Mohamed Ibrahim’s Blog

Yesterday we had a power surge at home. I noticed around 10 am when the website was not responding. When I went back home, I found both the webserver and my gateway machine both having errors and ubuntu halting at “run fsck manually”. Luckily, I was able to fix the webserver without a re-install. I have keep daily backups from both my postgres and mysql databases by dumping them around 4:00 am daily. The dump is stored on a separate hardrive, which gets unmounted after the dump completes.

I had to re-install the gateway machine. On the good side I got to re-install gutsy instead my older feisty installation. No data lost, as I keep my /home always on a separate partition, I only had to re-install the OS.

To prevent future damages and save time, I bought a UPS 900KVA , which should be fully charged when I go back today. Also, I got a KVM switch, instead to moving the monitor, keyboard and mouse connections over the four machines.

The housing bubble wrote a not so short post about housing troubles in California. Well, it’s not only in California - may be as far as I recall that California was one of the leading states to reach the downhill. However, in DC metro areas the bubble also bursted strongly.

We’re seeing an exceptional opportunity to buyers especially those with cash in hand. The usual qualified buyer can sometimes negotiate around 10% of the property’s asking price, and that for upgraded units, with new appliances and freshly painted - and I’m saying that they are excellent. Properties that need work, well, will be negotiated even more.

Its not over. The CEO of country wide and KB homes both say the US will still face a tough market next year. All the people I know and who’s working full time in real estate say that yes they feel the crunch of the market. It’s not the normal market like before, and when I say normal market I mean fair one. At one point of time the market was advantageous to the sellers and was unfair to buyers and things started moving around till the market became unfair to sellers. In between there was a slight lapse of what we call a fair market to each, and it was not very long.

In my area and in average one out of eight listings sell. That’s my own stats & analysis. Two month ago approximately, it was one out of five. And as you can see in GCAAR’s report, it seems more expensive houses are being sold than less expensive houses, compared to earlier this year and last year. That’s the only way I can explain the continued rise in the average and median prices of homes !

I added more features this weekend. First I’ve been playing with maps. Microsoft virtual earth maps seemed very competitive when compared to Google’s. They provide a much better bird eye’s view with a close up, that can be rotated so the website visitor can see the property from it four sides.

This is not the case however in all areas. Some areas especially the agricultural do not have this nice bird eye close up. The drawback of Microsoft maps is they’re slow in comparison with Google’s.

I also removed the clutter from the home page by using tabs. Now to find a city yo’ll need to select the county tab, then select a city from the list inside the tab. The city list still needs some work to be easily readable.

I also enlarged the alerts so that people can notice it. Before, they were tiny and small and very few people noticed that they even exist.

I tried adsense ads on my website a year ago. I ran the ads for a period of a week, and kept an eye on everything starting from stats, conversions and ad revenue. I only added a link unit on the top of each page.

After a week, I stopped the ads. I got the feeling that my page views were less and so the possibilities for conversion are now smaller.

I gave adsense another try. I’ve been running ads on my website for almost 10 days now. I loaded the pages with ads, tested channels and kept an eye on which channels are converting more. I also kept an eye on signup rate and number of visits, average time of a visit and on page views.

Since I gave adsense a longer chance, this time revenue is much larger, almost 10 times more the previous test. The adsense bot crawled different parts of the website, although it did not crawl every possible place. Some places are still showing public service ads, flu shots and things like that.

The number of page views fell almost a half. One other reason that might have affected the total number of page views is virtual earth maps, which are now showing on the property pages. Those are ajax based and so the users don’t move out of the page and keep playing with them.

The number of signups fell but not drastically. The average time per visit is around 80% from the original. My conversion rate in terms of users and showing requests and phone calls was not significantly affected.

My own conclusion is most of the people who left the website were going to leave anyways. Little of them were going to stay, and that’s why the average time per visit on the site fell only 20%. Further, it is good that leavers leave while your competitors pay you for those leavers - at least it covers hosting and the basic real estate bills.

