Posts Tagged ‘marketing’
Tuesday, April 3rd, 2012
One of the companies, where I'm doing a part time job, as an IT Consultant, System Administrator and Web developer, a e-marketing specialist and business consultant (the list goes on 
) … planned to integrate a Newsletter support in their WordPress based websites.
As this fits my "job description" ,I took the task and implemented a simple but functional Newsletter support to their 4 WP based sites. In this article I will in short describe, my experience with placing the Newsletter subscription.:
Earlier I've done something similar as, I've added a subscipriotion (form) box to WordPress to use Google Feedburner RSS . What I needed this time, however was a bit different. The company required the newsletter to be a separate one and don't relay on Google Feedburner (RSS) to deal with the subscriptions .
It took me a while until I came with a working version of a Newsletter and I actually tested all in all 4 newsletter wordpress plugins before, I had a well working one. Here in short, In this article I will shortly take a look at the 4 WP newsletter plugins:
1. A wordpress plugin called simply Newsletter
As of time of writting this is the most popular wordpress plugin, when I looked through:
- http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/
Wordpress Newsletter plugin can be obtained via http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/newsletter/
Its really Advanced, probably the best free newsletter for WP available as of time of writting. The plugin supports email subscriber user confirmation (double opt-in), as well as can be accustomized to work with single opt-in.
For all those who don't know Double Opt-In is the technical term for a once requested user email (single opt-in), for subscription which is later confirmed by following an email box sent link pointing to confirmation URL.
Double Opt-In is almost a standard and "must" as otherwise, many spam bots will fill in randomly email addresses and your subscribers list will be mostly containing spammer email addresses.
1. Install WordPress Newsletter Plugin To install Newsletter plugin;
a) download and put into wp-content/plugins/ and unzip
server:~# cd /var/www/blog/wp-content/plugins
server:/var/www/blog/wp-content/plugins# wget -q http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/newsletter.zip
server:/var/www/blog/wp-content/plugins# unzip newsletter.zip
b) Enable in Plugins:
Plugins -> Newsletter (Activate)
c) Configure Newsletter
A new menu will appear in the left WP control panel, like you see in below screenshot:
Newsletter plugin is very configurable but it takes a bit of longer time until it is confingured to work well. So be patient with it.
d) Make Newsletter field appear on a wordpress home page.
In order to enable just configure Newsletter plugin (text and subscription form) to appear on the wordpress pages, you need to add the plugin as a widget. To do so go to:
Appearance -> Widgets
Drag and drop the Newsletter plugin widget to the widget right pane. Put it on the exact place you would like it to appear.
Once the widget is placed, you will see it appear to the respective location on WP pages, you should have something like:
If while you enable the plugin and put the Newsletter widget doesn't appear on WordPress, this is probably due to some Cache left from some enabled WP caching pugin like W3 Total Cache
In any case if Newsletter form subscription, is not appearing on your pages, delete the cache/ directory:
# rm -rf /var/www/wordpress-site/wp-content/cache/
I've experienced, this caching problems and it was quite a riddle, until I found out that the Newsletter plugin is not appearing on the WP pages because of the old cache. I've checked bacicly everything (error.log , apache php_error.log) etc.. Therein, there was no error or anything, so after a long 1 hour or so poundering I figured out this kind of caching done by W3 Cache.
My guess is, the same newsletter "not working" issue is probably observable also on WP installs with other caching plugins like WP Hyper Cache or WP Db Cache
2. ALO EasyMail Newsletter WordPress plugin
I don't know, why but this plugin didn't work properly on the wordpress install, I've tested it. Its true the wordpress version where I give it a try was not running, the latest stable wordpress so I assume this might be the reason for the empty pages returned when I enabled the plugin.
According to wordpress's plugin – http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/alo-easymail/, the plugin is marked as Works, however in my case it didn't.
3. Adding WordPress Newsletter through Email newsletter
This plugin was a real piece of cake, compared to all of the rest, tested this one was the easiest one to install and configure on WordPress.
