web 2.0 ish
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Yahoo! came out with a FireBug addon - YSlow, that takes a look at your web page and offers a score on performance. Most of the recommendations are easy enough to follow, below are 3 that take some Apache httpd.conf hacking to get working:
1) Configure ETags
Add this to your httpd.conf
2) Turn on Expiration Headers
# Turn on Expires and set default to 0
ExpiresActive On
ExpiresDefault A7200
# Set up caching on media files for 1 year
<FilesMatch “\.(flv|ico|pdf|avi|mov|ppt|doc|mp3|wmv|wav)$”>
ExpiresDefault A29030400
</FilesMatch>
# Set up caching on media files for 1 week
<FilesMatch “\.(gif|jpg|jpeg|png|swf)$”>
ExpiresDefault A604800
</FilesMatch>
# Set up 24 Hour caching on commonly updated files
<FilesMatch “\.(xml|txt|html|php|js|css)$”>
ExpiresDefault A86400
</FilesMatch>
3) Add Gzip compression
Install mod_gzip for Apache, add this to your httpd.conf to configure mod_gzip to handle files/settings
<IfModule mod_gzip.c>
mod_gzip_on Yes
mod_gzip_can_negotiate Yes
mod_gzip_static_suffix .gz
AddEncoding gzip .gz
mod_gzip_update_static No
mod_gzip_command_version ‘/mod_gzip_status’
mod_gzip_keep_workfiles No
mod_gzip_minimum_file_size 512
mod_gzip_maximum_file_size 1048576
mod_gzip_maximum_inmem_size 60000
mod_gzip_min_http 1000
mod_gzip_handle_methods GET POST
mod_gzip_item_include mime ^text/.*
mod_gzip_item_include mime ^httpd/unix-directory$
mod_gzip_item_include file \.shtml$
mod_gzip_item_include file \.html$
mod_gzip_item_include mime ^application/x-javascript$
mod_gzip_item_include mime ^application/javascript$
mod_gzip_item_include file \.js$
mod_gzip_item_include file \.css$
mod_gzip_item_include mime ^application/x-httpd-php$
mod_gzip_item_include file \.php$
mod_gzip_item_include handler ^cgi-script$
mod_gzip_dechunk Yes
# DO NOT WASTE TIME COMPRESSING IMAGES
mod_gzip_item_exclude mime ^image/.$
mod_gzip_item_exclude mime ^image/
mod_gzip_item_exclude rspheader Content-Type:image/*
</IfModule>
That’s it, those 3 changes improved my score from F (60) to a respectable B (81).
Written by Tim on August 16th, 2007 with 3 comments.
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Who knew datapoohbah could be so insightful on a iPhone Development Podcast? Check it out, it pretty well done, and he makes some real good points.
I’ve been playing around with writing a iPhone web application, more to come on this soon.
Written by Tim on July 24th, 2007 with 6 comments.
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Thanks to the Atlassian folks for letting us know about this gem, finding cache info in firefox just got easier - type about:cache in your browser:
Written by Tim on July 12th, 2007 with no comments.
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Is there really any doubt Google has Microsoft beat by 10 folds for search results? Here is a search I did on a Microsoft Great Plains error: “No TaxScheduleKey, but TaxAmount was passed in” Apparently Live.com doesn’t index Microsoft’s own newsgroups. Google does. Also Live.com the suggested alternative searches are based on the word “passed” which is a giant leap to assume my entire query revolves around 1 word. Google suggested TaxAmount as two words. I recently listened to Adam Bosworth MySQL speech in which he said how Google comes up with their “Did you mean” algorithm. It has nothing to do with a dictionary lookup, but instead looks at the past queries and what suggestions users ended up clicking when presented with choices for “Did you mean”. It really means Google is becoming a better search engine without any code changes, something Microsoft should take a qu from.
Written by Tim on July 9th, 2007 with 1 comment.
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Today we were playing with xajax trying to eliminate some redundant page reloads and also keeps some divs hidden based on user input without having to manage their state. All was working as expected on our Linux box (Fedora) but when we tried to get it running on IIS it was dying. It looked like no response or anything was coming back from some simple AJAX calls. So we did as every good web developer should do - bust out FireBug. Looking at the NET results we noticed we were in fact getting a response from our request but with an additional “PHP Notice undeclared variable message” (not show in the pic). It didn’t really dawn on us that this was the culprit until we opened IE 7 and it returned with a dialog box saying it could not parse the XML because of a space, pointing out the “Notice” message was returned before the XML response. A closer look at our PHP.ini file resulted in use turning off Notices and turning on Errors only. This was the issue. Goes to show you having two browsers for debugging is a good thing 
Written by Tim on June 25th, 2007 with 6 comments.
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Thanks to Scott for clueing me in on the Safari 3 for Windows Public Beta. I must have been hiding in a hole, cause I did not see this coming at all.
