Archive for the ‘Computing’ Category

Leverage Browser Caching

Saturday, January 7th, 2012

In the previous post I wrote about enabling compression for your pages so that they would load faster to the visitor. Today I’m going to write about how you can make use of browser caching to save some bandwidth. Some people told me that their ISP or hosting provider requested that they upgrade the hosting [...]

Let Apache Compress Your Website

Saturday, December 24th, 2011

Website speed is one of the most important factor to make people like to visit more. In 2008, I wrote Compressing WordPress Output and this is done by adding one line to index.php The problem with that approach is that when you upgrade WordPress you have to manually add the line into index.php, and the [...]

Sparrow and Shortmail

Friday, December 9th, 2011

I’ve been pushing the limits of my mid-2010 13″ MacBook Pro lately, running all sort of applications and leaving them running. There has been occasions where the machine will freeze while it struggles to schedule the CPU time to all of the applications. I use a lot of email, and by a lot I don’t [...]

Compiling flip on Mac OS X

Saturday, July 23rd, 2011

I was looking for a simple utility that will work like dos2unix tool on Linux to convert endlines from DOS to UNIX. I was scraping some contents from a server running .NET and those ugly ^M characters appeared in vim. I found this https://ccrma.stanford.edu/~craig/utility/flip/, downloaded the PPC binary and used it happily for a while. [...]

Shrinking VirtualBox Disk Images

Saturday, April 23rd, 2011

On my MacBook Pro with minimal disk size (250GB) I had to install VirtualBox in order to run any kind of Windows, for emergency cases. I was able to install Windows Server 2008 in a 20GB dynamically expanding virtual disk image (VDI). A couple of months back I also made a clone of my HP [...]

Good Bye MyBlogLog

Thursday, February 24th, 2011

I have just received an email from Yahoo! announcing the end of MyBlogLog service. It’s going to be discontinued effective May 24, 2011. Nice of Yahoo! to give us some time before terminating it for good. However the link for help pages redirected me to this page: http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/ysm/ll/featured/index.html, which I think is a mistake because [...]

Google Authenticator Rocks

Wednesday, February 23rd, 2011

OK, “Google Authenticator” is actually the name of the smartphone apps provided by Google. What is it all about? It’s two factor authentication similar to the ones banks use to authenticate users to log in or to perform transactions. Corporate users might also have the same security method using smart card or RSA SecurID to [...]

Mac OS X: Modifying Stubborn Files Transferred From Windows

Saturday, February 12th, 2011

This is related to the previous post, where I had a lot of checked out Subversion working copies in my disk. They came from a Windows machine I used before I bought myself a Mac. For your information, in a Subversion working copy, there will always be a hidden folder named .svn in each directory, [...]

Starting Subversion Service on Demand in Mac OS X

Saturday, February 12th, 2011

Since I moved to a new home I didn’t let my Linux servers run 24/7 so that I can save on electricity bills. It’s not so much about moving homes but it’s about the tariff increase. My 500W and 400W power supplies can easily reach the max usage of around 300W each which translates to [...]

Google Instant, Anyone?

Thursday, September 9th, 2010

I saw quite a significant number of tweets mentioning Google Instant, and decided to check it out. Some people might already be aware of it or heard of it before but I am outdated, that I am willing to admit. First, I went to the Official Google Blog where I saw Search: now faster than [...]

Maxis Transparent Proxy is Causing Problems to Developers

Saturday, August 14th, 2010

I had to transfer 2 WordPress blogs to another hosting provider last night, as the free one is going to expire today. It should be as easy as: Transfer the files Transfer the database Change DNS servers in registry to the new DNS servers Configure the new hosting location In a few hours after the [...]

SMTP Smart Host Setup for Postfix in Snow Leopard

Friday, August 6th, 2010

PHP does not have any SMTP authentication mechanism in its configuration, and most developer opt for PEAR packages to perform email sending via custom ports and SMTP authentication. I am one of those who will avoid using external packages as much as possible unless really necessary, and of course because I wanted a quick solution [...]

Maxis SysAdmins Are Rookies?

Thursday, August 5th, 2010

If you’re one of the SysAdmins working for Maxis, and you celebrated the recent System Administrator’s Appreciation day, you should really think about your future. SysAdmins are supposed to make people life’s easier, not the other way round. Maxis has been implementing transparent proxy for some time now, I think to save on bandwidth usage [...]

Connecting to Exchange using Entourage via Outlook Web Access

Wednesday, August 4th, 2010

I wanted to be able to use my personal laptop to check my work email, so that I don’t have to carry around the 3kg DELL beast all the time. Sure, I can use the Blackberry but typing long emails on it can prove painful especially with fat fingers. I have VPN access, but Cisco [...]

Error Compiling djbdns and daemontools

Tuesday, July 20th, 2010

While attempting to compile djbdns 1.05 and daemontools 0.76 on a CentOS 5.5 I received the error: /usr/bin/ld: errno: TLS definition in /lib/libc.so.6 section .tbss mismatches non-TLS reference in envdir.o The problem can be eliminated by adding: -include /usr/include/errno.h In conf-cc files for each tarball. Don’t forget to install gcc first, if you have a [...]