One of my clients wanted an E-Commerce solution for his website and after a little bit of analysis we opted for the community edition of Magento.

We wanted something based on the usual LAMP stack, that was OpenSource so it could be extended, was free as in beer, had great international support, was fully featured and enterprise ready, could pass PCI DSS compliance, allowed reasonable payment gateway options, could scale and was easy to extend as well as backup. Also we wanted complete control of the deployment, rather than integrating with a 3rd party cloud service provider such as Shopify to keep costs down and retain flexibility.

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We’re rolling out monit on our new platform at the request of a vendor to manage their new service. I’ve always been dead against these kinds of automated failure recovery tools as they often require human intervention after the fact anyway and all the platforms I’ve managed will have failed the server anyway so why not restart the services after the root cause analysis is done? My tune is slowly changing though and I’m coming to appreciate this method of systems recovery a lot more.

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I’ve been watching my Awstats installation this month as idimmu.net is about to peak with over 7000 unique visitors in a month for the first time in it’s history, which is pretty awesome. But there’s been something really weird going on in the results ..

This is kind of ironic as in a recent job interview I was asked

What would you look for to ascertain suspicious activity on an instance of Apache serving static image assets?

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Earlier today I got in to discussing Bitcoin Arbitrage with a mate of mine, with the cunning plan of creating a bot to monitor different exchanges and profit on the difference in trading prices. After an analysis this was deemed a silly idea, or conversely we aren’t good enough, as moving real money or bitcoins around the exchanges seems to be an extremely painful process. The first step though was creating a wallet!

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The second part of this series covers creating our first Android Virtual Device or AVD. The Android Virtual Device (AVD) is basically a configuration for the Android SDK’s emulator that lets you define the hardware and software characteristics of an actual Android advice that you can then test your code on. Whilst not being as good as running your app on real hardware, testing it on an AVD is the next best thing!

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Hi guys, when telling a story it’s always best to start at the beginning, so the first thing to do on my journey is talk about how are we going to install Android Eclipse. My workstation is a MacBook but the process is the same on both Windows and Linux. I’ve put together a short video of the entire thing, from downloading Eclipse and the Android SDK to installing Eclipse, the ADT (Android Development Tools) plugin and then configuring ADT to use the Android SDK!

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Whilst skimming my Bash history today looking for an esoteric one liner I’d written earlier I started to ponder what my most used commands were, it’s easy enough to find out! This is actually output from my Mac, not a Linux box, I tricked you 😀

<br /> Chill:~ rus$ history | awk {'print $2'} | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr | head -n 10<br /> 106 ssh<br /> 49 ls<br /> 44 cd<br /> 42 curl<br /> 34 scp<br /> 25 vi<br /> 15 mv<br /> 15 cp<br /> 12 grep<br /> 10 rm<br />

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This blog is and has always been a blog of integrity, righteousness. A stalwart blog where I document my IT struggles and things I like to eat. Basically a combination of everything I hate in the world and everything I love, all in one place. And it’s going to remain that way. I will never sell out!

I like to read the Internet sometimes, I think I’m about half way through and so far nothing’s happened. But over the last few weeks I’ve been reading Smart Passive Income, basically a blog where some guy allegedly makes $50kpm by telling other people that he’s er .. making $50kpm. I think he’s making shit up personally, but it’s kind of inspiring. I’ve had Adsense running on this site for 2 years I think now, maybe more, who knows, and strangely I’m not retired and am still getting my fists dirty with magical computer machines. This blog has become amusingly popular though, although I don’t have a hardcore following it’s nice to read the odd comment about how I’ve helped someone create a Yum repository.

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