Archive for April, 2006

Tip: Speeding up your web application

Saturday, April 29th, 2006

Add your .htaccess rules to the virtual host configuration file. This reduces the load average because the rules are kept in the memory instead of being parsed every time the page is shown ;)

Managing patchsets against CVS?

Friday, April 28th, 2006

Dear Lazyweb.
What options do I have for managing my own patchset against live CVS. I’m certain that my changes won’t be accepted until I have completely rewritten the application ;)

Thank you.

Vacation trip and the Eternal Lands Resource Database

Thursday, April 27th, 2006

Spent few days on the western parts of Saaremaa in Sõrve, where we explored some of the WWII military installations. Sõrve was the last stronghold of the German forces in Estonia during the WWII and was the place of the bloodiest battles between the German and Soviet. The Soviets also built one of their mightiest defence complex in Sõrve known as the Stebel’s battery. The battery consists of a command center and windmill-like observation tower which are both connected with two underground gun emplacements about kilometer from the command center. The cannon emplacements are 16 meters deep, two-story concrete constructons, with two meter thick concrete walls and a 3.5 meter thick concrete roof. But as the German forces were closing in, the guns were blown up and all the tunnels were flooded :(
Also this wall doesn’t exist anymore, the storm has made it disappear.
I didn’t have an Internet connection there, but nevertheless hacked up a simple resource-mapping application for Eternal Lands MMORPG which I call Eternal Lands Resource Database (yeah, I know, the name sucks ;)) It’s written in PHP, the data is stored in MySQL database and uses some Javascript and AJAX bits to make it look more Web 2.0 ;). It is still beta, missing lots of maps and resources (currently contains flower data only for the startmap) but if I could get community helping me this could turn into a killer app. If not, then I have at least learned some Javascript and AJAX stuff ;) The todolist for it is long (and private), but the next item will be a contact form so people can submit suggestions, bug reports or whatever. Stay tuned and in the meanwhile check it out again :)

/me goes bluetooth…

Sunday, April 23rd, 2006

Finally got the missing piece (the male USB plug) for the usb-bluetooth dongle. Brait soldered it on the PCB and testing revealed that we can make things better :) Now let’s hope that Google’s Summer of Code makes the difference in GNOME’s Bluetooth stack.
Gentoo’s Bluetooth support rocks - after finding a right doc, I just compiled and installed required modules, emerged the bluetooth stuff and plugged in the dongle. Tried the simpler commands like pinging my phone and saw some packets moving back and forth the computer and phone.
Now I’m just waiting for the next part - HAL and Udev and things that just work ™ :) Would be nice to share appointments between phone’s calendar and computer.

Disclaimer:
The text above was typed @ 03:32 in the night. You can tell me about bad wording and typos. But please try to do it in form of a constructive criticism :)

Certs, those damn certs…

Wednesday, April 19th, 2006

Took a week off. Not voluntarily though, I had to do it because I managed to allow a bunch of flu germs to penetrate my immune system. :) Last Tuesday I visited dentist who removed one of my badly situated tooth. Spent a night at Tuljo’s place and took a bus next morning to Kuressaare. While sitting on ferry the flu striked - suddenly I felt very cold and started shaking… Got home, went straight to bed and didn’t come out until it was Friday :) Had a bad fever until Sunday, then my health started showing signs of improvement. I do not consider myself 100% OK yet, but spent few hours outside yesterday and few hours today too..
And now the certificates part. Store20.com server is administered mostly by me, but it was built by Taavi and later I took over then administration when he went to the USA for the summer. And most of the time some things feel very dark for me :) One of them was the area of ssl certificates. Today I finally managed to sort this thing out and now I have to renew only one version instead of 4 which were all scattered over /etc directory. Previously it was every few weeks that someone said me that Store20’s certificate is outdated. :)
And some technical stuff too. I use CAcert.org community driven Certificate Authority signed cert which is used by Apache (web server), Postfix (mail transport) and Cyrus-Imap (Imap server). And all this is managed by Gentoo’s excellent package management system which makes managing all this really a joy. :)
The mail system itself needs a redesign. But it’s a bit too much for now :)