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...

MANIFEST.in not honoured during install phase The python package setup procedure appears to be a mess, you have setuptools, distutils, and distribute (distutils2?). All I set out to do was to fix the installation setup.py in django-simplemenu package which was omitting the non-python module plain locale directory but instead got myself involved a 3 hour roller coaster; I am sharing my findings in hopes of helping you, so if you are reading this do +1 this. Including sub directories and non python files as part of package There are two ways: MANIFEST.in file and package_data setup.py option. The latter is Pythonic but doesn’t do recursive includes - so you would have to list every sub directory - and can not include files in the root top most folder; sure once could write a python function to do this but why the complexity? MANIFEST.in with its file/directory pattern matching and with the setup.py's ``include_package_data`` option fits the bill: ``include_package_data...

But old style Google Places pages are still out of luck Early this month Google introduced functionality to verify the new Google+ Local pages - not the old style Google Places which will be eventually migrated - but the new Google+ pages that must be created under the Local Business or Place category. The process is simple consists of having a Post Card with a unique pin mailed to your businesse's address. Once that is accomplished your brand page will look something like Sleepless Goat Café Google+ Local Page and more importantingly it will be unified accross Google's Search, Google Maps, and Google+. Business utilizing the former Google Places will be eventually transitioned to Google+ Local . For more information please see the oficial FAQ and discussion threads here and here Google Places Administration Page For those of you that asked below is a screen shot of the old style administration page for Google Places that will eventually be phased out...

Echo Limiter Prevents FreeSwitch Voicemail Functionality If you experiencing issues while trying to leave a Voicemail due to 'Your recording was below acceptable levels' or similar errors try turning off the recommended 'Echo Limiter' in Linphone 's settings. I experienced this problem on the latest version of Linphone for Android when calling my FreeSwitch setup. Testing from a land line and with other soft phones worked as expected, changing 'record-silence-threshold' and 'record-silence-hits' FreeSwitch's mod_voicemail settings had not effect, and hence through the process of elimination the culprit was determined to be the 'Echo Limiter' setting. Saving you hours and hair; so do +1 this.

Change or Increase the Length of Dial Tone I have the Cisco SPA3102 and when attempting to setup a conference I found the default 10 second dial tone duration was not long enough - the fast busy would kick in before I finished searching through the phone directory. To change the duration follow the below instructions: Login into the VOIP box Select 'Advanced' mode Select 'Voice' tab Select 'Regional' sub tab Under 'Call Progress Tones' modify the 'Dial Tone' default entry's 10 second delay to whatever duration you wish.