Archive for 2004
Ideas For New Posts
December 29th, 2004 • 3 comments General
I’m a statistics guy, I like keeping track of number of visits, to know how good (or bad) am I doing. Browser percentages, to figure out if IE is still #1 in the market, or is it finally moving from its throne. Referrers, they let me know if somebody was interested in something I wrote and linked to it, otherwise I wouldn’t have ever known that ActiveState has actually linked to my Komodo review. But what I love most is search keywords, words that people searched for and ended up at my site.
Why search keywords?! Well because they can easily turn on the little light-bulb over your head and give you ideas for things to talk about. Right now, I’m using AWStats which makes reviewing statistics a pleasure, if you’re still stuck with Webalizer, I suggest you give it a test drive.
But let’s get back to the subject. Search keywords give you an idea of what people who come to your site are usually looking for; sometimes, you can be amazed. I had no idea that anyone could search for open a dockbook file with open office and end up at my site reading a post on PseudoPOD for UltraEdit.
So from now on, I’m going to select certain keywords I like to post related articles about, hopefully people will end up with something more relevant. Here are a couple of searches I liked and most probably will be talking about later on:
- kwiki customization
- cflags optimizations qt freebsd
- what are PHP’s advantages
- php5 overriding base class functions
- why blogging
- dokuwiki subversion
- using subversion
- install plesk gentoo
- mod_python mod_php comparison
And last but not least, I loved why MSN looks plain, a question that remains unanswered by Google-addicts :)
PHP and Apache
December 25th, 2004 • PHP
Following the latest discussions on PHP vs. Apache, I felt I had to say something about it. John Coggeshall doesn’t really think there’s a real reason to switch and actually consider Apache2; but guess what? That’s wrong!
Some people at the Apache community are pretty pissed off at how PHP pushes people away from Apache2 although it’s literally the next best thing after 1.3. The reason is obvious, Apache guys want people to use Apache2, PHP guys say don’t. Of course you can say that in thousands of pretty ways, but the fact remains that PHP people (and especially module writers) aren’t paying much attention to Apache2.
But why? Apache2 has all sorts of great features, like threading, filtering, module API, etc. Why not make use of it? I hear you say “If it ain’t broken, don’t fix it”. Well duh, Windows 3.11 wasn’t broken (sort of), OS/2 seemed like a solid system too, heck PHP4 wasn’t broken, it worked, didn’t it? But weren’t they “fixed”?
IBM and RedHat, a marketing stunt?
December 12th, 2004 • Rants
IBM and RedHat join forces?! Well pardon my irrational sense of bad smell, I by no means am a business expert, but when this happens, I bet you anything both companies are going after lots of bucks. My hope is that “ISDs” (Independent Software Developers) won’t have to pay royalties just to get “certified” and get a nice guy-in-a-blue-hat stamp on their site!
I know, I know. Linux is going for the enterprise, blah, blah… But wasn’t the point of free software is to be, well, at least free (oh you know what I mean, as in speech damn it)? I don’t want to have to ask for a certification for my software quality which I might not get because some incredibly ignorant manager decided that he doesn’t like my hair.
So I guess this means that if GNU doesn’t get certified by a multi-billion
dollar company we won’t have ls or gzip, right? Or
how about Apache, BIND, Qmail and Sendmail? They aren’t ready for the so-called
enterprise. Excuse my rage here, but free and enterprise don’t seem to get along
well, you can get either, but not both, at least by current standards.
Yes, UnitedLinux is a great effort, having various standards that Linux distributions must follow is also great, but what’s the point of having a single entity decide whether my software (or distribution for the matter) is Linux-quality?
A call for the open source community, please don’t make this happen, IBM and RedHat are a lot of help, just don’t let them take control.
So what do you say, Google?
December 11th, 2004 • General
Now this isn’t ground-breaking, auto-completion is a pretty old idea, but the way Google suggests queries, learns about your searching habits, and makes you feel good, now that’s ground-breaking.
Under the hood, everytime you write something in that little search box, Google sends an XmlHttpRequest and gets the results to be displayed. This can be trouble on slower connections, and I suspect dial-up users will benefit from the idea, but with some caching, I think they can make it.
Can’t wait until Google makes it final. Watch out MSN!