Just like with Newsletter and ALO EasyMail Newsletter once the user is subscribed, from the admin there is possibility to sent crafted messages to all subscribers.
The plugin is a great, choice for anyone who is looking for quick install of Newsletter on WordPress without extra "config" complications.
Below is a quote describing email newsletter, taken from the plugin author webpage;
Advantage of this plugin
- Simple no coding required.
- Easy installation .
- Using this plug-in we can send email to all registered folks.
- Using this plug-in we can send email to all comment posted folks.
- Email subscribe box for front end
- Check box option available to select/unselect emails from the send mail list.
- Integrated the email newsletter plugin & simple contact form plugin
- Enabling the plugin is done via admin menus:
Plugins -> Inactive -> Email Newsletter (enable)
Afterwards, the plugin requires a quick configuration from wp-admin:
Email Newsletter -> Subscriber form setting
You see in the screenshot, the config where to place the plugin is trivial.
To make Email Newsletter appear on the pages, you will have to add the Email Newsletter widget from:
Appearance -> Widgets
The widget looks like the one in below screenshot:
Drag and drop the widget to the widgets pane. Onwards on the wordpress pages, should appear an email subsciption box:
Though Email Newsletter is great, it has one serious drawback, as it doesn't support Double Opt-In. Therefore people subscribing through it are not mailed with a request to confirm their email subscription request.
As a result, its very likely many spam-bots submit fake emails in the newsletter subscribe form and in 1 year time your newsletter email list might get full with tens of thousands unexistent emails. If you end up with this bad scenario, once newsletter emails are sent to (regular) exitent subscribers, many of the bulk emails in the list will never reach their senders, but will just fill-up the mail server queue and take up server resources for nothing for one week or so (depending on the email configuration keep undelivered mail setting).
Anyways, since the basis of this plugin works fine, I'm sure if the author modifies it to include a simple Captcha instead of double-opt functionality, the plugin can become top plugin.
If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
Tags: administrator, ALO, Auto, bit, blog, business consultant, Cache, confirmation, confirmation url, description, download, Draft, e mail, email addresses, Feedburner, form, free newsletter, google, Install, job, job description, mail newsletter, marketing, newsletter, newsletter subscription, newsletter support, NewsletterAs, Opt, part time job, plugin, Plugins, quot, relay, something, spammer, specialist, subscriber, subscribers, subscriptions, support, system administrator, time, web developer, Wordpress, wp newsletter, writting
Posted in System Administration, Web and CMS, Wordpress | 3 Comments »
Monday, April 2nd, 2012
I've hit an interesting article explaining how to check unread gmail email messages in Linux terminal. The original article is here
Being able to read your latest gmail emails in terminal/console is great thing, especially for console geeks like me.
Here is the one liner script:
curl -u GMAIL-USERNAME@gmail.com:SECRET-PASSWORD \
--silent "https://mail.google.com/mail/feed/atom" | tr -d '\n' \
| awk -F '' '{for (i=2; i<=NF; i++) {print $i}}' \
| sed -n "s/
Linux Users Group M. – [7] discussions, [10] comments and [2] jobs on LinkedIn
Twitter – Lynn Serafinn (@LynnSerafinn) has sent you a direct message on Twitter!
Facebook – Sys, you have notifications pending
Twitter – Email Marketing (@optinlists) is now following you on Twitter!
Twitter – Lynn Serafinn (@LynnSerafinn) is now following you on Twitter!
NutshellMail – 32 New Messages for Sat 3/31 12:00 PM
Linux Users Group M. – [10] discussions, [5] comments and [8] jobs on LinkedIn
eBay – Deals up to 60% OFF + A Sweepstakes!
LinkedIn Today – Top news today: The Magic of Doing One Thing at a Time
NutshellMail – 29 New Messages for Fri 3/30 12:00 PM
Linux Users Group M. – [16] discussions, [8] comments and [8] jobs on LinkedIn
Ervan Faizal Rizki . – Join my network on LinkedIn
Twitter – LEXO (@LEXOmx) retweeted one of your Tweets!
