This month shows a continuing acceleration of our main indicators and I'm very proud of the team!

Figures to keep in mind: 10M page views -- showing a 20% increase MoM, 250k unique visitors, 360k members!

Worth to note is the realease of our Web site update, have a look at it: www.mobiluck.com

I habe been discussed the best way to keep his data safe and accessible anytime anywhere you are with my friend Fred (fredbrunel.com) last week.

He exposed that we required to have some kind of duplication to an external drive, but this caused him some trouble.

My way to handle this is pretty simple.

For years now (I mean since 1990 basically), I am always keeping all my data in one location, in one HD. That is, my laptop internal drive.

As I am equipped with a MacBook on Leopard, I use time machine to make "realtime" duplication on an external drive that stays at home 100% of the time, while i carry my macbook all the time in my Crumpler backpack. The external is currently a USB2 1Tb WD Book drive which I bought for a mere 170€ if I remember.

The only point here, is to cope with the ever growing disk space required by the data over years.

My solution is quite straight: every 6 months or so, I simply buy the biggest internal drive on the market and replace the one I currently have. This way I increase of about 50% the disk space every 6 months. THe cost of a disk is typically always the same 130€. And you have to replace it by your own, which is quite easy operation that takes 10mins to say the truth.

To make the transition really seamless, I just make a time machine backup, shutdown my macbook, replace the HD and boot from the external drive using the last time machine backup. It takes a while to restore the HD, but you can have a beer in the meantime (or anything you think's best suited to you).

Once this is completed, your setup is ready for duty. And I keep the former internal HD in a safe place offsite as a rescue backup.

While working on an administrative shell script for our mobile location-based social networking service http://m.mobiluck.com I came accross a weird issue. Let me explain what I want first.

I am analysing incoming ads hits on our service, data mining the apache log file. I wanted to use a simple script in bash.

The point is to display how I grep the file for answering a question, and then display the result of the grep.

But as I came accross an issue, I will generalize it with this very simple script:

#!/bin/bash
c='ls |wc'; 
echo How many files in this folder:
echo "$c"; 
`$c`

I was expecting the following results:

How many files in this folder:
ls |wc 
      21      37     535

Unfortunately, I've got the following:

How many files in this folder:
ls |wc
ls: |wc: No such file or directory

Turning on the debug mode I've got the following:

+echo How many files in this folder:
How many files in this folder:
+ c='ls |wc'
+ echo 'ls |wc'
ls |wc
++ ls '|wc'
ls: |wc: No such file or directory

It appears that bash add simple quotes where it finds blank spaces. How it comes?

Any idea how to fix this?

Wow, amazing... I'm pretty sure most former IN-FUSIO workers will be pleased of that; here is the indian daredevil user's HTTP user's agent:

I have come accross an issue about one phone that is not handling cookies correctly. In order to understand where the bug was -- either the Nokia 6600 or our server, I needed to trace the apache response header sent by my service http://m.mobiluck.com. I wanted to check the Set-Cookie headers.

First of all, looking at apache trace feature didn't give me much help, I've basically found nothing.

I turned to a low-level tool, tcpdump: this is a tool that enable root to capture any UDP/TCP packets right from the network interface of the server.

Installing tcpdump is pretty easy on debian, just do the following:

I was most interested in capturing HTTP protocol. But our production server handles hundred of thousands users communication so we must filter the right connection out of all this "mess".

Looking at the apache log, you can easily found the IP of the Bouygtel GSM gateway, in our case it was: 80.214.249.1

As I am interested in HTTP only protocol, I filtered this by using the "port http" option.

Here is the command line I used to capture the HTTP communication:

The "-s 0" option tells tcpdump not to drop some packets. The "-w " just ask tcpdump to write the capture in the specified file. And the -A tells it to ASCIIfied the dump.

As a result I've got the following catpure:

