Tag Archives: irritating

And then…

Posted on in News

… the magical, floating, multi-color space-orb just disappeared and I was able to go on with my so-called life.

Anyways, I was working on ZagrebDox for the whole month of February and it kind of took all of my time and energy, but ended up being a really nice project because I’ve, once again, learned a lot of new things about WordPress.

I’ve also learned a few new things about MySQL and how to crash your hosting provider’s shared server.

What happened:

  • the site has over 300 pages (each with at least 3 attachments)  and I’ve used a permalink structure which started with %category% – this combination produced waaay too many rewrite rules
  • there was a 20MB database size limit
  • for some reason, the wp_options->rewrite_rules field got duplicated ~10 times, and the database had grown to 50MB in no time
  • combine that with the 20MB limit and what you get is a bunch of never-ending transactions
  • so the server went kabang! and the site was promptly moved to another one

To solve the problem, I’ve changed the permalink structure to begin with %year%, disabled creation of rewrite rules for attachments (thanks to Johan Eenfeldt – his code has made my number of queries per page drop from ~3900 to ~90), set the number of post revisions to 2, and then repaired and optimized the database which now stands happily still at 5.7MB.

I don’t know how rewrite_rules field got duplicated, I haven’t used any plugins that would mess with it, so I’m still in the dark about that. What I do know is: you can’t host over 700 sites on one single server and expect everything to go smoothly until the end of days. Not to mention that the only available transport protocol is fsockopen which made the admin area a bit slow until I’ve blocked all the others…

There’s been some other stuff I’ve worked on, but I’ll put that in another post.

It’s lunch time. And I miss Ma.gnolia…

Comment spam, 2nd try

Posted on in News

I like spam. I love it. Really.

Yesterday, I was reading about the comment spam on Particletree and how it’s full of compliments. Today, I found myself in the same trouble. Good thing that I don’t have my sitemap linked anywhere, I’d probably end up with a thousand moronic comments, all with the same title (“My homepage”), inspiring content (“Great work!”, “Thank you!”, “Well done!”, “Good design!”, “Nice site!”) and a letter-mashup link beneath it.
I won’t disable comments as I don’t get them that often, so feel free to spam some more :)

Boring stuff, I know, I just had to brag about it.

Forgive me, but I have to swear. Fuck you PayPal.

Posted on in News

My friend’s dad is a citizen of a country other than Croatia. He’s got a credit card and my friend used it to open a PayPal account because it’s not possible to open one if you’re a citizen of Croatia (and that sucks big time). For a couple of years all worked well. Until this very day, when PayPal decided to display the following message:

Error 3028. You have been accessing your account from a sanctioned country. Per international sanctions regulations, you are not authorized to access the PayPal system. For more information about your PayPal account status, contact ofacappeal@paypal.com. For further information regarding international sanctions, please refer to the U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control at www.treas.gov/ofac, or to the UK Bank of England at www.bankofengland.co.uk/sanctions.

Now, I don’t understand a damn thing I’ve read on the OFAC site, and the other link points to a non-existent page. Could it be that what they’re trying to tell us is something in the lines of: “We don’t care what country you’re a citizen of, but you are currently in a sanctioned country and you cannot use the PayPal system. Yes, we understand that you could very well be there on a vacation, but, again, we really don’t care.”?

What’s worse, it seems that the account stays unaccessible until you contact them by e-mail and try to clear things up. Because, you know, a terrorist could be trying to access your account illegaly and that is very bad. Terrorists are everywhere and they want to harm everyone. Well fuck you PayPal, I’ve survived without you before, I surely can live without you in the future.

I wonder, why doesn’t Amazon block my account when I try to buy something using my Croatian credit card?

Maybe I’m wrong and the problem lies in fact that a member of Al-Qa’ida had actually tried to hack into my friends account and Paypal just wants to protect him. But I guess the message then wouldn’t say “You have been accessing your account…” but “Someone has been accessing your account…”.

And all I wanted was a fracking Flickr account :(