Dan Makovec's blog

Selling Cars

Dan — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 05:45:41 +0000

Recently we launched our online Cars portal, and so far it’s been reasonably successful at attracting private sellers due to its relatively cheap pricing, array of payment options and seller features when compared with its competitors. As with any new commercial site, we’ve faced a chicken and egg situation. You need visitors to make a site attractive enough for sellers to advertise, but you need enough stock from sellers in order to attract visitors.

The powers that be, until recently, have been advocating an “organic” approach to developing the site’s business. Indeed, “if you build it, they will come” has been a bit of a mantra around here since long before I joined. Fortunately though, that has changed somewhat in recent months. In one month, we’ve doubled the amount of stock advertised on the site, and we’ve started promoting the site via both traditional media and Google AdWords.

I wouldn’t say that traffic has shot up, but it’s increased steadily.Our analytics system tells us that users are spending more time on the site compared to before, and our sign-up rates have increased dramatically as I’ve made little tweaks to the system’s software to iron out kinks and bottlenecks.

As of today, we launched the first round of our dealers listings section - something which dramatically increases the attractiveness of the site to potential shoppers. We’ve also outsourced the site’s look and feel re-design to some experts in the field (the current design has proven that I’m no HTML artist) to give it a more polished look and improve its SEO. The redesign is coming along and we’re hoping to have it up in the next couple of weeks.

Also coming along is the part of the system that most excites me. With the majority of the classifieds functionality live, we’re expanding Cars.com.au out to become Australia’s premier motoring portal. We’ve got some partnerships with content providers signed up, and we’re working on the content management system at the moment. I can’t say too much at the moment, but when that part of the site goes live, we’ll have a really useful motoring site ready for the Australian mass market unlike anything that’s out there at the moment.

Fun times ahead!

Back in Sydney

Dan — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 06:59:06 +0000

Well, I’m stuck here for a week, and once again, Sydney has turned on the charm.

We have the wet weather, the grumpy check-in ~~bitch~~ clerk, and the Pakistani taxi driver who told me that all gays will burn in hell and he’d like to personally cut all their throats as soon as I mentioned that I used to live in Newtown.

I’m theoretically here until Friday, working night shift down in the datacentre for the next couple of days. With any luck though, I’ll get my stuff done sooner and get back on a plane a day or so early. Fingers crossed!

Sun buys MySQL

Dan — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 01:55:25 +0000

Woah. This will have some interesting consequences out there amongst the open source community. Sun, which created Java, Solaris and some pretty funky hardware that our sites run on, is buying MySQL, the company that developed the data base that our sites, and nearly every startup web operation’s sites, runs on.Just announced a few hours ago. I wonder how this will develop?

Just moved to DreamHost

Dan — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 07:45:35 +0000

TCH’s comparatively miniscule storage quota was getting on my nerves, particularly with my IMAP addiction. So I’ve moved to DreamHost, where the hosting’s cheap and the storage and bandwidth abound.Actually, I moved my mail across to DH a couple of months ago. I just moved my web across this evening so that I can finally give TCH the flick (as soon as the DNS updates, which I’m hosting at E-Info, propagate).It also gave me a chance to install Joomla and a couple of other pieces of software I’m investigating for work. An interesting afternoon’s research.

MeBeam - platform agnostic video conferencing

Dan — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 02:42:51 +0000

I just came across MeBeam - a free service which lets you conduct video conferences using nothing more than a web browser. It uses a flash based chat client that accesses your hardware effortlessly. Definitely the best one I’ve seen so far.

iRule for throttling clients under F5 BigIP LTM

Dan — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 00:27:23 +0000

We had a little problem with a DDoS attack this morning on DirectoryAustralia, so I was forced to go down the path of using Apache mod_rewrite to blockany access by a given user agent whose identity had been borrowed by a rogue bot. Not pretty, but it got the site back on track.The problem with this approach is that it still means the requests come in to the load balancers, get assigned a worker node, hit the node, get run through the Apache rewrite checks, then get rejected. It also means more config syncing between multiple servers.I thought to myself that given we’ve purchased a couple of really pricey F5 Big IP load balancers, surely there would be a way of having them generically throttle connections per IP without having to burden the servers with the effort of doing so? So I dug around a little into the F5 iRule syntax, and hit this page, which presented some nifty solutions that helped. Here’s one derived iRule, based on the third rule listed in the above page, helpfully called Cap_connections_per_IP

when RULE_INIT {

    array set ::active_clients { }

when CLIENT_ACCEPTED {    set client_ip [IP::remote_addr]    if { [info exists ::active_clients($client_ip)] } {        if {$::active_clients($client_ip) > 10 } {            reject            log local0. "Reject overactive IP $client_ip ($::active_clients($client_ip))"            return        } else {            incr ::active_clients($client_ip)        }    } else {        set ::active_clients($client_ip) 1    }}when CLIENT_CLOSED {    set client_ip [IP::remote_addr]    if { [info exists ::active_clients($client_ip)] } {        incr ::active_clients($client_ip) -1        if { $::active_clients($client_ip) <= 0 } {            unset ::active_clients($client_ip)        }    }}

