Everybody has seen their share of this message prompt. Let me show you how to disable this prompt completely.

To disable the prompt, first you have to fire up the group policy editor. To do this. Go to the start menu>Run , then enter gpedit.msc. You should be greeted by the group policy editor. The options in there could be ovewhelming and if you don’t know what you are doing you can make your PC unsuable. So be careful with it.

The options that you need is under Computer Configuration>Administrative template>Windows Update

Set the setting for “No auto-restart for scheduled Automatic Updates installations” to “Enabled”.

Press ok and you’re done. Here’s the irony though, you have to restart for the settings to take affect.

I try to make this as general as possible but mostly they apply to php/mysql development as that is what I have the most experience in.

Databases

First of all. The most common bottlenect of a web application is not the application itself but the database.

Query optimization

Database queries are typically very expensive. But a poorly designed query can take even the best servers to its knees. Which is another reason to hire good programmer (But that’s a rant I’ll save for another time). A profile is an important tool in query optimization. For MySQL there a handy guide to Using the New MySQL Query Profiler MySQL profiler at mysql.com.If you are using postgres then there’s the EXPLAIN command for you to use.

Caching

MySql have a query cache system that you can use. This is particularly usefull for if your application keeps asking for the same data over and over again. For example requesting application settings from database on each page load.  If you are using a language that, unlike PHP, supports application wide variables, for example Java. These queries are better cached into the application memory during application start instead. Just make sure you update the settings if you update the settings in the database. This frees up the cpu from doing sql queries at the expense of some memory overhead. On a busy site this is very much worth it.

memcached is a general purpose memory cache engine but is frequently used as a database cache. Running a big site without memcache is like running up a hill with a backpack full of bricks. You can do it, but you really don’t want to. A lot of people use memcached In conjuction with all any database cache that they already have in the database. memcached is created by the guys behind LiveJournal to help cope with their 20million+ page view, so you don’t need to worry. memcached is one of the big boys here.

Application

These deal with mostly application performance tuning. And not programming for performance.

Caching

On the application front, you can attack the issue of caching from multiple angle. There opcode caching, output caching.The great thing about opensource is that a lot of very smart people that face the problems that you face today already created a solution for it. PHP opcode caching

PHP is an scripting language. Meaning that it is not compiled. When a page is requested. The source is process into machine language and then the instructions are ran. This is done each time the page is requested. You can save a lot of CPU power by caching the generated bytecode that so that the same page need not to compile each time it is access. This is called opcode caching. For this there are a lot of solution but I recommend APC(wiki link). It’s one of the few that still remain active. Opcode caching was popular around PHP 4.1 but somehow most of them fell off the bandwagon and no longer being actively developped, some evolve as other opcode caching projects but just stay dead. Most of the old ones still works with PHP4 but most can’t  even work with PHP5(I think no one should use PHP 4 anyway, a 10 years old language but that is also a rant for another day).

Template Caching

Opcode caching is often accompanied with the used of a tempalate engine to do template caching. Template engine like Smarty can cache all or parts of a rendered web page, or leaving parts uncached. A cached page use more or less the same amount of processing power as serving a plain HTML page. This is really usefull  for a site for data that don’t change to often after they are updated, for example, blog posts. With Smarty your blog posts can be cached while your sidebar with the your widgets that needs fresh up to date data can get the updated data.

Segragate dynamic and static data

Apache is a good webserver. But it is geared towards dynamic content. lighthttpd on the other hand is a webserver that is made for speed. It can’t do many of the fancy things that apache can do. But it can serve static page really really fast. phpClasses used lighthttpd for all their static pages (graphics, javascripts,css, file downloads) to handle the huge amount of traffic for their site. On a smaller scale you can offload all you static content to services like Amazon S3 to host all your static content. That’s the speed of Amazon Enterprise Datacenter at your disposal what else can you ask for.

Summary

Basicly I touched a little on performance for traditional Web application. There are many other thing that you can do to optimize your web application. Newer AJAX heavy websites require the same basic concept but a different approach towards the subject. There are also many other areas that I haven’t touched yet. Like replications of database to spread your database load database and web server clustering. We also haven’t touched on programming techniques to maximize performance.

Application performance is a big subject and hopefully this will give you a small start toward designing high performance PHP web application

A few things that caught my eyes.

