Category: The Undefined Remainder

Geeky stuff. Internet, Games, Free Software, Sci-fi etc.

Dreamhost PS activated!

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Engage Warp speed…3!

I just got in Dreamhosts’ new shiny and exciting Private Server thingy after just 2 short days. In all honesty I was expecting at least a few weeks of waiting so I was quite surprised when I got an email informing me that it has been activated 😀

It may have to do with me sending a question their way from the support page, to ask them a few questions relating to this. You see, I was not certain how much of a difference that would make for me, if it was worth it and if I should go for MySQL or Web Server hosting.

You see, I’m still quite a small fry at the moment and between the 3 blogs I’m hosting, I’m not averaging a lot of visitors. I always assumed that by being this small, a shared hosting plan is the best choice. Unfortunately I kept running into performance issues and even though I optimized and tweaked, they just went on and I was sick and tired of having a single page take on average 5 seconds to load and, too often for my liking, upwards of 10. I was even afraid that I was starting to get on Dreamhost’s support nerves with all the support tickets I opened for performance 🙁

It was at the point where I was considering moving to another hosting service (possibly on a virtual server) that my eyes fell on the new Dreamhost PS option, suddenly appearing in my Dashboard. Quite the timing. The reason why I decided to stick with Dreamhost still is that I just love the merry way with which they do business and their support has been very nice in my experience so far. I just felt I should give them another chance.

The PS option mentioned that this is by invitation only however and googling around a bit, I found a few people talking about it but none had any real experience. They were mostly saying that it sounds like a good idea but they were not going to use it because so-and-so hosting was better. Nothing tangible. Since I exchanged a few emails with Dreamhost support and I am now live with it, I thought I might write a few things about it.

Dreamhost PS Performance

I’ve only had the thing running for a few hours now so I can’t make much of a comparison. It does feel much faster for me but it could just be the placebo effect.

PHP

I did try to run my heaviest page just to see the experience: From an average of 10 seconds (due to the heavy php involved) it dropped down to 2.5 secs. This seemed a major improvement, however on a second test I did 8 hours later, the speed was 12 seconds again. Not certain if it’s affected by mysql, slow feed replies or whatnot. Nevertheless, doing a few more tests, the average seems to be 2.2 seconds. This should be in part because of Simplepie’s feed cache.

Gallery

Here the difference is much more striking. My Gallery2 installation used to be unbelievably slow more often than not. I would be lucky if I could get times below 5 seconds per page. Now the average seems to hover at around 2 seconds again and this is, frankly, a very pleasant surprise. Even The Wesnoth Journals gallery seems to have picked up unbelievable speed and that was the one that drew quite a few complaints. Awesome!

WordPress

Here the speed difference did not seem so striking initially. Average speeds hovered at around 2 seconds again which is a speed that I was reaching after my own optimization quite often. The difference now of course is that the speed seems to stay at that average instead of spiking to 5 – 10 seconds without reason. I have not seen one page actually going higher than 5 sec. Same thing persists in both the ACP (which has a heavy theme and is not theme optimized at all) and the Wesnoth Journals.

However a susprise awaited me on my more thorough testing this afternoon. For the first time Ev4r, I get sub second speeds, consistently! And this is without WP-Cache activated! If anything makes the whole page exceed one second, it is the Intense Debate comment script who’s speed is dependent on external servers, and even then the delay is never more than one more sec. This is truly amazing. With WP-Cache, the speed seems to stay consistently subsec!

The WordPress Dashboard speed, as expected, has improved considerably as well and finally I don’t have to wonder why it sometimes takes so goddamn long to load :D. Average speed of Admin Panel items seem to be:

  • Dashboard ~ 2 sec
  • Plugins ~ 3 sec
  • Automated Plugin upgrade ~ 1 sec (!!!)
  • Settings ~ 1 sec
  • Write ~ 1 sec (!!!)

The multiple exclamation marks are on items that truly impressed me since they always seemed to take a inordinate amount of time to load (around 5 secs) and the change is most striking.

Drupal

Here the speed confused me a bit. In my single Drupal installation averga speed hovered at around 3 seconds where suddenly it dropped to subsec again. Cannot really say if the server had a momentary slowdown at the start.

And with that, my little performance check ended. I think the change is quite obvious and for now I am quite happy with the results. I am still curious to see how this will fare during the more active afternoon – night hours (for me, for you Americans it will be morning – afternoon). If things turn around considerably, I will write about it.

