Posts

Showing posts from March, 2010

Annoying Geo Targeting

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Ever see those annoying ads on websites you are visiting, which advertise services or locations around where you are currently surfing. How do they figure out where you are?? Such kind of targeting in the online media world is called as "geo-targeting". Every computer or device that connects to the internet gets an IP address assigned to it. These addresses are assigned based on your location, so if you are in North America your IP will start from 63.*.*.* or 64.*.*.*. If you are in Asia, your IP address will range in 202.*.*.* or 212.*.*.*, so on and so forth. These addresses are further drilled to second and third level based on the subnet mask.

Hot Deployment issues

The build always makes it to the staging and production server after a series of rigorous tests. This ensures the build is complaint with the requirement and that none of the old features have been compromised in any way. Once in a while, a rare, but an annoying " Scope Creep " scenario does happen. Just minutes before the demo some one would realize a missing feature or patch which missed the commit deadline and did not make it to the server. So as a quick temp fix we just deploy that file to ensure the code does not have to go through the grueling tests again. Some of the smart developers don't commit these hot patches to SVN or merge it with the patch branch, losing the feature again.