1. “IT management”, (meaning managers. Read:PHB) has the highest average annual salary
2. The regional’s ( Malaysia, Indonesian, HK, Thailand, India, Philipines, Singapore) Top Certification is CCNA. (Which is understandable, since most network engineers and/or servers operator job are very Certification oriented in selecting candidate) But in Malaysia the top Certification is MCP. Where did all this MIcrosoft love come from? I thought we are the pirate culture here in Malaysia.
3. Our neighbour in singapore earn about the same amount as we do in Malaysia. Only in Sing Dollar.
4. “Media, Marketing and Sales (Non-IT)” gets the highest average annual salary.

That’s the only thing I ca think off. I’m to depressed from finding out that I get less money than salesgirls and PHB alike.

One tip though, create a new firefox profile before restoring a full backup as the extension cannot replace in use files.

You can find FEBE at the Firefox Addon Site or at the Chuck Baker firefox entension forum.

While waiting for someone to  answer my questions I figured I’d be helpful and browse for something in the coders forum. So the the story was there was a guy that started programming and wanted to know a good language to start with, and wanted to choose between vb.NET and java. I’ve always had a bone to pick with vb and vb.NET, nothing personal, I’ve always feel that best practices are better learnt when you are starting to learn to code, rather than go through the trouble of unlearning your bad practices. And I feel like I’ve articulated my point through calm and in a more or less civil way. And I personally believe what I wrote about all the bad things a bad programming language teach you and how it is better to start off with a better programming language like java or even C#. See, I said C#, I support .NET, I’m not a microsoft basher. Which is why it puzzles me why a guy in the forum called me out as a Microsoft basher. 

Granted my research was not that complete. I cited some stuff that is more relevant to vb6 rather than vb.net (it was a forum post, I googled a little and that’s it, i didn’t do a 3 hours research). But I do feel that the essense of it was there and the point is that it is better to start with a language that doesn’t follow best practices like allowing uninitialized variables. I even said that I understand that vb is not bad, it has it uses like rapid UI prototyping, and my point is that it is not a bad language, it’s just a bad FIRST language. Which I believe that I have stated clearly.

Which is why I was stil puzzled as to why I was called out as a Microsoft basher. I didn’t even mention Bill Gates. I don’t blame the poster, maybe he had his fair share of microsoft and VB basher. Which is why he annoyed at “yet another one”. I’ve just felt that I was really sincere in my posting and not flamebaiting. Maybe the language of the internet is a lacking in communicating some of the emotion in a sentence. Or whatever. Anyway the poster was a regular with 1000+ post, so I didn’t bother to reply, I’d just look like newbie trying to pick a fight with a regular. No amount of reason can win that fight. And even the poster said that he’s signing off on the conversation cause he’s tire of this old debate and the thread already starting to veer into another direction. So I let it go.

The thing that gets me about this is that I really was sincere in trying to help the thread starter and also sincere in my believe that you should start out with a good programming laguage that teaches you go programming practices. I’m not trying to bring the debate here. Just making my point and saying my peace. No offence intended to anyone.

The thread:
http://forum.lowyat.net/topic/660021

I think what makes me so excited about this site is that it does perfectly what I am trying to do most of the time. Give simple tips to ease the use of computer for non tech savvy computer users. And the owner of the site does it in simple plain language that is easy to understand for beginners. And she does it with a little style and personality too in her writting.

I also like the educating the masses aspect of the site. It aims to give help and tips for things that an advanced user like me already took for granted. Reading through the entries reminded me of things that I took for granted for so long and forgot that it needed to be learnt. That I think is the problems with me (and I believe other advanced computer user) is that we are so used to a lot of things we subconciously assume a that everyone knows how to ,for example, ping a site to test for connection or burn a dvd. But the site gives out simple tips like these and in a way that is interesting to the reader base.

In summary, I think the content is good for the level of audience and the writting is interesting. And I personally love the site because it sort of reflect what I’ve been trying to do but don’t have the time, effort, eloquence, style and the right gender to do.

Come head on over there. Wanita & Komputer

First and foremost, never search for domain availability at Network Solutions’ website. They put a hold on the domains that you searched so that you can’t buy it from anyone but them(at a high price). I REALLY REALLY hate them. But just do a search on  “network solution” and “front running” enough people rant about them already.

