Alphatek – Steven’s Tech Blog

Today, we received a bunch of Android-based phones at work, amongst them a Motorola Droid/Milestone. I quickly tried to connect it to my Fedora 12 box and fired up Banshee. As you can see on the screenshot below, it was perfectly recognized without any intervention and I could synchronize my music library to it

Ok, this is a pure rage rant. I’m really sick of companies paper launching products that are totally unavailable to customers for months. Last November I made a blogpost about the Nokia N900, which I finally ordered. On the paper it’s still the best Linux-based phone which has the greatest compatibility with my Fedora boxes.

Today I received an e-mail telling me that my N900 would probably be delivered mid-February. That would be almost 3 months since I paid and of course you don’t get any money back on the price drop that occurs during this period…how screwed is that? It wasn’t even a pre-order, the N900 was “available”. Nokia, if you can’t deliver a product to your customers, fucking don’t sell it if you have no stock! I’m so fed up of these lousy business practices.

Nokia are not the only to blame, nVidia and ATI behave exactly the same when they launch new lines of graphic cards. Whose fault is it? The marketing guys? I honestly don’t see how generating hype on a product and not delivering it for months will help you. All you gain are angry customers who lost money on pre-orders and all the buzz effect is gone once the product really hits the streets. Great job!

On the other hand you have Apple, they have a sense on how to deliver products to the market. When a product is announced, it’s available. Guess what? They are doing fine.

To backup MySQL databases, there is the well known and handy executable called mysqldump. It has one big shortcoming though, you can either backup one database to a file or all databases to one giant file with the “–all-databases” option but you can’t backup every database to separate dump files.

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RequestTracker is a widely used tool in many companies as it allows one to implement an effective workflow to handle any kind of events: customer requests, bug resolution etc…the requests are all filed as tickets to be resolved and put into queues.

RT also has a notion of priority levels for tickets, ranging from 0 to 100 and it supports scripting to automate some tasks. RT does a lot of things actually, but it’s a bit of a scary beast at first, with a not-so-clear documentation.

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Until recently, I couldn’t care less about shiny new mobile phones. When mine broke or it was time to change to a new one due to my mobile operator contract ending, I simply went for the “free” phones that were somewhat compatible with Linux. My current phone, a Nokia 5310, can for example serve as a modem in Fedora vie USB connection or Bluetooth thanks to NetworkManager and it perfectly synchronizes with Banshee for my music and podcasts.  It’s just slow as hell, but that’s another story.

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Today I had to search quite a long time how to use Apache’s mod_rewrite to create a “maintenance” page for a web server. The goal was to:

• Redirect all URLs usually going to http://foo/go/bar to http://foo/maintenance-light.html
• Redirect all other URLs to http://foo/maintenance.html

All the maintenance pages are also using some CSS and images. Creating this redirection sounds really stupid and simple, but one thing wasn’t clear in the documentation and it took me quite a while to figure it out…every RewriteCond is only valid until the next RewriteRule! Not knowing that, I had infinite loops on the second RewriteRule…so I hope that this post will help someone else to avoid this problem.

The lines to add to your Apache config are:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/maintenance.html$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/maintenance-light.html$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !/img/(.*)$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !/css/(.*)$
RewriteRule ^/go/ /maintenance-light.html [R,L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/maintenance.html$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/maintenance-light.html$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !/css/(.*)$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !/img/(.*)$
RewriteRule $ /maintenance.html [R,L]

The first line is there to simply enable the Apache rewrite engine. Then we have 4 lines to “exclude” some paths from being rewritten and finally we find the rewrite rule. Note that they are processed in order. The “L” flag instructs Apache to skip all the following RewriteRule statements as soon as the one is matched.