Some Dreamhost PS Q&A

During my email conversation with the Dreamhost support, I had the opportunity to ask a few more questions about the service in order to make sure it is right for my needs. I will place the answers here in case anyone else has similar queries.

  • Q: I experience considerable slowdowns with my wordpress installation and it’s certainly not my setup. I think it might be MySQL as I don’t see anything loading for a few seconds and then everything comes up together. However every time I tried to put a support ticket for this, I see the web server under heavy load. I’m now not certain if I should request MySQL or Web Server hosting.
  • A: Go for Web Server. From my results I can see that MySQL hardly plays much of a role after all. My speed improved dramatically from just a small Web Server hosting plan.
  • Q: If I request Web Server and see that it does not make much of a difference, can I switch to MySQL and vice-verca.
  • A: When you request either a web or MySQL PS, since it must be physically setup, you are requesting one or the other and they are not interchangeable. If you decide you want either, you must visit the provisioning page to request whichever you decide you would like and if you want both, you need to request both individually at the same page of the panel-
  • Q: How do I request both a Web Server and a MySQL PS? I can only select one through the radio buttons
  • A: Request one, then go back and request the other.
  • Q: If I decide I don’t want this service anymore (say, because it does not make much of a difference) can I return to my previous shared hosting?
  • A: They won’t be able to move you back if your usage is above what is expected for a shared server account which is the base 150 level of the PS service. As long as you are below that level consistently, then there shouldn’t be a problem moving you back to shared, or at least giving you a discount on it.
  • Q: The information also mentions that I can adjust my RAM and CPU usage in real time. However, if I adjust my usage within the month one or more times, how much am I going to be charged?
  • A: You will only be charged at that rate for as long as you keep the slider AT that rate. So it’s all pro-rated. If you keep it at 150 and then move it up to 1000 for an hour, then back down to 150, you will only be charged the 1000 rate for that hour. No more, no less. 🙂
  • Q: I see the slider gives me the max burst I can get as double. Does that mean that if my rate is not enough I can increase the slider only up to that burst?
  • A: No, once activated you can increase your rate to the max of 2300 at any time, even if you started at 150.
  • Q: I ordered it. How long does it take usually?
  • A: No idea. In my case it took 1 day 😀
  • Q: The rates are vague. How much should I order for a small site with just a few thousand per month?
  • A: Low. I have four worpdress and two gallery2 installations hosted at the moment and my load is around 100Mb of RAM. My CPU is still at 10. My biggest spike was when I disabled WP-Cache and loaded my lifestream 5 times where my RAM jumped to 155.

So, that was my initial review of Dreamhosts shiny new upcoming Private Servers. I hope I have provided you some information to make the correct choices 😉

And now it's Pidgin's turn to go down…

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It seems that ICQ made some protocol change which broke the Pidgin and Meebo authentication with it.

Subsequently, the pidgin homepage has been DDOSed from all the people trying to access it, because the Devs decided to send an message to all the clients instructing:

The client version you are using is too old. Please upgrade at http://pidgin.im

Annoying and funny together 😛

Oh well, it pays to have more than one account at IM services sometimes and for the rest of you, there is always good ol’ email 😉

EDIT: Holy shit. I just got 220 hits on this post for people googling the error message above. Win!

People, if you want another option, go for the ethical choice 😉

Intense Debate Comments > Blogspot/Blogger Comments

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Dear Blogspot/Blogger users, I can see that unfortunately my previous arguments for switching to a better free blogging platform has not convinced you. That is unfortunate but I however have another request to make of you.

As I mentioned in the previous article, the blogspot commenting system sucks donkey balls. It pains me every time I have to leave a comment and I have to suffer the horrible captcha and interface (among others). It honestly deters me from leaving the occasional comment as I can’t be bothered to go through all this hassle.

You may have also noticed that I have recently taken a liking to Intense Debate Comments and I have already installed it on all the wordpress blogs I manage, even though the wordpress commenting system is quite adequate for most.

Thus I would like to ask you all blogspot users for a small favour: Please, please, switch to the IDC system. It is painless and it will also grant you so much of a better way to handle them than before. I don’t have to list all the features here as you can easily check the website itself for that but in short, what you will get over blogger is:

  • Comment writing on the same page of the main post (no need to open a new one)
  • Comment editing
  • Much more ajax-y, web 2.0, sleek look. That way people find it easy to leave a comment
  • A greater management of comments (reputation, threading etc)

Screenshot of Evolved and Rational with Blogger comment systemScreenshot of Evolved and Rational with Intense Debate comment systemFor Comparison, on the left you can see how Evolved and Rational looked before, and on the right, you can see how it looks with IDC

So, dear Blogger/Blogspot users, please listen to my appeal and give it a try. Do it for my peace of mind. And if you have any problems I’d be glad to give you a hand.

