I feel better already. Gotta hop back to the hospital first thing tomorrow morning, though. (to finish up the paperwork and get the final instructions from the fine surgeon that fixed me up)

The signed copy of James Zabiela’s brand new “Renaissance: The Masters Series” arrived while I was away. What an excellent homecoming present from myself :)

Here’s a crappy phonecam photo of it, sent via MMS to email, and then uploaded (cause I broke my usb bluetooth adapter):

These past few days (and nights) in the hospital have been… interesting.

Tonight, though, has been extra special. First I was forced to endure the whole Dora 2009 final evening terror, and then I had to listen to the winning song twice. Painkillers paired with 0,6l of dark beer helped (to an extent).

What I’m listening to now is a different beast altogether. It’s an amazing dissonance of running water sounds (coming from a non-purged-of-air radiator) paired with a cacophony of snores — there are 3 beds per room, mine’s in the middle — sometimes the left snorer performs a wonderful crescendo, sometimes the right one, sometimes they just complement each other perfectly. The running water sounds are randomly constant.

I’m dubbing tonight’s performance “Radiatorium Klokotur Stertor in D-minor”.

Broke my left clavicle while snowboarding yesterday. Surgery appointed for tomorrow. Fingers crossed that all goes well.

According to Wikipedia, surgery is rarely used in clavicle fractures, but there’s always a “but” and a “special case” when my ass is involved with something.

Clavicle (collar bone) is supposed to be a fast-healing bone (or so they say). The usual healing time for adults is 4-6 weeks, after which some physical therapy will probably take place (as my left hand might be weakned by the 4-6 weeks of immobilization).

If all goes well, I think I have an idea for my next tattoo :)

UPDATE (17:48):
Woke up around 14:20. Survived the surgery. Vaguely rembering going to the x-ray machine right after the surgery, which means they have x-rays of the metal plates they just installed. I need to get my hands on those and post them here.

Working on a recent project I noticed that about 20% of user’s accounts have not been fully activated (typos in email addresses and/or bounced activation emails being the main culprits). After trying out several solutions (and realizing none of them worked for me), here’s my solution (pasting and excerpt from the README):

SMTP_Validate_Email – Perform email address verification via SMTP.

The class retrieves MX records for the email domain and then connects
to the domain’s SMTP server to try figuring out if the address is really valid.

Some features (check the source for more):

• Not really sending a message, gracefully resetting the session when done
• Command-specific communication timeouts implemented per the relevant RFCs
• Catch-all account detection
• Batch mode processing supported
• MX query support on Windows without requiring any PEAR packages
• Logging and debugging support

The source is over on Github: http://github.com/zytzagoo/smtp-validate-email

Was at the anti-conference  today. ’twas cool. Nothing spectacular tho, but saw a bunch of folks I haven’t seen in a while, which was cool. As usual, it’s all about the networking effect. If you want knowledge and deep insights, stick to googlin’.

The 6 degrees of separation thing turned out to be so fucking true it was unbelievable! Croatia is just one fuckin’ giant village, no matter what anyone says.

P.S.
Good times with the crew that went out for drinks afterwards — we should do it again soon.

January 23rd, 2009. Zagreb’s second BarCamp. Be there if you can.

I know I will, you know, with me officially working from home on Fridays. Officially. Last friday was my first. It was fuckin’ awesome.

A quick checklist of what to do when you want your web project to FAIL (if not instantly, then over a prolonged period of time during which no one involved will be happy):

