tOMPSON’s blog

Today I upgraded Wordpress, the system I use to host this blog. The current version is 2.3 - the upgrade was nice and smooth, just as described . Nothing more to say than: I am happy to have some security issues fixed.

Security, Web

If you like twittervision.com you will like flickrvision.com too. It shows every picture uploaded to flickr and  equipped with location information on a world map. Great. I could watch it for hours.

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I flew over the list of posts for day 3 of Darren’s group writing project and selected my favorites:

• Top 5 CSS layout tips
• Top 5 Free Software You Should Be Using
• Top 5 Reasons To Move From Free Hosting
• Top 5 Essential Sites For Bloggers
• Top 5 Must-Have Blog Monitoring Tools
• Top 5 Blogging Myths

Blogroll, Web

I do not know how many times I had to search for the right icon for one of my application - lifehacker today posted a great site for finding one - iconfinder.net

Too bad that this site seems to be down because of all the traffic it got today (or has it been hacked?)

General, Web

Do you need to write PHP code? Too bad Last week I had to consult someone who needs to call a Webservice from a PHP. Lucky as I am I have little PHP knowledge but found a nice tool: NuSOAP

NuSOAP is a library that allows you create a Webservice client in PHP very easy. It comes with some examples and good documentation. NuSOAP is able to parse a WSDL file from an URL or file at runtime and to fill in the values you provide in arrays. This approach is fast an works well for simple requests. It is also possible to create very specific requests with namespaces by using the soapval class.

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Digg.com, one of the biggest social networking sites around was really unsocial this week. The story: A user digged a story that contained the HD DVD key that was revealed this week. This key allows anybody to devcrypt HD DVD’s and the movie industry will not be happy about it.

Digg not only tried to remove the story and banned the user who first digged the story but they had no chance. The story got 23000 diggs that day and got even bigger. See the Screenshot on BGR - every story in the top ten was about it.

I do not really know what to think about that … was it right to ban the user? Are there any legal consequences for publishing the key (I thinks so) and/or for diggin’ it?

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Last week I configured an apache2 web server for content compression to speed up delivery over a slow connection. The onboard tool apache2 provides for this task is mod_deflate. It is really easy to configure and works great.

I used the configuration as described under “Compress everything except images” and it worked right away. I proved this by clearing the browsers cache and using the Live HTTP headers Firefox Add-on.  In the response header fields you can see if content is gziped or not.

After some days users told me that they were not able to vie PDF documents anymore. Their Internet Explorer only displayed blank pages instead of printable PDF documents. It seems like Internet Explorer 6 on Windows 2000 is not able to deal with PDF documents delivered through mod_deflate. So I had to change my configuration from SetOutputFilter DEFLATE to AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html. I added all the mime types I wanted to get compressed explicitly and PDF  worked again.

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Its late at night but checking my Google Reader brought up an interesting blog post from Scoble and so I have to add my two cents. In his latest Scoble Show he broadcasts and interview with Lon Safko who created papermodelsonline.

The company he founded is the dream of every businessman: Minimal costs with maximum income. He has no employees, no production costs, no rent - only server fees - and the amount on his bank account keeps growing.

The website sells (as the name says) papermodels. Customers buy and download them, print them and use glue to build their models. Additionally he has a lot of contracts with companies like American Airlines, BMW, Ford and so on who offer models of their cars or planes on their web site for free.

Great! This is one of these stories that makes me searching for my great business idea a bit more

Blogroll, Web

Jeff Atwood has an interesting post about massive scaling problems of twitter. In an interview a developer of twitter said that:

By various metrics Twitter is the biggest Rails site on the net right now. Running on Rails has forced us to deal with scaling issues - issues that any growing site eventually contends with - far sooner than I think we would on another framework.

I never tried to use ruby on rails to code an application and I would not want to do it with PHP. Articles like the ones I mentioned above strengthen my opinion that J2EE is the best platform for creating web applications.

I think the guys from twitter used Rails to get there service up and running as quick as possible and now have to deal with the drawbacks of interpreted languages.

Java, Web

Lately I had to experience a lot of problems with the download time of web pages in Firefox. For example when searching Images with google only 60 percent of the images in the search result were loaded. First I thought my network (ISP, router, …) caused the problem but then I found out that the same page load normally when using Internet Explorer (which I do very rarely).

After some trying to disable some Firefox Add-Ons I found out that Fasterfox was causing the problem. I configured it to Default (not Turbo Charged) and everything worked fine again. I was using the Turbo Charged setting now for over two years without problems. While I have not found the real reason I will leave it to Default.

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