I will continue testing and moving ads around, and in the same time I’ve got a load of features to add to the website and lots of new cool toys for my web visitors to play with while they are searching for homes.

Adsense is really addictive. I started putting some ads on my website, and my initial goal was just to pay off hosting expenses. I really found that there is a huge potential in the adsense program.

My only problem its becoming addictive - really addictive. When you find that half hour of work will have a continuous and sustained pay back for the rest of your website’s lifetime its really worth.

The cycle has been going through optimizing ads, adding more services for website visitors, analyzing then tuning the ads placements.

Things that I’ve learned:

1. Using channels is a no-brainer requirement. It helps to see what works and what does not work. The way I use channels is for every ad it will belong to a channel with the website’s name (mibrahim.net), its type (large-rect), its placement (top / right / left), the page it’s on (search results / property / info …etc), and one big combo of those (prop-large-rect-top-mibrhim.net). Now you’ll be able to figure out which positions work overall on your website, which type of ads do better and you can do the same for every type of pages.
2. Reading the tips offered by google helps for your initial placement of ads
3. Use larger sized ads - they usually outperform smaller ones

New listing for sale in Colonial Village Arlington. The unit has been totally renovated, new wood floors, new paint, new kitchen counter tops, new dish washer, new refrigerator. The unit has a parking spot that conveys on sale, and not all the units have that !

Wordpress 2.3 Beta 1 was released yesterday. I installed it and been playing with it for a couple of hours now. There are some speed improvements, but I didn’t feel a significant leap.

What I noticed is the plugin update notification, and I’m not positive that it wasn’t there from earlier versions. The theme that I’m using is working fine as well as all the hacks in the theme, and in the plugins.

The tagging feature is a very nice update. I had to use a tagging plugin and add a line at the end of the post to add tags.

I will continue playing and see what happens for the next couple of days.

On one of my searches on Google zaf’s blog came up again, this time he was complaining from SSH attacks. I looked in my /var/auth.log and I find this:

Aug 21 13:56:17 local sshd[7744]: Failed password for root from 202.171.152.211 port 42343 ssh2
Aug 21 13:56:19 local sshd[7752]: (pam_unix) authentication failure; logname= uid=0 euid=0
tty=ssh ruser= rhost=202.171.152.211.static.zoot.jp user=root
Aug 21 13:56:21 local sshd[7752]: Failed password for root from 202.171.152.211 port 43304 ssh2
Aug 21 13:56:26 local sshd[7768]: (pam_unix) authentication failure; logname= uid=0 euid=0
tty=ssh ruser= rhost=202.171.152.211.static.zoot.jp user=root
Aug 21 13:56:28 local sshd[7768]: Failed password for root from 202.171.152.211 port 44577 ssh2
Aug 21 13:56:30 local sshd[7770]: (pam_unix) authentication failure; logname= uid=0 euid=0
tty=ssh ruser= rhost=202.171.152.211.static.zoot.jp user=root
Aug 21 13:56:31 local sshd[7770]: Failed password for root from 202.171.152.211 port 46364 ssh2
Aug 21 13:56:33 local sshd[7776]: (pam_unix) authentication failure; logname= uid=0 euid=0
tty=ssh ruser= rhost=202.171.152.211.static.zoot.jp user=root
Aug 21 13:56:36 local sshd[7776]: Failed password for root from 202.171.152.211 port 47340 ssh2
Aug 21 13:56:38 local sshd[7782]: (pam_unix) authentication failure; logname= uid=0 euid=0
tty=ssh ruser= rhost=202.171.152.211.static.zoot.jp user=root
Aug 21 13:56:40 local sshd[7782]: Failed password for root from 202.171.152.211 port 48644 ssh2
Aug 21 13:56:42 local sshd[7790]: (pam_unix) authentication failure; logname= uid=0 euid=0
tty=ssh ruser= rhost=202.171.152.211.static.zoot.jp user=root
Aug 21 13:56:44 local sshd[7790]: Failed password for root from 202.171.152.211 port 49725 ssh2
Aug 21 13:56:46 local sshd[7800]: (pam_unix) authentication failure; logname= uid=0 euid=0
tty=ssh ruser= rhost=202.171.152.211.static.zoot.jp user=root
Aug 21 13:56:47 local sshd[7800]: Failed password for root from 202.171.152.211 port 50548 ssh2

