The things I do.

As an Internet developer, I’d like to think of myself as well-versed on the Net Neutrality debates and how important it is for the Internet providers to remain “neutral”.

As a consumer, I want a good deal on the things I use, and I want features that make sense to how I use the service.

So I’m intrigued why the Net Neutrality advocates are coming down on T-Mobile so hard for their new Binge On offering.  I think I’m actually going to switch to T-Mobile specifically for that feature.

My wife and I are parents, and we have been known to allow our child to use our phones to watch videos online.  This usually occurs outside the house.  

The mature video services like Netflix and Amazon Video strive to start playing the video as quickly as possible and avoid the “buffering” or pausing the video as more of it is downloaded to your device for playback.  They do this by figuring out how fast your Internet speed is, and then decreasing the quality of the video until they find the best quality possible on your connection without having to buffer.  Mobile Internet speeds are fast now that LTE and HSPA+ are commonplace.  So online videos over mobile Internet connections are consuming a lot of data simply because they can.

But that’s silly.  Nobody needs to watch Cat in the Hat in 1080p on a phone.

I looked for a way to help my wife and I spend less on mobile data use.  The path I went down as most-feasible was to create a VPN server at my house, then throttle any client connected to that VPN down to a slower Internet speed.  I abandoned the project.  It’s not simple, and I don’t have the time to mess with tc and traffic shaping tools.

But T-Mobile does this, and provides it for free.  And they even provide it without it counting against your data usage.  And I don’t have to manage a VPN server and tweak traffic shaping rules and provide tech support from a disgruntled wife when it doesn’t work.  And nobody has to remember to connect to a VPN server before handing the phone over to the kid.

Win. Win. Win.

I get the counter-argument.  T-Mobile’s Binge On only supports the services they support.  So it’s almost like they’re promoting those services by not charging you for data on those supported services, but charging you data for other services that aren’t supported.  I concede that Binge On isn’t a perfect solution in that regard.  But it’s a start.  And as long as T-Mobile is willing to talk with a smaller online video service like crunchyroll.com so that they can also participate with Binge On be on a level playing field as big guys like Netflix, I don’t see the Net Neutrality conflict.  

But a solution like Binge On I don’t think can offer a “throttle every video” solution, because a lot of video services aren’t sophisticated enough to downsample the video to support a slower Internet speed.  So buffering could occur.  And T-Mobile would get the blame for throttling and causing the buffering.  So I support putting the responsibility on the video provider, big or small, to integrate into T-Mobile’s Binge On program and meet their technical requirements.  Again, as long as anyone has the ability to participate with Binge On (and T-Mobile wants this), in my opinion Net Neutrality is maintained.

And you can turn Binge On off so you can stream something in 1080p when you choose.  

Yii by default logs to a file, and buffers up the log entries into memory and writes them to disk at the very end of the request (or console request).  In Yii2, it'll buffer up to 1000 messages by default before it flushes the messages to a log file.  This may not be ideal, though, if it's a long-running request and you expect to see the log messages right away rather than all at once after the request completes.

My first stab at this was to simply toggle the "flushInterval" property of the logger to 1, meaning it'd flush its buffer on every log entry.  It did not work that way, though, when I tested it.

Each log target has its own "exportInterval" property.  A log target can be anything: logging to a file, logging by sending an email, inserting a database row, etc.  So this field serves the same purpose, but at the target level.  What this means for me I'll need to adjust this property for any log files I want to write to immediately.  What I ended up with is:

$logger = \Yii::$app->getLog(); $logger->setFlushInterval(1); foreach ($logger->targets as $logTarget) {     if ($logTarget instanceof \yii\log\FileTarget         && $logTarget->enabled     ) {         $logTarget->exportInterval = 1;     } }

After leaving a job and moving onto another, my LastPass profile was showing multiple logins for sites that my new work also uses.  To streamline my life and get back to only having a single login for these sites, I decided to cold-store the old passwords.

(Note: I'm sure my old employer deleted all my old accounts upon my departure, but I'm a digital packrat and would rather not delete data when I can avoid it.  What if one day I recall using a service at my old job and need to look up the site name?)

The same process can be applied to sites that are just long-in-the-tooth and that you no longer expect to need anymore.

