J.me

Server outage, 3 days offline, a month credit

A surprising news came to my inbox 2 days ago from Site5, indicating that the server which my account hosted has been down since the night a day before. As a result, all of my website were all down. I have completely moved all of my domain to Site5, so this is certainly a bad news. Fortunately, I don’t have (yet) any business that rely solely on it, so damage to me is actually minimal.

According to Site5 customer service, hardware issue that the server experienced is extremely rare. They had to restore backup and it was a lengthy process, there is also a network issue that caused the restoration to fail at the first time. The restoration finally done today and server is up again. They are also offering one month credit to my account as an apology. 🙂

To my surprise, Site5 is pretty responding regarding this issue. They update the forum frequently and for users that didn’t bother to check the forum often, they sent an email everyday regarding the status of server, explaining what is happening that day. Despite the outage, I’m actually quite happy with the customer service and Site5 itself for a reliable service so far. Hopefully, this won’t happen again in future. 🙂

Google sorry

Well, this is a little unusual. I got two times of Google sorry today, while I actually never got one before. This happened when I’m trying to search a query in Chrome address field. Weird… It might be my network though.

And of course, I don’t have any bot program to run search repeatly. And I also didn’t do any ping to their server. Is that means Google have increased their security for overuse of their search engine? Well, whatever. I just hope that it won’t happen again. 🙂

The oDesk Debit MasterCard powered by Payoneer

black-card-small

The above picture is the oDesk Prepaid Debit MasterCard that is powered by Payoneer. As you might know already, Payoneer offered a prepaid debit card for every member of its partner company. I got mine from oDesk. Here is my personal experience for using this card and also there is some comparison with Paypal regarding the fees. 🙂

Yesterday, I finally received my oDesk Debit MasterCard. It takes approximately 3 weeks from approval into arrival. FYI, I got my card approved in 4 days after registration and it sended through regular mail. Once it is arrived, I activate the card immediately and withdraw my remaining oDesk balance into the card. I was withdrawing $50 into the card.

Google Code Jam qualification round

Finally, Google Code Jam 2009 qualification round has finished. I almost forgot this actually, until there is notification that tell us that the Code Jam has a problem at the beginning and get extended time for 2 hours (even though there is a notification 24 hours before, but I completely forgotten, lol). Finally I can participate in a couple of last hours left.

There is three problem that it is needed to be solved. The problem A is pretty simple, we can just change the pattern to Regular Expression and it’s done. I do it this way, but a little slower on large data. The B case is completely blank for me, never have run into this kind of problem before and I can’t finish it. For the C case, I can finish the small data, but not for the large data. It seems, I still need a lot of practice for better algorithm. 🙂 But at least, I’m advanced to the next round. Let’s see how long I can stand in this competition.

Careful with Float data type

Usually, I store number with decimal point in float, but now I run into a problem – the rounding error. This really doesn’t good in financial data like money, for example, in float datatype, when we calculate 10000000-25, it will result in 9.99998e+006, when we convert to decimal (I do it in PHP), it will result in 9999980. Not good!

But that was a big mistake I made, if you just take the data, let’s say

SELECT floatdatafield FROM whatevertable

you will get this 9.99998e+006 value, and no matter what you do in PHP, you won’t be able to get the exact value, 9999975. So for the solution, we need to use the SQL function, ROUND(). So instead of just select everything, we can do this

SELECT ROUND(floatdatafield,2) AS floatdatafield FROM whatevertable

This will round it to have maximum 2 numbers digit after the decimal point and it will return 9999975.00, exactly what we need.

Another solution is to use decimal data type instead, or by defining the number of digits before and after decimal point of the float.

Using Wacom eraser in GIMP

Well, if you have Wacom tablet, you should know that our pen have eraser on the top. This working well in Photoshop, but not in GIMP. Since I’m GIMP user, I would love this eraser working too, but I can’t find the way…

So, I’m searching the web, and get the solution. It is pretty simple actually, all we need to do is…okay, read more to read… 🙂