the web dude diary ^^

[bad_brain]

many of us are in the IT business or plan to get into it as professional, so I thought it might be funny to share anecdotes....for the already-pros to have a laugh and for the about-to-become-pros to see what they have to expect in the wonderful world of IT.

my latest funny experience is still in progress. I have been a little sick in the last days, and when I was just about to get a nap yesterday I got an email from a customer introducing me to another customer. he said "those guys need help to FINISH an e-commerce site, just uploading 10 products and a few pages, they need it to be done until Friday (in 3 days)".
well, sounded like a quick&easy job, the new customer was also a nice guy, but when I asked for the material that has to be uploaded (I actually expected some pics to place in a shop and some text for the pages) I was linked to a storage with a whole bunch of images and Adobe Illustrator files. so yeah...it turned out: that's all they have so far.

so the "quick&easy" job turned into a "full blown e-commerce site from nothing but a bunch of pics within 3 days" job.
quite a challenge. but well, I accepted, but of course not without telling them that I can not give any guarantee that the deadline can be kept, especially because web dev always depends a lot on the information flow between the developer and the customer.
but ok, now, 1 day later, I have the site about 75-80% finished. of course not in a way that is even close to perfect, but well....they said the most important is that the site can go online for sales on the weekend, and so a lot of compromises have to be made from their side.

but I have to admit I am still a bit proud of how fast I got that site that far especially with that source material.

oh, and the customer payed in advance, which could of course have been a great reason for working only half the time and using the other half to play video games...and then saying "well, I told you, no guarantee to keep the deadline!"...
but then again: it's a nice feeling to stay professional at all times.

[ayu]

ah yeah I saw the site before, nicely done man

Well, I can share some stuff I did last night.
It's about that job you and Thugz were talking about before.

So I got to it last night after my usual work, did some manual testing, scanning and playing around.
The service is supposed to be an "online file encryption service", much like mega.com and Dropbox.

It turns out though, that "safe" is not a word that should be used with this site, and the deadline they wanted
to keep so that they could go live, will be impossible if they want to stay serious about this.

The so called encryption doesn't seem to work properly, since you can access other members folders, files and private messages
They have a "verification key" that they said they added to add extra security, but the variable that checks if the key is correct or not, is stored in a plain text cookie, so by just editing the cookie you can login without the key.

This all shows how important testing is, especially when you want to go live with a service where you promise to secure the end customers files.

All in all I wrote a juicy report and sent to Thuggy, although I'll probably rewrite it a bit and make it easier to read tonight or tomorrow, depending on how fast Thuggy is to read it.
But seeing as he has a lot on his table right now, I think I'll have a little more time at least

[bad_brain]

wow...so mab was right when told me you basically "destroyed their code"...
you guys please share what was actually meant as my piece of the cake from that job, as I was not able to take part at all because of that "quick&easy" job.

just in case you are bored (or anyone else, but proxy please): 188.190.98.18
that host tried to attack the server I am developing the site on (ftp flood), obviously newly pwnd (or skiddie) server in the ukraine. needless to say a single route command ceased the lameness.

[reparto]

When I was in school it was easier to ask me fix computer and IT problems rather than get the IT staff.

So one day I was asked for help, I assumed it was something like missing cable or Internet Explorer acting up but when I get to the teacher who wanted help they turn to me and say "I'm using Microsoft Word and I'm trying to make this writing look bigger on the screen, how do I do that?".

It was such a difficult problem to solve, it still haunts me in my dreams. ;D

[bad_brain]

lol...reminds me of my very first web dev customer I ever had. I sent him some stuff for review as mail attachment, which ended in a 30 minutes phone call where I had a hard time explaining him how to unpack a .zip file.

[maboroshi]

This isn't really a funny story more fucked up then anything. I received a PC to work on at a shop I was doing a bit of work at, they were bringing in repair clients for me. The client say's hackers got in to his computer and put malware on it.

Later in the afternoon I decide to work on it, looking at his browser history I find all sorts of references to young boy porn searches. So I go to my employer and say hey this is on this guy's computer in his browser history.

He decides to look in to it further, and there is tons of downloaded images and videos of all this shit to. So my employer decides to confront the dude and say hey this was on your computer, the client kept saying hackers got on to it and downloaded it, which was definitely not the case.