By just putting the IP on Google, I found that this guy is very famous. And it repeats twice or three times a day from another Korean IP. After searching the net the most promising and easiest to install solution was denyhosts . It looks in the /var/auth.log and applies rules to filter the IPs which are attacking your machine. It then adds them to /etc/hosts.deny . A nice feature is a shared xml/rpc service where every host running deyhosts can share the IPs trying to attack his/her machine. Also, download the latest black list .

Installation was practically trouble free. I used synaptic to add the package, edited /etc/denyhosts.conf and enabled the SYNC parameters to share the IPs of attackers. After enabling the SYNC, my hosts.deny was filled by more than 1400 IP addresses ! Amazing how much time those people have to annoy us, instead of focusing on building something useful.

A quick not - I noticed that the attackers recognize services running on standard port numbers. So they assume that FTP is on port 21, and SSH is on port 22. A very simple countermeasure is to run the services on non-standard ports - this would at least thwart almost 99% of those attacks.

One of the best tools that I used this year is Google Documents. I really liked the extent to which they stretched the use of javascript, and created almost an online office suite.

I was reading on the google code blog when I read a post about zoho.com , and it was the first time for me to learn about zoho.com . I tried the website, and it is way more advanced than Google docs. It includes online presentations, project management, online database and even a shared testing application.

I honestly believe that Microsoft should focus on the OS, do a good job there and stop stretching themselves so thin. They are no where close or dream to be close to any of those apps.

I read Google’s post , and it’s just amazing how those guys are thinking. I believe that those teams brainstorm and have good quality product planning, that list and prioritize features as well as developers that realize those and don’t stop or refactor the product every a couple of years.

So in summary, Google earth is now capable of viewing the skyline - which what I call the result of good quality lateral thinking and extending older ideas into today’s technology.

Youtube changed the internet. News segments, ads, and homes for sale are not being posted as videos on youtube. Increasingly, I’m noticing home videos being added. Since I did a video for my listing, I’ll describe my experience and things that I learned - which might be helpful to others.

When I looked on youtube, I noticed that most videos are being shot using a video camera held by hand. My advice is to use a tripod. Carrying the camera by hand makes it wobble and it becomes harder on the viewer to focus on details.

The second advice is to rotate the camera slowly by hand. If you can record the video non-interlaced, it will be better.

The third advice is to shoot the video in segments. Do not try to shoot one big piece of video. Visit every room or ares in the house by itself. If you have a wide angle lens it will produce a much better video than normal lenses. Also, for sunrooms or large basements shoot from a lower hieght.

A simple video maker is enough to put your real estate compilation together. I used Microsoft Video Maker, the one that shipped on my home windows XP on the DELL laptop. There are many more professional video editors, including GPLed / open-source ones like kdenlive or Cinelerra .

When composing the video give introductions for a couple of seconds, who you are & what’s your phone number. Before every video segment, write a caption screen describing what is the next segment is about. You can use a creative commons licensed piece of music for your background, while your video is playing.

At the very end, make sure to place a summary and information about you and your company - as well as equal housing opportunity (may be even you want to place the icon all the way on the video).

Finally, upload your video to as much video sites. Insert the video to your weblog, and make sure to write well about the listing. The process is not hard, but time consuming. Every time you’ll update the video you’ll want to see the preview at minimum. Sometimes after composing the final version, other factors will show and you’ll modify the timeline again.

Remember to generate a low bandwidth version of the video - not all the people have DSL and FiOS.

I’ve read a lot in the internet, and many posts claim that freenx installs seamlessly and works without any hiccups even the ubuntu community docs, which might in fact have been true at one point of time. The one that really worked well with no problems is nxserver from nomachine, however, the free version of nxserver is limited to two users and two sessions. This makes it impractical if a machine is being accessed by more than two.

