All posts by Ram Sundararaman

IP to Location

General

Most occasions we depend on certain web services that pump so much of ads to support their interface. We built our own using the binary database maxmind has for free. We spiced it up with some map so that it’s more visual. We’ll be making that an optional feature controlled by the URL very soon.

ip2location | arroWebs labs

Earlier, only the country data was available – which it claims is still very accurate but what has been used here is their lite data for the city info across the globe. One thing that must be noted is that the IP information provided by these databases do not have direct relationship with the location of the user but the location where the IP range has been allocated. So, when we use our ISP, BSNL to connect, we get at least two IP ranges – one from Udaipur and another one from Jaipur.

The sad truth still is that the coordinates of Udaipur are wrong even in this – i guess they took it from a wrong geolocation.

Save MySQL!

General

If Oracle buys MySQL as part of Sun, database customers will pay the bill.

In April 2009, Oracle announced that it had agreed to acquire Sun. Since Sun had acquired MySQL the previous year, this would mean that Oracle, the market leader for closed source databases, would get to own MySQL, the most popular open source database.

Google Dance – heard of it?

General

Another SEO jargon – This is something that you better pay heed to. It seems like when google updates their servers with the crawled information, their test servers and the main results show different outputs. There are many tools that help quickly display the results side by side to compare.

Here’s a quick one that we put up at labs.arrowebs.com/googledance/. If you have comments, please post them here and we’ll get back with necessary updates to the tool. Though there are many on the web, this one is attempted to provide a very simple interface with no bells or whistles – sounds googlish? eh!

The importance of enthusiasm

General

It’s very true that without this anything can be nothing sooner or later. There have been times that I thought it may not be a feeling that everyone has or need to have. But I just read this article which talks about how Steve Jobs makes it happen at Apple. Not a big fan of Apple that I am, still use an iPod for music and envy the folks who talk about their Macs. Many videos or screencasts that people do, they use one and it looks cool.

Without deviating from the subject, I think the way these guys feel about the products and services that they provide – it’s not just in their talks but in their beliefs. Now that I know it, it’ll be added to the mentoring armory and will be used where possible.

No matter what people might think how silly a product, an idea or what you do can be. If you believe in it – you can make it happen. It seems that’s what many felt about twitter, but I’ve read somewhere that the folks at twitter think that they can change the world with twitter.

Upgrade WordPress via SSH

General

The Automatic Upgrade, ever since it came into the scheme of things, we had mixed reactions. We told some of the customers that you won’t need us for doing this. WordPress has made it so easy that it’s available at a press of a button. Nay! The customers went to somebody else 🙁

The following steps worked for us, login via SSH and ch to the directory where the wordpress blog resides (It is assumed that you do not have a sub directory called wordpress beneath this one) –

wget http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz
tar -zxvf latest.tar.gz
cd wordpress
cp * ../ -R -f
cd ..
rm wordpress -R
rm latest.tar.gz

Now, you can login as admin and do the database patch and get going. Post your experience in the comments below. Please take backups!