• under no circumstances are you to acquire a staging/testing server with the same setup as the production machine(s) — what a waste of resources! The bang-for-buck ratio clearly steers in the branded coffee mugs and t-shirts direction;
• outsource your office IT infrastructure;
• make sure your dev team is understaffed and make sure you over-budget in the bullshit departments — after all, they’re the cream of the crop, bringing in the money with every little thing they do;
• tolerate a lot of bullshit, incompetence and poor quality work for sustained periods of time — that way you’ll make sure that anyone actually worth a damn within the team/company — leaves.
• make sure to add additional hoops & hurdles which get in the way of your developers getting things done; These include, but aren’t limited to:
  • have them work behind very restrictive firewalls and/or proxies;
  • do not enable VPN access into the company network;
  • while you’re at it, make sure to limit their mailbox sizes too, so they cannot access work stuff from home with OWA either;
  • for God’s sake, never give them administrative or power user privileges on their machines;
• don’t do any usability tests/studies, focus groups, alpha/beta previews and other silly shenanigans (which require experts in their respective fields and time to process properly) — have sales, marketing and other departments chime in with what they know “just works and looks great”;
• have a strong business plan somewhere along the lines of: “we’ll sell advertising space”. Then proceed to evaluate the project’s success on the number of banners sold, their CTRs, page views, bounce rate and similar minutiae that are completely irrelevant and easily faked/bought anyways;
• keep looking over your shoulder constantly in fright of competition; if you look hard and often enough, there’s a strong chance you won’t get any; If God hates you and decides to strike down upon You (with Furious Vengeance), absolutely make sure to completely ignore them. Ignore the mistakes they’ve made, do not learn from what they did right, and stick to your (time and time again) proven business plan from above; If that doesn’t work, try adding extra banner positions.
• ignore real users’ feedback;
• invest in or bet on a software solution / technology that you know nothing about, that your developers haven’t had a chance to work with / test fully yet (or for which you’re unable to hire additional (proficient) developers); bonus points awarded for the software/technology still being in the concept stages (with nothing but .pps slides to show for and a vague alpha/beta release date) and you committing your team to an impossible go-live deadline;
• make sure non-technical people are managing technical people;
• ignore backups;
• have looong, boring, unproductive meetings;
• institute weekly and/or monthly reporting on as many levels as possible; it doesn’t really matter that the report contents are bullshit and no real work was done; Make sure to explain that it’s not because you have no confidence, or that you’re afraid to relinquish control (your strong urge to know and micro-manage everything) — it’s because the higher-ups said so, and that’s just how it’s done.

2008 A.D. was a really hectic year for me, on both professional and private fronts. I survived and I’m ready for the next round of life’s sucker-punches. Bring it on bi-atch!

Since I’ve been hard at work for the past 16 months non-stop (no sick days, no vacation), it’s time to take a lil’ break now (during which — hopefully — I’ll finally finish up and publish some of the draft posts that have been laying around for the past year).

I was thinking of listing all the good & bad things that’ve happened in the past year, but there’s no need — It’s all in the past and lessons have been learned. The future matters.

Happy New Year everyone.

He he, latest Threadless shopping spree resulted in me ordering these 7:

• While you were reading my shirt I took your wallet.
• The Discovery of Geometry
• Have Fun
• Spoilt
• I Wish I Were
• Satan’s Little Helper
• Corporate Zombie

Luckily, I didn’t have to pay any extra customs fees this time.

The new RTL Hrvatska website has been redesigned recently. And re-coded. It’s looking fresh and whatnot, but I’m not gonna talk about the site’s design. Well, not visual design anyway.

I’d like to talk about the importance of knowing what the f**k you’re doing if you’re getting paid to do it.

Why? Here’s why: http://www.rtl.hr/data/zyt.was.here.html

Big deal, eh? Well, here’s another gem:

total 84
drwxrwxr-x  14 trikoder trikoder 4096 Nov 13 12:23 .
drwxrwxr-x   5 trikoder trikoder 4096 Sep  3 13:49 ..
-rw-rw-r--   1 trikoder trikoder  266 Nov 13 12:23 .htaccess
drwxrwxr-x  17 trikoder trikoder 4096 Sep 12 17:13 _templates
drwxrwxr-x   2 trikoder trikoder 4096 Sep  8 12:42 admin
...

That’s the begging of rtl.hr’s public_html directory listing in case you’re wondering. No, I don’t have FTP access. Yes, I did manage to run a remote code execution exploit. With nothing else but a web browser.

Takeaway lessons for the Trikoder crew (the guys responsible for the new site):

• disable register_globals
• keep your external libraries up to date!

Good luck and Godspeed, you’ll need it!

P.S.
The Trikoder crew has been contacted with full details on what’s wrong, how to fix it etc.