It seems that vBulletin doesn't test on PHP 5.4 or 5.5 these days. Either that or they're happy to just suppress errors rather than actually fix them.

I upgraded my forum today to vBulletin 4.2.2 and noticed these errors on a search page:

Warning: Declaration of vBForum_Item_SocialGroupMessage::getLoadQuery() should be compatible with vB_Model::getLoadQuery($required_query = ”, $force_rebuild = false) in …./packages/vbforum/item/socialgroupmessage.php on line 261

Warning: Declaration of vBForum_Item_SocialGroupDiscussion::getLoadQuery() should be compatible with vB_Model::getLoadQuery($required_query = ”, $force_rebuild = false) in …./packages/vbforum/item/socialgroupdiscussion.php on line 337 

Luckily a user on vbulletin.com support forum has a fix: http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/forum/vbulletin-4/vbulletin-4-questions-problems-and-troubleshooting/4000233-warning-declaration-of-vbforum_item_socialgroupmessage?p=4000793#post4000793

What annoys me is that vBulletin released this version a while ago, but are still distributing it with this code error.

Google released new passback tags for GPT (DFP) a while back. While these tags appear to work, they don't comply with W3C standards. E.g

<script src="//www.googletagservices.com/tag/js/gpt.js">
googletag.pubads().definePassback('/7146/adunit', [300, 250]).display();
</script>

It seems you can have either src or text between the tags, not both. It generates this error:

line 533 column 9 - Error: The text content of element script was not in the required format: Expected space, tab, newline, or slash but found g instead.  

I'm unsure of a solution at the moment. I have raised this issue with our account manager, but I don't expect any fixes anytime soon.

When using xalan-c 1.10 and the supporting package xerces-c (3.0.1) from EPEL, Xalan would segfault when transforming xml with xslt. E.g.

This is a great page on how to build OpenSSL 1.0.1 for RHEL/CentOS 6.x:

https://www.ptudor.net/linux/openssl/

This has been ported from the work done on Fedora OpenSSL (https://admin.fedoraproject.org/pkgdb/acls/name/openssl and http://pkgs.fedoraproject.org/cgit/openssl.git/). FIPS has been removed for ease of compiling.

Have been running this on our dev environment for a few days and seems to be secure. OpenSSL 1.0.1 adds TLS 1.1/1.2 (changelog here: http://www.openssl.org/news/changelog.html)

So Edgecast has announced a new product today, a separate CDN just for e-commerce sites.

As Telecom Ramblings puts it:

The new network is based on their existing CDN technology, but built on an entirely separate network infrastructure tuned specifically for the site acceleration and transaction needs of online retail sites. In other words, it’s aimed at enterprises tired of sharing a least-common-demoninator fast lane with everything from cute cat videos to gaming updates to whatever it is kids listen to these days.  

Am I the only one who reads this as a lack of confidence in their core CDN product or are they trying to differentiate themselves from other CDNs? To me a CDN should be able to handle any traffic that you throw at it and if you are getting slow downs then it's time to find a new CDN.

I would rather my CDN put more time and money into their core product than branching off and building a completely separate network. What's next, a sports CDN? News CDN? Porn CDN?

Here are the list of the existing Chorus (previously Telecom NZ) cabinets: http://www.chorus.co.nz/file/3194/existing_distribution_cabinet_list_may_2012.xlsx

The coordinates of the cabinets are in NZ Map Grid format and can be converted here: http://apps.linz.govt.nz/coordinate-conversion/index.aspx?IS=NZMG&OS=WGS84&IO=NE&IC=H&IH=-&OO=NE&OC=H&OH=-&PN=N&IF=T&ID=+&OF=H&OD=+&CI=Y&do_entry=Enter+coordinates&DEBUG=&ADVANCED=0 (with X being the Easting and Y being the Northing)

Recently I have seen "kraken-crawler/0.2.0" hitting my site. This is a bot used by Kontera (advertising company) to "better understand and analyze your site’s content" (according to their support staff).

Apparently the crawler adheres to robots.txt so you can block it by adding:

User-agent: kraken-crawler/*
Disallow: /

The URL to their crawler info is broken so it's hard to get an idea of what this is used for. If you are also seeing this bot, hopefully this helps you.

s3fs requires fuse 2.8.4, but on RHEL the latest version is 2.8.3, so fuse needs to be installed from source code.

Microsoft have finally released IE10 for Windows 7. It seems their download page is getting pretty hammered. Looking at the requests on the page it seems that everything is held up with a request to ajax.microsoft.com. The page loads the template header, but no more. Surely in the day and age a company like Microsoft would load their ajax async and prevent a single script from taking down the page.

Update: it seems this is a problem with the latest build of Firefox's Aurora. Twitter is experiencing a similar problem with one of their scripts, so there may be a problem with Firefox's script engine.

Amazon have released their new application management tool OpsWorks. This uses Chef to deploy and maintain instances on AWS. While it looks neat and I'm sure it will work for startups it's not something I could trust. I still like to get my hands dirty with server deployment and I try to use bare metal rather than virtual instances where possible. Also, from what I'm reading this tool is still very much a "beta" and is quite buggy.

The tool itself is not revolutionary, there are many other systems out there that do a similar thing. What is interesting though is that Amazon is offering this, once again improving the tools available without the need to use a 3rd party. Will this kill off competition or prompt the current providers to lift their game?

OpsWorks has brought up an interesting question. Now that AWS is using Chef and they have thousands of developers/sites using them, will Chef become the defacto standard and will other configuration management systems die out? There is a rumour that Amazon might offer Puppet support along side Chef, but that's just a rumour for now.

Personally I think Chef will increase in popularity due to OpsWorks, but I don't think Puppet et al will die away. Each system has their own merits and devs/ops will use whatever suits them and their environment.