Archive for March, 2008
Monday, March 31st, 2008
Here’s some good news for Amazon’s EC2 users:EC2 now supports Static IP addresses using Amazon’s Elastic IP Addresses feature. Each account can allocate up to 5 Elastic IP addresses to be used (you can contact Amazon to get more). These IP’s can be allocated to one instance which will replace the dynamic IP for that instance - you can move the IP to a new instance at any time.
Beware that an unused IP address costs $0.01 per hour of non-use, which means that while the IP address is assigned to a running instance, you don’t have to pay the charge, but if you shutdown the instance which the IP is assigned to, and don’t immediately assign it to another instance, you’ll end up paying for this charge.
The Elastic IP Addresses feature gives you more control of the IP addresses associated with your EC2 instances. Using this new feature, you use the AllocateAddress function to associate an IP address with your AWS account. Once allocated, the address remains attached to your account until released via the ReleaseAddress function.Separately, you can then point the address at any of your running EC2 instances using the AssociateAddress function.The association remains in place as long as the instance is running, or until you remove it with the DisassociateAddress function.Finally, the DescribeAddresses function will provide you with information about the IP addresses attached to your account and how they are mapped to your instances. Accounts can allocate up to 5 IP addresses top start; you can ask for more if you really need them.
Read about Elastic IP Addresses and other new features over at : http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2008/03/new-ec2-feature.html
Posted in Tech Stuff | No Comments »
Saturday, March 29th, 2008
Stumbled across this interesting article at Leo Büttiker’s blog which tells why pagination on a web app is a database killer:
On the view of your database the worst thing you can do in your web app is paging. Paging is horrible in the view of performance. To explain let me take a little example:
SELECT SQL_CALC_FOUND_ROWS gb.*,
u.username,
u.uid,
u.geschlecht,
u.mitfoto,
[... some more fields...]
FROM member_gold_guestbook gb
LEFT JOIN users u ON u.uid=gb.uid_from
[... some more left joins...]
WHERE gb.uid_to=’22152′
AND visible=’1′
LIMIT 0,10;
That’s not that bad at all, but when you go to page 300 your database server will hat you for this. The database server has not only to calculate the 10 items you want to show but also all 3000 previous items.
Sure you may argue nobody will ever go to page 300. Somebody will not, but “googlebot” and his evil brothers will. And the bad thing is that you can, as long as you need paging, nothing do against it. There are just a few tricks that may reduce your server load a bit.
Read the whole article at: @leo’s :: Why your database says paging sucks!
Posted in Databases | No Comments »
Friday, March 28th, 2008
Adobe has just announced the beta version of Photoshop Express, which is an online service which allows users to perform basic editing and apply effects on your uploaded images. They also provide 2GB of image hosting.
Photoshop Express was created with Flex, Adobe’s free, open source framework for building RIAs. Flex applications provide a consistent, rich user experience across operating systems and all major browsers, including Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari and others. An Internet connection and an up-to-date Flash® Player 9 are all that are required to experience Adobe Photoshop Express. In its early phases, Photoshop Express is available to US residents-only in English. Users may experience slow performance if accessed outside of the US. Future plans include availability in other languages and countries.
Link: http://www.photoshop.com/express
Posted in Links, Sites | No Comments »
Monday, March 24th, 2008
Firefox 3 seems to have stabilized, and is ready for the masses to test it out. The final version should be out by June according to this news report from Reuters:
“The program’s creators told Reuters on Thursday that the privately-held company’s trial version of Firefox 3 browser is ready for the masses to use after months of development.
Engineers at Mozilla are still putting the finishing touches on the software and hope to release the final version of Firefox 3 by the end of June, Schroepfer said.”
Link: Mozilla says Firefox 3 ready for prime-time | Reuters
Posted in General Stuff, Software | No Comments »
Thursday, March 20th, 2008
Did you know what the function register_shutdown_function does in PHP? The manual defines this function as :
Registers the function named by function to be executed when script processing is complete.
This function runs at the end of any script execution - it also runs if your script exits prematurely due to some errors. This is a useful function to catch such exceptions in your script. Eirik Hoem’s written an article on this function over at his blog, where he shows an example on how to trap a premature end of script due to a fatal error:
<?php
$clean = false;
function shutdown_func(){
global $clean;
if (!$clean){
die("not a clean shutdown");
}
}
register_shutdown_function("shutdown_func");
$a = 1;
$a = new FooClass(); // will fail with fatal
$clean = true;
?>
Read Eric’s Article at : Dying with grace - PHP’s register_shutdown_function
Posted in PHP | No Comments »
Sunday, March 16th, 2008
Just found this “Billie the Vision & The Dancers” over at last.fm. Pretty good music from this band. Luckily all their albums at last.fm have free downloads of the songs. Listening to Absolutely, Salutely while writing up this post. Go ahead and check out their albums at last.fm :
Bille the Vision & The Dancers’ official site: http://www.billiethevision.com
Posted in Music | 2 Comments »
Sunday, March 16th, 2008
Asido is a PHP image processing solution, with “pluggable” drivers(adapters) for most environments. Asido is still in starting stages with the following drivers supported, with more on the way:
- GD
- ImageMagick
- MagickWand
Some of the image manipulation features which are currently available in Asido are:
- resize
- watermark
- rotate
- copy
- crop
- grayscale
- convert
To check out these features and the PHP code to go along with them, head over to: http://asido.info/about/features/
This looks like a basic list which I’m sure will grow with future versions of Asido. You can get the latest Asido release from SourceForge.net:
http://sourceforge.net/project/platformdownload.php?group_id=191718
Asido Home: http://asido.info/
Posted in PHP | 2 Comments »
Friday, March 14th, 2008
If you’d like to work on your favorite PHP apps on your S60 phones, here’s PAMP - Personal Apache, MySQL and PHP. This is implemented on the Symbian OS using Open C, which is a set of industry-standard POSIX and middleware C libraries for S60.
To install PAMP on your S60 mobile, you’ll have to make sure that your’s is a S60 3rd Edition device with 128MB RAM. Running MySQL itself requires 64MB. The Documentation over at Nokia’s opensource wiki states that this has officially been tested only on the N95 and E61i devices, but should work on any S60 3rd Edition device with 128MB RAM.
For instructions on how to install and setup PAMP on your mobile, head over to dev.mobi’s article which shows you how to install and get PAMP running on your Mobile and also how to make your mobile server accessible over wifi and the internet using Raccoon Gateway.
PAMP Howtos: http://dev.mobi/node/817
Project Wiki : http://wiki.opensource.nokia.com/projects/PAMP
Download Link : Sourceforge Download Page
Posted in PHP | 2 Comments »