Back in Sydney

Dan — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 11:39:28 +0000

It’s 10.30 at night and I’m up on the 75th floor of World Tower overlooking Hyde Park and Kings Cross all the way across the harbour to Manly.

From up here, this town ain’t so bad. Tonight however I descended my ivory (well, glass really) tower and walked amongst the plebs doing their Christmas shopping in Pitt St Mall and realised why I left. Shitty traffic; pushy, rude people; pollution; crazy prices. Makes me glad to be a Brizzy boy now.

Yes, it was a 45 minute drive the 12km to the airport along the Gateway this morning, compared to 20 minutes to get from Mascot to the Sydney CBD, but given how rarely I use that road these days, it’s a small price to pay.

Virgin also went severely fubar today. They had a major nation-wide systems meltdown. So much so that they had to resort to doing the paperwork using, er, pen and paper! My flight was delayed an hour. Not that I minded, as it gave me time for a hearty breakfast in Brizzy airport. Plus also the equipment that was supposed to have arrived in Sydney for me yesterday hasn’t made it yet (after several promises of various missed deadlines). It’s coming tomorrow apparently - the suppliers promised! I just hope it’s before lunch, so I have enough time to actually install it before hopping back on the flight.

It’s hard to believe that this time last year we were preparing to drive from Sydney to Adelaide for Chrissy. This time we’re staying in Brisbane. Just as well really - we’ve got some serious gardening to do in preparation for a mid year rennovation (nice big back deck and verandah going on the house). I just hope the transplanted trees survive the drought.

Speaking of drought, there’s no sign of one down here. Dams are nice and high, and everything’s lush. I think I’ll make the most of it - the jacuzzi in my ensuite awaits.

Night.

Dan’s fitness regime, take 47663.

Dan — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 11:27:31 +0000

Ouch. It hurts.

It felt so good this morning, back on the weights and cross trainer after a year of blobbing up. Now it’s lunch time and everything aches.

Why do I do this to myself?

At least this gym has a pool.

That’ll be nice on a hot day.

More db44 info

Dan — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 05:24:46 +0000

Just an addendum to that last post, in case anybody finds it handy: when building the db44 port, it appears that you’ll need to use some variants.

Use: port install db44 +darwin_8 +universal

Hope that helps!

MacPorts db44 build fails under OS X 10.5 Tiger

Dan — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 05:22:11 +0000

Was scratching my head over this one for a while. When I try a port install db44, I get the failure:

../dist/../db_dump185/db_dump185.c: In function 'main':../dist/../db_dump185/db_dump185.c:212: warning: assignment makes pointer from integer without a cast../dist/../db_dump185/db_dump185.c:214: warning: assignment makes pointer from integer without a cast

../dist/../db_dump185/db_dump185.c:229: error: 'struct __db' has no member named 'seq'

../dist/../db_dump185/db_dump185.c:229: error: 'R_NEXT' undeclared (first use in this function)

../dist/../db_dump185/db_dump185.c:229: error: (Each undeclared identifier is reported only once

../dist/../db_dump185/db_dump185.c:229: error: for each function it appears in.)

../dist/../db_dump185/db_dump185.c:234: error: 'struct __db' has no member named 'seq'

../dist/../db_dump185/db_dump185.c: In function 'db_hash':

../dist/../db_dump185/db_dump185.c:262: error: 'struct __db' has no member named 'internal'

../dist/../db_dump185/db_dump185.c:264: error: 'struct __db' has no member named 'internal'

../dist/../db_dump185/db_dump185.c: In function 'db_btree':

../dist/../db_dump185/db_dump185.c:289: error: 'struct __db' has no member named 'internal'

make: *** [db_dump185.lo] Error 1

It turns out that this is a known bug, and the workaround solution is to rename /usr/local to /usr/local-offline, run the port install, then rename /usr/local back again. Now, back to building Apache2 and PHP5.