Chroder.com

http://www.php.lt/benchmark/phpbench.php

Interesting page. Benchmark’s all types of situations, I was surprised with a few.

If you know me, then you probably know that I was the former owner of DevBox (and her sister sites). Though now they belong to the IMDT network, I still develop them.

If you hang around the forums (DBF) then you have probably heard me talk about DB3. Not much progress was being made for a while, I had school, work, vacation — a life ;-). But now I’ve got time to finally start cracking down and working on it.

You might be thinking, “wait… DevBox 3?”. Yes, there was a DevBox1, though I can hardly remember it all all . And DevBox2 is the one we are using now. So why all the change? Partly because I’m a change-a-holic But for the most part, the site grew (small as it is) and at the same time my skills grew. It’s natural for any site to undergo large changes once and a while, and in it’s short life I think DevBox has changed more then most sites.

I’ll tell you where it all started, if I can even remember correctly… Back in the day of WMF (I say ‘back in the day’, because the forum is now under new management that really sucks, it used to be a great place.) it was my “dream” to own a big developers site like SitePoint. Every web developer has their dream site, that was mine. Before DevBox I had a site called Webex, where I would be offering free hosted scripts like hit counters, guestbooks and all that. That was around the time I new little more the HTML, so that never really got off the ground (not to mention I was using free hosts to host it). Then came my cmn.cc times. I couldn’t pay for hosting myself so convincing my credit-card bearing mom to put it on the internet was a hard thing to do. After explaining that the DES-cracker computers built in the ’90s would take about 149 trillion years to crack this ‘new’ 128-bit encryption, and that it was more likely for her to find a corrupt waiter at a restaurant then someone taking her info from the internet, she agreed. Cmn.cc was nothing, literally. I think I had it for a year or two, and for that time it was nothing. A waste of my mom’s $6 a month When the domain expired on cmn.cc, the changes started. I switched hosts (from MyAcen), and registered the DevBox.net domain name. My luck was extremely fortunate around that time, as I won a free vBulletin license from a contest Cary (a vBulletin team member) had put together. So I got that up right away and was the main focus for DevBox for quite a while. I had a redirection page up on the main page pointing the forums promising “coming soon”. A few weeks down the road I won the Webmasters Award from WMF which meant I got my link at the very top of the forums for a month, and a free domain (since I was a moderator at the time, ian (the owner) offered me $10 instead — I took it). With the link pointing towards the forums, a few freindly faces started to pop up. That’s where it all began.

DevBox1 didn’t last long, I don’t think. It lasted about the time from vB3 Beta 5 to vB3 Beta 7. DevBox2 has been there ever since. I’ll let you in on a little secret, I hate DevBox2. I really do. The whole foundation is messy and buggy (the site itself is alright), I rushed to release it — a good lesson learned. I’m taking my time on DevBox3 (as you might notice ;-)) and I’m an very very proud of it thus far. It’s clean and fast and integrates into the forum perfectly.

So what’s new in DevBox3? Most of the new things the end user will never see. It’s the same idea: categories, articles and snippets. But the base, the CMS is totally reworked. This isn’t DevBox2.1, this is DevBox3 — a 100% rework. I literally threw away the code for DevBox2 and started anew. With the sexy admin panel (which DevBox2 never even had), it’s finally easy to manage categories and the content queue and edit options and skins and usergroups (and and and !). But the most noticeable part for the end user will be the design. I’ve created a new very (very) simple design that is XHTML transitional, very clean and sleak. But other then the design, the new “My Office” section is where you’ll be able to submit your content, amongst other nifty things. And you’ll finally be able to add comments to articles! One thing that I’ll find useful is the new “favorites” feature, you can add any article or snippet to your in-site favorites (not your browser bookmarks) so you can know when they’re updated or just look over them whenever you want. I’m looking to add the “author watch” type thing (similar to Deviantart) where you can put any author on a “watch” list and be alerted when they have a new article published.

Here are some sneak peaks (though the ACP most, other then moderators, will never see. I just wanted to show it off ;-)):

Anyway, I don’t know why I decided to post this. Just wanted to blog

If anyone knows of Kevin Rose from The Screen Savers (TechTV) then you might know of The Broken. The Broken (taken from their FAQ) is a “hacking videozine”.

There are only 3 episodes (the second is about 5 minutes, so maybe 2 episodes if you count them seriously) and they cover some pretty basic stuff (including a segment on how to download warez via kazaa, but be careful “some software costs money” lol!). Episode #3 includes an interview with the famous hacker Kevin Mitnick, though the interview is kind of a short version of the keynote Mitnick presented.

I liked the segment on wardriving and using airsnort to crack encryption keys (listen to Rose and go download Knoppix STD if you’re a Windows user and want to try some of the stuff out, I like it better then F.I.R.E.). All in all, it’s pretty non “1337″ but still fun to watch.

