Blog Home Page » Archived Blog Posts in December, 2006

Posted: 2006-12-29 14:13:18
Tags: technical   perl   javascript   api   google   programming   Geolocating the site's visitors

I'll admit , it became a bit of an obsession to see where my visitors were coming from to this new site. So I set out on what turned out to be a bit of an arduous journey to locate a database/web services that will geolocate my visitor's IP address. I initially started off in a state of  disbelief when I found out that there are vendors out there actually selling this data for insane amount of money (upwards of thousands). I also looked at http://www.hostip.info/, but their web service just wasn't all that reliable .

Enter: maxmind, even though they are a commercial entity, they were generous enough to make a lite version of their GeoIP City database freely available.  As per what they said about it:

Approximately 97% on a country level and 60% on a city level for the US within a 25 mile radius.

They have APIs for various languages, I used the one for Perl (you must compile and install a native C library for the perl module to work with that).  I was really impressed by the performance. Now armed with the all the city, country, long/lat coordinates of my visitor's IP addresses (or atleast 97% of them) here's a final product of it using Google Maps that shows geolocations of my site's recent visitors. Click here.

Cheers!
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Posted: 2006-12-29 03:52:57
Tags: general   Welcome to the newly redesigned, remade sakram.net!!
Hello Visitor,

I welcome you to my newly redesigned site. All the work over the past few weeks pretty much sucked the life out of me. This better, or at the least hopefully, land me some job in the future  as I am about to graduate soon .

I hope you like it and if  not,  save your complaints for a few weeks as I marvel at my own creation .  Speaking of my creation, I should at least acknowledge the assistance of the great code igniter framework. Not only was I able to deploy this site in such a short time, but I learned a great deal of OO PHP on the way.

Yeah... I had to reinvent the wheel on various aspects of this site several times over, but it certainly was a worthy learning process. Now I need to go get some shuteye. Thanks for visiting again and hopefully you'll visit often as this "labor of love" of mine will get updated pretty frequently from hereon.

Best Regards,
Shahrier

P.S. I have an rss feed for this site. If you use a newsreader, this'll come in handy.
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Posted: 2006-12-27 15:05:57
Tags: general   music   entertainment   video   Spanish Guitar Performance @ Cafe Django

This is a snippet from a performance I attended on my birthday. Enjoy!

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Posted: 2006-12-23 00:02:39
Tags: general   Hello World!

This is the very first blog post of this site!! It is only appropriate, from a programmer's POV to make this the customary "hello world" post.

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Posted: 2006-12-22 23:24:37
Tags: entertainment   humor   animation   video   A singing hippo to light up your day!
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Posted: 2006-12-22 23:23:15
Tags: animation   humor   entertainment   video   Mario & Luigi Meets Grand Theft Auto
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