Blogs

Mafia Wars bugs

Submitted by tomo on September 29, 2010 - 3:40am

After playing Mafia Wars for awhile, I've noticed some bugs recently. They are in the way certain strings are formatted.

'You were snuffed in the fight, losing 6 experience points%FMT_SPAND_END%'

'%OPPONENT% asked their Mafia to attack you. Fight them back now'

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Movie Theaters in Saigon

Submitted by tomo on September 11, 2010 - 7:56pm

Does anybody aggregate movie theater show times for Ho Chi Minh City? Here's where I get my information, from disparate sources on poorly designed Vietnamese websites:

Cinebox
212 Lý Chính Thắng, Q.3 (near Kỳ Đồng)
240 Đường 3/2, Quận 10 (Hòa Bình, huge place)
http://www.cinebox.vn/index.php?page=schedule&step=1

Galaxy
116 Nguyễn Du, Q.1,
230 Nguyễn Trãi, Q.1
246 Nguyễn Hồng Đào, Q.Tân Bình
http://www.galaxycine.vn/?cine=calendar&search=cinema

Megastar
Hung Vuong Plaza
CT Plaza
http://megastar.vn/index.aspx

And then there's always free movies at:
Bobby Brewers
45 Bui Vien, P.Pham Ngu Lao. Q.1
86 Pham Ngoc Thach, Q.3
306/8 Nguyen Thi Minh Khai, Q.3
179 Tran Huy Lieu. Q.PN
http://www.bobbybrewers.com/bv_schedule.html

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Cygwin mkshortcut Unicode Windows filename support

Submitted by tomo on September 8, 2010 - 1:03am

Cygwin comes with utilities for dealing with Windows-style shortcut files. readshortcut will output the file path that a shortcut links to (and more) and mkshortcut can create Windows shortcuts. However, there is currently one limitation. Windows filenames are in Unicode and have certain other limitations that Posix filenames do or don't have. The current Cygwin mkshortcut doesn't deal with such Unicode filenames. However, you can patch it so that it does.

1. Get source for all Cygwin utils at: http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/cygutils.htm

Attachments: 
text/x-diff icon
mkshortcut.patch
text/x-c++src icon
mkshortcut.c
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Mafia Wars tournament in Las Vegas: Uh oh!

Submitted by tomo on September 7, 2010 - 1:38pm

Zynga's Mafia Wars Facebook text-based game is experiencing all kinds of performance issues right now. And to top if off, if you try to fight in a tournament in Las Vegas you'll see the message:

"Uh oh. We were unable to retrieve a tournament bracket for you. Please try again later"

But only after they deduct your stamina and coins! This happens every 4 hours so it's better to avoid playing in the tournament for now!

Pligg long running queries

Submitted by tomo on September 7, 2010 - 2:20am

 

 

For awhile I've been plagued with these long running queries on my Pligg site that were running up CPU:
 
SELECT DISTINCT pv_user_id, pv_type, pv_page_id FROM mypligg_pageviews GROUP BY pv_type, pv_page_id, pv
 
And so I was running the mkill Perl script to kill any queries taking longer than a minute to complete.
But recently even that stopped working, leaving queries in the Killed state but still running up CPU.  They were all stuck in "converting HEAP to MyISAM".  Did some diagnostics:
 
mysql> SHOW GLOBAL STATUS LIKE 'Created_tmp_tables';
+--------------------+-------+
| Variable_name      | Value |
+--------------------+-------+
| Created_tmp_tables | 196   |
+--------------------+-------+
1 row in set (0.01 sec)
 
mysql> SHOW GLOBAL STATUS LIKE 'Created_tmp_disk_tables';
+-------------------------+-------+
| Variable_name           | Value |
+-------------------------+-------+
| Created_tmp_disk_tables | 159   |
+-------------------------+-------+
1 row in set (0.01 sec)
 
mysql> show variables like 'tmp_table_size';
+----------------+----------+
| Variable_name  | Value    |
+----------------+----------+
| tmp_table_size | 33554432 |
+----------------+----------+
1 row in set (0.01 sec)
 
 
So it seemed there wasn't enough memory to perform the conversion without going to disk which is not what we want.  So I set tmp_table_size and max_heap_table_size to larger values, max_heap_table_size too because MySQL uses the lesser of the two.
 
mysql> set tmp_table_size=100000000;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)
 
mysql> set  max_heap_table_size=100000000;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.01 sec)
 

And now we're golden, CPU back down to normal levels and queries finishing.

