Newest Industry - Latest Comments

Re: Google Chrome: One thing we do know… (HTTP Pipelining)

spierzchala — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 00:29:18 -0000

Cool. Now, if it's not supported by anyone, it should get pulled from the RFC. And now that the browser engines are almost all abstracted from the browser that wraps around them, maybe it's time to look at what works to make browsers and content delivery faster.

Re: Google Chrome: One thing we do know… (HTTP Pipelining)

Mark Pauley — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 20:52:27 -0000

You're wrong. Chrome could pipeline, nothing in Webkit prevents this. Chrome doesn't use the CFNetwork loader nor does WebKit marry the browser to any given network / HTTP stack, just look at the code. The reason Chrome doesn't support pipelining is likely to be the same reason that no other browser pipelines out of the box: pipelining is broken. Pipelining only works when the remote server supports it, if the remote server fails to pipeline then your page will actually load much slower. This is the case with IIS 4 and 5 which are common enough to cause concern. Also it turns out that some mods to Apache don't pipeline properly, resulting in garbled output. The ultimate solution will be a compromise as is seen with the fledgling 'support' for pipelining in Firefox's HTTP stack which is off by default.

Re: Caran D’Ache Fixpencil: Where do you buy them?

iamuarme — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 20:40:30 -0000

Lee Valley Tools carry the 3mm Fix pencil and parts.

Re: Browser Wars: The Slow Rise of Internet Explorer 8

spierzchala — Mon, 11 May 2009 16:09:08 -0000

Found the problem - it wasn't the theme, it was a rogue plugin that was borking the HTML. Likely a tag that wasn't being properly closed.

<sigh>

smp

Re: Browser Wars: The Slow Rise of Internet Explorer 8

spierzchala — Mon, 11 May 2009 14:38:09 -0000

Ugh.

Time to find a browser compatible Wordpress theme.

smp

Re: Browser Wars: The Slow Rise of Internet Explorer 8

Mike Carter — Mon, 11 May 2009 14:19:17 -0000

Interesting stats, but you should know I had to enter IE8's COMPATABILITY mode just to view your post here... :)

Re: Browser Wars: Internet Explorer 8.0 Released on Windows Update

spierzchala — Fri, 01 May 2009 08:24:16 -0000

Microsoft claims that there are fewer bugs and irregularities in the handling of standards with Internet Explorer 8. That said, I would recommend running the browsers through the ACID2 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid2) and ACID3 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid3) CSS tests.

smp

Re: Browser Wars: Internet Explorer 8.0 Released on Windows Update

Andrea Belvedere — Fri, 01 May 2009 01:14:55 -0000

Another browser to having to deal with....
does this means that now we have one extra css conditional statement ?

Re: Dear Apache Software Foundation: FIX THE MSIE SSL KEEPALIVE SETTINGS!

Scooter Hanson — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 10:08:21 -0000

I'm glad to see you exclude nokeepalive. With a setup including an OCSP responder, that nokeepalive flag kills us with multiple pki cert validation requests per page load.

Re: Does the browser really matter?

spierzchala — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 20:10:30 -0000

Quite right, Mr. Unger. That is exactly the point that I am saying.

If the Browser doesn't matter, and most applications are run over the web, then does it matter what operating system you use? Or if you use a traditional operating system at all?

It's just as likely in the future that the primary device will be a phone/computer hybrid that is dockable and portable. As long as the apps are available and seamlessly integrate no matter what the platform is, then the operating system will go the way of the browser.

Interesting, but irrelevant.

Re: Does the browser really matter?

DaveU — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 20:01:43 -0000

If the web is the application, the browser is the operating system. And although no one likes it, everyone understands that Windows and MacOS are different. They are built out of different bits and pieces by different development teams and each have their unique strengths and weaknesses. The same is true for different browsers.

One might as well say that we have no need for multiple desktop operating systems - Windows, MacOS, Ubuntu/Debian, Red Hat EL/CentOS, Fedora, Novell/SUSE, etc., etc.

