Recently in Web Category

I have been working with products from OPNET for more than a year now. This is the first discrete event simulator that seens to approach their functionality! Check it out, free for non-commercial uses; you do want to model your home network don't you?

OMNeT Community Site

OMNeT++ is a discrete event simulation environment. Its primary application area is the simulation of communication networks, but because of its generic and flexible architecture, is successfully used in other areas like the simulation of complex IT systems, queueing networks or hardware architectures as well.

Google Gears (BETA)

http://gears.google.com/

hmmm every application that runs closer to the user, is a step towards microsoft's home turf. While arguably this fragments pure search, I would say that google has the cash to burn.

and a brilliant point, that must make msft jealous is google has conditioned their customers to accept targeted advertising which microsoft would never be able to sell on the desktop.

now put one and one together and you realize, the ads will be offline too. !!!

I as a consumer, can consume an online as readily as an offline one, and this is just more impressions for google.

IIS

Enabling HTTP Compression (IIS 6.0)

To enable global HTTP compression by using IIS Manager

1.	In IIS Manager, double-click the local computer, right-click the Web Sites folder, and then click Properties.

Enabling HTTP Compression in IIS 6.0

HTTP Compression is a wonderful technology that accomplishes a lot of different things. It allows faster page serving to clients and lower server costs due to lowered bandwidth (these two being enough for me to implement). There are a handful of articles out there that explain how to implement HTTP Compression in Internet Information Server (IIS) 6.0, but I haven’t been able to find a nice step-by-step article, so I decided to set one up. In this how-to, I’ll briefly explain what HTTP Compression is and how it works in IIS 6.0, and then provide step-by-step instructions on how to implement it because it’s not as simple as flipping a switch. In fact, there are many things in multiple places on the server you have to properly configure to implement HTTP Compression.

 

Apache with mod_gzip

Compressing Web Output Using mod_gzip for Apache 1.3.x and 2.0.x

Web page compression is not a new technology, but it has just recently gained higher recognition in the minds of IT administrators and managers because of the rapid ROI it generates. Compression extensions exist for most of the major Web server platforms, but in this article I will focus on the Apache and mod_gzip solution.

Lotus Domino

Lotus Domino Web Access client performance improvements

See how significantly your Domino Web Access client performance can improve with the release 6.5.3 hotfix (included in Domino Web Access 6.5.4 and later). Administrators and users learn tips to increase performance and to improve user satisfaction.

There are a number of presentations here that cover the way that yahoo uses apache internally and in their server farms to host web content. Much food for thought particularly the way they are not expiring images, for ten years! If the image changes the image gets a new filename...

Michael J. Radwin talks

Oh to have had this a few months ago... There's nothing more annoying than going over your monthly minutes and getting hit with an outrageous overage charge! Install this plugin for t-mobile or one of the other carriers and never worry about it again.

TMobile Minutes Used Firefox Extension: TMobile (USA) Minutes Used version 1.1 for Firefox 2.x

Ok so if you set up a virtualized server all your expenses are deductible since you have no equipment to depreciate. I like the idea of the elastic nature of the Amazon setup. It is about right on pricing for dedicated virtual instances, but is more flexible on pricing.

C'mon 10 cents an hour for the equivalent of a system with a 1.7Ghz x86 processor, 1.75GB of RAM, 160GB of local disk, and 250Mb/s of network bandwidth. whoa!

AmazonEC2 - Lucene-hadoop Wiki

Hadoop is a framework for running applications on large clusters built of commodity hardware. The Hadoop framework transparently provides applications both reliability and data motion. Hadoop implements a computational paradigm named Map/Reduce, where the application is divided into many small fragments of work, each of which may be executed or reexecuted on any node in the cluster. In addition, it provides a distributed file system that stores data on the compute nodes, providing very high aggregate bandwidth across the cluster. Both Map/Reduce and the distributed file system are designed so that node failures are automatically handled by the framework.

All this power and storage boggles the mind. Has anyone else noticed that the 'net' seems slower the past year? Perhaps these upgrades will bring some of the responsiveness back.

Data launchpads of the cloud wars

Microsoft is building a new data center on 74 acres in the town of Quincy in central Washington. The six-building complex will include about 1.5 million square feet covered in rows of server racks to power current and future online services. The site includes a electrical substation and a diesel-powered generator for backup power just in case there is an interruption in the 48 megawatts of power drawn from the local power grid.

I have sent an email to Amazon's customer service to try to resolve a shipping charge that showed up on a recent order.

It wouldn't be a big deal if it were a big item, or that Prime just didn't apply. The problem is other items I have placed in my shopping cart for subsequent orders that clearly qualify for $25+ free shipping on ground delivery -- are assessed a charge, even for 3-5 day delivery.

I'm sure it's just a glitch in the system. I sure hope so, I know I save a lot on shipping with Prime, and more on Amazon's low prices.

Update on Friday. Earlier this week, they refunded the shipping charge. Checking now, I see no shipping charges for items I have added to the cart.

Yay!

So it's the end of the Memorial day weekend, and I decide to take a look at the trouble I found had cropped up on Friday... My movable type comments were corrupt, and I had something like 70,000 junk comments. so anyway it was too much for MySQL and the database table was corrupt for mt_comments. I wasn't too worried because I knew this was a static site so I wouldn't be offline completely. But it was a nagging problem I knew needed fixed.

I opened a ticket with pair.com Monday morning around 10am to see if they could help, and within an hour the problem was fixed! Is that service or what?

Thanks go out to Kevin O. for his prompt service, and dedication on a holiday! He went ahead and repaired the comments table to resolve my problem. Now I'm not a MySQL expert by any stretch and having a host that would provide this assistance at the drop of a hat is just great. My next big project is going to use a lot of MySQL so probably this won't happen again, but the help was greatly appreciated.

Pair.com

These were useful in clearing out the junk comments:


show columns from mt_comment;
delete from mt_comment where comment_junk_status < 0;
delete from mt_comment where comment_author like "%loan%";




Nice write up on creating themes for WordPress. I like WordPress more and more, and have considered switching this site. Right now I am using WordPress for internal company blogs... good stuff!
The undersigned Blog Archive From XHTML/CSS to WordPress

As I’ve promised earlier (here and here), I would write an article of how to make a WordPress theme, and I will give my best shot, through this article, to show you the process from a finished template to a finished WordPress theme.

Macworld: News: Google launches financial Web site
Nice clean look. Glad to see this service.

Google Inc. launched on Tuesday a financial news and information Web site called Google Finance. It will be in direct competition with well-established ones such as Yahoo Inc.’s Yahoo Finance and Microsoft Corp.’s MSN Money.

TALES TO ASTONISH!: IE Sucks
This rings so true! I used to have a heavily tweaked template on this site, and it would not work in IE... Rather than fix my site for internet explorer, I reverted to a more stock template. Until more people use Firefox, we will have to decide whether that extra market share is necessary or not...

IE did not recognize half of my work. I might as well have written the HTML in Lincoln Logs and displayed it on a Speak-N-Spell.