Professional Work Weblog

iOS7 a revolution, but for who?

Jul06
2013 Leave a Comment Written by Farhad Malekpour

images

Main weakness of Apple is hiring the wrong persons. They did that before in 80′s and to be continued.

iOS7 is a good OS, but it’s not Apple. They got the market because their iDevices was capable of handling tens of graphic layers over each other creating a mind blending interface packed with unique features. Now in iOS7:

  • Average users don’t care about dynamics in main interface of iOS, moving a screen because I said so is just similar to move it because there is another screen beside or gravity makes them move. That’s a huge technological difference, but just for developers, not public.
  • Average users like to have some contrast in screen. Sure a simple design is much more elegant, but you can’t capture eyes of users with just text. It’s like a woman with or without makeup!
  • In their opinion, new design is based on contents with large fonts and less graphics (no lines, shadows, etc). That’s good for pages inside a book, not the cover. I shown screenshots of native Calendar App on iOS6 and iOS7 to about 50 people including Android fans, only one of them said iOS7 is a better design.
  • And finally, everybody including Android and Win8 can make something like iOS7, but only apple can (could) create a remarkable operating system like iOS6 and run it on a small device at fantastic speed.

 

If you have time, watch http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8mttU82V64, specially from 47:30 to end. You will get the idea what will happen to a company when marketing department get in charge of design!

 

Hopefully they turn back before iOS7 concept gets into OSX.

Posted in Logs - Tagged ,

Charge iPad with PC

Aug23
2012 Leave a Comment Written by Farhad Malekpour

I searched a lot about finding a way to charge my iPad with regular USB port of the PC. So far there is no way to do that unless USB port of the PC provide at least 1.2 Amp of current which most of the mother boards does not support that. So I start looking for a USB Hub to do that job. Unfortunately most of the USB Hubs, even those with separated power supply only provide standard 500 ma which is useless for charging iPad.

Then I found this DUB-h7 DLink hub, bough it from Tiger Direct for less than $30. This hub has 7 ports in total, two of them marked for high current which can charge the iPad. Tried one of the ports and vola, iPad is charging, but when I connected the hub to PC, iPad stopped charging again.

It seems, there is a software that you need to install on your PC in order to have both iPad connection and charging at the same time. Finding the software was not easy as DLink removed the link from their web site. I found it anyway and installed it on my Win7-64 and everything work perfectly fine. Now I can sync my iPad with PC while charging it at the same time.

Link to DLink iPad Change Utility:
http://discontinued-software.googlecode.com/files/iPad_Charge_Utility_1.07.exe

 

 

Posted in How To

3TB Hard Drive on Intel Matrix/Rapid Storage

May04
2012 6 Comments Written by Farhad Malekpour

Yesterday I had to upgrade my system for larger storage, So I decided to go with a pair of 3TB hard drives to be in RAID1 (mirror). After backup and make sure I have copy of everything I started to remove old hard drives and install new ones. In BIOS I surprised to see that Intel Matrix Storage does not recognize the 3TB space on drives, just 740GB!

Searching for a solution didn’t go anywhere, I have an ASUS P7P55D-E mobo which is not old and should have all required modules with latest BIOS flashed from ASUS. But for some reasons ASUS is not up-to-date with latest BIOS modules. Latest BIOS for my mobo has Intel Matrix Storage version 8.x while current version according to Intel is 10.x!

Installing the Intel Rapid Storage in windows didn’t fix the problem, although that software could recognize the hard drives as 3TB, but unable to create the RAID volume.

