Microsoft Product Excellence

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Monkey Business or How Monkeys copy Human Irrationality

How to make an URL-shortening service

Recently I was a little bit bored. And always when I’m bored I gonna start working on small projects just to drive away boredom. What I did this time was an URL-shortening service. URL-shortening service? What’s that? I’m pretty sure, most of you have used one before. Everybody hates long addresses like http://www.example.com/this/is/a/horrible/long/url.php?id=laksdfjlkfadjoweiu - they are extremely uncomfortable, especially when you want to copy them into an email or share it on a service like Twitter. So URL-shortening services like tinyurl.com come in handy, as they shorten an address like above to something like http://tinyurl.com/AB734 (this is just an example).

These services use special algorithms to shorten URLs. Although I was using this service regularly, I was never paying attention to how it is achieved. Until yesterday. As I already mentioned I was bored. And suddenly it struck me - why not build an URL-shortening service? This can’t be so difficult, I thought. So I started to google a little bit and then started to code. And to be honest, it was not that difficult. In this blogpost I gonna show you how I wrote my URL-shortener.

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Automated Backup-Jobs on Mac OSX

It is always a good idea to backup a system. In my case I was looking for a bulletproof way to backup the mysql-databases on my web server.  In the past I used to run mysql-dump locally on my Mac to backup those databases. When I lived in New Zealand and had only restricted access to the web (due to the restricted network of the University of Otago) this was no option anymore. So I ended up with making the mysql-dump directly on my webserver. A cronjob would control it and periodically backup the databases. This however, was not the most intelligent way to solve the problem as the backup now was done on the same system as the database. So if the system would go down, not just the database would be gone but also all the backups. So I ended up downloading the dumps manually using sftp which was possible as I used Corkscrew to bypass the proxy. I’m pretty sure that I would have found another way to automate the backup on my Mac, but it would have definitely been awkward and complicated.
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Prince of Otago

Yes I can

How to build an Academic Career

iPad@MadTv…

R.I.P Sun

Happy Birthday, Jesus!