December 2003 Archives
It's a wierd type of addiction. Like being alcoholic or chocoholic, I call this "Mousoholic". 
In fact, I am addicted to mouse (to be accurate, computer mice). I do buy a new mouse almost once every two week. Even more wierd about me is that I do not use a computer mouse unless I forced to do so. I mean I am much more comfortable with keyboard (My logic says keyboard has 100 more keys than a mouse, so it is more capable).
It doesn't matter what kind of mouse is it. I will buy it immediately if I like it. It is why I have two mice at work, two laptop mice in my backpack, 3 mice at hom e which I use them frequently, and many more mice that are not being used at all.
Since it is something abnormal, I call this being mousoholic.
Firebird team is working hardly on 0.8 development, and they have planned to release it very soon. But I am still stuck with latest 0.7 nightly build because it is very stable. The thing that I hate about upcoming 0.8 is the old red icon.
For no logical reason, the firebird team has decided to include old icons in 0.8 instead of the brand new blue icon they were using in 0.7 builds.
Unless they use a better icon, I will be a FireBird 0.7 user.
The journey is over. And it was somehow painful as I guessed.
I have moved to FreeBSD + MT 2.65 + MySQL from old Linux + MT 2.64 + BDB.
It was shame for a FreeBSD advocate to run his personal website on Linux, while he is running almost everything else on FreeBSD. Now you can see the "Powererd by FreeBSD" logo on bottom of right side links.
The most annoying part of this transition was BDB to MySQL part. My current BDB installation in FreeBSD refuses to read database files which I have moved from the old Linux box. Then I realized that it is a waste of time to work on this issue. So got back to the old linux box and moved all my weblog data to a MySQL database using mt-db2sql.cgi. After exporting to MySQL and dumped the new database using mysqldump utility, and then moved to new server. It was much easier than solving that idiot BDB problem.
Except the database problem, everything else was piece of cake. But this piece of cake got 4-5 hours of my time.
Anyway, I am very happy that I am where I should be.
This server is proudly running on FreeBSD!
Finally!
The not-so-popular solaris for x86 is back online for free download. I have started downloading three CD images. The first image is the operating system itself, while two others contains additional softwares.
The x86 version of Solaris gave me a bad headache the last time I used it. The most serious issue with it is hardware incompatibility, especially with network cards and graphic cards.
I hope the new one has solved all those compatiblity problems.
The new installer is not stable yet, but I love it. It is even more cool when you can install the program with "I do NOT accept the terms of the license agreement" option checked. It does not matter whether you accept the license agreement or not, it just works fine!
Happy birthday to perl!
Does this mean that once my blog was in TOP 100 weblogs? Interseting!
I am running POPFile on my laptop for a couple of days now. Except some minor hiccups, it is running just fine. I am trying to shortly explain how it works and my take from its performance and accuracy:
Basically, POPFile is a Perl program that runs in background and acts as a POP3 proxy. This way it can scan your incoming mails and classify them based on Naive Bayesian algorithm. It means it uses Artificial Intelligence methods to detect spam. It learns from your mail traffic, and once it was wrong about something, you can manually learn it.
I've just discovered POPFile, the AntiSpam POP3 proxy. At a glance it is very cool. Despite it is a Perl program, but it runs on Windows like a charm. The program is already equipped with its own perl interpreter and comes with a simple web interface for configuration.
I didn’t have the chance to go through it completely, but once I did, I will post a full report, right here.
Stay tuned…
There are many ways to make money from a website. Many sites show advertising banners, while many others run paypal and ask for donations. Another method is to join B&N or Amazon’s affiliate programs and advertise their stuff on your website. Once someone buys goods by clicking on your advertising link, they will credit your account with a percent of the sale. This is the story that most of us already knew. 
I am running B&N advertising links on my website (right side of the screen, you can see the book banner). The reason is not to make money, but just to introduce interesting books. I update the book section once I have time, usually once in a month.
The reason that I use the affiliate system is that they provide a short HTML snippet that you can paste into your HTML page easily. I am too lazy to make a script of my own to take ISBN number and generate such an icon (Is there such MT plug-in out there anyway?) Another advantage of it, as I already mentioned, is making money, like I do.
Money? That is the only thing that I am not making here! Check out the site revenue report for past year here.
I have to admit that I have never been good in business. Being a geek alone is not enough for life. A little knowledge of business is a must.
Slashdot reports that BSDForums wrote that Dru Lavigne has an article about "Steganography in FreeBSD" on OnLamp.
Anyone else is going to continue this chain please?
I have discovered that following configuration improves web browsing speed noticeably:
user_pref("general.smoothScroll", true);
user_pref("network.image.imageBehavior", 0);
user_pref("network.http.max-connections", 48);
user_pref("network.http.max-connections-per-server", 16);
user_pref("network.http.pipelining", true);
user_pref("network.http.pipelining.firstrequest", true);
user_pref("network.http.pipelining.maxrequests", 100);
user_pref("network.http.proxy.pipelining", true);
user_pref("nglayout.initialpaint.delay", 100);
(For those who are not familiar with above stuff, I recommend typing “about:config” in their address bar in Firebird, or searching for “prefs.js” in their profile directory. A good reference can be found here).
Well, as it is almost obvious by looking at the configuration itself, I will explain some of them:
First option turns on the “smooth scrolling” behavior in your browser, for who are switching from IE. Next option turns off auto image resizing (which is really annoying). The next options increase the number of total concurrent connections and max concurrent connections to a server at a time.
HTTP pipelining is also very useful, especially when you are behind a high delay internet link. It avoids making a separate connection for any single object, and uses a single TCP channel to transfer more than one object. This behavior makes your pages downloads faster, due to the nature of TCP three-way handshake.
The last option decreases the delay that Firebird waits before drawing pictures in a web page. Note that reducing this number to zero may cause weird behaviors by firebird, so increase it if your firebird crashes while loading images.
A good but not complete list of configuration parameters can be found at: http://www.geocities.com/pratiksolanki/