So I started to search and search and then more search. There is a handy utility called MMTool, it can modify contents of a BIOS BIN file. That allows me to replace the old version of IMS with new one. Here are the steps:

  1. Download MMTool_3.19.
  2. Download latest version of BIOS from ASUS web site. Mine was P7P55D-E, so I searched for the BIOS in ASUS web site and download.
  3. Download copy of the Intel Martix/Rapid Storage ROM. Download it from  8086-2822_10511070. It’s a zip file, extract it to get the .BIN file.
  4. Run MMTool and open the BIOS file.
  5. Look for the module having:
    ID: 20
    Vendor ID: 8086
    Device ID: 2822
  6. Select ‘Replace’ from top, browse to location of the BIN file (8086-2822_10511070.BIN), make sure module ID is 20, Vendor ID is 8086 and Device ID is 2822. Then click ‘Replace’
  7. ‘Save ROM As…’, give it a new name, then load it to your motherboard using a BIOS flash utility or the BIOS itself if it support the flash tool (mine does).
  8. Restart the system and I can see that new Intel Matrix/Rapid Storage is in place and recognize the drives as 2.7TB.

 

 

 

 

 

Posted in How To

RBL Based IP to Location

Jun15
2011 3 Comments Written by Farhad Malekpour

I needed a very fast and effective way of fining geographical location of an IP address. I’ve already implemented a very nice interface located at Dayana Host IP Location, but due to web based system it’s not fast enough for what I need.

Basically I’m trying to block access to login to certain mail boxes (managed by exim) from some countries. Routine is in Perl, so I can easily find IP address of a host using DNS lookup. All I needed was a service to give the location based on incoming IP address. I used rbldnsd and modified it to accept MaxMind country database and wola, it works as expected.

To use, first reverse the IP, just like what you do with RBL based spam lists. For instance 204.50.14.1 will be 1.14.50.204, then combine it with .rbloc.dayanadns.com and make a DNS query to find IP address, for example:

$host 1.14.50.204.rbloc.dayanadns.com

That will give you two records, an A record and a TXT record.

‘A’ record will be in form of 127.0.X.Y wherre X is the ASCII code of the first letter of country code and Y is the second letter. For our example returned IP is 127.0.67.65 which means ‘CA’ (C=> 67, A=>65).

TXT record is the complete country name, i.e. ‘Canada’.

Here is a sample perl script to get the country code:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use Socket;

$packed_ip = gethostbyname('1.14.50.204.rbloc.dayanadns.com');
if (defined $packed_ip)
{
    $ip_address = inet_ntoa($packed_ip);
    my(undef, undef, $d1, $d2) = split(/\./, $ip_address);
    $country_code = chr($d1).chr($d2);
}
print "Result address: ".$ip_address."\n";
print "Country code: ".$country_code."\n";

and this one is in PHP:

<?php

$ip_address = gethostbyname('1.14.50.204.rbloc.dayanadns.com');
list($d1,$d2,$d3,$d4) = explode('.',$ip_address);
$country_code = chr($d3).chr($d4);

print "Result address: ".$ip_address."\n";
print "Country code: ".$country_code."\n";

?>

 

 

Posted in How To, Programming, Scripts

Network Problem

Jun09
2011 Leave a Comment Written by Farhad Malekpour

Today we’ve had tons of problems in data center. Rogers (Rogers Business Solutions) is one of our broadband providers and their link was totally unstable. It’s a fiber optic line connected directly to our data center, so the line itself is good, but their equipments are either buggy or old or …

They changed them a few times today and we had to call them several times to get them fix the issue. But it seems they use Telus infrastructure and every body know how Telus do the job. In my opinion, Telus is the worst communication company in Canada. Just try to reach some one or use their ultra complicated network of sites, all will result in hours of waiting for a critical issue.

For now, that link is stable and there is no packet lost. I hope what they’ve done was a permanent fix.

 

Posted in Logs

I’m back

Jun08
2011 Leave a Comment Written by Farhad Malekpour

It’s been a while, busy doing some projects. To name a few:

  • Major improvements on List 4 All web site, specially in members area.
  • Design a complete management system called Say5 for Hosting Linux servers including installation, root, reseller and end user control panels, a web server and 22 other web related daemons all written either directly by PHP or with C + Zend. It’s in production and at the time of this writing, we are serving about 2500 sites with it.
  • Design and programming a live customer support system called LiveAdmin with PHP for server side and JavaScript on client side, it’s in production now.
  • phpOnline which is a very simple customer support script written with PHP for server side and Flash for client side has its own web site.
  • Design series of classified sites like vancouver-classified.com, toronto-classified.com and 54 other cities in North America.
  • Design series of directory sites like vancouver-directory.info, chicago-directory.info, ottawa-directory.info, and other cities.
  • Design and programming about 30 applications for iPhone and iPad, some of them can be found in www.bejbej.info.

and some other small sites and projects. My latest project was a CPanel interface for iPhone and iPad. It’s awaiting approval by Apple. When they approved it, I’ll post a detail description here (hopefully).