Re: Gutter Helmet: Not alone with installation problems

amg-p — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 22:19:42 -0000

My mother, 74 years old purchased Gutter Helmet. It was installed on the front of the house only due to the cost. The first heavy rain she had, approx 6 months after installation, her basement flooded. She has lived in this home for over 45 years and nothing like this happened previously. At 74 years old she was vacuuming up the water and carrying out pail after pail of water upstairs and outside. When she called the company, they would not return her calls. My husband took over trying to reach them and had the same problems. When he finally did get in touch the installation supervisor/manager he was rude, argumentative, unwilling to listen at all and insisted Gutter Helmet was not the problem. This went on for approx. 3 weeks. Not hearing back from him we tried to get in touch with the owner of that particular Gutter Helmet. After 2 weeks of calling and leaving messages almost every day he finally returned our call. He also was terribly rude, argumentative and didn't stop long enough to listen to the problem jumping in very defensively. When he finally relented and said he would come out to the house he let it be known it would NOT change his idea or opinion of his product since "his product never fails". We had written to the Better Business Bureau and that is the only reason he called and scheduled an appointment. As of Monday April 27, 2009 this matter has NOT been resolved.

Re: On the persistence of family - William A Kinnear

spierzchala — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 18:29:45 -0000

David:

Thank you. He will be greatly missed by all of us.

smp

Re: On the persistence of family - William A Kinnear

davidparmet — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 18:13:39 -0000

So sorry to hear the news. I lost my grandfather a few years ago. Like yours he came from a different world, in his case construction. Whenever I walk the streets of New York and see the buildings he worked on, I think of him.

Re: Hit Tracking with PHP and MySQL

spierzchala — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 16:23:44 -0000

This is definitely a solution for a small web site, and was designed to be small and light.

I started using this more when I was hosting my blog outside of the tracking infrastructure, so there is no increase in traffic on either infrastructure.

Steps could also be taken to aggregate the data based on patterns in the data and then archive the raw results outside the DB.

Many ways this can be improved upon. But it gets folks thinking.

Re: Hit Tracking with PHP and MySQL

Chris — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 13:20:28 -0000

What about scalability issues? The database size will expand quickly with traffic and it adds another hit on the server with each page load.

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

spierzchala — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 12:35:11 -0000

This is not good. It sounds as though you have your docs already compressed using GZIP. mod_deflate is designed to do this on the fly as content is generated.

When HTML content is compressed using mod_deflate, it should maintain the text/html MIM-type.

smp

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

Arabinda — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 11:59:13 -0000

Hi,
This is a great article. Thanks.
You have a mastery over the subject.
Please help me with an issue I have.

I have set - mod_deflate on Apache 2.x I have.
And a dynamic content (Actuate report - in Dynamic HTML) is - gzip - encoded while received by the client browser.
I am using Internet Explorer 7.x.

However IE7 is not unzipping it.
It recognizes that the MIME Type - application/x-gzip-compressed.
But it says - it is not a recognized Mime Type and opens a window to 'save' the page.

Any help will will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks
Arabinda
Pune, India

Re: Hit Tracking with PHP and MySQL

spierzchala — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 17:47:17 -0000

Using ip2long is a holdover from my Geographic IP Database, where performing IP searches was far easier with a numeric value than an IP address. Most application development languages have a way to convert these numbers back to IPs quickly. As well, this conversion can occur natively in MySQL SELECT statements.

You could add a column to the database table that added the raw IP address with very little change to the method described in this article.

Re: Hit Tracking with PHP and MySQL

Karthik — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 16:46:28 -0000

Why do you convert the IP using ip2long - are there any benefits to it?

Re: Compressing PHP Output

spierzchala — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 15:05:23 -0000

It shouldn't affect you performance to any great degree as it is used in many production environments currently.

However, if you do have the ability to do compression inside of the Web server itself (Apache, IIS, etc.), I would recommend that over adding compression at the application layer.

smp

Re: Compressing PHP Output

Shobhit Prabhakar — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 11:21:58 -0000

Can you please let me know how much overhead it would be on my server. I've VPS plan with about 50 sites hosted.

- Shobhit
http://shobhit.net/

Re: Bacon! I smell Bacon!

spierzchala — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 15:50:45 -0000

"So once I'd fueled myself up on coffee and Bart's baco-cinders-nothing beats an all-black breakfast-and read all the comics, I threw one leg over my battle-scarred all-terrain stump-jumper and rode several miles to work."

Neal Stephenson
Zodiac

Re: Geographic IP database using PERL, PHP and MySQL

spierzchala — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 12:11:08 -0000

Unfortunately, all the data does exist, but it is in the whois data for the blocks in question. This is a manual process that I chose not to undertake due to its complexity and my lack of programming skils.

Re: Geographic IP database using PERL, PHP and MySQL

Jakob — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 11:40:45 -0000

Well yes, but the idea was to make a do-it-yourself solution using public and free information. I have all the pieces in place, except for the one "country code" that does not conform to the standard ISO 3166.