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Theme developer saving to wrong temp directory

Submitted by tomo on September 7, 2010 - 1:36am

After importing a database for a Drupal site from a different server, you may see errors such as:

warning: file_put_contents(/devel_themer_19527646904c852428ef200) [function.file-put-contents]: failed to open stream: Permission denied in /home/tomo/xxx/sites/all/modules/3rdparty/devel_themer/devel_themer.module on line 638.

And if you try to select an element:

Ajax variables file not found.

What's going on here is the files aren't being written to the temp directory which is a Drupal variable stored in the database.  Delete the row from the variables table where name is file_directory_temp and then Drupal will automatically set the variable to the correct directory.

delete from variables where name='file_directory_temp';
or
delete from variable where name='file_directory_temp';

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First post

Submitted by tomo on September 6, 2010 - 11:10pm

I've decided to start blogging to encourage myself to do things worth writing about.

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© 2010-2014 Saigonist.

About the author

Asian-American expat living in Vietnam over 3 years. I am involved in tech startups and do Drupal consulting. I choose to live in Saigon and Vietnam and I want to see the city and its people reach their true potential.

Where is Saigon?

It's not wrong to wonder where in the world Saigon is.

Saigon is the name of the city now officially known as Ho Chi Minh City. But most people who call Saigon home call their home Saigon and it's mostly tourists who I hear refer to it as Ho Chi Minh City (or Ho Chi Minh Ville for the French).

After the Vietnam/American War ended in 1975, many place names ceased to exist such as Saigon, South Vietnam, and plenty of street names.

Tu Do is now Dong Khoi, Thong Nhat is Le Duan. And Tan Son Nhut Airport is now Tan Son Nhat International Airport. Rue Paul Blanchy has been Hai Ba Trung since the 1950s.

Those who haven't seen Vietnam for decades will be confused not just by the geographical changes but the incredible amount of development and modernization that has since taken place.

Latest Technical Posts

I also post a lot of technical material unrelated to Vietnam that doesn't hit the home page. Starting from November 2015 I am only posting technical articles on my new sub-blog: TECH.saigonist.com

  • Definition of Startup: What isn't a startup? : What is a startup? We're in the middle of a tech boom and it's become fashionable to either work for a startup or to be a startup. But what is a startup? How do you know that company offering you a...
  • My Startup Experiences : I've been involved in start ups for over a decade now. During that time I've worked for companies in varying stage of development. Not all of them were startups. But how can you tell if it is or not...
  • Code Retreat 2012 - Ho Chi Minh City : $(document).ready(function(){ $('.geshifilter').hover(function(){console.log(this);console.log($(this));$(this).css('position', 'relative').css('width', '800px').css('z-index', 1000);}, function...
  • Internet Censorship in Southeast Asian Countries (Myanmar, China, Malaysia, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam) : Vietnam has been labeled an "enemy of the Internet" by Reporters Without Borders. There have been a lot of cases of bloggers being targeted, harrassed, and arrested. But RSF (Reporters Sans...
  • Using 3G Internet in Cambodia : On my most recent trip to Cambodia I bought a Cambodian SIM card so that I could both make calls and use the Internet on my smartphone. At the Moc Bai/Bavet border are a number of Khmer people (who...
  • MailChimp vs poMMo, Mailman, Phplist - Self-Host or Outsource Your Mailing List? : Use your own mail server or outsource it? Let's say you have a rather large mailing list of a few thousand email addresses and, well, sending it out with GMail is no longer cutting it. What are your...
  • Internet in Vietnam - Good, Bad, Ugly : If you ask Vietnamese officials, you'll hear such hyperbole as "the Internet service development in Vietnam is in no way inferior to developed countries in the world" (Mai Liem Truc, former Deputy...
  • poMMo proBLEMs : poMMo is free open source mailing list management software. It's written in PHP and pretty basic but does give a decent management interface. However, it's no longer maintained. There is a GitHub...
  • Preventing Repetitive Stress Injuries for Programmers and Writers : My situation I'm a career programmer who has suffered from pain in my hands and arms for several years. Like carpal tunnel syndrome, this pain is from damage to tissue (including tendons) caused by...
  • Calling the US for free from foreign countries : Calling US numbers from the US is pretty trivial and nearly free. But calling from another country means either: - paying for long distance from your telephone company - using a phone card to call...

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