TJLUG

I have no idea if Legion (The movie) is coming to Jordan, it is out today in America, with the new law (few years) tightening the limits on Blasphemy, this movie could be Illegal, i am not sure yet, but from what i understand of the law talking about it could be illegal.

If indeed this movie does not make it to theaters because of it’s clear hinting and aim, i am going to Egypt to see it (Or wherever it is playing).

Anyway, here are my thoughts on the movie if i understand right (Although sharing my thoughts could be illegal as well from what i understand from the law), here is what i think.

I think the AIM of this is, when you are in the theater, if you are like me, you always want the good guy to win right, the guy that fights for the Human race and for the week etc….

Well, what if he who wants to end the human race is God (Remember Noah, yeah that kind of mass godly murder ?) and a rebel angel decides to save the human race ? which side would you be on ? i would certainly want the angel (Micheal in this case) to win.

I couldn’t help notice how similar this thing is to God’s secret army, (or The Prophecy in America), but that one is pure entertainment, this one actually makes a point.

In god’s secret army, if i recall right, more angels decide to follow Lucifer’s footsteps and rebel against god, so god sends his angel’s to earth to deal with the outlaw angels, Then some humans get in the way, and angels didn’t really care for humans, they only wanted to get the Job done

Anyway, in this Legion, things are different, here is what i make of the trailer, the green band and the red band are very similar.

1- It’s a horror movie, remember….

2- Inspiration from the terminator.
A girl is pregnant with the one who can save the race, someone needs to protect her and him

3- Micheal is on the Human’s side, Agains’t god’s will

* Some note worthy quotes from the actual movie trailer (The only one that exists up to now)

- The last time god lost faith in man, he sent the flood, This time, he sent angels

- Micheal: I knew he was going to send you Gabriel, you were always eager to please him
Gabriel: Unlike you

In the Red Band trailer.

The trailer starts with an ice cream bus playing the ice cream music reading “Frosty treats”, the bus stops, A thin guy comes out (An angel as you will see later), then his arms extend and he gives the impression of an angry predator that starts to move forward on all 4, where the trailer jumps to the next seen where a voice speaks about a prophecy her mother told her

When i was a little girl, my mother spoke of a prophecy, of a time where all the world would be covered in darkness and the fate of mankind would be decided, one night i had the courage to ask my mother why god had changed, why he was so mad at his children, she said, i guess he just got tiered of all the bullshit

In the red band trailer, Although we see a man with wings (Maybe god, but the wings look like those of Gabriel from later in the trailer), and unlike the green trailer, NO voice says “The last time god lost faith in man, he sent the flood, This time, he sent angels”, Only the green one says that, this one, Micheal drops to a street on earth, And it seems, cuts his angel wings with a knife, and a strange ring around his neck tightens then breaks.

A police car goes by somewhere, a burning cross opening in the wall, and Micheal exiting it with a couple of bags as a police patrol stops him, the police man asks him to put his hands on his head, and he says there isin’t much time, the police man attacks him (But fails againt the angel), and a spirit enteres into the second police man, the spirit says “What are you doing micheal ? Micheal replies, i’m following my own orders now, Then you will die along with the child the spirit responds, and the second police man shioots at micheal, micheal shoots back and then says “It Started”"

A police car moves across the street and all the lights go off as the car goes.

Now the scene goes to a diner in a gas station where someone turns the TV on and a “This is not a test” appears, EBS… then an old lady that is in the diner (In the other trailer you see her entering) says “Oh you don’t have to worry about that, It’l all be over soon.

the old lady (In both trailers talks to a pregnant waitress):
Old Lady: How far along are you
Waitress : Ah Just about there
Old Lady : But the baby
Waitress : I got it under control
Old Lady: But it’s gonna burn
Waitress: What did you just say ?
Old Lady : I said your fucken baby’s gonna burn

Waiter: How, How
Someone: I don’t know who the hell you think you are, But i’d like you to appologize right now

Then the old lady bites the man in the neck and he falls to the ground, then the old lady says “Your all gonna fucken die”, and starts climbing the walls to the ceiling, one man with a rifel, and another yelling shoot her, he does, and the old lady drops to the floor.