Memberlist for Collaborative WordPress Blogs

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In case you have a self-hosted Worpdress blog which has multiple authors you may have noticed that you don’t have lots of option to show information about each one. You can have each author create a post for himself and link it from the sidebar (Which is how Debunking Christianity does it), or you can create a page for each one after they provide you some information about themselves. Finally you can just leave each author’s page to be the default list of posts.

I wasn’t satisfied with either of those options so I looked around and found something better. So I have just finished with my custom member list setup at the Antichristian Phenomenon and I thought I’d share how I did it in case anyone wishes to implement it as well.

I started after I discovered this excellent guide from WPDesigner. Although I didn’t need the role manager, the rest of the instructions were perfect for my purpose. So I installed the necessary plugins (plus Register Plus to stop spammers registering) and started adding fields.

I then needed to display those fields in each author’s page somehow. In also wanted to do that without making the page totally different from the reast of the site. So I copied the archive.php file to author.php. I enterred the file and inserted all the necessary variables for my fields (as described in the guide) and deleted all archive loops except the author’s. This way the user visiting the author page could see the author profile but also a list of articles they have written.

The curauthor variable was used to grab information for some of the default fields. Unfortunately the Wp User Manager plugin does not give you the names for all the default wordpress fields but fortunately the documentation in curauthor is complete. I copied the html div the archive loop was in (so as to have the same format) and created a little list to show each author’s profile. Here’s how it looks like currently

Once that was done, I decided to see if I could also put comments in each author’s page as well. Unfortunately, just putting the php call for the comments template between the info and the archives did not work. Apparently WordPress does not expect comments on archive pages. However since I am using Intense Debate Comments at the moment I figured that they would be agnostic on where I am putting their script.

Unfortunately since IDC works through the wordpress comments template, where that does not appear, so does IDC. I managed after all to work around this by copying the script itself into the template. It wasn’t easy to get the code for this since IDC insists on providing you with a WP plugin instead of allowing you the option to paste the script somewhere. I finally got the code by telling IDC that I wanted to install it on my gallery. Unfortunately, the script then had the wrong ID and I needed the correct one to have my comments logged at the correct blog. For this, I was able to just edit the WP plugin code and copy the ID from there. So I pasted the script in the template itself and, lo and behold, it worked! I now had comment capability on each author’s profile page 😀

Once this was done, I made a quick test comment to check if it works and noticed that IDC was logging a strange page title for the Author’s profiles. It seems that my theme is using a title for author archives as if they were a category archive and that would not do. I thus edited my header file and placed an if statement to check if it is an author page. On a positive, I changed the page to show a more appropriate title as well as the author’s nickname (through curauth again). Unfortunately IDC still kept grabbing some weird titles (or not at all) but it’s not caused by the title anymore.

Finally, I listed the authors of the blog on the sidebar through a php widget, I looked at it, and it was nice.

Since we're on the subject of Firefox…

Db0

Now that Firefox 3 is out, I thought I’d check what the general trend has been on google searches for the browsers. While of course this does not give us an accurate information, it is good at what it does, which is to show us an overall trend.

Now that Firefox 3 is out, I thought I’d check what the general trend has been on google searches for the browsers. While of course this does not give us an accurate information, it is good at what it does, which is to show us an overall trend.

firefox 1.00
internet explorer 0.48
opera 0.54
safari 0.16

Firefox, IE, Opera and Safari

We can see here how Firefox grew meteorically back in 2004 via word of mouth and then peaked out once the release date was announced. Then it stayed pretty much stable while steadily increasing while the rest of the browsers have taken a downward trend.

Another peak is at the end of 2006 where firefox 2 was released and then I expect a new, much higher peak to appear for the next days 😉

It is funny to see that even when IE7 was released, you cannot really see any difference in the search volume. On the other hand, Opera seems to be constantly hogging the media spotlight for some reason. What an attention whore 😛

I wanted to have the trend for the search term “IE” included which has a solid 0.3 is added at the end. However I still don’t know how to merge two search terms together in a single trend. Anyone know?