NutshellMail – 24 New Messages for Thu 3/29 12:00 PM
Facebook – Your Weekly Facebook Page Update
Linux Users Group M. – [11] discussions, [9] comments and [16] jobs on LinkedIn
As you see this one liner uses curl to fetch the information from mail.google.com's atom feed and then uses awk and sed to parse the returned content and make it suitable for display.
If you want to use the script every now and then on a Linux server or your Linux desktop you can download the above code in a script file -quick_gmail_new_mail_check.sh here
Here is a screenshot of script's returned output:
A good use of a modified version of the script is in conjunction with a 15 minutes cron job to launch for new gmail mails and launch your favourite desktop mail client.
This method is useful if you don't want a constant hanging Thunderbird or Evolution, pop3 / imap client on your system to just take up memory or dangle down the window list.
I've done a little modification to the script to simply, launch a predefined email reader program, if gmail atom feed returns new unread mails are available, check or download my check_gmail_unread_mail.sh here
Bear in mind, on occasions of errors with incorrect username or password, the script will not return any errors. The script is missing a properer error handling.Therefore, before you use the script make sure:
gmail_username='YOUR-USERNAME';
gmail_password='YOUR-PASSWORD';
are 100% correct.
To launch the script on 15 minutes cronjob, put it somewhere and place a cron in (non-root) user:
# crontab -u root -e
...
*/15 * * * * /path/to/check_gmail_unread_mail.sh
Once you read your new emails in lets say Thunderbird, close it and on the next delivered unread gmail mails, your mail client will pop up by itself again. Once the mail client is closed the script execution will be terminated.
Consised that if you get too frequently gmail emails, using the script might be annoying as every 15 minutes your mail client will be re-opened.
If you use any of the shell scripts, make sure there are well secured (make it owned only by you). The gmail username and pass are in plain text, so someone can steal your password, very easily. For a one user Linux desktops systems as my case, security is not such a big concern, putting my user only readable script permissions (e.g. chmod 0700)is enough.
Tags: article, atom, Auto, awk, client, com, cron, Desktop, download, Draft, ebay, email, email marketing, email messages, facebook, Fri, geeks, Gmail, GMAIL-USERNAME, GNU, gnu linux, google, Group, https mail, liner, LinkedIn, Linux, linux server, linux users group, mail, marketing, news today, OFF, original article, password, quot, rizki, sat 3, script, SECRET-PASSWORD, terminal, thing, top news, twitter, username, Users, Weekly
Posted in Linux, System Administration, Various | 2 Comments »
Wednesday, February 29th, 2012
I hate facebook, from the deepness of my guts! However, unfortunately in one of the companies I'm employed, occasionally I have to use it as an advertisement media to improve the Search Engine visibility for their websites (gather them some more likes). As a not big lover of facebook, I'm also not a facebook-pro, anyways with this circumstances, I'm starting to learn basic tips on, making a facebook page / profile more user friendly and hence more attracting to facebook users.
From what, i"ve read there are plenty of factors that can affect on how attractive a facebook page / company profile , anyways some of the factors are more important to tamper than others. Such two factors of top importance are:
Let me evaluate a bit on each of the three aforementioned fb marketing weight factors.
1. Using Page likes for popularization.
- Lets say that you would like to make marketing to a company websites which is involved in Financial or Investment market.
Enter with the company created page or profile and facebook and think for and search for as many keywords related to the company business as possible.
Check each of the results if the Page / Group is liked by hundred thousands of other people, then just give it a like too.
By doing so for a couple of seconds all this (hundred thousands or millions) of people who has also liked it will see for a second (or less), what hangs on your Facebook profile
The chance someone gets interested into what is your profile saying here is high especially if this pops up to a some 100 000+ of logged people who previously liked a fb page 
2. Joining groups as a way to drive more visitors to a facebook profile
Joining big groups consisting ot thousands or millions's logic is the same like with the page likes. The only difference is some groups are kept private the so called (Closed Group).
Finding a number of similar (Open Groups) to your company activities and joining them will possibly display your company facebook profile to as many profiles as the group has.
