Ledscripts.com Blog

I tend to get myself involved with projects that have a lot of small files — on the order of a few million.  These files are often only good to me for a short period of time, such as when I’m importing a million xml files into a SQL Database for processing later.  I’ve also worked on projects where millions of spam emails pile up in queues to be filtered by humans, which they obviously never will be, and simply need to be removed.

The annoying thing about this is the time/effort it takes to remove all of these files quickly and with as little system resource consumption as possible.

In this entry I’m going to show you a couple of ways you can set your self up for quick removal of files that you know (or are pretty sure) will be temporary, so you need to quickly remove them.

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Begin a full time DBA can make you realize how important backups are.  Enterprise database systems like Oracle and Microsoft’s SQL Server provide excellent backup mechanisms for doing “live” backups of the databases that guarantee consistency and allow for point-in-time recovery.

 In the open source world, however, we’re left with old skoul methods of doing backups such as cold backups, or even worse, text-based “dumps” of the databases.  I’ll let you waste your time reading about how MySQL “recommends” you backup a database, and how PostgreSQL’s pg_dump works.  These methods are very resource intensive (creating a bunch of “insert” statements and formatting everything as plain text) and can even lock our real working processes (in the case of MySQL) while it is doing the backup!

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I’ve decided to release a web-hosting application that I had built from scratch a couple of years ago, ServAdmin. You can access the SVN repository on Google code here: http://servadmin.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/

 Some of the features:

• Single administrative panel to control any number of servers (unlimited)
• Written from scratch — does not rely on 3rd party packages
• Written in about 95% PHP5 code. 
• Secure communication between servers using stunnel.
  • This allows you to have servers spread across the Internet where communications between them will happen on open networks, and still maintain a secure environment.
• OS-independent - Right now I’ve only written the ‘Linux’ server pieces of code, but this could be easily applied to any operation system.  It is designed in such a way that you simply have to write the layer for whatever OS you’re concerned with.
• Controls MySQL, Apache, Bind and vpopmail to make a complete hosting environment.

If anybody out there is interested in picking up development, just let me know.  It is really only a few polishes away from being a complete product.

While browsing this very nice 5000+ Resources to Do Just About Anything Online blog entry, I can across a very nice “Getting things Done” site named Nozbe. 

What I particularly liked about it was that it had a very simple API that you can work with.  Basically, you make a specially formatted request and it sends results back on a JSON response.

JSON was likely chosen as the response type for a few reasons:

• You can make the requests via AJAX so it is very easy to integrate with web sites.
• You can easily use it with PHP5’s very nice json_encode/decode functions.

I, however, wanted to be able to write a windows application so that I could quickly add tasks to my project lists without having to actually open a web browser.  The ideal tool would be a simple icon-tray application that I would rick click on and say “add action” (actions are what Nozbe calls what I would call a task.)

I decided to start writing a .Net application to do just this.  In .Net (C#, in my case) you have to have some external library to handle the JSON parsing — because writing it yourself would be a pointless waste of time. 

Thankfully, Json.Net has done just that for us.    Thanks to this nice library and about 10 minutes of fiddling around, I was able to piece together a “proof of concept” application to show myself that want I wanted to do, could be done.

For now, I’ll throw up my demo application for anybody whom wants to do download and extend.  If I actually follow through on completing the application, I’ll post the updated app as well. 

Side note: I guess I better create an action item in Nozbe to finish the application!  If only there were some Windows application that would allow me to do this very easily….

 - Jon

Download Nozbe .Net API Integration Proof of Concept