ENCRYPTION NO
TAG POS=1 TYPE=INPUT:PASSWORD FORM=NAME:form2 ATTR=ID:fid-passwd CONTENT=PASSWORD_GOES_HERE
TAG POS=1 TYPE=BUTTON ATTR=ID:buttonid-login
URL GOTO=https://IP_GOES_HERE:8443/server/db_server_databases.php?db_server_id=1&previous_page=%2Fserver%2Fdb_server_edit.php
TAG POS=1 TYPE=SPAN ATTR=ID:spanid-webadmin

From now on you can get up and do a jumping jack instead of sitting there getting RSI. A pleasure!

A moment of realization...

support@floogy.com (Shamus of Floogy) — Fri, 08 May 2009 23:08:00 +0000

"A moment of realization is worth a thousand prayers."
- Woody Harrelson, Natural Born Killers

I've just had one of those. First, take a glance at the charts in Recession hides a boon for US Dollar and then read this quote from two centuries ago:

Observing the charts in the previous post, one thing becomes obvious: Trouble did not start until the US Dollar began rocketing skyward versus other major currencies. The entire credit crunch is that distribution of property which a 10-year-old would tell you must happen when the amount on loan becomes worth more stuff before it's repaid.

This massive increase in buying power (30%+ hidden interest on your credit) is being desperately covered up by mass inflation (injections of cash), which will soon render it invisible through shelf prices. The looking glass is only clear when held up against a basket of foreign currencies.

Because the Federal Reserve Bank of New York's stated purpose is to manipulate the ebb and flow of currency, this is a very big deal indeed, amounting to theft. Unfortunately, the position which is meant to oversee them (Secretary of Treasury) has just been filled by their own former president. The same private company which is responsible for this filthy transfer of ownership sent New Zealand their very latest election winner. I smell a rat, and see evidence plain as pellets of poo...

Recession hides a boon for US Dollar

support@floogy.com (Shamus of Floogy) — Thu, 07 May 2009 02:30:00 +0000

The rise and rise of the US Dollar versus major currencies around the globe, simultaneously, would be the major financial headline any other year.

One time too many, I've heard people in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and even the United Kingdom comment as a matter of fact that the US Dollar has suffered some grievous calamity at the hands of October's completely accidental market crash. Whether the truth is unreported or we're all simply avoiding those glum faces of the mainstream media, I can't be sure. But let's set the record straight, regardless!

In the suitably menacing charts below, the colourful lines are market indexes, so you can see what happened to the USD's value versus [your currency] as the drama unfurled. The blue line is the exchange value of the USD versus [your currency], and up is a stronger USD:

[US Dollar vs. Australian Dollar]
plus 3x markets for context

[US Dollar vs. British Pound]

[US Dollar vs. New Zealand Dollar]

[US Dollar vs. South African Rand]

Alongside the US health advisory to never flee to Mexico and/or cavort with swine, I would issue my own advisory to budget 30% more than last time for your next visit to the 'States. Those nice ladies at the foreign exchange desk may be considerably less appealing.

Ensim to Plesk migration primer

support@floogy.com (Shamus of Floogy) — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 15:24:00 +0000

Since Parallels bought Ensim last year (when they still called themselves SWsoft), and especially since Ensim has since reached it's EOL (end of life support and upgrades) it's about time somebody wrote a reference for web site administrators who are migrated from Ensim to Plesk. Read on for a primer containing five (5) essentials for web site admins.

1. Control Panel Login

Ensim default:
http://example.com/admin/

Plesk default:
https://example.com:8443/

Plesk's control panel Login field expects your domain name (without the 'www.') -- not your username, as you might expect.

2. FTP

Ensim's FTP usernames were entered in the full email address format (username@example.com). Plesk expects only your username.

3. Databases

While Ensim allowed the same database username to access multiple databases, Plesk does not. Keep reading if you had more than one database in Ensim at time of migration.

When migrating from Ensim to Plesk, a user will have been generated for each additional database in alphabetical order. Your first database's username (i.e. dbuser) would not change, but from the next database onward, the new user would be named dbuser2, then dbuser3, and so forth.

NB: We took the pain out of this by sifting through all files which contained local database connection code, and updated the usernames for you!

4. Document Root / Full Server Paths

Ensim's full paths to your document root look like either of the below:
/home/virtual/example.com/var/www/html/
/home/virtual/site123/fst/var/www/html/

Plesk's full path to your document root looks like this:
/var/www/vhosts/example.com/httpdocs/

Anywhere you may have used the full path reference (PHP image upload script, forum configuration, etc.) must be updated to suit.