Posted in Programming

How to disable delayed bounce back messages in exim

Jul27
2006 1 Comment Written by Farhad Malekpour

Problem: When a mail server accepts a message and later decides that it can’t deliver the message, it is required to send back a bounce email to the sender of the original message. These bounce emails are often misdirected.

For many MTAs there are solutions, so here is my solution for exim:

Solution: This solution uses filtering to discard bounced back emails. So your exim should have a central filter. Such filter can be configured in exim.conf configuration file like this:

system_filter = /etc/antivirus.exim

Where antivirus.exim is the filter file, Format of this file described in exim documentation:

http://www.exim.org/exim-html-4.62/doc/html/filter.html

Most CPanel boxes have this filter already set and working. Usually default filter file has these lines at the beginning

if not first_delivery
then
finish
endif

That means rest of the filter conditions will be ignored if that’s not the first delivery. To make sure you should put the bounce filter before those conditions or filter may not work properly.

Now the bounce conditions itself. Here is the code:

if $sender_address is ""
then
if ${lookup{${extract{2}{@}{$recipients}}}lsearch{/etc/localdomains}{yes}{no}} is "no"
then
fail text "Delayed bounce message ignored"
seen finish
endif
endif

This will discard any delayed bounce message. If you want to receive a copy of the discarded message (just to make sure it works) use this code:

if $sender_address is ""
then
if ${lookup{${extract{2}{@}{$recipients}}}lsearch{/etc/localdomains}{yes}{no}} is "no"
then
headers add "Old-Subject: $h_subject:"
headers remove "Subject"
headers add "Subject: [Delayed Bounce]$h_old-subject:"
headers remove "Old-Subject"
deliver "abuse@yourdomain.com"
fail text "Delayed bounce message ignored"
seen finish
endif
endif

Make sure to replace the abuse@yourdomain.com with your email address.
Hope that helps someone.

Posted in How To

Dayana MySQL Databases Check

Feb02
2006 Leave a Comment Written by Farhad Malekpour

This script will check all tables within all MySQL databases of a server.

Code written in Perl and can be executed at a root access shell with a command like this:

perl dysqlcheck.pl

No installation will be needed Just download to a folder and execute. You might need to change some configuration parameters at the beginning of the script itself.

READ MORE »

Posted in Scripts

Affiliate System

Aug02
2002 1 Comment Written by Farhad Malekpour

Aug 2002
Dayana Networks

A fully automated system for those who want to earn money by referring others to Dayana Networks. Flexible commission and direct payment using PayPal. Use cookie for tracking sales and referrals. Use mySQL for database and Perl for code.

Posted in Programming

Multipart Account Activation System

Jul02
2002 Leave a Comment Written by Farhad Malekpour

Jul 2002
Dayana Networks

As a part of my new e-commerce web site this web-based application control user payments in a secure SSL tunnel, then open account for hosting instantly. I use Perl/PHP for programming and mySQL for databases. All parts of this application have been written on RedHat Linux 7.3.

This process use multi way payments, basically it has these abilities:

  1. Accept Direct Credit Card payment in a SSL environment.
  2. Accept payments by PayPal.
  3. Tracking user activities by assigning a 16 digit unique order number.
  4. Accept 3 levels of accounts, Personal, Business and Reseller.
  5. Daily sales values for administration uses.
  6. Track refunds.
  7. Fraud Protection System on Credit Card payments.
  8. Customer Support Tracking System.
  9. Report any illegal access to administrator email and cell-phone (text messaging)
  10. Ability to open account on different Linux server.
Posted in Programming
← Older Entries