A typical scenario I often get is that I have more ideas than time, and I just don't have the time to do what I want or need. I also tend to want to avoid the nitty gritty details of writing code or text. I prefer to keep the bird's eye view.
If this is a situation you're in, I have one suggestion you can try: Hire Virtual Assistants on oDesk.
I have had people working full time for me for over a year, developing software, writing texts and creating graphics. Using good workforce from low cost countries can give you opportunities you didn't have before, especially as you get some experience.
To get started, my best suggestion would be to try out some people on some smaller projects, and keep track of who does well. Usually you get your work well done, but for large projects it's good to get to know each other first. Over time you build a reportoire of resources that can be contacted when you need work done, and you'll know you get quality work.
Good luck with those virtual assistants!
posted at: 00:00 | path: /2010/04 | permanent link to this entry Sun, 11 Apr 2010
There are a bunch of pretty easy things you can do to optimize your website for speed, improving the user experience and scalability of your website - without even touching your code!
This is Ketil's checklist of easy optimizations that will probably give your site a healthy speed boost:
- Don't let MySQL do a DNS lookup for
every single connect from the webserver to the SQL server. Avoid this by adding the following option to the [mysqld] section of my.cnf:skip-name-resolve
Make sure to always use IP-addresses in the GRANT command if you do this. - Compiling the php script before execution can take hundreds of milliseconds - for every hit to your webserver. Install and enable PHP APC on your webserver to cache the compiled code, avoiding compilation delays for every access. You don't need to write any code to use this, even though APC can be used for other sorts of caching as well
- Browsers need to download and parse css and javascript files before showing
anything to the user. Speed up the download by using HTTP level compression. Install and enable the headers and deflate modules on your webserver (deflate is usually already enabled), and make sure your css and javascript files also get compressed with this configuration in deflate.conf
<IfModule mod_deflate.c> AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/xml AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xhtml+xml text/javascript text/css application/x-javascript application/javascript BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4\.0[678] no-gzip BrowserMatch \bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html Header append Vary User-Agent env=!dont-vary </IfModule> - Let browsers cache static files for up to a month. Install and enable the
expires module on your webserver, and add a config something
like this to your virtualhost config to let browser cache images for up to 1 month:
ExpiresActive On ExpiresByType image/gif "access plus 1 month" ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access plus 1 month" ExpiresByType image/jpg "access plus 1 month" ExpiresByType image/png "access plus 1 month"
For further improvements, some more advanced, please check back for the next posting on this subject.
-Ketil
posted at: 15:16 | path: /2010/04 | permanent link to this entry Fri, 09 Apr 2010
DRAC5 Console Redirection Plug-in on Ubuntu 9.10
I'm in charge of some Dell servers, but after installing Ubuntu 9.10 on my laptop I've been unable to get the Dell Remote Access Controller 5 console redirection plugin working. It just kept dying with the error message "
- Install firefox 3.0 on ubuntu 9.10
- Run firefox 3, connect to DRAC and install the plugin
- The plugin assumes you are using the default profile, which was wrong in my case. When I started it, nothing happened! To fix it, I installed ghex and edited the file $HOME/.mozilla/firefox/
/extensions/{975F5C72-BB6D-11DD-8236-0DA656D89593}/plugins/librac5vkvm.so. Search for '*.default' and replace it with an equally long wildcard that matches your profile directory. I replaced it with '????*.ff3'. After replacing it should look something like this: ~/.mozilla/firefox/????*.ff3/extensions/{975F5C72-BB6D-11DD-8236-0DA656D89593}/videoviewer
Now I finally have console access again!
Still not working for you? Remember to upgrade the RAC firmware version to at least 1.45 (09.01.16)
posted at: 02:42 | path: /2010/04 | permanent link to this entry
Installing Firefox 3.0 on Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala
I got stuck needing an older version of firefox on Ubuntu to run a legacyi firefox plugin. It can also be useful for web developers needing to test their pages in older browser versions. This is how I installed Firefox 3.0 on Ubuntu 9.10:
- Download source:
wget ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/3.0.18/source/firefox-3.0.18-source.tar.bz2
- Install necessary packages. From System -> Administration -> Synaptic Package Manager, choose:
build-essential libx11-dev libdbus-1-dev libidl-dev xserver-xorg-dev libxt-dev pkg-config
(You may need more, I've installed other dev packages before) - Unpack the source archive, and compile:
tar xvfj firefox-3.0.18-source.tar.bz2 cd mozilla ./configure --prefix=$HOME/ff3 --enable-application=browser --disable-crashreporter make make install
- Before running normally, start firefox with the profile manager and create a new profile for the old version of firefox, eg 'ff3':
firefox -ProfileManager
- Install some necessary plugins (flash and java) where firefox will find them:
mkdir $HOME/.mozilla/plugins cd $HOME/.mozilla/plugins ln -s /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/flashplugin-alternative.so ln -s /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun-1.6.0.15/jre/lib/i386/libnpjp2.so
- Run firefox 3.0 with your new profile:
$HOME/ff3/bin/firefox -P ff3
I tried the same with Firefox 2, but the build failed:
wget ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/2.0.0.9/source/firefox-2.0.0.9-source.tar.bz2 tar xvfj firefox-2.0.0.9-source.tar.bz2 cd mozilla ./configure --prefix=$HOME/ff2 --enable-application=browser --disable-crashreporter make (compilation failed on my computer)
posted at: 02:28 | path: /2010/04 | permanent link to this entry