5. Users and Mail

In Ensim, adding a user to your account created an email address and optionally an FTP account and/or a subdomain of their own. In Plesk, these are treated separately. A Mail User, a Subdomain, and a Web User (includes FTP account) are distinct entities.

Webmail, formerly accessed under example.com/webmail/, is instead at webmail.example.com. Happily, nothing need be changed in your POP3 / IMAP settings for Outlook, Thunderbird, your mobile phone, or other favourite mail client.

6. Webalizer / Statistics

Ensim default:
http://example.com/webalizer/web/

Plesk default:
http://example.com/plesk-stat/webstat/

In Summary...

Those are the most important things to know upon migration. It's not an exhaustive list because they are, after all, two separate products. Having said that, it's important that everybody know a few things up front, so please comment if I've missed any show-stoppers.

To those readers hosted by Floogy, enjoy the speedy interface of your brand new Plesk control panel.

Public service announcement

support@floogy.com (Shamus of Floogy) — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 23:25:00 +0000

This is a public service announcement to citizens of the United States of America. You are being robbed. Your corporations -- er, news networks -- can only be trusted to muddy and obscure the fact that you are, indeed, being robbed. Wake up.

Are Bush and his cronies on a last-minute fleecing? That's where the media's blame will lie entirely after January 20, 2009, but you know better. You'll remember that Barack Hussein Obama II scurried to Washington, DC mid-campaign to vote for the original bailout with McCain and Bush, which was rejected even by Congress. That seems to say the only change you'll see from him is change on your dollar.

Yahoo! Laugh it up.

support@floogy.com (Shamus of Floogy) — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 10:36:00 +0000

Public companies are such a funny thing. We entrepreneurs could profit $180,000 then $300,000 then $250,000 while being very well fed and travelled; living our dreams.

Now, try earning that, in millions per annum, as a company listed on the gambling board. I mean, stock exchange.

Ah! You would be deemed a failure and a loser; the press would profile shareholders and anal ysts crying that their money (which they passively bet on you gobbling up more and more, like a crazed animal) has gone to the person they bet against.

201-year-old advice on current issues

support@floogy.com (Shamus of Floogy) — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 01:28:00 +0000

What benefit is there to building upon hundreds of years of civilization and literature if our economic advisors and politicians refuse to read and learn from other civilization's mistakes?

"Luxury, Mr Cobbett, blasting, consuming luxury, will be our ruin; and if we do not soon give an example, which has never before, I believe, been given in the world, luxury will make us fall under the overwhelming power of France, and blot us out of the list of nations.

"The great must set an example of heroic self denial, they must give up their splendid, extravagant, and senseless pomp, or the whole nation must suffer for their obstinate blindness; if taxes must be raised for the continuance of the war, they must be raised either by the total abolition of all useless places and pensions, or they must be raised from the fortune of the great exclusively, for the poor and middle ranks are already ground to powder; and if the rich have not prudence, or foresight, or virtue enough to make great sacrifices of luxury to safety, we mast all suffer together, but woe be to them who might have saved us and would not."

— Cobbett's Weekly Political Register

Click the image to the right to zoom in, or load up the full version.

If you're interested in more ancient advice and insight along these lines, see the parliamentary debates when England was considering how best, if at all, to return to a resource-based economy in 1819. The parallels to today's fiscal crisis are astonishing; from large bank loans being the popular solution proposed by government, to characters not tainted by a vested interest in that loan standing up in Parliament to plead for sanity; to point out the obvious cons of an economy-based society of debt and scarcity, where labourers are punished for abundance and advances in technology.

First, kill all the lawyers

support@floogy.com (Shamus of Floogy) — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 01:08:00 +0000

Thank Shakespeare for our title today.

Do you know anybody who has been arrested for stealing beach sand, or air, or water from the sky? Understand that with abundance, evil becomes almost irrelevant.

Is it conceivable that without the artificial boundaries of an economy, patents and corporations which maintain fictional scarcity of both resources and technology the devil could not walk freely among us, maintaining division, scarcity, hunger, greed, status, price and rank?

How to estimate without psychic powers

support@floogy.com (Shamus of Floogy) — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 03:57:00 +0000

An interesting question on the process of churning out an esimtate was recently posed by a Creative Director in my LinkedIn group who is "looking to add measurability" while lamenting that "finding the time to follow up on jobs is difficult."

This is a common problem, so I'll summarize my thoughts on a potential alternative here, out in the open. I'll take the stance of advocate for the duration of this essay. Here's the elevator pitch:

We should stop considering our time entirely, unless there is a real danger that it would be worth less than the client's value. Billing for value rather than time is nothing new; you trade in this manner every time you head to the grocery store. Due to the power of modern programming languages and development tools, and the productivity of a true web developer with years of experience, it should never be a problem to provide more value than time invested.