Freenx comes in as the solution however, every time I try to install freenx I spend at least an hour trying to guess what’s going on and then I leave off to something more useful. This time I decided to take it all the way to the end. I debugged every call from the nxserver file, till I located the problem and finally got it to work.

I will describe what I did and how I got it to work, although the solution might not work for every one and on every setup, yet it is better than nothing.

STEP 1
Add the following lines to your /etc/apt/sources.list [exactly like the community docs say]
deb http://free.linux.hp.com/~brett/seveas/freenx feisty-seveas freenx
deb-src http://free.linux.hp.com/~brett/seveas/freenx feisty-seveas freenx

STEP 2
apt-get install freenx

STEP 3
vi /usr/lib/nx/nxnode

Goto line 482 (press 482gg)

Edit the line (press i), change it to:
PATH=”$PATH_BIN:$PATH”

Add another line after:
$PATH_BIN/nxagent :$display 2>&3 &

Go out of editing mode - press ESC

Save the file type :wq and press enter

STEP 4
vi /etc/nxserver/node.conf

go to line 70 (70gg)
uncomment ENABLE_SSH_AUTHENTICATION=”1″

STEP 5
Download the nxclient for windows from the nomachine’s website. Make sure the SSL is not checked (i.e. SSL encryption is on). Connect with your client to your server and enjoy.

What was the problem with freenx then ?
The nxagent does not run as expected, and goes out with exit code 1 because it can’t find an option file somewhere inside the .nx directory. Earlier in the process, that option file should have been generated but it looks like it does not. After the nxagent terminates, your client does not find any one to communicate with on the other side and finally gives up and generates an error. If you remove the options parameter from nxagent line, sometimes nxagent goes out with an error because it can’t find a font ! so I ended up removing all parameters except the display. Well, it worked ok for me & I hope it does for the rest of you.

Adam wrote a post on Google’s webmaster central blog. I believe the way he describes cross linking, server location roots from usability and benefit to the website visitor. One way or another Google should be measuring the quality and usefulness of a site to the visitor. Things like bounce rates, pages per visit and of course inbound and outbound link quality are all factors here in play.

I believe that a website would succeed if it can capture people’s attention, and that point is the point where search engines will be sending even more visitors to that website. It’s actually the reverse of what we’re doing. Focusing on how to please the search engines won’t actually please them. But giving quality and a usable website to the visitor will make the visitor come again.

One other comment that goes inline with the same thought was also made by Adam on web masters world when he mentioned in the middle if this means site navigation that’s broken without javascript, well, that indicates a potentially significant user experience problem, and that should generally trump any SEO-related concerns.

Amazing ! It looks like different groups of people are analyzing different markets. Two posts about fairfax forecolsure rates one in the examiner and the other in wtop and I’m sure there’s more out. Both articles say that forecolsure rates are up, and people cannot afford what they used to before.

In the same time, GCAAR’s May report shows there’s a price increase [June's report was temporarily removed from their website].

HOW CAN THAT HAPPEN !. The only theory I have is lesser homes are being sold at the lower range - since buyers with low income are now renting versus buying. Buyer’s with higher incomes are buying lower valued properties and the rate by which those buyers decreased is smaller than at the lower range. However, property values are going down, which is totally different from the median price of sold homes.

I will try to validate my theory and write another post soon.

Google announced yesterday that supplemental results went mainstream.

This was a very important news for webmasters who used to complain A LOT about my pages are all supplemental, please help. I was one of those people for a very long time. The problem now, is that there is no reason to complain as there is no proof that there pages are supplemental. After all, showing that a page is supplemental does not contribute to the searcher’s experience.

Although I know I have supplemental pages in my website, my main goal is to increase my website traffic an convergence rates, and that what I learned over the course of the past three years. The last thing I learned to care about is how many pages are supplemental. Google, yahoo and other search engines will be able to send a certain amount of daily visitors. It is up to us to make those visitors come back again.

