Daniel Sokolowski's Blog

One home owners experience with microFit ***a posting and project in progress*** microFit is an Ontario program under which the government will pay you a premium for any electricity you generate back to the grid through renewable sources. It started in 2009 and offered an amazing 80.2¢/kWh for electricity generated by rooftop photovoltaic panels. The demand was so high that to keep the program balanced in 2012 the rate was lowered to 54.9¢/kWh - 31.5% lower and I would bet the rate will continue to declined as the program is now under yearly review. Assuming an average 13¢/kWh electricity cost in Ontario the rate is still appealing and makes the investment worthwhile financially and of course environmentally. It must be said that if you yourself are considering microFit then do not wait - apply yourself or have it done by a company on your behalf - once you get a approved your rate is locked in for 20 years and you have 6 months to complete the project. Furthermore, because th...

A Tip for squeezing a little more free space from a VPS Our web design VPS with Linode has been rock a solid solution over the last 4 years. It currently hosts multiple client sites, freeswitch, mail agent, wireless security camera feeds, and in the past even a Minecraft server and FreeNet; all these services eat up precious hard drive space and with only 20GB the wall can be hit early. However this measly 20GB does comes with a kick ass IO rate that beats even some dedicated servers Stop blabering and get to it Linux logs everything, these logs grow overtime, systems run 'logrotate' to archive and delete old logs - the settings are very liberal and tweaking them could save gigabytes of space, 1.1GB in my instance. Modify your /etc/logrotate.conf as needed but the important bit is compressing by default and using bzip2 instead of gzip to do so. # see "man logrotate" for details # rotate log files weekly weekly # keep x weeks worth of backlogs - defaul...

Locating the administrator of a Google Analytics account For whatever reasons a client might have not been granted access to their Google Analytics information by their former developer. This normally is not an issue as developer are mostly a friendly bunch and when asked will grant proper access, but what if the former developer's identity is unknown or lost? - yes rather unlikely scenario but this has happened to us and it can happend to you. Google Analytics tracking ID reverse lookup by ewhois On the surface ewhois is your typical look up service with the one and important exception is that it allows tracking down the administrator of analytics tracking code. This can be accomplished due to the fact that site tracking codes contain a common id representing the parent account. Danols Web Engineering Google Analytics tracking codes are UA-12420089-X where X is the unique id of a tracked site. Based on this fact ewhois is able to return other related sites from i...