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            <p></p>
            <p>A new version of the <a href="http://www.radinks.net/ftp/applet/">FTP applet</a> was released on the 27th. <a href="http://www.radinks.net/ftp/changes.php">What's new in this version?</a> not much except for a fixing up a couple of compatibility issues.</p>
            <p>FTP servers running on window the copy cat system can sometimes be configured to return a unix style directory listing. (why?). In most cases the Applet handled this situation well, however there were still a few cases where it wasn't handled properly (would you blame the applet?). The motivation for this new release was primirily to solve this issue.</p>
            <p>Secondly we noticed that the applet did not work as expected on titan ftp servers so we fixed it too at the same time. Titan is in fact both an SFTP and FTP server (which is unusual). And guess what <a href="http://www.radinks.com/sftp/">Rad SFTP</a> does not work too well with it's SFTP servers. yikes.</p>
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FTP Applet

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            <p></p>
            <p>My trusty old Siemens S55 has an item called 'GPRS Info' it says a total of 1016.87 MB has been transferred. That's 1GB, if you consider the fact that the sim has spent quite a bit of time inside other phones such as the 6600, the 6630 or the P910i discussed here the total would be much much higher.</p>
            <p>I have no doubt that this is the highest usage by anyone in Sri Lanka - in fact I intend to find out.</p>
            <p>(since the previous post was rather lenghty, this post was kept short, so that nature's balance is preserved)</p>
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1GB of GPRS

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            <p></p>
            <p>Companies without a US office are at a huge disadvantage when it comes to credit card processing. If you happen to be a Sri Lankan company, accepting credit card payments is like swimming upstream with both hands tied behind your back.</p>
            <p>When choosing a payment gateway options are really limited for non us companies because most gateways are available only if you have a US bank account - for which you need to have a US presence. Something that is too costly for most small businesses.</p>
            <p>At first glances it would seem that there are plenty of choices, that is until you actually try to sign up with a gateway. The sign up forms do not even have a field to enter the country.</p>
            <p>There are several others namely, <a href="https://www.2checkout.com">2Checkout</a>, <a href="http://www.paysat.com">Paysat</a>, <a href="https://www.ccavenue.com">CCAvenue</a> and <a href="http://www.ikobo.com">Ikombo</a> that will accept international merchants. There is always a catch. CCAvenue will only accept vendors selling tangible goods. Paysat and IKobo do not accept all major cards.</p>
            <p>Here in Sri Lanka, where the local banks which pay 5% interest to depositers and have prime lending rates in excess of 10% boast of payment gateways on their website. But you cannot sign up online and when you call to find out, no one seems to know anything about it.</p>
            <p>Faced with all these problems <a href="http://www.radinks.com">we</a> have been using 2checkout for the past two years. Unfortunately their service standards have dropped over the last few weeks like a ton of bricks. Curiously if you search the web you will find lots of people saying it has always been that way.</p>
            <p><a href="https://www.paypal.com">Paypal</a> is not an option. Though they say "send money to anyone with an email address" that is a lie , their service is available in only 40 countries and our country is not in that list - which is perhaps fortunate jugding by some of what has been said about paypal.</p>
            <p>In order to find a more suitable solution I had a chat with a financial consultant who has lived and worked in several countries. He pointed me to several Sri Lankan companies who sell online and find out how they do it.</p>
            <p>Unfortunately these organizations primarily target Sri Lankan consumers and sell tangibles. What use is a consultant that cannot tell the difference between a tangible and intangible product? I didn't tell this consultant that I processed my first credit card transaction in 1997 long before most of the other Sri Lankan companies even hear d of the internet.</p>
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Payment Gateway Woes

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            <p></p>
            <p>Time for another complaint against <a href="678.html">the nokia 6630</a>. To be fair it may not be a problem with the device itself but a problem with the memory stick that accompanied it.</p>
            <p>When you attempt to access either the still or video camera you get a nasty message that just says 'System Error'. This happened at a time when I was out of town and without ready access to the net. The usuall remedies of rebooting, taking out the battery+sim to reboot again does not work.</p>
            <p>Damned if I will reformat the whole thing again like I did the last time the phone caused problems - there are a couple of photos that I wish to salvage. The next attempt was to remove the MMC and reboot the phone. Viola! with out the memory, the camera (both the still and video) can be readily accessed - even though the phone compains about the missing memory, it will automatically switch to the built in phone memory and continue to function without failing.</p>
            <p>Now to plug in the MMC again and try to access the camera, as you may have already guessed you get nothing more than that boring old 'System Error' again.</p>
            <p>This probably means I am going to loose the photos - this fear was confirmed when the device was plugged into a computer with a USB cable - everything in the device is inaccessible, the darned thing has to be formatted.</p>
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6630 System Error

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            As the subversion documentation says, a good FAQ is a list of questions people might actually ask and not a list of questions some none geek marketeer dreamt up. These are some questions and answers based on my own experience.

