The wonders of photoshop

Actually I use GIMP.. but our designer type person here uses Photoshop. In fact.. he used it to create these pictures of Steger! (With the help of my trusty Nikon Coolpix camera).

We really do work here.. honestly!




BFN

Stolen Sandwich.. the perils of a shared fridge

We went up to the break room earlier today, and found this note stuck to the fridge. Sorry for the quality, my mate took a picture of it on his camera phone.




Click for a larger view.

Mantis, my new pest control

I've been umm'ing and arr'ing about getting some bug tracking software setup. I never seem to find the time, until today. I considered installing bugzilla, but i'm not all that hot at server admin type stuff, so was worried to read things like "backup backup backup".
I set my browser to go to google, and typed in "bug tracker php". The very first (non paid) result was Mantis. Sounds good to me! I read a little about it, searched on whether it had a ton of bad reviews or not, and was thoroughly impressed with what I saw.

After downloading it to me desktop, I decided (in my infinite wisdom) to try installing it locally first. I have Xampp running locally, so I thought it would be a breeze. Not so. I can't remember the errors I was getting specifically, but it was enough for me to give up and go straight onto the server install. That sounds dangerous doesn't it!! "Oh dear it won't run on my safe little local environment.. lets break the server!" But really, I don't expect a whole lot to run locally, Xampp can only do so much for this windows machine.

Turns out on the server I had a bunch more success. I had to patch the version I downloaded (small mysql typo/bug) but aside from that it went off without much of a hitch. With all the messing around I did, I'd say it took me about an hour from searching for it to having it running.

In the past I've avoided bug trackers because they've seemed over cumbersome, like a whole extra step I have to perform, along with the hundreds of other tasks I have to do every day. I am reformed. I'm tired of hunting through my notebook searching for a note I made 6 weeks ago on the bottom of a page which I think had a diagram of a server on it.. maybe not.. darn where is it?!

I've been using Mantis now for a grand total of 3 hours. If anything comes up, I'll be sure to post again about it. Since most management attempts fail because no one participates, I've decided that this is 99% for me, and 1% for everyone else. Even if people send me an email, an IM, a phone call, I'll put them all in Mantis myself, so I won't forget!

I'm really looking forward for the satisfaction of marking a bug as done.. I can't wait!!

Mantis is at http://www.mantisbt.org/

BFN

It's fixed!! (amazon etc)

I am very happy to say.. it wasn't my fault for once! Woot! I have no idea what/how it was fixed.. but it was. I got a response from our host saying they think they found it, and try it. First time.. no, not fixed, second time, no, third time, no (This is where I started to panic.. this is day two by the way), fourth time, no, fifth time.. YES.

The error is completely gone. SOAP works perfectly (I think I will reimplement it) REST works perfectly.. everything is perfect. I wonder what was broke?

BFN

Temporary failure in name resolution

Yep.. what the heck is that?! Temporary failure in name resolution...

I think this is why the Amazon links stopped working, it also explains what happened to a couple of the feeds.
This code:

$request = 'http://ecs.amazonaws.com/onca/xml?
Service=AWSECommerceService&AWSAccessKeyId=xxx&
Operation=ItemSearch&SearchIndex=DVD&Actor=Brad%20Pitt';
$response = file_get_contents($request);
echo htmlspecialchars($response, ENT_QUOTES);

Gets this error:

Warning: file_get_contents(): php_network_getaddresses: getaddrinfo failed: Temporary failure in name resolution in /var/www/html/includes/amazon_cart_small.php on line 16

Here is the most annoying part.. NOT all the time. I google'd it, tried a few things, emailed support at our host.. still nothing. Any clues?

BFN

REST did not solve anything..

Seems there is seriously something wrong between us and Amazon.. we're not speaking.. sometimes.

My favourite kind of error, the intermittent kind! I'm ignoring it for now, sadly we will lose revenue while buy links are down, but I can't see a way around it yet. I'm having similar, although not as fatal errors with REST as I had with SOAP.

On a completely different note, I found a link to a member of my Clan from Tabula Rasa (video game) who actually makes a podcast.. huh: http://rumheroes.mypodcast.com/
The funniest part is this post: http://rumheroes.mypodcast.com/2007/11/Photonic_Cramps-57445.html

Whoa nelly.. People really like this stuff.

BFN

SOAP problems making me go REST

The Amazon buy links have been live on the main site for almost a month. Yesterday they all stopped working. Strange.. I took them all off the site, so it's now like they were never there.

On further investigation (googling the error) it turns out _lots_ of websites are experiencing the same problem. The question is where to go from here. I read some more about ways to communicate with Amazon, and it turns out that REST is supposedly faster than using SOAP.

Luckily I'm familiar with some of the steps involved in setting this up, so perhaps later today we will be live again with buy links for the main site, and they won't take 15 minutes to load!

BFN