Somebody’s commin.
A police car approaches, and one of the guys says “Now What”, The police car stops in a very wiggly fashion due to speed, and Micheal comes out of the police car

He doesen’t look like any police man i ever saw, Even one from LA

Take one more step and i’ll drop you right there, the guy tells the police man, where the police man (Micheal) responds, “You dont know do you ?”

Don’t know what asks the man, and Micheal takes the rifle and points it to the guy and says, there here…

Police cars come all together, with police men acting like the one that the strange spirit was in in the beginning of the trailer

A girl asks, are you here to protect us , and the angel responds with “No Not you, her”, Why me ? “Because your child is the only hope humanity has of surviving”, and the lady says, i don’t even own a car.

Alright Rambo, do you mind tellin us what were fighting ? and Micheal responds with “Angels”

Then a flock of angels (appearing as Humans with wings) appear in the trailer, Gabriel enters the room

Micheal: I knew he was going to send you Gabriel, you were always eager to please him
Gabriel: Unlike you

They just want the child

I don’t even beleiv in god, then the angel responds, “Just found that he doesen’t beleive in you either”

Then someone sets fire to a car direct from the a gasolene pump.

An angel seems to be fighting the Micheal angel with his wings !

Are you saying this is the epocalypse ? I’m saying this is an extermination

Then the girl asks micheal, are we safe now, and the angel responds, NO

And the red banner trailer is done, here take a look at it, but as you can see above, there are some scary part, the one that takes you by surprise is when the old lady at the diner bites the man in the neck, otherwise, i would say it is scary but not extremely.

Since the trailer has been removed from Youtube, you will need to google out “legion red band” and you will clearly get the Red Band trailer links in the google video links area.

Now that i have the files needed to start digging all over the internet for Statistical data, i would probably need to start with a domain name to display the information at, And i (after buying a bunch of domain names) can not make up my mind yet, but i will let you know as soon as i do

I would like the name to reflect my intention to collect statistics and provide history for every statistic, as i said, i will let you know when i come up with a nice vacant name.

So, a nameserver, what different networks has the nameserver machine moved to over time, What domain names has it served over time, what nameservers a domain has used over it’s lifetime, How many websites (Domains) is this web server serving, How has the number changed from year to year, and other things

While trying to design such a system, it proved to be far more challenging than i thought, the interconnections of everything are a bit complicated (Taking efficiency into account), every host name can have multiple IPs, every IP can have multiple names, an example of a questions that need to be answered before the design would sound like, a website that changed Nameservers but the new NS has the same ip as the old (Same physical serveron same network), has it really changed nameservers, and no this is not like the tree that fell in the woods, they are real questions ?

So the statistics that need to be collected and used are complicated but there are other issues that i must deal with as well to protect the internet and keep it safe

1- Spammers, somehow, the statistics MUST be protected from spammers (And other types of crooks).

2- Scalability, Where the terrabytes of data are stored, and where the processing is done should not be the same as the web server that serves that data, and the web server that serves the text data should not be the same as that that serves the graphics etc… cheaper networks should be used in a way, and more expensive faster networks should be used in a different way, processing intensive operations should be done somewhere, and data fetch and display operations in another, synchronisation should be automatic

So for the above, the following are guidelines i have come up with till now

* A captcha image must appear after x page views where domain names are displayed for any client IP
* Google and other spiders must be able to archive the website and serve relevant usefull pages to there visitors, but must not provide a way for spammers to mine data, meaning, the search engine must NOT cache (Or display cached copies) of the pages where domain names appear

I will keep everyone posted right here on all such issues

For now, i need to go create an open source FAST IP-2-Country system for use with this system, and a way to seek help in building it (Where people report there GEO Location).

Stay tuned for some serious internet statistics.

WordPress consumes a considerable amount of my time, not blogging, but updating this wonderful blogging tool, but is it not time yet to create some sort of Auto-Updating software ?

And by auto updating, i mean in a safe way that does not involve allowing apache to write to all files, i mean a bit of a more complex machanisim where one of the files is owned by a user allowed to edit the contents of PHP files or something creative that does not end up being itself a security vulnerability.

