Howto monitor special changes at a website with nagios

i have to say, i really love to see the new htc amaze coming to europe.
to know, when this new phone will be available at t-mobile usa, i used my nagios
to monitor this ;-)

/usr/lib/nagios/plugins/check_http  -H www.t-mobile.com -u "/shop/Phones/cell-phone-detail.aspx?cell-phone=HTC-Amaze-4G-Black" -s "Coming Soon"


very simple ;)

Howto parse webserver logfiles for 404 errors

today i have found a very nice command for parsing 404 errors.
here´s an example that works perfect with nginx:

cat access.log|cut -f 7,8,9 -d \ |grep "404"|sed 's/HTTP\/1\.[01]//'|sed 's/404//'|sed 's/ //'|sed 's/"//'| sort | uniq -c | sort -gr

How to check whether an element exists using jQuery

this is just a little reminder for myself.
thanks to Aaron Russel.

Variant 1:

if ($("#mydiv").length > 0) {  // do something here }

Variant 2:

if ($('#mydiv').length){ // do something here }

Variant 3:

if($('#mydiv').size()) { //do something }

Variant 4:

if ($('#mydiv')[0]) { // do something }

any more ? let me know ;-)

PDF: Count pages of multiple files

first install xpdf-utils.

then the magic command line: 

find -maxdepth 1 -iname '*.pdf' -exec pdfinfo {} \;|awk '/Pages/ {SUM += $2} END { print SUM}'

Thunderbird Colors on lost focus

Today i got crazy again while working in Thunderbird (with the default skin).
Did you ever noticed, that thunderbird looses the focus on the current email at the list, when you open another windows ? i.e. when you reply to a message, that´s very bad usability.
you can fix it like this:

• Search your profile folder: i.e. C:\Users\xxxx\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird\Profiles\xxx.default
• create a folder "chrome"
• create a file "userChrome.css"
• and put into it, for example:

/* Selected message background and font color */
/* "background" is the highlight shade - grey */
#threadTree > treechildren::-moz-tree-row(selected) {
background: #E3E3E3 !important;
}
#threadTree > treechildren::-moz-tree-row(selected, focus) {
background: #E3E3E3 !important;
}

/* "color" is the font shade - dark red on focus, dark blue on lose focus */
#threadTree > treechildren::-moz-tree-cell-text(selected) {
/*color: #DD0000 !important;*/
color: #808080 !important;
font-weight: bold !important;
}
#threadTree > treechildren::-moz-tree-cell-text(selected, focus) {
/*color: #0000DD !important;*/
color: #000000 !important;
font-weight: bold !important;
}

the important thing is: the background-color of the current selected row/email.
in my example the difference is not that big, but i´m sure you know what´s to do
and you are free to change colors in this example as you need.

Source: Mozilla Forum Mozilla Developer

Facebook caching bugs me

It seems like Facebook caches the image and the description of the website - and even the URL :-(
This makes testing very difficult.

OXID and the category thing

Today i was shocked about the load time of several pages at the admin interface.
First let me say, i used a default installation of a OXID EE 4.4.4. After importing
18.000 categories, the admin interface gave me the well known error

Allowed memory size of xxx bytes exhausted

after this i set the memory_limit to 128M
the result:

Allowed memory size of xxx bytes exhausted

after this i set the memory_limit to 512M
the result:


Fatal error: Maximum execution time of [...] seconds exceeded [...]

okay, so give him more time ;)
after setting max_execution_time to 9999 (0 doesn´t work!)

it took 90 seconds to see something after a click at this areas:

- Administer Products
  - Products
  - Categories

and yes, as usual it has something to do with little hidden checkboxes to fix a problem like this ;)

disable the following keys, and all will be fine and fast again:

- Load complete Category Tree for Search
- Load Categories and display Category Navigation

Germanwings 0900 - ne Danke...

Wer keine Lust hat diese Wucherpreise für 1€/Min. zu zahlen, der ruft bitte hier an: +44(0)871 702 9979 (Irland) - dort wird auch Deutsch gesprochen. 3,7 Min mit Skype kosten 0,839€ :-)

Freedom Keyboard Pro and Android (and connectbot)

For a few days i got my Freedom Keyboard Pro.

I just wanted to test it with my HTC Desire (Android).
Because there are now beta drivers available i was pretty sure to get a comfortable way of administrating my servers while i am out of my office. As every android user should know, i am using the best ssh client available: connectbot.

and here the problems begin: the most important keys are not working:

• TAB
• CTRL

connectbot has a special key-mapping because it´s  primary made for soft-touch-keyboards or the hardware keyboard of the phone. so while working on a server CTRL is only working for me with pressing the track-ball. that´s not really perfact at the moment but in fact you can work a lot of better and faster at your servers with ssh. the beta drivers are really beta ;) there are a lot of keys you should not press while the keyboard is connected to the phone because the driver crashes and you have to kill the keyboard-app, delete all settings and restart the connect, that´s circumstantial and needs to be fixed by the developers. at the moment i just can say: this keyboard is worth to buy but it needs a lot of improvement and the apps (like connectbot) needs to be adjusted to make working really smooth and easy without the need of touching your phone while typing.

i really hope to see improvments here, i also made a request for supporting the keyboard and i also wrote to the developers of the android drivers in hope that these both parties get connected to each other and to see a working connectbot with this keyboard in the future. if you plan to buy this keyboard or if you like connectbot like my, please support my request! ;)

here you can see howto connect the keyboard with your android:

Gtalk with me

sorry, i removed the chat link, does not work with android ;-(( i have to find something better....
but anyway, if somebody likes a free live chat widget on the page, try this.