Most of the groups are not too active therefore joing groups as a way to drive attention of facebook users to a desired profile is not so efficient as with Page Likes Adjusting a profile picture logo dimensions to a wide skyscraper.
It might seem strange but actually the size of profile picture set to pages or profiles in facebook matters, different profiles dimensions could have impact on Page Likes
The reason for the fb picture profile having influence on the marketing is very simple. If you have a wider picture you can graphically include more data visible for the user that is always stuck to the page and hence seen by the user.
I've realized this after, I've red few articles online on the same topic along with that I've noticed many big brand pages on Facebook like for instance BMW (Cars) with over 8 000 000 of likes, Adidas and Nike – with over 6 000 000 likes, have set up this wide skyscraper dimensions logos.
Here is a crop taken displaying the wide skyscraper profile picture set by BMW cars.The profile picture used by BWM (cars) has an image dimensions of: 180×500 heigh x widthAdidas's profile logo has a size of 180×489.
Nike uses a bit of unstandard 390×720 (but while uploaded facebook website automatically crops the image to a size which is fittable for a wide skyscraper) with dimensions like (200×400)Another franchising company with big likes base, I've seen is McDonald's with 19 900 000+ likes! again with a banner logo consisting of wide scraper with picture dimenions (180×439 – height / width )There are some comparatively big user base facebook pages, like Ubuntu's non-profit organization with 555 000+ thousands of likes, and their logo has dimensions of 180×181 pixels.
Not all of the highly liked (visited) facebook pages however use a wide skyscraper as a profile logo and still has enormous number of likes.
One contra-example showing that there is no clear relation between facebook profile picture dimensions and page popularity (number of likes) is Metallica (Musician/Band) fan page – (http://www.facebook.com/Metallica), which as of the time of writting this article has the UNIQUE HIGH NUMBER of 23,725,897 LIKES!
As far as, I've further red on many blogs, there are two general facebook standard banner profile picture recommendations:
1. One is facebook square like profile picture
- (this is the classics), if you just place a picture that is not too wide automatically facebook upload scripts will tailer the picture to have dimensions like: 180×180 pixels
The other recommended facebook pictures size is the wide wide-scraper and it should possess an image dimensions size similar to:
width x height -180×500 pixels
This is pretty much the few basics I so far, know of can help to easily gather a custom fb company Page Likes.
As facebook is really HUGE nowdays fb marketing has advanced tremendously.
I'll be glad to hear some cool tips & tricks you know? which can help a facebook page / profile popularity rise up.
Looking forward to hear for your good or bad facebook experiences
- Likes of pages, which are liked by thousands of hundreds or millions of people
- Belongings to groups / Membering to big groups (consisting of thousands)
which hold similar interest or business activity
- Profile picture logo dimensions
Tags: activity profile, advertisement, Auto, belongings, business activity, BWM, chance, circumstances, company business, company websites, crop, deepness, Draft, facebook, Group, guts, heigh, height, Image, instance, interest, investment market, Likes, logic, logo dimensions, logo size, lover, marketing, marketing tips, nbsp, Open, page, page company profile, page group, page profile, quot, reason, Search, search engine visibility, SEO, someone, topic, visibility, weight factors, width
Posted in Everyday Life, Various, Web and CMS | 2 Comments »
Friday, February 17th, 2012
Free Software (FS) is free as in freedom as well as free as in price. Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) is developed by geek hobbyist which voluntarily put their time and effort in writting, testing and sharing with anyone for free million of lines of programming code. This doesn't mean however the price of free software costs is 0 (zero). Though the "end product" - Free Software developed is FREE, "real" software costs as with any other product costs huge money.
I've recently read on Jeb's blog an estimation on how much is the cost of one of the major Free Software project efforts – Debian GNU / Linux
According to James E. Bromberger – the whole Debian project was estimated to be at the shocking price of $19 billion – $19 000, 000, 000 !!!