Just thought I’d post and remind you (because we all know) to backup your mySQL databases. I recently lost my localhost databases (about 8 of them). I had about a week-old backup that I had to resort to. I had a lot of things I had to re-apply on my database.

For those who don’t know how I’ll show you how. For smaller databases you might get away with using the “Export” feature in phpMyAdmin, but when you have big databases the script might hang and timeout. So you’ll want to use the mysqldump application instead.

The command is the same accross platforms. Get your command line goin’ (Windows users: Start->Run->cmd. I doubt I have to tell Linux users how to access the terminal :-P) and cruise to the mysql bin directory. Once there, simply run the command:

If you want to backup all databases on the server, replace “database_name” with the “–all-databases” option:

You can also pipe your SQL output to gzip if you’d like (most likely, only Linux users will be interested in doing this):

If you want to automate the process (perhapse put it as a cron job) here’s a little bash script I picked up from somebody at WHT:

This will create files named database_<date>. For example: database_feb01 (note that ‘01′ is the day, not the year. You’ll have to hack it if you want the year as well. I never had a use for the year because I never kept backups that old).

Just tried a new look again. I think it’s ugly, but it’ll do ’til I’ve got some time for a better one

I started experimenting with the GD image functions and decided there was no better way to test them out then to create a simple image verification script. So read on and I’ll show you what I got. The script is pretty simple, it creates a random string in the form of word1_word2#. For example: mess_week94. It uses PHP’s native session functionality (I know, eeew! :-P). The form itself is simple, could be edited for more fields (obviously). See the screenshot for an example.

So read on if you want
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A prediction has been made, we will listen in on some alien radio broadcast. But then what happens when it takes a century to return the call because they’re 1000 light years away?

I’m not much for the SETI project, sending crazy signals into space seems like a waste of time to me. By chance they do get somewhere, and by chance ET is listening, and by chance ET cares, and by chance ET responds — we won’t know for another century.

Source: Space Daily

(Thanks to Praetor for correcting my spelling. I didn’t think anyone would care about spelling on a blog! Go ahead, look for more. They’re there!)

A lot of people have asked me lately how to create collapsable tables (or div’s, or anything else for that matter) and I thought I’d do a little informal writeup on how I do it.
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I got a DVD writer a little while ago and thought I’d just post on how to do an easy backup (legal, of course ;-)) of your DVD’s. If your using the easy-to-come-by media and DVD burner (meaning, your not going to be using dual-layers) then you’ll probably need two DVD±R’s (commercial burners burn on 2 layers, basically doubling the capacity).

Now you can use either DVD+R’s or DVD-R’s. Most burners these days can burn on both. DVD+R’s are generally better quality, but cost a little more and DVD-R’s are the opposite. I’ve heard lots of people that use DVD-R’s exclusively without problems, so it’s up to you.

I do things the easy way First thing you want to do is grab the software:

1. DVD Decrypter
2. InterVideo DVDCopy 2

Now the first thing you want to do is decrypt the DVD (they put protection on them, much the same like games have Safedisk etc.). So fire up DVD Decrypter. It should automatically “sense” your DVD in your drive and the pane on the right should be populated with a list of files (.VOB and such). Since you want to backup the whole movie, select them all and click the big Decrypt button (with the DVD-Rom icon pointing to the hard drive icon). This will take a little while to complete.

Now what you want to do is open up DVDCopy2. I use this app to split the DVD into two parts (because we must put them on two DVD’s, remember?). Change the source to the directory you just decrypted the movie to, and change the Target to your DVD writer.

Before you press the “Burn” button, click the little wrench icon to bring up the “Optional Settings” dialog. Switch to the “DVD Media” tab and uncheck the “Fit to One Disk” box. The default action of DVDCopy2 is to compress your movie so it’ll fit onto a disk, but with compression you get some loss of quality. If you take out all the special features and whatnot then you might be able to get reasonable quality from a compressed movie. Anyway, press OK to return back to the main window. Make sure the DVD button “bubble” is pressed (the “Copy As:”) and you can now click the Burn button.

So there you have it That’s how I do most of my backups when I’m in a hurry. There are lots more ways to do it though, check out the great guides over at Doom9.org.

Todd Hollenshead (ID’s chief exec) stated that Doom III would require your computer to meet at least these minimum requirements:

A 1.5-gigahertz Intel Pentium 4 chip or AMD Athlon 1500.
384 megabytes of memory.
Two gigabytes of hard drive space.
An nVidia GeForce 3 graphics card or better; or an ATI Technologies 8500 or better.

Though I can’t find any “recommended” specs yet, you can bet they’re going to be somewhat greater then these minimum specs. So if you’re like me, your on your way out to go grab some stuff!

Source: Houston Chronicle