Firefox 3 download hiccups

Db0

It seems that the firefox download page is having some (more) troubles. Ever since I got the first link I kept seeing the Firefox 2 download version. Eventually I managed to download the file but looking back a few minutes ago, the page had again reverted to Firefox 2.

I don’t know if anyone else has the same problem, but just in case you can’t find the download link, here a direct link to the file for the English Gnu/Linux and Windows versions. Here’s the link to all the versions as well.

Meltdown! Meltdown!

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I just gThe download day servers are dyingot the email that it’s my time to go ahead and download firefox 3 as part of the download day and, who would have thunk it? The servers are dead of dying

Haven’t they learned anything from others?

People, when you’re going to try and break a world record of download in 24h, don’t you think it would pay to have your bandwidth boosted? And for pete’s sake, don’t send us an email sending us to download firefox 3 and find a page advertising firefox 2!

Argh!

Btw, it seems my own server is having a solidarity slowness…again.

UPDATE @ 9pm: It’s here GO!

Get some satisfaction

Db0

No, this is not an advert for an online “adult” chat room but rather about my newest discovery in the internetubes two-point-zero.  I discovered Get Satisfaction (GS from now on) from a PMOG mission and I immediately thought that this is a very useful tool, especially for all these places where they have message boards as the end-all of support.

The thing is, a forum is a wonderful tool but its main function is to handle discussions, instead of the whole range of features user support requires. For example, I always disliked the way most fora handled suggestion requests as I could never tell when and if my suggestion was liked, by how many people, if any developers saw it, if they liked it, worked on it etc, unless people commented or unless I started a vote.

However with the usual laziness of the internet, having to write something is generally not done very often, especially if that entails registering to yet another forum and having to say something more than “+1” or “I agree”.

Which is why I love the fact that in GS I can use the same account to report problems, ask questions and propose ideas. I can track all my conversations from the same central point and, this is this feature that I really love, you can “vote up” a topic that interests you, which gives the company behind the product a better understanding of how many people have the same issue or want the same feature.

I’ve already opened companies and products for stuff I use and I cannot find a support channel for, or that support channel is too limited (like a very simple forum). People representing those companies can at any time join and take over the channel which will give them some additional control like add new keywords to Overheard, another feature that I start to like a lot.

By subscribing to the Overheard stream of the products I like, I can now sit back and just wait until my feed reader notifies me that someone has mentioned the product name on twitter. If that twit is a question or a problem, I can jump in and provide some help if possible.

Oh, did I mention that GS has some great RSS feeds to subscribe to? Feed for new topics, feed for lifestream, feed for overheard etc. For someone like me who likes to get his information on a plate, it’s a gift, especially since almost all forums don’t support RSS topics.

So, yeah, here’s where I’ve been wasting my time lately. But of course it hasn’t been totally a waste as through GS main page (where anything new passes) I’ve managed to discover some quite cool products to try out. Specifically I’ve discovered Intense Debate which I’ve already liked enough to add to all three of my Blogs.

And before I forget, it’s a cool feature that you can check how many problems a product has at any point by visiting the GS page. Once they implement a solid feature to see how many of them have been solved as well, it would be a great way to tell how problematic a product is.

And finally, the main reason why I like it so much is because I finally have a place to vomit out my ideas for product improvements which otherwise get lost in the void 🙂

Theme Upgrade Fail

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I never understand why upgrading to the newer HemingwayEx is such a hassle. This is the second time I’ve attempted it now (once more on 1.0) and I just now gave up.

What is happening is that I get the theme to work, I can change the colours just fine and switch to finally using widgets, but for some reason I can’t get the suckerfish dropdown to work and I keep running into various other problems (like my gallery losing its theme etc).

It wouldn’t be such a great problem if I knew where to start but what is happening is making me scratch my head. Specifically, even drop-downs start to work once I put the code in, they get hidden behind the background. That is, I can see the dropdown menu appearing (the top of it) but its somehow placed behind the main content and even expanding the navigation does not make it appear. Grrr

Anyway, it’s too much bother to figure out what is causing this so I’ll stay with my current version which still seems to be working fine. I will however attempt to widgetize it and perhaps upload it as a different version from HemingwayEx. I’ve aready created a sourceforge page for it (waiting approval still) and then possibly more people might be willing to help.

It only annoys me that I spent so much time on it and I still couldn’t get it to work as the current version.