Here is how JEB got the $19 billions, a quote taken from his blog:
"By using David A Wheeler’s sloccount tool and average wage of a developer of US$72,533 (using median estimates from Salary.com and PayScale.com for 2011) I summed the individual results to find a total of 419,776,604 source lines of code for the ‘pristine’ upstream sources, in 31 programming languages — including 429 lines of Cobol and 1933 lines of Modula3!
In my analysis the projected cost of producing Debian Wheezy in February 2012 is US$19,070,177,727 (AU$17.7B, EUR€14.4B, GBP£12.11B), making each package’s upstream source code worth an average of US$1,112,547.56 (AU$837K) to produce. Impressively, this is all free (of cost).
James has done incredible job with this great research and he deserves applause.
However I believe the numbers proposed by his research are slightly different if we speak about realistic cost of Debian GNU / Linux.
The real costs of the working software ready to install on a user PC are way higher, as according to Jeb's research only the software cost based on code line count is considered.
Hence James software estimation calculates only the programming costs and miss many, many factors that constitute the software end cost.
Some of the many, many REAL COST / expenses for developing a huge Free Software project like Debian GNU / Linux to be considered are:
a) bandwidth costs for hosting free software (on the server side)b) bandwidth cost for developers or FS users downloading the software
a) Time spend to spread the word of the great added value of Debian and bundled software (Mouth by Mouth Marketing)
b) Time spend to advertise Debian and its free software components on blogs, social networks (identi.ca, facebook, twitter) etc.(Voluntary online Marketing, SEO etc.)
c) Time spend on generating ideas on future program versions and reporting them to Debian FS community
d) Time on evaluation and feedback on software
e) Time spend on managing free software repository (download) servers voluntarily (by system administrators)
f) Time spend by users on Bug Tracking & Bug Reporting
g) Time spend on research and self-actualization by software developer)
h) Time spend on software Quality Assurance
This are most of the multiple factors which should probably influence the cost of any non-free (proprietary software) project. No matter this costs apply for non-free software, it perfectly applies for free software as well.With all said if if we assume the non-programming costs are equal to the programming costs of $ 19 000 000 000 (suggested by Jeb). This means the real cost of Debian will presumably be at least $32 000 000 000. Putting $ 19 billion for all this long list of "additional" costs (besides pure source) factors is probably still very under-scored number.
- the developers use of their own computers (hardware depreciation)
- electricity bill of the volunteer (developer) working on the program or project
- electricity bills for servers where free software is stored and available for download
- volunteer developer IT skills and tech knowledge (KNOW HOW)
- Internet, network, dial up bandwidth cost
- personal time put in FS development (programming, design, creativity etc.)! here the sub costs are long:
- Costs for Project Management Leaders / Project Coordination
- The complexity of each of the projects constituting Debian
Very interesting figure from Jeb's research is the Programming Languages break down by source code figure.
Jamesresearch reveals on the 4 major programming languages used in the 17000+ software projects (part of Debian GNU / Linux):
- ANSI C with 168,536,758 – (40% of all projects source code)
- C++ at 83,187,329 – (20% of all projects source)
- Java 34,698,990 – (lines of code 8% of sources)
- Lisp – (7% of all projects source code)
His research also provides a general idea on how much the source code of some of the major FOSS projects costs. Here is a copy of his figures
Individual Projects
Other highlights by project included:
| Project |
Version |
Thousands
of SLOC |
Projected cost
at US$72,533/developer/year |
| Samba |
3.6.1 |
2,000 |
US$101 (AU$93M) |
| Apache |
2.2.9 |
693 |
US$33.5M (AU$31M) |
| MySQL |
5.5.17 |
1,200 |
US$64.2M (AU$59.7M) |
| Perl |
5.14.2 |
669 |
US$32.3M (AU$30M) |
| PHP |
5.3.9 |
693 |
US$33.5M (AU$31.1M) |
| Bind |
9.7.3 |
319 |
US$14.8M (AU$13.8M) |
| Moodle |
1.9.9 |
396 |
US$18.6M (AU$17.3M) |
| Dasher |
4.11 |
109 |
US$4.8M (AU$4.4M) |
| DVSwitch |
0.8.3.6 |
6 |
US$250K (AU$232K) |
As you can imagine all the source evaluation results, are highly biased and are open for discussion, since evaluating a free software project/s is a hard not to say impossible task. The "open" model of development makes a project very hard to track, open source model implies too many unexpected variables missing from the equation for clear calculation on costs. What is sure however if turned in money it is very expensive to produce. At present moment Debian Project is sponsored only through donations. The usual yearly budget 5 years ago for Debian was only $80 000 dollars a year!! You can check Debian Project annual reports throughout the years here , for year 2012 Debian Project budget is as low as $ 222, 677 (US Dollars)! The output price of the software the project provides is enormous high if compared to the low project expenses!
