Author: Alexander Mamchenkov

About Blogging

It\’s been a long time when I wrote some of my ideas which are not related to my current technical tasks or immediate life events. This post was mostly encouraged by one of posts at my brothers blog. I start think about blogging from different aspects.

First of all, I would like to note that all the blogging I do here I do mostly for myself. I am happy when other people find something useful here, but since I do it for myself, I am not seeking for any judgments or whatever.

Second is that I prefer not to blog that to write something just to write. I don\’t care how ofter I do write something, instead, I care that this something is worthy to be written, especially if it might take some attention from others.

Finally, I have a note regarding reading other blogs (not mine by me). People complain that I do not comment (almost). This is true, since leaving a comment under someones post for is the same as writing my own post and I will not write something like just \”cool :)\” or whatever since I find it a bit stupid. Many people tell that by leaving a comment I show that I am interested in one\’s life – false (as from my view). I will not read a blog as a whole if I don\’t give a shit about someone, but if it came to the point where I do just read one\’s blog – it means I do care somehow about this person and leaving a comment will come only when one particular post will get some special interest from me and from where I might possibly start a discussion.

Sorry for such a messy post, but I just get pissed off sometimes when people what to make me comment (and I don\’t really see a point there) or when I see blogs where people just write something to show off they are posting.

P.S: Leonid (my bother), this has nothing to do with the post I mentioned above or your blog as a whole. Instead I mentioned it because after I read it I start thinking a lot about it and I also visited many blogs afterwards and did some small observations :)

SPAM Comments

Since I am using Karma plugin to sort out the SPAM comments I have no problems, but yesterday I received a complain that Karma is also bouncing the normal comments some time. My view on this is that I will not change anything, but I would advice to first of all watch the content of a comment you post to make sure it does not look like SPAM and second – if you visit my blog quite often and if you are interested on writing comments (I hope), then you\’d better register as a used here and this will help to make sure your comments are not filtered away.

MS Exchange and IIS inetinfo.exe process stuck

I have this strange problem now with one installation of MS Exchange server and IIS inetinfo.exe process on that machine. Whenever I restart the server running MS Exchange, the inetinfo.exe process start consuming 1GB of ram and stops all mail delivery. SMTP server just accepts mail and pulls it to \”Messages Pending Submission\” queue for later delivery.

It seems that inetinfo.exe does some indexing of MS Exchange store during which it consumes all resources and delay mail delivery. The only way to solve this is to wait until the inetinfo.exe finish this indexing, but normally it takes some hours. Since this is not the case (users need mail), I had to come up with some tricky solution:

1. Put a scheduled task to restart IIS every 2 minutes (%SYSTEM%\\System32\\iisreset.exe) since after the restart IIS manages to deliver around 10 pending messages before getting stuck

2. Make the IIS to be restarted until evening so that users can have their mail delivered (though with some small delays)

3. Stop scheduling after the working day so that the inetinfo.exe can finish indexing overnight. In the morning of the next day the server will be fine.

The biggest problem here is that I can not get what particularly the inetinfo.exe does, so that I could possibly find a better solution.

FormBuilder

Yet another useful model for developing web applications with perl. Though I am using Template Toolkit to make job easier, I am fed up with building similar forms in my web applications. Now I found a very nice combination of things: Catalyst + Class::DBI + TemplateToolkit + FormBuilder.

Catalyst, being an MVC framework (which I really like) does all the routing job of determining what to do apon the request and how to do it. Catalyst::Session alsp provides me with all I need in regards to sessions.
Class::DBI (along with Class::DBI::Sweet and Class::DBI::mysql) makes the process of storing, retrieving and doing other stuff with data very easy and comfortable.

Template Toolkit reduces the amount of HTML written a lot.

CGI::FormBuilder makes it very easy to work with forms. I have only one general template to define how the form will look and a bunch of config files to define different forms. It also does a lot of validation work (both with javascript on client side and perl on server side).

Another good point is that all of the above modules can be very easily integrated into one application and used smoothly together.
Any other useful things?

New news reader

Recently I decided to try and use Gnome on my laptop instead of KDE (not that I do not like KDE – I love it. It is just I want to try and study Gnome a bit more). In addition to changing the desktop I decided to find some software which matches it more. One of new applications I got is Liferea which is a news aggrigator similar to KAggregator but it looks to me much better, though there are some things which I like in KAggregator and they are missing here.