The process I found that worked for me is as follows:

Create a LastPass Identity that will contain all my old logins.

Move all the sites and secure notes that I used to use at my old job to the new identity.

Using the LastPass Chrome extension*, I switched to the new identity (Tools > Identity) and then exported to CSV (Tools > Advanced Tools > Export to > LastPass CSV File). *Note: when I attempted this using the lastpass.com site, the export gave me all my sites, not just the sites belonging to the Identity.  So I recommend using the extension instead. Update: I submitted a bug report to Lastpass and they promptly resolved this, so using the website for this step also works.

With the sites now safely backed up to CSV (it's probably a good idea to eyeball this for validity too), I deleted all the backed up sites by clicking back to "Sites" then single-clicking the first site and shift-clicking the last site, right-clicking on any one of the sites and clicking "Delete Selected".

I clicked back into Identities tab and deleted the identity I created for this purpose.  If you're logged into the identity you're deleting, LastPass will log you out, and so if that happens to you, log back in again.

Lastly, I created a new "Secure Note" for my old job password archive and attached the CSV to it.  I could have encrypted the CSV file first, but since LastPass encrypts the data before uploading to the cloud I didn't see much need.

Should I ever need to pull up a password from the old job, I can download that CSV and look it up in there directly, or I can Import it into my LastPass account again.

Like a lot of people, it's important to me that I never lose the photos and videos my wife and I take.  Digital cameras and smartphones have replaced celluloid cameras, and so making exact duplications are possible.  This opens the door for making sure we can never ever lose those files.

Local backup is the first line of defense.  For that, I built a dedicated media server out of an old, outdated computer using OpenMediaVault (OMV).  it does a lot, but for the purpose of this topic, the feature I use on here is the FTP server, which acts as a place to receive photo and video backup files from various devices.

My wife uses an iPhone, and so on her phone I installed CameraSync and configured it to automatically upload photos and videos to the OMV server via FTP. I use an Android phone, and I settled on Auto Uploader Free (and additionally use Google+ Auto-Upload for auto-awesome and Dropbox for sharing).

But what happens if the OMV server crashes?  Or a computer on our network gets the CryptoLocker virus and encrypts all our files (even the ones on OMV via shared folders)?  Or if there's a house fire?  Or lightning strike?  Or my neighbor is experimenting with generating EMP's and knocks out all our computers and hard drives?  

Remote and versioned backups are the second line of defense.  For that, I just signed up for a storage-heavy VPS at Backupsy that gives me 250GB for $6/month, and I had a vanilla Ubuntu server instance installed.  I toyed with the idea of having OMV setup there, or something web-accessible like OwnCloud.  But instead I opted instead for #TrustNoOne security and installed nothing on the VPS.  It'll basically just act as a dumb SSH server with a lot of storage.

On the OMV server, though, I installed Duplicity.  This is a well-vetted software that will do incremental and client-side-encrypted backups.  Duplicity is configured to simply backup the Photos directory and doesn't bother with the other files that I don't mind losing (if I lose my Ubuntu 12.04 ISO I can probably just download it again ;).

So after all is done, I can do anything I want on my OMV server (including hosting OwnCloud for sharing), and still backup mission-critical files like family photos and videos to a remote location.  And all this happens automatically, securely, and continuously.

Echo can be used to output concatenated variables in an interesting way.  Unlike Print, you can concatenate strings with a comma instead of a period.  But is it really all that much better than the old fashioned concatenation with a period, or embedding your variables within double-quotes?

For this test, I'm using the loopTest.php gist with the following parameters:

$testString = generateRandomString(500); // example: loopTime(0.5 /* seconds to run per function */,     function(){         global $testString;         echo 'test ', $testString;     },     function(){         global $testString;         echo 'test ' . $testString;     },     function(){         global $testString;         echo 'test ';         echo $testString;     },     function(){         global $testString;         echo "test $testString";     } );

The results are in:

Results (larger is better):   1)    389,648 iterations in 0.50 seconds.   2)    365,994 iterations in 0.50 seconds.   3)    383,308 iterations in 0.50 seconds.   4)    351,916 iterations in 0.50 seconds.

TL;DR:

Echo with a comma or two echo calls are equally fast

Using a period to concatenate strings for echo is the slow.