$more nokia6600ascii.txt

?ò???|QFHެFF?NF?ӣ*E8?@2?]P??[y"P0?P??O?`NP
?J|QFH?FF^L??NE8@@??[yP??P"W??0?P??Я?
Gb`?J}QFH?8^LBB?NF?ӣ*E4?@2?`P??[y"P0?P?W???O?|?
??Gb`~QFH8????NF?ӣ*Ex?@2???[y"P0?P?W???O??j
??Gb`GET /?page=intro&channel=Buzz-Flirt-IN-testmcs HTTP/1.1
Host: m.mobiluck.com
Accept: audio/wav, audio/x-wav, audio/basic, audio/x-au, audio/au, audio/x-basic, video/mp4, video/mpeg4, 
video/3gpp, application/vnd.rn-realmedia, audio/AMR-WB, audio/AMR, application/sdp, audio/sp-midi, audi
o/x-beatnik-rmf, audio/midi, application/java-archive, text/vnd.sun.j2me.app-descriptor, application/vnd.wap.wmlc, 
text/vnd.wap.wml, application/vnd.wap.wbxml, application/vnd.wap.wmlscriptc, text/html, applic
ation/vnd.wap.xhtml+xml, application/xhtml+xml, , application/x-wallet-appl.user-data-provision, application/vnd.met.ticket, 
application/vnd.symbian.install, audio/x-pn-realaudio-plugin, audio/x-pn-realaudio, audio/mpegurl, audio/x-mpegurl,
 text/x-co-desc, application/vnd.oma.dd+xml, application/vnd.nokia.ringing-tone, text/vnd.symbian.wml.dtd, application/java,
 video/3gp, audio/rmf, audio/x-rmf, audio/x-midi, application/x-java-archive, application/vnd.oma.drm.message, 
application/x-x509-ca-cert, text/plain, text/X-vCard, text/calendar, text/x-vCalendar, text/css, image/*
Accept-Charset: iso-8859-1, utf-8, iso-10646-ucs-2; q=0.6
Accept-Encoding: gzip;q=1.0, identity; q=0.8
Accept-Language: fr
Cookie: PHPSESSID=40551094df2c98748c211e7ddb053b73
Cookie2: 
User-Agent: Nokia6600/1.0 (4.09.1) SymbianOS/7.0s Series60/2.0 Profile/MIDP-2.0 C~QFHJ?BB^L??NEH@@{?[yP??P"W??0?V6??i,
Gb??~QFHp????NF?ӣ*E??@2?
P??[y"P0?V6W???O?.?
??Gb`onfiguration/CLDC-1.0
Profile: "http://nds1.nds.nokia.com/uaprof/N6600r100.xml"

~QFHy?BB^L??NEI@@{?[yP??P"W??0?V???h?
Gb??~QFH?xx^L??NEJ@@v?[yP??P"W??0?V????
Gb??HTTP/1.1 302 Found
Date: Wed, 04 Jun 2008 08:25:34 GMT
Server: Apache
P3P: CP="IDC DSP COR ADM DEVi TAIi PSA PSD IVAi IVDi CONi HIS OUR IND CNT"
Expires: Thu, 19 Nov 1981 08:52:00 GMT
Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0
Pragma: no-cache
Set-Cookie: nbvisit=1; expires=Fri, 04-Jul-2008 08:25:34 GMT; path=/; domain=m.mobiluck.com
Set-Cookie: lastvisit=1212567934; expires=Fri, 04-Jul-2008 08:25:34 GMT; path=/; domain=m.mobiluck.com
Set-Cookie: rigoler=-1; expires=Fri, 04-Jul-2008 08:25:34 GMT; path=/; domain=m.mobiluck.com
Set-Cookie: AB_ID=1212567934-2213; expires=Fri, 04-Jul-2008 08:25:34 GMT; path=/; domain=m.mobiluck.com
Set-Cookie: AB_firstvisit=1212567934; expires=Fri, 04-Jul-2008 08:25:34 GMT; path=/; domain=m.mobiluck.com
Set-Cookie: AB_nbofvisit=1; expires=Fri, 04-Jul-2008 08:25:34 GMT; path=/; domain=m.mobiluck.com
Set-Cookie: AB_lastvisit=1212567934; expires=Fri, 04-Jul-2008 08:25:34 GMT; path=/; domain=m.mobiluck.com
Set-Cookie: AB_color=gray; expires=Fri, 04-Jul-2008 08:25:34 GMT; path=/; domain=m.mobiluck.com
Location: /?tapeshdah=40551094df2c98748c211e7ddb053b73&redirect=intro&channel=Buzz-Flirt-IN-testmcs&&sdlredirfrom=intro
Content-Encoding: gzip
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Content-Length: 27
Content-Type: text/html

Note that in the dump there still are some binary chars not filtered out by the -A option, but those chars doesn't prevent us to read the HTTP code.

As you can see, we've got the Set-Cookie headers that shows the server has the right behavior.

Should we conclude that this phone with the given firmware mishandles HTTP protocol?

Looking further at the dump, I noticed that the PHPSSESID was correctly handled by the client. So why? This cookie ws written without any expiration date:

This is odd. I then modified my own cookies, now passing them without expiration date, and guess what... It works!

And the next equest from the phone had my cookies:

Looking at the RFC didn't make me know if I did something wrong. If you know why, tell me in the comment section.

MobileZoo.biz if close to reach a great milestones: 200,000 mobile DNA uploads! I see the traffic steadily growing since the last 3GSM event and I changed to an even more powerful hosting solution in order to face the traffic.

As MobileZoo gaining extra popularity every day, I can't wait to reach the 500K DNA uploads! This represent 72 manufacturers and more than 1,000 device models.

Currently 40 developers use MobileZoo embeded technology to track their application deployment statistics. You can do it as well, it's free.

DNA UPLOADS
196500

DEVELOPERS
40

MANUFACTURERS
72

HANDSETS
1058