Faster page loads by combining/compressing Javascript & CSS
May 29, 2007 by Jason · 3 Comments
I just saw an interesting article and had to test it out on a new site I'm developing (sorry no link to that). The article "Make your pages load faster by combining and compressing javascript and css files" includes a PHP script and directions for easily and automatically combining and compressing your Javascript & CSS pages.
Now, I know what you're thinking... If you've got 4 JS files for a total of 50KB then combined they're still going to take 50KB. Yeah, that's 100% true. You're probably also thinking, "why should I compress my pages when httpd can do that on the fly?" Well, yeah, that's also true.
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Setting up an RPM build environment
May 21, 2007 by Jason · 10 Comments
Back when I started this site I was recommending that users go through the process of chown-ing chmod-ing the /usr/src/redhat folder so that it was writable by a normal user account as opposed to only root. A few weeks back a user brought up the question of why I was doing this. Well, the answer is "it's just the way I've always done things"...
When I started using Linux a decade or so ago I was taught that this was where you built rpms. Later, when told that I shouldn't be compiling as root, I simply created a new user, changed the permissions on that folder tree, and went about my business. The truth is, there's absolutely nothing wrong with this process if you're the only user of the system. However, you can run into real permission problems and conflicts if there are multiple users on the box and more than one want to build an RPM...
A couple lost comments…
May 14, 2007 by Jason · 3 Comments
I had a bit of a mishap involving a comment-related plugin and lost about an hour's worth of comments when I restored from a backup. I believe that I only actually lost only one or two non-spam messages, but still... If you posted a comment on this site in the last 24 hours but no longer see it, please post it again. Thanks.
Update: Fixed! All comments have been recovered.
Upgrading to MySQL 5.0.41 on RHEL and CentOS
May 11, 2007 by Jason · 14 Comments
As happened with 5.0.36 and 5.0.37, it looks like the MySQL 5.0.40 Enterprise-only release has been followed almost immediately by a community version of 5.0.41. As the purpose of my Yum repository is to keep your LAMP stack on the bleeding-edge, I bring you RHEL/CentOS RPMs for "MySQL 5.0.41"!
I don't have an actual changelog for 5.0.40 to 5.0.41 because the only changelogs that are published are for 5.0.36 -> 5.0.38 -> 5.0.40 and 5.0.37 -> 5.0.41 for Enterprise and Community releases respectively. That said, if anyone would like to go through the changelogs for 5.0.38, 5.0.40 and 5.0.41 and find a list of differences, I'd be happy to post up the details with proper credit given.
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5,000+ Spam Comments!
May 10, 2007 by Jason · 4 Comments
About an hour ago this site rolled past 5,000 spam comments caught by Akismet. As far as I can remember there have only been a couple that snuck past and had to be manually classified as "spam". I wish my email filter worked this well. If anyone has any suggestions as to a client-based spam filter that integrates well with Outlook other than SpamBayes let me know.
Upgrading to PHP 5.2.2 on RHEL and CentOS
May 5, 2007 by Jason · 33 Comments
It's been quite a while since the last release of PHP 5.2. The article I posted on upgrading to PHP 5.2.1 was published back on 2/10/2007, just short of 3 months ago. That all said, PHP 5.2.2 has finally been released and it includes many of the patches that were submitted under the recent "Month of PHP Bugs" (formerly known as "March").
The spec file goes largely unchanged from my release of 5.2.1, although the source has been updated to 5.2.2 and one RH-supplied patch (#50) has been updated to reflect some of the code changes in this newest release.
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Upgrading to MySQL 5.0.40 on RHEL and CentOS
May 5, 2007 by Jason · 2 Comments
Another month brings another Enterprise-only release of the MySQL database server under the "Monthly Rapid Update" program. As with the last few Enterprise releases, I've built RHEL-style 32- & 64-bit binary packages for all of the community users out there so that they can keep their systems up-to-date.
The spec file is unmodified from my release of 5.0.38 but the source has been updated to 5.0.40. If you would like to download the src.rpm to compile yourself or simply to look and see what I've done, feel free to use the link at the bottom of this post.
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New development environment coming soon…
Up until now I've been doing all of my package builds on physical systems. Given that electricity is expensive, that space is at a premium, and that I haven't turned on my air conditioning yet and it's getting pretty hot, I've decided to start building the repo packages in virtual machines inside of VMWare Server The bad news is that I'll probably take me most of the weekend to download and install 4 VMs. The good news is that I just said 4 VMs instead of 2 VMs. That's right, I'm going to start building EL5 packages.
P.S. - Oh, and yeah, I know that MySQL 5.0.40 has been released. I've got binaries for 32-bit systems already built but I'm not going to update the repo until I get the 64-bit binaries for EL4 created.
Problem Event Name: BlueScreen
May 2, 2007 by Jason · 53 Comments
As if the giant blue-colored screen used in prior versions of Windows wasn't enough to let you know your computer crashed, apparently Microsoft has decided that in Vista they need to let you know that your computer blue-screened once it comes back up as well.
While, normally I would think that additional information about a crash was useful (I mean, many power users know that nv4_disp.dll is a video card problem, but a quick search on Google can help troubleshoot most of the info that you get on a blue screen), this particular message tells you absolutely nothing useful about the crash. Perhaps the developer who created the dialog could help, but your average Joe is going to be completely lost.