For us the free software users, price is not a concern, Debian is absolutely free both as in freedom and free as in beer
Tags: 4b, Auto, average wage, cobol, code, com, count, david a wheeler, debian gnu, debian project, depreciation, doesn, download, Draft, effort, electricity, euro, foss, Free, free as in freedom, free software project, free software projects, freedom, geek, gnu linux, hobbyist, jeb, job, marketing, Modula, nbsp, Open, open source software, package, PayScale, programming code, programming costs, programming languages, project efforts, quot, real software, rsquo, Salary, software, software costs, software estimation, source lines, time, tool, total, working software
Posted in Everyday Life, Linux, Various | 3 Comments »
Wednesday, February 8th, 2012
I had to create a number of Facebook and Twitter accounts for one of the companies where I am employed. As I had to put Avatars to each and every new account. I therefore had to resize the company logos to fit the to the avatar dimensions..
It took me a bit of research until I found the proper picture dimensions. Here are the dimensions:
For facebook page Avatar the good picture width / height dimensions is a square like:
151x151 pixels
If however you prefer to have a sky scraper picture in Facebook, this is possible as thumbnail pictures up to 180×540 w/h pixels are showing up in FB.
At most cases FaceBook automatically resizes the uploaded picture and generates a thumbnail which in most pictures looks okay, however in some odd picture dimensions the picture preview might be messy, so its better to ship the profile pic in standard square size like 151×151, 256×256, 313×313 etc.
For Twitter page Avatar the fixed picture width / height dimensions is:
73x73 pixels
In Twitter again the avatar picture should be a square like, to have twitter during upload automatically resize and make a good looking pic thumbnail. If some picture with a non square dimensions is uploaded as an Avatar for twitter account usually, twitter's pic auto resize server side program chops parts of the picture. This is not a bug but expected behaviour. In Twitter another requirement is that the uploaded avatar image does not exceed 700kb, trying to puload a picture over 700k fails.
In both Facebook and Twitter the uploaded Avatar logo should be in format JPEG, GIF or PNG .
To resize the company logo pictures for FB and Twitter, I used GIMP 's:
Image -> Scale Image
menus.
I've red some people claiming the size of the Avatar logo in Facebook could have some impact in terms of e-marketing, but I'm not sure if this is a fact or some false rumour. Anyways it is sure that a wide sky scraper like picture allows you to show more even from the profile and maybe through the picture have larger influence over the audience.