            <dl>
                <dt>Oops, I entered the wrong text when commiting my changes how do I change it?
                </dt>
                <dd>If you don't remember the revision number for your commit, type <em>svn info</em> to find out then. look in the db/revprops/ folder in your subversion repository. Assuming this is at /var/subversion and your revision number is 122 the file /var/subversion/db/revprops/122 will contain the message that you typed in. You can open this file in your editor and change the message but don't edit anything else.
                </dd>

                <dt>Can you do a stat against a specific revision?</dt>
                <dd>the <em>svn stat</em> command certainly does not accept the <em>-r</em> parameter through witch you can generally tell subverison which revision you want to compare against. The simplest solution would be check out the revision of interest into a clean directory and diff against that.</dd>

                <dt>How Do I revert to a very old revision?</dt>
                <dd>
                    <p>The <em>svn revert</em> command, like the <em>svn stat</em> command does not accept the -r parameter. Fortunately the <em>svn update</em> command does. So instead of reverting you can actually update to an older version (now doesn't that sound like a contradiction?). But it's probably going to give you problems when you try a commit.
                    </p>
                    <p>Another approach is to remove your current working copy and start off with a fresh checkout - of an older revision.
                    </p>
                </dd>

                <dt>I try to make a branch and I get this error:
                    svn: Commit failed (details follow):
                    svn: Invalid change ordering: new node revision ID without delete
                </dt>
                <dd>I usually see this error when I try to make a new branch/tag using the working copy and I have some locally modified files in the working copy. Subversion should perhaps give a different message that indicates the root cause (the local modifications). Once you commit your changes you can easily use the <em>svn cp</em> command to create your branch.
                </dd>
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            <p></p>
            <p>I was just checking up on who links here when I realised that message boards and newsletters are getting more of a wild west character each day. Or rather it's a case of the blind leading the blind.</p>
            <p>It is for this reason that I have not posted anything on the PHP mailing lists for a long time. The PHP-General mailing list is populated by a bunch of idiots who believe it to be the 'General' mailing list. Old timers who have attempted to keep the posts on topic have been sharply rebuked by people who believe it's our job to help people who are too lazy to google or RTFM. As a result most of the replies are now made by these very people and not much needs to be said about the quality of the replies.</p>
            <p>As for the message boards, I found a discussion on <a href="692.html">gilbc detected *** double free or corruption: 0x050ca9d0 ***</a> The second post on that thread points to my <a href="000609.html">post on jan 11</a> after that it gets pretty wild. Some even suggesting that these errors are caused by faulty hardware.</p>
            <p>If your RAM is faulty or your <a href="52.html">CPU is toast</a>, your machine simply will not boot. Period. If by some chance only a few transistors in the RAM are busted and your machine manages to boot up, the moment that area of RAM is written to your machine will go down like a ton of bricks. Those unfortunates on windows systems will see the notorius blue screen of death. The only hardware failures that ordinary desktop PC can handle well is a hard disk with bad sectors.</p>
            <p>As <a href="http://www.jasonn.com/node/107">Jason - a blogger who has linked here</a> as pointed out, there are all sorts of people throwing darts in the darks pretending to know what they are talking about, more often than not it's just a matter of bluff. Jason was referring in particular to my post on <a href="000661.html">SSHD</a>.</p>
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The Message Board Wild West

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            <p>I have in my hands an Ericsson 910i and I am wondering what all the fuss is about. This is a phone that tries too hard to be too many things at the same time. This expensive phone cannot hold a candle to the <a href="678.html">6630</a> - the other phone I am toying with at the moment. The phone I use on a regular basis and the only one I own is an old siemens S55, and that's far superior to the 910i</p>
            <p>For example the 910i has a qwerty keyboard but the keys are so tiny it's nearly impossible to make use of it while holding the phone with one hand. I recall seeing other phones that allow you to bring up a keyboard on the display and tap at it with the styles, perhaps this phone has that feature but I am yet to find it.</p>
            <p>How about the camera? the camera is of appalling quality, it's nearly impossible to use it indoors the pictures are of appaling quality, the resolution is only 640x480.</p>
            <p>It does have an MP3 player but without the headset it sounds like a scratched up old record. It does have a video recorder and player but it looks grainy even on the phone (haven't tried playing the files on the PC yet).</p>
            <p>What about J2ME? I haven't even figured out which version of MIDP is installed on it yet (the manual didn't say and I haven't checked up the site yet - Sony-Ericsson like Siemens does a very good job making information hard to dig up).</p>
            <p>Does the phone have any positives? yes. It has huge display and it has a built in chess program which I quite liked.</p>
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            <p></p>
            <p>A few days ago, I wrote about the <a href="http://www.radinks.net/file/file.php">Rad File Manager</a>. At the time it was a Java File Manager. That has not changed, Janus had two faces, now Rad File Manager has two backsides!</p>
            <p>Well jokes apart; Rad File Manager as a newly added PHP web application. As I mentioned in my previous post, this is a software that is made up of a web application which runs on your HTTP server and a client that runs in your browser. They work together to provide the functionality that you might find in an SFTP or FTP client/server combination.</p>
            <p>For the previous version (1.00) the server side components were in java (Servlets and JSP) for the new version (1.10) we have made recreated the same <a href="http://www.radinks.net/file/php-manager.php">web application in PHP</a>.</p>
            <p>So why have two 'editions'? Well web developers fond of java will want a java version and a php scripters will want a PHP version. At <a href="http://www.radinks.net/">Rad Inks</a> we try to keep our design as simple as possible - and the design of Rad File Manager is simplicity itself. That's what makes it so easy to integrate it into existing web applications.</p>
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Java and PHP File Manager

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            <p></p>
            <p>The authors of PHP have a great sense of humour. Anyone who has ever called the phpinfo() method on April 01st (any year) can vouch for the fact.</p>
            <p>Usually the top of the screen in the phpinfo output page is occupied by the PHP logo, today that place is taken up by a dog. The dog is looking back at you as if to say "why are you looking at me that way?".</p>
            <p><img align="center" src="https://www.raditha.com/blog/images/phpdog.jpg"></p>
            <p>Despite using php for around eight years, I have never seen this before. I immidiately reazlied that someone was having a joke at my expense. That doesn't mean a bulb went off in my head and I said "off with you, I know this is an april fool's joke". I wasn't about to unplug my network cable or go ape thinking that I had been hacked.</p>
            <p>Like 99% of programmers, my first reaction was to type "phpinfo dog" into google to confirm that the authors of the php engine are not just great programmers but great practical jokers too.</p>
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Monthly Archives for 2005 04