There's more to it than being a less complicated way to approach an estimate. Make no mistake, we're talking cost estimate alone. The laborious task of filtering project goals down into to-do lists with associated time estimates is, of course, essential for planning your days. No way around that, if you manage your projects in a way that allows clients to know exactly what to expect, by when, incrementally.

Personally, I continue to approach estimates whichever way the client wants. The simplest case is when they tell us what they want, with a reasonable level of detail, and propose their own budget. It's easy to tell if the project will be worthwhile, and it wouldn't be unusual to start on such a project the same day it were first mentioned. These, I can now say in hindsight, tend to go even more smoothly than the ones we try to predict, down to which module we'll be tinkering with next Tuesday at 3:45pm.

More time to journey down the roads which open up to a developer as he builds a system an interconnects the modules. More time to work on bug fixes, class abstraction and IE6 compatibility. Less time spent gazing into crystal balls and explaining every failed prediction to a worried client who's expecting only what he or she has been told to expect.

A web site is grown rather than built. Builders charge for labour by the day. Gardeners sell their produce either based on how much profit the store can derive from it, or if they sell directly, how juicy the end user experience is. Don't we do the same?

Books for those who work alone

support@floogy.com (Shamus of Floogy) — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 10:41:00 +0000

Despite being written for solo consultants, the book "Getting Started In Consulting" by Alan Weiss, PhD came highly recommended for anybody working at home. I don't remember where, exactly, but isn't that the beauty of RSS feed reader interfaces which completely strip away brand association with the source? Good practice tip: mention your own web site in your blog posts, once in a while. It's not egotistic, just a practical way to introduce people to yourself, or, for you more profound bloggers, to remind them whose work they're feeding on.

End rant. Resume selfless book promo. I say that anybody who works alone for even a few hours per week will save a lot more time than they put into this book just by reading the first two chapters.

Tired of books which are all business? Grab this guy's ride through life so far:

How to fix pinoc.org or pinoc.info iframe infections

support@floogy.com (Shamus of Floogy) — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 13:01:00 +0000

A lot of popular scripts developed for PHP 4 are currently being hacked through a tmp directory exploit. This is affecting web masters all over the place, so we've decided to do something about it, and write this little blog post in case it helps somebody.

If you see HTML code resembling iframe src="http://pinoc.org/count.php?o=2" being inserted into certain files on your web hosting account, you know that you are infected. I decided not to water that "infected" down to "affected" because loading a malicious 3rd-party file into your own web page is pretty serious business. Enough sobering up, let's get this solved!

Floogy Host clients, just ask us to sort it out for you. Everyone else, just follow along below:

1. SSH (or Telnet) into your web hosting account. If you don't know how, or can't connect for some reason, email the web address of this article to your server administrator, close this page, and get yourself a coffee.

2. You're in? Okay, just paste the below one-liner (right-click to paste if you're using the PuTTY SSH client on Windows) and hit Enter to sniff out files which may be infected:

grep -lir "pinoc" *

3. If no file names show, you are safe; go in peace. Else, head to the top-level infected directory, and then paste this perl one-liner after replacing "/path/to/start/from" with the path to your top-level infected directory. If you have any problems, be sure to make it a one-liner before pasting. Run step 2 again and you should see no file names show up.

Good deed ticked off, now I deserve my grilled cheese sandwich! Yes, linking to cuil.com is the flavour of the week. I really don't see myself using it much, not while I'm this accustomed to Google's keyword-based search. But, it's pretty nifty for topic-based search.

Ymail = Fail?

support@floogy.com (Shamus of Floogy) — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 08:07:00 +0000

After reading over at ZDNet that Yahoo! has introduced two new e-mail address domains, I had to know which they were. Well, I won't keep you in suspense; they're rocketmail.com and predictably, in hindsight, ymail.com.

Naturally, I headed over to ymail.com to see if they were re-branding or just redirecting traffic to mail.yahoo.com. The latter seems to be the case; the only catch being that it fails.

There's an unexpected level of quality control from the guys who brought us the excellent Yahoo! Developer Network.

Close Ymail, back to Gmail... which is, ironically, where I started down this path.

Colours trump lorem ipsum

support@floogy.com (Shamus of Floogy) — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 13:38:00 +0000

I've just been laughed at, in the best way possible. After a friendly real estate agent named Helen emailed me a spreadsheet of available properties, I mindlessly highlighted the properties according to my level of interest and fired it back. Her amused little chuckle at my way of being understood, followed by her intuitive understanding of what I was after, proved to me that, in retrospect, colours (and shapes, and other universal cues) trump explanatory text on a daily basis.

