Echo Binary

I left yesterday to visit my girlfriend and we spent quite a while chatting, watching tv, eating, etc. I visited her since we haven’t seen each other for about a week already, so I didn’t care what I left on our server that day. What I last configured in our server was the email notification for the online support team. I set their email to our default email support email address.

I went back home last night, plugged the computer and do my routine… I checked the server and the pending online support tickets. Hmmm… I thought the the ticket was responded by someone already so I smiled, but I was terrified when I clicked the ticket and viewed a long list of reply history, in loop! I don’t know what happened but it’s probably because of my email configuration. It triggered a system bug inside our support center that made the CPU load in our server quite high this evening. Well… I left the email looping inside our “piped” email support system for and 4 hours, it resulted to 2.8 Gigabytes of MySQL database (overhead) size from a 2 kb email.

If you don’t know Piping is a technology that immediately query an email right inside the database for storage. In other words, it “capture” the email for instant trouble ticket issue. So to simplify that, in every loop, the email was stored repeatedly in the database.

From 2 kb of email, it was able to accumulate its size to 2.8 Gigabytes inside the database. In fact I’m quite amazed that our Linux server managed this kind of load! It was able to hold 100% CPU utilization for 4 hours, and still serve our customers fast. It simply means that we are powerful enough to host in heavy loads without system failure.

This is an accident but it also tested how powerful our server is. Luckily we have the hardware to support this kind of abuse.

Lol, I think I need to remind myself quite often that I’m a young man and I need to groom myself quite often. I spend most of my time either sleeping or doing work in my PC, so I let my facial hair grow within 1 week. I really feel “aged” because of my look and because of that I shaved this morning to reward myself a younger look I’m just 19, so I deserve it. Hahaha! Who cares about my facial hair anyway… well, perhaps my girlfried ‘coz she is probably not used to it.

This is my experience on SMF skinning.

I was skinning the whole day… and it’s more like an educational and experimental skinning experience with SMF.

The skin is totally embedded inside the PHP code, as a result you cannot preview it inside WYSIWYG editor in anyway. You have to dig the HTML code to make sense out of it. I think it’s quite simple to edit the theme as long as you know how to extract the HTML codes but it can be very problematic if you get lost in the big pile of codes. PHPBB has done template simpler by separating the design template and the logic but it seems SMF combined the logic and template together. It’s somewhat between the template engine of Invision and PHPBB. Of course, PHPBB template system will always be the easiest to edit, but I admit it does not have powerful base code inside the template itself. IPB has it’s own simple logic in templates while SMF has it’s built-in PHP code in template. It’s true that SMF has made a powerful template system but it’s not really easy to modify. I wish that they will provide skinning tools that can easily extract the HTML out of the PHP codes.

I was sick for two days, thankfully I recovered quickly… Now, I’m back to work again.

Here’s what making me busy right now: Mambo skin and Simple Machine Forum (SMF) skin.

I just finished the Mambo skin before I got sick while the SMF skin was delayed because of my illness. Anyway, I’ll continue the skin making tomorrow.

Yes, I’ve actually felt this term wasn’t good at all. It’s all messed up due to damned administration… damned boycotts… and damned student leaders. -_-

I’ve learned my lesson and it’s enough already. Now, this should be the last time that I’ll be getting a “just-pass” mark in my report card. Phew… I have a scholarship to work for and now I’ve been erased from Dean’s list again. Ohhh.. what a bummer. I really hope that next term will be a much better term. I really need to pull myself up together and get serious about my academic life. This time I should have no excuses because my next load of subjects are all interesting. Database, Economics and Accounting, Data Communication and Networking 1 and Rizal.