Ok, moving on.

Typically a  .com domain goes for USD10(Google Apps - USD10/yr, Yahoo Domains - USD9.95/yr, GoDaddy - USD 9.99/yr and pretty much everyone else is offering it at USD 10/yr) , USD10 is a good midrange price. Some companies offer .com domain names at the expensive price of USD 30. Stay away from these companies and all their other products(register.com, Enom, network Solutions)(I won’t even link to to them, HA!).  Local companies usually give these out for RM50(Exabyte -RM55, Serverfreak – RM40/yr), but a lot of companies also offer it for RM80. So usually it’s better to buy it from overseas companies at USD10. (espcially now with the USD at 3.1 RM).
Edit: Some local company actually do provide budget domain names at RM30 ( MercuMaya -RM30/yr)

Shopping around, you can find real cheap .com domains that go at around USD6/yr (Netfirm - USD 5.95/yr, Name.com – USD5.99/yr, MadDog (USD 6.95/yr) ) , most companies that sells domain at USD10 will also let you have the domains at these prices if you register for 2 or 3 years.

.my domains are a more expensive. Typically it goes at around RM100/yr. With some companies offering it at around RM80. Furthermore a .com.my requires you to have a Malaysian bussiness license

If you are on a budget. A .info domain are now selling really cheap at around USD 1/yr. (ix-one.com - USD1.99/yr, GoDaddy – USD0.99/yr,)

If you are REALLY on a budget. A .tt domain is available free at Joynic.

Shop around.Some registrar provide whois privacy where the registrar info is on the whois lookup, as a protectection against spam abuse. Or just as a privacy matter. This is good for individuals but bussiness sometimes like to put the info up on the whois so that they can be reached easier. And if you are not tech savvy maybe a company with a good support is an important issue for you. Also remember that web hosting companies also sometimes bundle free hosting with their hosting plans. So please consider these issue also when deciding on where to get your domain from.

This is just a basic overview of the domain name price. If you have any tips. Please feel free to share them. I conclude this with a list of my recomended domain name registrar.

1. Netfirm (http://www.netfirms.com/) USD 5.95/yr (18+-) (I use this)
2. MercuMaya (http://www.mercumaya.net/domain_details.html) RM30 (support local, Malaysia boleh! )

I have grown fond of it from my ussage of slocate in linux. When working in Solaris 10, however, there was no slocate utility.Browsing through the Sun Freeeware site I was surprise to see that is it not among the available download. The alternative is to compile it from source. I will show you how.

First thing to do is to get the source distributuion from the official slocate site. Get the version 2.7 distribution. Version 3 is a little better overall, a complete rewrite of the old codes and some fixes. But it doesn’t use the ./configure script for compilation but a hard coded Makefile so it’s a little cumbersome to (re)configure. So I figured we go with the 2.7 release. Here a  direct link to slocate v2.7 source.

slocate v2.7 also require automake-1.4. I had success with v1.4-p1 but I suppose any revision from v1.4-p1 untill v1.4-p6 will do. Get them all at the gnu automake ftp site.

Compilation of automake is very straight foward. After extracting everything, use the standard

• ./configure
• make
• make check (optional)
• make install

There is one caveat though, the configure script for slocate will look for automake-1.4 instead of the default automake. So rename it manually afterwords. Or alternatively you can use the –program-suffix=-1.4 argument for ./configure

Ok, now we can start compiling slocate.

Start by extracting the archive. And then

• ./configure
• make
• make

There are a few things that you have to change maually in the Makefile before running the make install command. This because the different way the Solaris 10 handle the parameter of the “install” and “chmod” command as oppose to how linux handles them and also because of the subtle diffrence of the way both OS handles command line parameters (linux allows parameter after command arguments e.g. cp dir1 dir2 -R, Solaris doesn’t e.g. cp -r dir1 dir2).