Currently I’m working on a newer version of the website that enhances the user experience, increases the visitors engagement and creates a relationship with the website visitor. I believe that this is the correct route to grow my website.

On July 28th, I suddenly found no traffic in my analytics account. Although I repeatedly looked on their blog, no posts were there till Monday when Google people noticed and posted this. I hope that one day they will implement an e-mail notification system instead of making us think that something is broken with our websites !

Now I’m using more than one stats service, other than awstats with daily breaks. Previously I used to use awstats and now I gave up on it as it is not meant for a large website.

Beside analytics, I’m giving hittail a try, and see what kind of info will it add beside analytics.

In a previous post, I showed a chart in which I plotted my local real estate market absorption rate relative to a year earlier. When that ratio was over one, it meant that the market is bullish and below one meant that it’s bearish.

I updated the chart based on the new June 07 monthly statistics released by GCAAR, and also used Montgomery county MD single family home as a sample of my local market.

Two charts appear here. The smoothed version is in green, and the non-smoothed version is in light transparent blue.

The updated news doesn’t really show us any good indicators. The end of the chart is trending down, and what’s worse is that the previous trough started from June 05 and ended on Feb 07 (see the green smoothed chart). I hope that the trough isn’t that deep or it’s going to be disastrous to sellers specially those with ARMs as they won’t be able to sell at a price that covers their loan.

There’s a lot to talk about when it comes to insurance. Whether you’re renting or owning you’ll definitely need to have at least one insurance policy. I will write a set of posts in which I will outline different types of insurances and how they are related to real estate. I will also present some opinions that I have, which does not necessarily mean that they are advices or imply that they are correct nor that they are suitable for you. Actually, those opinions can be wrong, and can cause you harm - and sometimes can just work well and can save money.

Starting with opinions. I support the services that insurance companies give. In summary, the objective is to protect you against accidental loss or damage. There are many forms by which an insurance company can be established. Two of those forms: A. the form that we all know and exist around us is a profitable corporation that gains from people’s premiums and provides coverage against loss or damage. B. The infrequent form is a corporation owned by its investors, that invest their money and use the income to protect its investors against accidental loss. The second form is of course the more beneficial for people, and the least frequently seen. I like the second form.

I don’t like all the ways by which insurance companies advertise. Specifically, I don’t approve of putting the viewer in a mood of fear, out of which he or she decides to buy insurance. Buying insurance should not be an outcome of fear, it should be the result of needing the service.

To demonstrate what I mean, I will link to four commercials from three reputable companies. And I’m specifically commenting on the way of advertising and not the quality of service.

An out of fear commercial , also out of fear, out of something else other than fear, out of something else other than fear.

… To be continued.

At last the nx server[/nx] is now working on my [tag]ubuntu box. I’ve been trying to get this running for a while now, and finally I discovered my mistake. I had X11Forwarding enabled in my sshd_config , which conflicted with the X11 forwarding the nxserver trying to do ! When I disabled it, all worked fine great and smooth ! Actually the error was the .Xauthority and .Xdefaults files in my home directory. A simple check, try to create another account and see if nxclient will successfully log into it and display the gui.

The picture on the left is a screen-shot of gnome with firefox running displaying google news.

The installation steps:
Downloaded the nxserver, nxnode, nxclient .deb pacakges from the nomachine.com website, and installed them using dpkg -i . I used the default key. I had to copy authorized_keys2 to authorized_keys because the default configuration of sshd assumes that the key is installed in authorized_keys and not _keys2 . The deb packages creates an nx home directory in /usr/NX/home/nx inside of which there is .ssh directory.

We changed the way pictures albums are presented for every listing. The way it currently works is by showing the large version of the picture you click on in the same listing page. The page refreshed quickly and moves you to an anchor just above the thumbnails.

By testing a couple of times, I found it much easier than the older way of a separate page showing that displays the album. Also, the website visitor will not move away from the listing page just to see the picture. Feedback is welcomed.