Yes, it's simple; and you're forgiven for wondering what manner of boredom drove me to write a blog post about it.

Even when something is spoken or written down, there are enough variations in our level of linguistic ability, accent, sentence structure and so forth to murk the waters. Yes, that's murk as an action verb, because this is post mentions linguistics. I can also tell you that my girlfriend (teehee, I said girlfriend) subconsciously chooses prepositional phrases to begin her sentences. But I have no idea how to spell scabenga.

I see something about spreadsheets up there... highlights... ah, yes! The point of this post is to share with whatever readers may stumble across this archive (as it will be, by the time this is first read) an idea. An idea that you could try next time you design a layout, a presentation, or a logo. Use colours, not lorem ipsum, to say what you mean. People might even understand you.

'Bout that time eh, chaps?

support@floogy.com (Shamus of Floogy) — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 15:54:00 +0000

My name is Shamus, and I've just realized I'm turning 25 this month.

A few minutes ago, I was taking a 5am stroll around the neighborhood. When the weather is fine, there's no better way to wind down after a night's work is done. With the realization that my quarter-century milestone is around the corner, though, winding down isn't exactly what took place.

Floogy is a huge part of my life, as it has been since laying claim to the domain name back in 2001. I had an idea that my $14/mo web hosting bill was too high, and that more of my motocross buddies would have their own web sites if it cost less than $5/mo. It worked; even it's 7th year, Floogy's new web hosting clients still tend to come from motocross land. I miss being a more muddy, broken, enthusiastic participant in that industry.

The years, meanwhile, have been flying past.

A short while after launching the web hosting service, I was somehow contracted as a lecturer of web development... but not for long. When the CEO simply disappeared (along with a whole lot of zeros from their balance sheet), I was freed unexpectedly. With web development on the brain, I began building and face-lifting a few web sites for the sake of it, with one unexpected side effect; a portfolio.

In the mean time, Floogy as a web hosting service was growing steadily, and in 2006 I handed over day-to-day server administration to fresher faces. This was a huge deal for somebody used to micro-managing every aspect of every email, server, invoice and account. Prying my fingers off those reigns actually took a few attempts, and to this day my mobile would let me know if any server coughs.

The benefits of leveraging other people could not have been more obvious. Even more time was freed up, which was promptly filled with web dev projects. Word of mouth is a wonderful thing, and without any advertising the incoming development work kept myself and anywhere up to a half-dozen others busy up to our eyeballs.

This has been the case since. 007's a blur of airline meals, sleep deprivation, deadlines and celebrations. Despite this, there has been a nagging feeling that more can be done. I had always pictured retirement at 25, and though I wouldn't take it now if it were on offer, to have that option... well, that'd be swell.

This brings us back to the beginning, where I'm strolling the neighborhood. I guess there was a bit of thinking going on and I had to spill some out, unusually, into a blog. This is not an apology. I will do this more often, because it's my blog and I am micro-managing it. For now. =]

Here Comes Another Bubble v1.1 - The Richter Scales

support@floogy.com (Shamus of Floogy) — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 22:54:00 +0000

This is quite an amusing video. Like the last bubble, though, it only affects companies who are leveraging other people's money.

Android Demo

support@floogy.com (Shamus of Floogy) — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 02:12:00 +0000

A juicy look at what the fabled GPhone really is.

This is far more exciting than a single phone; complete separation of hardware from software is the way forward, and Google is being very wise not to muddy which business they are in: Software.

Opening up the platform to developers the world over is ingenious. No, nothing like Facebook's fake openness (here, add your apps), but real open source where any developer can feel free to contribute directly to the operating system.

I can't wait for the rollout.

About the Floogy Blog

support@floogy.com (Shamus of Floogy) — Tue, 22 May 2007 00:49:00 +0000

This blog is for people who build or run their own web based services. From time to time, it will also highlight major updates to the services delivered by Floogy.

Having focused on web hosting and custom development since 2001, Floogy is moving into the delivery of software as a subscription service. Current internal projects:

Invoicing software for subscription based services
Store software for one-off sales
Store software for Herbalife Independent Distributors

Yes, we still do custom development. Lots of it. Current external projects include:

Book editing software for medium-large organizations
Community web site for Catholic adherents
Streaming video platform for real estate agents
Store integration for fly fishing club
Edit-in-place web site management solution for market research group

This blog was inspired by the consistent efforts of those entertaining and informative people whose posts provide us with a fresh perspective each week. The best of these are the geeky SitePoint Blogs and the unpredictable Signal vs. Noise by those smart folk at 37 Signals.

Enjoy the posts to come!