Security Volnerabilities are sometimes more commonly found in code that is distributed free (Like GPL), the code is distributed, then someone who has just learned a bit on regular expressions (A search mechanisim that can be used in most advanced editors to look for strings in files) searches the code for some sort of volnerability prone syntax, and then scrutenises it in order to inject links into popular websites for the purpose of fooling google into thinking they own an important website about some important medication

Truth be told, the guys at wordpress are doing a lovely job in updating there software as soon as a volnerability is found, Microsoft and other propertiary software vendors on the other hand enjoy the Security through obscurity principal and have to worry much less until disaster strikes, Like when IE brought the world destruction with a bunch of flaws that crippled most internet users and caused my dad to accuse me of vandalizing his PC on purpose, no doubt GPL is for the brave amongst us (And the generous).

But it may be time to write my own blogging software, as fond as i am of wordpress, i need a captcha system that i can trust (With no need for API keys and releying on other people’s uptime), i need a privilages system that does not classify people to Anon, User, and Admin, and a system that can be tailored to my needs easy by being simple and pluggable.

I have already found a name for it (TEKSTS.COM) and a nice hosting service for it (ALLSPOT.COM), once i finish the first beta release, i will open it for testing, then i will start adding functionality to it.

Surely, This is the main reason i was talking AJAX in the last post, because such an application without AJAXIFICATION is obsolete from day 1

Click here for an explanation of what AJAX is

So, i have been a C++ developer for 10 years, a PHP developer for 6 and a system administrator (*NIX) for god knows how long, but i speak no JavaScript.

I tried once with a very nice book called “JavaScript, The Definitive Guide” by David Flanagan, but couldn’t read through the first few chapters, simply put, the lack of what i consider a clear discipline got on my nerves *(Explanation follows)

What happens is, My brain got used to C++, then i started accepting PHP once i knew how the interpreter worked with my code and started making sense of what seemed a lack of discipline.

What happens is this, people consider C++ to be a tough language because you have to take care of every single detail, you invoke procedures stored at known addresses in memory, You borrow memory from the OS and need to give it back, you declare a variable and the type of that variable is fixed, you know, very strict, in PHP i had to wonder how i could simply switch the data type of a variable by simply assigning a new value, it felt as if it was very inefficient (By imagining what could be happening at the compiler level) having to deal with all the random castings one can make while writing PHP code, sure i was wrong, and the gurus that made PHP made sure it executes like a BMW (If C++ was a ferrari), in short, PHP turned out to be a very good performer, and surely, for the time savings PHP offers, i would chose it for web development over C++ any day of the week, if it can run WIKIPEDIA, it can run my applications.

It took me some time to understand how the interpreter of PHP works, i jumped into understanding it when i was fiddling with APC (Software to almost precompile your PHP code).

In case you are curious why i was playing with APC, I was playing with APC to try and make all instances of a WordPress PHP file in every client account (Website) use a single copy of the opcode to speed up WordPress on our servers, it turned out that APC uses a files INODE and not it’s flags and attributes for caching and my plans were canceled due to the risky nature of similarity guesswork.

Anyway, not to get far off topic, Javascript reminds me of my PHP-switch pains, i don’t comprehend it well yet (maybe i am getting old), and my brain functions in a very primitive way, the “Jump in now understand later” approach i have been trying to adopt is not working well, it never did, so i have always had to do it the hard way.

I have for a long time asked for a dose of wisdom from my gods (if you are wondering, i asked Athena, Minerva, and the mighty Nabu) but to no avail, this evil mechanism inside my brain is demanding a simple language (Like C++).

Sure JavaScript is a discipline, All computer languages are, but not to speak in absolute terms, When a Discipline has 2 many rules and even more exceptions, it looks random until you master it, what is getting on my nerves even more is the fact that everything i write in it works, and that scares me, i feel as if bugs will happen any minute with any user and crash his or her browser.

