I would like to admit to the public that I was a smoker for 2 long years. As a blogger & coder, I was very vulnerable because I often hit writer’s/coder’s block. Now that I am an experienced ex-smoker, I would like to tell the world that smoking is not a choice or a habit. It’s an addiction. Nobody smokes their first cigarette thinking that they will continue to smoke for the rest of their life. I remember smoking my first cigarette because I wanted to be cool in front of some people. I thought that there was no way one cigarette would get me addicted. I then thought that two would not get me addicted. Then three, four, five… slowly but surely, I became a 5 sticks per day smoker. The nicotine trap is so subtle that if you are not always carefully paying attention to it, then you would continue to burn your life away. Read on…
Previously, I mentioned that I was not able to successfully send emails via sendmail. This functionality is quite useful because WordPress, among other things, uses sendmail to send emails to you when someone leaves a comment on your post. So it turns out that because most public mail servers (i.e. gmail, hotmail, etc) do not trust my “omninoggin.com” mail server domain, all messages I sent were refused. After hours of research, I found out that I can route my mail traffic through my internet service provider’s mail proxy (SBC Yahoo!) to get this to work. Read on…
Back in my younger poor-college-student years, I’ve always been pissed that my cell phone bill was always substantially more than what my monthly plan costs due to cell phone taxes. Arnold taxes the average Californian 13.18% of their cell phone bill. If you tack on federal tax (5.48%), an average Californian will pay an extra $7.46 per month in taxes for a $40 per month plan. That’s about $90 per year. I was looking for ways to reduce this number and this is what I did:
- Researched which state had the cheapest cell phone tax (found out that it was Nevada with 1.14% tax rate).
- Opt for e-statement, so Sprint emails me statements instead of sending me a paper statements to my home address.
- Change my address online to Caesar’s Palace Casino:
3570 LAS VEGAS BLVD S
LAS VEGAS, NV 89109 - Start supporting the Nevada State government and watch my bill go down.
Here is the result of changing my billing address. Read on…
WP-Cache is a WordPress plugin that improves your WordPress speed by caching a static version of each dynamic page request and deliverying that static version for subsequent requests to that page. This in combination with WordPress internal cache, Apache cache, eAccelerator op code cache, and Varnish proxy cache provides the ultimate setup to combat traffic storms if your article gets dugg. *Note* that there is also a method that helps you turn on WP-Cache on demand (only during traffic storms), but I will discuss that in a later article.
If you’ve ever tried to install the WP-Cache plugin for WordPress just by uploading to the wp-content/plugins directory and activating it via WordPress Plugins administration, then you know that 99% of the time that method will not work because of some file permission problems.
Here is the proper way to do it: Read on…
I changed jobs about 2 months ago to a Test Engineer at Coral8. We develop and sell Complex Events Processing software and one of the things we brag about is high availability and guaranteed message delivery. One of the questions we got from one of our customers today was, “Can we run over UDP for greater reliability?” I can tell you that UDP does NOT stand for “Undropped Data Protocol”, see Wikipedia (first sentence of second paragraph).
If you don’t have ‘cvsup’ installed, do so by following the tutorial on Open Addict (section: Rebuild the World, and Recompile the Kernel):
Since all you have to do to update your ports is run the command:
cvsup -g -L 2 /root/ports-supfile
Just stick that command in your crontab and make it run every midnight.
crontab -e # This opens the crontab in the vi editor.
Add this line to the crontab:
0 0 * * * /usr/local/bin/cvsup -g -L 2 /root/ports-supfile
Shift+zz to save and you are done.
This it one of the reasons why I love Unix. With little thought, everything is script-able and customizable.
This is the coolest trick I learned while working at Blinkx. At the time, our management really hated when we go on any type of instant messaging applications. I also suspected that our messenger conversations and other internet activities were being monitored. I was pissed so this is what I did to combat their nosiness. Read on…
What are SSH Keys? (Easier than what you learned in Computer Security class)
SSH keys are one of the common authentication techniques people use to log into a Unix session (the most common authentication technique is login & password).
If you are like me, you get sick and tired of typing in your login and password every single time you open a new terminal to connect to a Unix session. This is where SSH keys help me everyday by letting me authenticate against the key once, and every new shell session I start will authenticate using the same SSH key.
All you have to do is create a pair of public and private keys. In this analogy, the public key is the house lock and the private key is equivalent to the house key.
Private Key = House key
Public Key = House locks
Using an SSH key to authenticate is like using one key for all the doors in your house instead of having a bunch of combination padlocks (with the same unlock combination) on all your doors.
Read on…
I hope I can get some part-time consulting jobs to do this optimization for small businesses. All in all, it doesn’t seem too hard to do and I enjoyed doing it. If you run into a problem just google it for the answer. Anyway, here is the recap of the steps I took to set up my FreeBSD 6.2 Web Server.
Okay I lied, eAccelerator gives a pretty darn high ROI, but setting up a proxy cache gives a comparable or higher ROI. I chose to use Varnish as my proxy cache.
Once installed, Varnish will keep a cache of all objects requested by internet users (e.g. post-generated PHP pages, CSS, javascripts, images) with the goal of off-loading some work from your web server (remember: we won’t want big Apache to do the work only if it has to). Also Varnish takes full advantage of the OS’s virtual memory and advanced I/O features on FreeBSD 6.x making it the optimal choice for my setup.
There were many confusing instructions on the web about how to configure Varnish. Here are the steps I took to setting up Varnish for a signal machine running both Varnish and the web server: Read on…