Tags: Auto, avatar, avatar image, avatars, behaviour, company logo, company logos, Draft, facebook, false rumour, fb, format, format jpeg, GIF, GIMP, height, height dimensions, Image, image menus, impact, influence, JPEG, logo, marketing, nbsp, non, number, page, picture, pixel, pixelsIf, pixelsIn, png, Profile, puload, requirement, resize, scale, scale image, server side, side, size, sky, sky scraper, square dimensions, thumbnail, twitter, upload, wide sky, width
Posted in Various, Web and CMS | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, June 25th, 2008
Today the day was pretty normal for which of course I have to thank to Our Awesome God I didn't have much work, I stand up somewhere around 11 o'clock. I did my usual morning exercises.By the way since I started practising everyday exercise I feel physically better. After that I prayed a bit.Afterwards I red the road regulations and laws book (as I mentioned in my previous bloggings I have starteda driving license courses). Somewhere around 12:30 Gery did called and asked me if I'm willing to go outfor a coffee. I accepted and we saw each other infront of the fountain. Because all the tables outside wasoccupied we and in the coffee itself was too hot we decided to move to the Kukla coffee. We coffeed a bittalked about stuff shared how our lifes are going etc. etc. After that I had to go to the college becauseI need a copy of my school completion diploma because my driver lessons teacher requires as well as therest of the documents my ID card, a picture etcetera, etcetera. In the college I met Todor Dyankov who wasteaching me at Statistics and in Marketing II at the college and Ertan also Nina the librarian, I have tosay all of them are pretty cool . Ertan showed me what he has made using Adobe's flex product andexplained how convinient it's usage is for creation of books and various other web based sort of manuals.Later at home I red more some chapters of the road regulations book. After which in 18:45 I went to the stomatology(this is the usual place where driving teachers park their cars and where we met with my instructor), he askedif it's possible to change the driving lesson to be in Tuesday for 18:30 to be honest I haven't had much choice since theteacher had some urgent job to do. Right after that I went to my mother and father grocery shop because previously wehad a stipulation that I my father and a close family friend (Georgi a namesake) would go somewhere out of the city becausethe 32 hours for which it suppoed that I had to be ready for the exam were far from enough for me to become a proficient driver.Eventually we went with my father's car (Opel Astra) to a place which was before used as a Driving Polygon and is a perfectplace for a novice driver like me. The most hard thing for me in governing the car was starting the car from first speed usingthe clutch pedal simultaneously with the "gas" pedal. With some practice there I can say I got better at starting the car on 1st speedalthough still it's pretty hard for me to move the car on 1st speed from stopped position when the car is on a small hill.After that we went out of the polygon and I drive on the road of Bogdanovo village. Right after we went back to the city.I went to see Bino because I have promised him to go out for a walk together. We had a nice walk in the city park, I came backhome I went to see my grandma just like I often do lately I stood there for 20 minutes and went home, ate and here I'm now blogging END—–
Tags: Adobe, awesome god, becauseI, card, city, clock, coffee, college, completion, copy, course, diploma, etcetera, everyday exercise, family friend, georgi, Gery, grocery shop, infront, instructor, lesson, librarian, marketing, morning exercises, mother and father, namesake, nina, place, quot, school completion, stipulation, stomatology, tosay, urgent job, work
Posted in Everyday Life | No Comments »
Friday, March 28th, 2008
I stand up in the morning at somewhere around 09:30. I made my physical excersises everyday. What I have to say that I'm trying to fast. You know it's the orthodox fasting period. Orthodox Eastern has to be on 27 may if I'm not mistaken. In the morning we had Marketing II classes with a teacher called Stanislav. Nobody has a homework and only three of us entered the classes so the teacher was furious. After that we had lectures with Ruelof on the topic of Marketing Research. I had not much job from work. Our project manager said that they are going to give me a phone so they can reach me cheaper and easier. We have to had some English classes just after the Marketing Planning lectures but the teacher Valio said we won't have it because he has some job to do. After the school I worked on the servers. Servers and stuff works just fine thanks to God. Unfortunately my health issues continue on and on. I'm starting to loose temper I try to pray for a little every night before I go to bed and every evening. I still hope God would hear me and heal me. Ahm what else in the evening I went to the 2nd hand furniture shop of my cousin Zlatina and her husband Ivailo I spend a little less than an hour there. After that I went to Yasho a colleague 1st year (A metal head and brother of one of my class mates) and we watched Dr. Strangelove together Or How I learned to stop worrying and drop the bomb. I really enjoy this Kubrick film . That's most of the day. I figure out that one of the qmail chkuser's patch wasn't working properly on one of the servers and I did some tweaks to make it work. Also I'm reading a little book on MySQL although I almost doesn't have time to read it. Well that's it Let's call it a day.END—–
Tags: Ahm, bomb, brother, class mates, colleague, Cousin, doesn, dr strangelove, end, excersises, furniture, furniture shop, hand furniture, HEAD, health issues, homework, job, manager, marketing, marketing planning, marketing research, Metal, nobody, phone, pray, Qmail, Research, Ruelof, servers, shop, stanislav, temper, thanks to god, time, tweaks, Valio, year
Posted in Everyday Life | No Comments »
Tuesday, February 26th, 2008
Today I helped my cousing to fix his internet connection on a laptop.
