Programming

I had fun this evening working on this with Samuel Reed. Performance and programming language choice is always a hotly debated topic and it's always fascinating the explore. It was truly interesting to see async php code. I know NodeJS is known for it, but PHP really isn't at all.

The actual article is here: http://reviewsignal.com/blog/2013/11/13/benchmarking-asyncronous-php-vs-...

I just published an article looking at the impact of the major outage that occurred yesterday (August 2, 2013) when EIG's Provo, UT datacenter failed. I also predict what to expect based on previous major outages.

There was definitely a major spike in data produced and I got down to analyzing it.

Full Story: http://reviewsignal.com/blog/2013/08/03/service-interrupted-a-look-at-th...

Sequential Account Numbers + Affiliate Program = Financial Transparency

Background

Accounts generally come in two flavors: name based and numerical. Name based systems use a text representation for an account (username). Numerical systems use an id number to identify accounts. (Note: these aren't mutually exclusive)

The affiliate program is nearly a staple of any online business these days. Companies give people a cut for referring them new customers that make a purchase. I have used dozens, if not hundreds of them. But what sort of information can be gleaned from these affiliate interfaces?

What's happening?
Some companies use sequential account numbers and their affiliate programs report the account id when you refer a sale.

Why would that matter?

It matters because I can measure your company's growth and revenue. It's pretty simple to take a few sales and calculate the time between them and see how many accounts were created on average per unit time. If the accounts started at 1, it's pretty easy to see how many customers have signed up too. If the company is selling one product, this pretty much gives away the keys to the castle in terms of the company's revenue. It's slightly more complex if there are different products and prices, but with enough data, you could create an estimated average sale value.

How is exposing this information problematic?

If someone, like a competitor or analyst, were trying to estimate or value your company, this would be a pretty simple (and possibly cheap) way to get that information. For a private company that doesn't want to give away their financials, this is a fairly direct way to get one of the key numbers (revenue).

Conclusion
This was just an interesting example of how little programming decisions might expose a lot more than you had planned. I bet there are many others that you may have encountered and I would love to hear of other seemingly correct programming decisions that might be wrong with more context.

I installed PHP APC today was simply shocked by some of the performance gains I was getting by it.

I had a problematic page that was calculating a lot of info (the same info) every time it loaded. Those were costly calculations.

APC gave me about 80ms faster load off the bat. But the performance was REALLY noticeable after a lot of users were hitting the site. (I used Blitz.io to do load testing)

It went from 2.5 second response time with 260 users to 400ms with 260 users. Without APC I had a 600ms load time with only 81 users.

The graphs below really speak for themselves.

TL;DR: caching = win.

No Caching Graph:

With Caching (APC)

It starts with an innocuous email:

Hi,

I am sorry I have to write you to e-mail from whois information of the domain. But I could not find contact e-mail or feedback form on your site.
We are looking for new advertisement platforms and we are interested in your site %DOMAIN%
Is it possible to place banner on your site on a fee basis?

Best regards,
Nicolas Gauthier

But it quickly turned strange:

Hi!

Thanks for reply to our proposal!
We like your price.We would like to place 160x600 banner.

To pass to the banner control system follow the link http://webmaster.burgoni.com
To enter use the following data:

login: %DOMAIN%
password: %PASSWORD%

I just published a simple JavaScript that helps websites comply with Twitter's Display Guidelines. It helps you comply with issues 2,3,4.

It automatically links to urls, hashtags and mentioned usernames. You simply set the div class to 'tweet' (or whatever you change it to in the code) and link to twitter.js. Make sure you also have jQuery(Only tested 1.6.4) loaded before twitter.js. It is a dependency.

https://github.com/kevinohashi/TweetParserJS

Thanks go to Raphael Mudge who helped with some of the regular expressions.

Future improvements: this code isn't perfect by any means. One improvement would be merging the 3 primary functions into one and some conditions. I've also seen some very elegant server side solutions using almost entirely regular expressions from CodeIgniter (see code below).


function parse_tweet($tweet)
{
$search = array('|(http://[^ ]+)|', '/(^|[^a-z0-9_])@([a-z0-9_]+)/i', '/(^|[^a-z0-9_])#([a-z0-9_]+)/i');
$replace = array('$1', '$1@$2', '$1#$2');
$tweet = preg_replace($search, $replace, $tweet);

return $tweet;
}

I wanted a simple 'Like' button connected to my facebook fanpage. No stream, no faces, no counts, no nonsense. I couldn't find an easy and obvious way to do it.

I spent more time than I would care to admit trying to figure this out and it turns out to be trivial.

1. Go to Like Button developer tool.
2. Set 'URL to Like' to your facebook page (http://facebook.com/FacebookName)
3. Set 'Width' to '50'
4. Uncheck 'Send Button'
5. Choose 'Button Count' for the Layout Style.
6. Uncheck 'Show Faces'
7. Get Code, choose iframe version.

The 50 width should cut off the like count box (you can make it bigger/smaller to make sure it works). Simple, easy, like button connected to facebook fanpage.

Screenshot below:

I wanted to report the bug to mozilla but it took me 15 minutes to even find their bugzilla and then it wanted too much of my time and to share my personal info (email address). So I will just post it here instead.

So basically the problem is if you double inspect, you can't escape the inspector and the close box (X) disappears.

Screen shots after the jump.

I ran into an interesting problem recently, I didn't want to change my links to some sort of URL forwarding script (facebook.com/l.php=http://kevinohashi.com) to track outbound clicks but I still wanted the outbound click data.

I thought it should be possible using JavaScript and the onClick() functionality. My first inclination was to just go to jquery and bind the click to a function that would simply make an ajax call to record the click data and then forward the user.

Upon further research I found out Google Analytics has this functionality and tracking already built in.

You simply include another javascript snippet:


<script type="text/javascript">
function recordOutboundLink(link, category, action) {
try {
var pageTracker=_gat._getTracker("UA-XXXXX-X");
pageTracker._trackEvent(category, action);
setTimeout('document.location = "' + link.href + '"', 100)
}catch(err){}
}
</script>


And then for any click you want to track you simply add:

onClick="recordOutboundLink(this, 'Outbound Links', 'example.com');return false;"

Outbound Links is the label for the link. It all shows up in the Event Tracking reports in Google Analytics. Simple.

Or so it seemed. I tried this method and some users complained that it broke things like middle click (open in new window) functionality. I am also not convinced it actually worked for every click, my click volume didn't seem to match on the links I did have access to stats on the outbound side for.

So I turned it off and canned the idea for now. I guess that's why facebook, twitter and everyone else seems to use link tracking scripts like l.php and t.co.