Mosey over here and read what you can do to help upcoming bad laws in the European Union.
Υπάρχουν και άτομα που μπορουν να επικοινωνήσουν οι έλληνες επίσης.
Dreamhost PS don't let me down already
Hmmm, I’m starting to see classic signs of slowdown on my sites already.
Gallery jumped up to 10 secs at a point and currently is at around 4. WP Dashboard took 6 secs to open and 10 or so for the Write new post.
Resource monitor does not show me exceeding my limits :-/
Dreamhost PS activated!
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…
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 😉
Holy shit! I've really let myself go
So I tried once again today to start with my tri-weekly exercises which I’ve stopped since last year (around this time). I was generally expecting to not have the same stamina as before but Jeebus have I falled out of form.
Numbers don’t lie unfortunately and since simplefit provides a handy logging system, I could not really delude myself that I’m at the same level as before. Indeed, I had totally “given up the ghost” by the time I reached half the count of repetitions of what I could achieve before.
At the 10th round of level 4 I was not able to lift myself on the 4th push-up. Could still handle the squats and lift-ups but the push-ups were killing me. In the end I decided just to drop to level 3 for the rest of the exercise and give myself 2 extra rounds for the wasted repetitions. And with that bonus as well, I still only managed to break the same time as in my very first attempt one year ago.
I have gone back where I started at 🙁
Nevertheless, I am willing to delude myself that I will probably catch up to my previous levels as soon as I’ve reminded my muscles what they could do.
Still, by the time I finished, I could barely lift my arms anymore. At least I don’t feel any major pain at the moment which, hopefully, means that I won’t be hurting at all my muscles by tomorrow morning. I could be painfully wrong (heh) but we’ll just have to see.
Intense Debate Comments > Blogspot/Blogger Comments
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)
For 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
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.
Political Compass Revisited
I was just setting up some new stuff over at the ACP and I decided to have the option for users to put in their Political Orientation if they so wished. As a fan of the Political Compass, I decided to suggest that they use that to present an accurate view of it, rather than use the abstract terms of left and right or Political Parties.
I tried to follow the link from my previous post on that, in order to get a sample link but apparently they changed their website setup and the link was dead. Visiting the page informed me that they now also provide a nice personalized page for printouts but I would have to take the test again.
Why not, I thought, and dived in once again. I didn’t expect much change in a year but I did move one square to the left. I then paid the €7 required and got a nice image to put on my wall.
You can not see it very well here but in case you’re missing it, I’m the red dot in Kropotkin’s Eye 😉
On the decline of Theism and the effects of fear
I just read this excellent article (hat tip: Pharyngula) about the last century’s trends in religiosy and, for a non-theist like me, it certainly perks up the ol’ optimism. Even though theists in the recent years have been claiming that theism is on the comeback while secularism and irreligiousness was just a passing fad, the cold hard data once again, forms the proverbial thorn in their soft underbelly of wishful thinking.
While this post is partly to advertise the article, I also wanted to comment on part of it that triggered a long standing wish of mine, which is to start talking about my own philosophy of life, but I’ll try to avoid getting into specific labels at this point.
In the article then, it is explained how religion’s drop in popularity is more closely related to socioeconomic reasons rather than being the result of proselytisation from the “New Atheists”. It is shown how most European countries see their religious population percentage drop with a positive correlation to socialism or socialistic policies. Indeed, some of the more socialistic Countries of Europe seem to have, for the first time, a majority or non-religious people.
I will not go into detail on this, as the article makes the case much better than I ever could, however it did raise a very interesting point. That US high religiosity has much to do with the lack of a social net for the population, and the easy way with which one can go bankrupt and never recover. Indeed this constant fear that the population lives with, is what drives so many people turn to religion or spiritualism for comfort. It is no wonder that the larger percentage of religious people resides in the poorer rural areas.
Of course this is a result of the rabid anti-socialism that is prevalent in the American society ever since the First Red Scare. Because of the huge negative emotions and reactions that being labeled “left” carries, socialist policies like universal health care, have failed to become reality which, among others, rightly earns U.S. their label as the aberrant example of a developed nation.
But what does this have to do with my own philosophy? Well, the correlation between non-theism and social safety reminded my of one of the building blocks for it, Epicurism.
As a philosophy, Epicurism was one of the first ((if not the first. Not absolutely certain on this)) who explicitly espoused materialism and a form of deism as a method to reduce fear and personal suffering. Especially because this kind of materialism instructed a radical reduction of human needs to the bare necessities, it allowed people to reduce their anxiety and fear which further chipped away at their theism.
It strikes me as brilliant then (( In a bad way)), that in the U.S., where the exact opposite of this materialism is promoted, (namely crass commercialism) the fear and anxiety increases and leads to even stronger theism. Indeed, theism itself quite often wraps itself around commercialism (or is it the other way around?) and takes away a sizable amount of money from the “flock” in exchange for blissful uncertainty. It’s like a drug who’s withdrawal symptom is fear.
I can’t help but wonder at the masterful mental construction this has created in the minds of U.S. Americans today.
- Greed → Commercialism / Consumerism.
- Consumerism → Fear. (“You have to buy more stuff, or the society will collapse“)
- Commercialism → Fear. (Lack, or reduced, social security keeping people scared of sudden mishaps)
- Fear → Greed. (“You have to have wealth or power to be happy“)
- Fear ↔ Traditionalism / Conservatism. (“We must return to our old values to save our society“)
- Fear ↔ Nationalism / Xenophobia. (“We must protect the homeland in order to survive and prosper“)
- Fear ↔ Authoritarianism. (“We need to reduce freedom in order to prevent societal problems and terrorism“)
- Fear ↔ Theism. (I don’t think I need to explain this.)
It’s a vicious cycle. It is no wonder that all these values and beliefs go together most of the time and generally, if someone has one, it is quite probable that he will have at least some of the others as well. All of them feed the fear, and fear feeds them all.
Does it surprise anyone that most Clergy have authority? Does it surprise anyone that most Clergy are conservative and most Conservatives crave authority? Does it surprise anyone that pure capitalists tend to be religious ((Even Objectivists who exhibit the most pure form of Capitalism display a certain religiousness)).
Finally, does it surprise anyone that fascism embodies all of these together in a nice round package?
Fear is the common denominator, and any philosophy that is designed to reduce fear is bound to reduce the person’s attachment to these values. This is why so many atheists seem confident, progressive, liberal and socialistic. They all lack the necessary levels of fear to be anything else ((I would also like to mention here that one can repel fear with anger as well, but only until his anger subsides. This is why atheism based on “anger at god” never lasts)).
What we need to do, is not attempt to convert people to atheism or non-theism. What we need to be doing is to change the society in ways that reduce fear. As that happens, slowly these values will start retreating due to lack of empowerment.
Since we're on the subject of Firefox…
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 |
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?