First Impression
- When I click on the top bar to expand the window, the dang thing disappears. Wait - Actually if I move it to my dual monitor and click the expand button the dang thing disappears. Guess the dual monitor code hasn’t been put in.
- It is fast, very fast. Although reports are FF is faster then IE, I’ve found IE to render quicker (maybe because of the extensions I have going on FF), but this thing is really fast.
- Finally, no more VNC to a MAC to make sure things are working correctly on Safari. This is great.
- Font rendering is nice - not clear type, but pretty close.
- Hey the backspace keyboard doesn’t move you back in history - not cool.
I’m not switching from FF because of the extensive plugins I use but for some fast web browsing this might make take over my IE.
Written by Tim on June 11th, 2007 with 2 comments.
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So I have a site - we’ll call www.site1.com that sets a client side cookie named CookieName1 and I need a subdomain test.site1.com to be able to read that value. Using php’s standard setcookie() method I set the cookie on www by using:
setcookie( “CookieName1″, $CookieName1Value, $CookieExpDate, “/”, “.site1.com” );
This works, no problem. Now test.site1.com uses .NET to read in the value and do something. Pretty standard stuff here:
If Request.Cookies(“CookieName1″) IsNot Nothing Then
”DO SOMETHING
End If
Build > Debug, set a breakpoint on the if block, skips right over it. Huh? I make sure IE has the cookie, try again. Nope, Request.Cookies(”CookieName1″) is Nothing. Can’t be an IE thing can it? Run same scenerio in FireFox - same result. Then it dawns on me, I’m not running this under test.site1.com, I’m running this under localhost. Everything was working as expected, cookies can only be read by *.site1.com. So how am I going to test this thing on my local machine? I do have a sandbox, test1sandbox.site1.com, but what if I didn’t? A simple solution is to change the host file found at %SystemRoot%\system32\drivers\etc\ with:
127.0.0.1 localhost
127.0.0.1 test1.site1.com
Run another Debug, change the http://localhost to http://test1.site1.com and now I’m able to read cookies from *.site1.com. Nifty.
Written by Tim on May 22nd, 2007 with 4 comments.
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Yesterday, Adobe announced they are open sourcing Flex, their all wiz bang Flash based web application builder. This seems to stem from their concern about Microsoft Silverlight/WPF/WP or whatever they are calling it today. This looks to be a Adobe’s last ditch effort to save Flash aka to Sun open sourcing Java. There is a reason Flex has never taken off, Adobe sucks at writing tools & programming languages/API for developers. Macromedia was bad (see Actionscript), Adobe is worse. Some companies can compete with Microsoft in terms of IDE & programming languages (Borland does a decent job) but Adobe is not one of them. Not to mention their Eclipse based IDE is not part of the open source release.
Most Flex/Flash users are designers in nature that want to go further so they pick up action script for a programming language on the side. Now you want these people to tear into some Java code? This could get ugly real fast. I’m not saying Silverlight/WPF/WP is going to be the end all, but sorry Adobe who cares?
Trying to write your own Java or Flash
code? It might be easier to start with
custom PHP/Perl script writing. Writing code can be tricky if you’ve never
attempted it before, so look at
free PHP scripts online first.
Custom web programming is great if you can pull it off.
Written by Tim on April 26th, 2007 with 1 comment.
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I kept getting this annoying authentication method when trying to remote desktop from Vista into a Windows 2003 server machine at work today. By navigating to the “Advanced” tab I could change the Authetication option to : “Always connect, even if authentication fails”, but Scott Forsyth has a registry edit that works perfectly:
Add a DWORD registry entry called AuthenticationLevelOverride in the \\HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Terminal Server Client\ and set it to 0.
Written by Tim on February 22nd, 2007 with 5 comments.
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Revised: Krugle - It might survive
Revised: Krugle - It will survive, their people in power get it
After reading Robert Scoble post on Krugle I ran over to krugle.com to see what type of advertising I could get (we write software development tools so it should be a nice fit), this is there business model right? Some red flags went off when it became a chore to find advertising info. Finally I came to their “Contact Us” page where I found Bill Daniher VP Finance & Corporate Development as the contact for advertising. More red flags - Why is a VP of Finance handling advertising? Maybe their VP actually do work, so I send him an email. He responds back that Krugle doesn’t have an automated way to do this yet, but he can manually add an ad to the site for a selection of keywords. I’m thinking this is going to be ugly to deal with, but still worth a try. I give him the word we want to proceed, what are the next steps? His response? Well, there is no response. So your a start up and someone wants to buy your service and you don’t respond? Not good. My email probably slipped thru the cracks, but that is why a VP shouldn’t be handling this. Then I read today that they partnered with Yahoo! to do their developer code search. I sure hope Yahoo! is paying them enough to survive, otherwise it won’t.
This is a big reason a lot of .com companies don’t survive. They put more stock into partnerships and VC funding then doing what they need to do—earn revenue and become profitable.
Written by Tim on February 15th, 2007 with 7 comments.
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