This guy had been a client of my employers for a bit, and my employer had been doing troubleshooting stuff for him like setting up his printer at his home. He had been in several times for repair I guess he never looked though.

Sadly I was not in the position at the time to be able to call the police, in any case at that time/year I doubt the police were in much of a position to be able to handle any case like that anyway.

Anyway that's the party killer story

Enjoy!

[computathug]

The amount of times i have been asked to go to a customers house as the PC wont start, press start and voila its on............ you cant fix something that isnt broke, hell knows what they were doing

[ayu]

The amount of times i have been asked to go to a customers house as the PC wont start, press start and voila its on............ you cant fix something that isnt broke, hell knows what they were doing

It's actually amazing sometimes when you get to know what they were actually doing.
I had one of my aunts on the phone once, and when I told her to press the "Computer" on the desktop (which on a Swedish version of Windows actually translate to "this computer" in English), she said nothing happened.

When I went to her place, it turned out that she had been pressing a button on the actual computer, since her computer was a small machine standing on the desk (desktop=skrivbord, DESK).
So basically what I told her, when translated roughly is "Press the computer on your desk", which she took literally.

[bad_brain]

YAY! 4 more "abuse" reports today...details coming soon today on the front page news...^^

[bad_brain]

and another fun day for web dude!

noticed some hosting iface backend activity for a specific website account, which is nothing unusual as I knew they are about to get a new website. but then I got a mail asking for help as "ispcp is not working anymore" (ispcp is the hosting iface) and the website he uploaded is not showing up.

I think my reply explains why...


just seen he additionally also deleted phptmp, cgi-bin, logs and errors directories...

[ayu]

[bad_brain]

after I fixed it he asked "where can I leave a testimonial" thinking that would be the payment....
when I told him that I charge 60/hour plus extra fees because today is a holiday here he was all like "but I didn't accept any fee when I asked you for support"....so I told him "ok, then I can revert all the changes I've done and you save the money by fixing it yourself? because this is a business, I'm not a charity organization."...and he suddenly accepted the fee...

[ayu]

because this is a business, I'm not a charity organization

haha nice. Good that you don't give in
I used to be really soft with stuff like that, and instead of saying something like that I would avoid a customer entirely in the future instead xF.
Don't think I would do that today though.

[bad_brain]

yeah, at the beginning you are usually way too worried about that, and it can be good to give existing customers some virtual candy every now and then to keep them happy. but after a while you learn to categorize customers into the really valuable ones worth to spoil because they have the contacts to get you new customers by recommending you, and into the "standard" ones which still receive a very good treatment (simply because you are a professional and want to be better than others) but where it wouldn't be a real loss if you lose them because all they have is a single website for example....really quick stuff can still be done for free for those too as long as they not make the impression they expect you to work for free in general (that happened once already with a customer, I ended that by charging already 20 bucks for a simple image upload).

and losing customers....well, we both know that 95% of the "IT professionals" out there are a bunch of morons which don't even deserve to be called "amateurs" (because it would be an insult to amateurs), so if someone wants to go you know they will only make it worse for themselves...and most likely come back later (when things became more expensive in the meantime for some odd reason )

[bad_brain]

the motto of today is better check the database...dude!

a customer with 2 sites on one of my servers sent me a little list of edits and bug fixes for one of her sites, and she also asked if I can find out why the site performance sucks.

I was aware of the site loading really slow since the start of the hosting (about a year ago) and I have been trying to find the reason 2 or 3 times already (ok, half-assed, because I never got the explicit, means payed, request).

it's a Wordpress site, and the strange thing was that even when switching to a vanilla standard theme and disabling all plugins the site performance stayed the same, which means about 30 sec of loading time while other (and more extensive) WP sites on the same server loaded lightning fast. so I prepared myself for a long evening of analysis, made some tea, and enabled the debugging output in wp-config.php.
while doing that I noticed there is an unusually long line at the start of the config file (I have set up ~500 WP sites all together, so I can almost recite the config file already ), and it was the line for the database host, which is always localhost on my systems.

but in this case it showed the database host name of a 1and1 server. so yes, I obviously forgot to edit that line when transferring the site a year ago and it still ran on the old database.....and because the 1and1 database was slow as hell the site loaded so slow.
and also yes: 1and1 obviously still runs an active database for a customer account cancelled a year ago.