Archive for July, 2009


Sunkhaze Stream

Jul 19

Today provided us with mostly clear skies in the high 70’s bordering 80’s; so after church Robin and I headed to Sunkhaze Meadows. The last time we were there we hiked a long a couple of trails so this time I wanted to kayak Sunkhaze Stream. When we arrived, there was no boat landing which was expected since it’s a Wildlife preserve so we parked next to a small bridge and carried our kayaks down the side of the bridge. While putting in I said the Robin that this is the type of steam I really enjoy, it’s not too wide, varies from 5-10ft and has just enough current to slowly move you along. Once in the water the current took a hold of us and slowly taxied us through bends and curves through its lush canopies and shore-lined dunes of grass and plant life. Each bend brought different sights of interest; fallen logs, boulders, open areas with tall grass and sporadic varying trees. For the most part there was very little wildlife to be seen besides a Sandpiper, female Wood ducks and a Beaver.

No man-made noises could be heard, only the sounds of lightly flowing water, a cool breeze whisping through tress and over long dune grass, and the sounds of chickadees, American Goldfinches, quacking ducks, Cedar Waxwings and the flapping of Dragon fly wings. We had an excellent leisurely afternoon kayak trip; the only thing missing was a kayak picnic. I have wanted to take a photo of my gear in my kayak so you can see how it’s carried- eventually I am going to get an inflatable sealable bag for it.

Tags: Kayaking, Nature, Photos 1 Comment »


Apache 2.x performance tweaking with mod_deflate and misc other tweaks

Jul 18

Roughly three weeks ago I updated JKOgden.net’s back-end and front-end; this is more of an intermediate’s guide to enabling mod_deflate and other tweaks and is partly intended for VPS servers as far as enabling mod_deflate.

First I’d like to talk a little about mod_deflate, first and foremost the module needs to be enabled in your Apache 2.x configuration so if it is not already you must recompile Apache and if you’re going to do that I would also suggest installing APC Accelerator which is a caching system for PHP. I have read some articles that you can add code to your .htaccess file to enable mod_deflate without having it enabled in your Apache configuration, however I have found that not to be true by looking into Apache log (/usr/local/apache/logs/error_log).

What is mod_deflate and why is it so important? When you request a file such as http://www.jkogden.net/index.php, your browser talks to a web server. The conversation looks a little like this:

  1. Browser: GET /index.php HTTP 1.1 Accept-encoding gzip,deflate
  2. Server: looks for index.php (/var/www/…/index.php)
  3. Server: HTTP/1.x 200 OK No encoding available 300KB <html></html>
  4. Browser: 300KB? Whoa, that’s a lot of data

As you can see, with all of the html tags, text, etc the text is quite large and is an inefficient usage of bandwidth.

What do you normally do when a file is too big to send? You use your favorite compression utility and zip it. If we could send a .zip file to the browser (index.php.zip) instead of plain old index.php, we’d save on bandwidth and download time. The browser could download the zipped file, extract it, and then present it to user.

Here’s an updated conversation when accessing a site configured with mod_deflate:

  1. Browser: GET /index.php HTTP 1.1 Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
  2. Server: looks for index.php (/var/www/…/index.php)
  3. Server: HTTP/1.x 200 OK Content-Encoding: gzip 30KB
  4. Browser: 30KB? Nice, let me unzip it

(more…)

Tags: Technical 3 Comments »


Synchronization

Jul 14

I spend a lot of time on computers, the internet and working with documents. Naturally I find it necessary to access my internet bookmarks, documents and other miscellaneous data wherever I am. Up until a year ago this was mostly impossible unless I had a VPN to my home network which is not the most practical or efficient option. I mostly use Firefox for browsing the web due to a few add-ons that make it very beneficial for me, one of which gives me the ability to sync my bookmarks online and access them in any web browser via a website if the computer I’m using does not have Firefox installed. Xmarks has really helped me out in certain situations are work and at a clients house when I needed to access a particular website. Xmarks also syncs with Internet Explorer which is also helpful for me as well. Another handy add-on that I use a lot is Toodledo, it allows me to create and organize tasks via their website/add-on for Firefox.

Microsoft has recently been working on a new product called Office Live, it allows you to upload, share and manage documents online, there’s even a plugin that allows you to access and save documents within Office which makes syncing much easier. Skydrive is another product from Microsoft that allows you to store photos, files, etc one of which I use for certain storing .exe files and config files. My other favorite cloud computing tools is Live Mail or better known as Hotmail; it allows you to have up to 500GB of mailbox space for free, it has calendering system, contact system, Skydrive, Office Live and when you’re home and want to access that data via an application (which I prefer) you can use Microsoft’s Windows Live Mail client and Office plugins to access that very same data.

Synchronization is not where I’d like it to be, but the technology is progressing and in a few years I see the ability to sync everything such as web browser settings, bookmarks, profiles, documents, etc and have access to them wherever you go.

Tags: Technical No Comments