These are my changes in diff format

161,162c161,162
<           echo “  $(INSTALL_PROGRAM) $$p $(DESTDIR)$(bindir)/`echo $$p|sed ‘s/$(EXEEXT)$$//’|sed ‘$(transform)’|sed ‘s/$$/$(EXEEXT)/’`”; \
<            $(INSTALL_PROGRAM) $$p $(DESTDIR)$(bindir)/`echo $$p|sed ‘s/$(EXEEXT)$$//’|sed ‘$(transform)’|sed ‘s/$$/$(EXEEXT)/’`; \
—
>           echo “  $(INSTALL_PROGRAM)  $(DESTDIR)$(bindir) $$p”; \
>            $(INSTALL_PROGRAM) $(DESTDIR)$(bindir) $$p ; \
393,395c393,396
<       $(INSTALL) -d $(DESTDIR)$(datadir)/slocate
<       chown root.slocate $(DESTDIR)$(bindir)/slocate
<       chown root.slocate $(DESTDIR)$(datadir)/slocate
—
> #     $(INSTALL) -d $(DESTDIR)$(datadir)/slocate
>       $(mkinstalldirs) $(DESTDIR)$(datadir)/slocate
>       chown root:slocate $(DESTDIR)$(bindir)/slocate
>       chown root:slocate $(DESTDIR)$(datadir)/slocate
404,405c405,409
<       $(INSTALL) -m 644 doc/slocate.1.linux.gz $(DESTDIR)$(mandir)/man1/slocate.1.gz
<       $(INSTALL) -m 644 doc/updatedb.1.gz $(DESTDIR)$(mandir)/man1/updatedb.1.gz
—
>       $(mkinstalldirs) $(DESTDIR)$(mandir)/man1/slocate.1.gz
>       $(mkinstalldirs) $(DESTDIR)$(mandir)/man1/updatedb.1.gz
>
>       $(INSTALL)  $(DESTDIR)$(mandir)/man1/slocate.1.gz -m 644 doc/slocate.1.linux.gz
>       $(INSTALL)  $(DESTDIR)$(mandir)/man1/updatedb.1.gz -m 644 doc/updatedb.1.gz

Your makefile might be generated a little differently but you can use this as a general guideline as to what to look for to change.

Finally, run

• make install

And there you have it, you installation of slocate. run updatedb to update your database. Then run slocate $filename to seach for $filename effectively.

Another caveat of this is that everyone using Celcom will essentially be as if on the same LAN as you are. So if someone have a virus, It’ll spread more easily. And now apparently someone got infected by a Fujacks worm. Technically it is called Win32/Fujacks.S by ESET.

The virus spreads by trying to infect any shared folder on the network. At work I swapped files  a lot with my fellow co-worker so I have a shared folder with write access enabled so that anyone can just copy a file over when they want me to take a look at it. This is a BIG risk. But sometimes convenient trumps security, even if all the guys at the office are very very tech and security savvy. We work on identity management system, security is out job after all.

Windows shared folder has a hard time with computers across different domains/workgroup so usually spreading anything through Windows shared folder only happened on networks and not the open internet. And guys here all have PC clean as a wistle. But with Celcom broadband connected, suddenly I am on a big networks with all kinds of (infected) PC.

So, the combined two factors above lead to an infection. The virus does a lot of things, like disabling services that it thinks will stop its spread like commonly used virus scanner (AVG, McAfee, etc). One nasty thing it does is that it deletes any .GHO files it finds. .GHO are Norton ghost files, usually used to image a harddisk for backup.  That’s why you always hear people telling you to have an offsite physical backup.  It also infects popular web files, all files with the extension ASP,PHP,HTML,JSP are modified so that they show certain website when they are run. So if you are running a webserver it’s also a very nasty thing to have. 

So after that little incident I have disabled all the shares on my PC. And if you are like me and want to have a way to share files on your network. I suggest a SFTP server. coreftp.com the makers of the CoreFTP client, also have a simple, stripped down SFTP server. Core FTP/SFTP Server is a very simple SFTP server, no fancy configuration, no multi level ACL, just a plain SFTP server. You fire it up, it ask for a username and password that you want people to use to connect to the server and you put in the root path of the directory you wish to share and click “Start”. That’s all, you got it running. No messing around with any SSH keys, no config, no nothing. Just a simple SFTP server, good enough to use in the office’s LAN.

This just one of the ways to secure your PC, I’m sure they are many other.  You can tell me how you secure your PC in the comment.

http://wp-plugins.net  has been good source of some obscure-ish plugins that don’t make it to wordpress plugin repository and I am eagerly awaiting their return, hopefully soon.