But as a web developer, It seems AJAX is essential and there is no running away from it, I have to add it to my skill sheet no matter the cost, so consider me away for a weeks time while i get a good grasp of this vodoo language

At my office, Everyone runs a PC with pleanty of RAM, and  uses less than 2GBs most of the day

My computer processes data stored in a database, my hard drive constantly making noises, reading and writing to that database, the raw data comes in every day, new data compared to old data… changes recorded, old data deleted, etc…

This process usually takes up 5 to 6 hours, even though i run multiple threads on 4 processors, the reason is, well the hard drive, every thread reads the data it needs to operate on, if only i had a good SSH to cut the time down to 2-3 hours, or wait, maybe i have what is better than SSD, RAM !

First, i need to informa anyone that i intend to use there PCs for a background process that they will not feel exists

Most of the users are Windows users, so i need MEMCACHED for Windows installed on there PCs, but before i install on there PCs, i will delay this operation until i implement on my own PC first (Although i have little of my 8GBs to spare unlike everyone else)

Now, let us play, First i download memcached, made sure it is usefull in PHP as well as C++

next i unzipped the data to C:\Program Files (x86)\memcached

Now open the command prompt (cmd)

cd C:\Program Files (x86)\memcached

From properties of the memcached.exe file, change properties to always run as administrator (I can’t because UAC is off and i don’t need to for that same reason)

On command prompt

memcached.exe -d install

Now, if it has been installed as a service, i should be able to see it right ? So i open services, scroll down, and there it is with startup type set to auto

Adding more ram to make use of 4GBs on every PC

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\memcached Server

find the ImagePath entry and change it to look something like this, adding the amount of RAM you want to use (Increase) to a number in megabytes, i want 4GB so that would be 4096MB

“C:\memcached\memcached.exe’ -d runservice -m 4096

Now when you start the service via net start “memcached Server”, it will run with 4GB of memory at it’s disposal.

Good, now what, Now we need to start memcached, Just start it from services, or run one of the following line to start it from the command line

c:\memcached\memcached.exe -d start
net start “memcached Server”

Now that it is online, let us see how it works from PHP

We need to load php_memcache.dll

edit php.ini (Mine is in my PHP directory, yours can be in the windows directory)

Uncomment (Remove from

extension=php_memcache.dll

Now restart apache

Testing !

Now i need to check that memcached works from PHP on my localhost

<?php
$memcache = new Memcache;
$memcache->addServer(‘localhost’, 11211);
print “Server’s version: ” . $memcache->getVersion() . “<br />\n”;
$memcache->set(“mykey”,”A string you should obviously see in output”,false,60);
print $memcache->get(“mykey”);
?>

The magic of multiple servers is done in php by simply adding more of the (addServer) calls, they will only be opened when they are needed and there is no overhead.

But i hear you say, host1 has 4GBs of memory, and host2 has 512MB of memory, This is where you should set the weight of host1 to 8 since it is 8 times larger than the smallest server which is 0.5GB (and default weight is 1)

A table with millions of records, one of them a long text field was taking up too much space, especially that it is on a solid state drive (Expensive and small), so i decided it was not done correctly

The data in the text field was a page, there was no need to search the page, and the data is only needed when we know the row, so i decided the text should be compressed

The PHP site could compress the data before storing it, and decompress it when displaying it, surely there is overhead in compression and decompression, but since we are not talking about millions of hits a day, it should not be a big problem

to begin with, there were 2 candidate functions to do the mission

gzdeflate – gzinflate
bzcompress – bzdecompress

So, i chose deflate since it is more efficient (Much faster), and while testing produced results comparable to bz2, infact, the results were almost identical.

I did the testing on the first 9k records

What you need to pay attention to is that the text field should no longer be UTF_GENERAL_xx , the same compressed data when the filed was UTF8 was 80Mb (the first 9000 records), while it was only 50Mb when the data was stored as binary large object.

Here are the results of storing the first 9k records

Plain text in UTF8 field = 183MB
gzdeflate in UTF8 field = 80MB
gzdeflate in BLOB field (The right way to do it) = 50MB

Once i knew what i was supposed to do, the data ended taking up 1/4 of the space it required in plain text.

You may ask why 1/4 when the database compresses to 10% of the size when we have a SQLDUMP file, the truth is, every field of every row is compressed alone, if we compressed all the fields into one gz string, we would have got the 1/10 but since we can only compress field by field, 1/4 sounds good to me.

Enjoy