The laptop was running Vista. A real nightmare, this OS is really heavy and even messier than Windows XP.
What else I'm trying to cope with life. Life is tough. What I can say….
Also I started a vsftp server on a FreeBSD box it took me some time because of configuration issues.
Right now I'mtrying to run a snort server still unsuccessfully for some reason the snort daemon does not start.
In the college everything is going in the old manner, except we have started studying Marketing II and another subject I forgot the name it is supposed to be something like statistics. The day was quiet with a bit of work.
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Tags: bit, college, configuration issues, connection, daemon, end, everything, freebsd, internet connection, laptop, life, marketing, messier, name, real nightmare, reason, snort, something, statistics, time, title, Vista, vsftp, Windows, windows xp, work
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Sunday, December 2nd, 2007
Yesterday I spend a lot of time outside with Lily. We went to the fountain we watched film at home. The film was called"Wild Hogs" it was supposed to be a fun commedy (only supposed to be). This week is going to be a taugh one.We have to present a project at Marketing Research.
I have to write a 600 words resume about International Enterprice,also we have to make a presentation in Culture. Today in the morning i was on a Liturgy again. God's grace ishere ! The week passed without serious server issues (Thanks God). Today I checked some logs of one of the serversand I observed oddities there. I checked the crontab and I realized it's because of a crontab. The dumped databaseis a HUGE one 2.6G (bzipped).
I asked in irc.freenode.net #mysql, and the guys there pointed me to a similar issuewhich was supposed to be an MySQL bug when dumping large database. Since the dumping databases were of a type MyISAMI ofcourse could have used mysqlhotcopy.
But in the end the solution to the problem was removing "–opt" option fromthe backup opts of mysqldump and passing "–skip-opt" to it (I suspect this would slow the dumping process a lot).But I don't care it is much better (a slow dumping), than hanging the whole Webserver and interrupting the site's visibilityover the Internet.
Btw I started playing Quake 2, it's cool but a little annoying there are too many tunnels and veryoften after I kill most of the bad guys I spend a lot of time searching for keys and stuff .. .END—–
Tags: 6g, bad guys, care, crontab, Culture, databases, end, enterprice, fromthe, fun, god, grace, HUGE, issuewhich, lily, liturgy, logs, marketing, marketing research, oddities, option, opts, presentation, project, quake 2, quot, Research, server issues, stuff, taugh, time, today tomorrow yesterday, tomorrow, tunnels, type, Wild, wild hogs, yesterday today tomorrow
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Wednesday, January 31st, 2007
Got the 2 mark on Marketing Exam. Again I'm a looser. I dont' have nor time nor desire to learn again for this exam.I think I'm not suitable for student. Today we was on a coffee with Mitko, Toto and Dido. Nothing special ordinary day.Yesterday we stayed in Mitko and was installing Gentoo Linux to his laptop. Gentoo's grub was buggy or something,we didn't succeeded running the kernel with GRUB, so we decided to switch to LILO. We were able to makethe maching bootable using LILO. Then there was an annying error with REAL_ROOT option. After a lot of wanderingediting of /linuxrc we found the mistake it was a mismatch in lilo a mistake we made writing in it we wrote therereal_boot instead of real_root. In the end everything worked okay. And I went home sleeping.I'm not sure where my life is going to again … I'm completely Lost in the Dark.END—–
Tags: buggy, coffee, desire, dido, end, everything, exam, gentoo, Got, grub, home, kernel, laptop, life, Linux, linuxrc, marketing, mismatch, mistake, Mitko, ordinary day, root, sleeping, something, student, therereal, time, toto, yesterday
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