TheNitai

I’ve found this and simply had to share it. This outlines a lot what an entrepreneur has to do. Have fun building businesses, I sure have

Currently doing some Plesk administration and migration of a couple of servers and run into “domain is expired” errors.

To be frank here, I’m very surprised at how many hosting companies have Plesk deployed, even thought the system has one of the worst user interfaces and to use it is like “searching” instead of “Oh, here it is”. Finding what you need within the Plesk administration is a frustrating task, to say the least.

So, today I was hit with a message of “… domain has expired”. While surprisingly it is easy to “unsuspend” a domain, it is quite the opposite if you are being hit by another message of “The domain is still suspended for the following reason: Domain is expired“.

Now, what? The domain is still expired even thought I just “unsuspended” it? There is no message indicating what you have to do next or what is still causing the domain to be expired. (I already ranted on the usability part, right?)

To make a long story short, the reason why Plesk is reporting the “domain expired” message is that the domain has a expiration date set!

Now, to fix this you have to go into the Domain itself, then click on “Resource Usage” (that icon belongs to the “Statistic” group!!!). At the very button of the Resource Usage page you will find the expiration date setting.

By now, you will probably wonder what the Usability designers of Plesk have been thinking and really wish that someone over at Parallels will get their act together. I wonder, who I can bill my time now, after searching countless of hours for such settings?

As an application maintainer you always look for the best performance in your application and website. At one point in your quest for the best performance you will undoubtedly trip over memcached.

In short memcached is (quote); Free & open source, high-performance, distributed memory object caching system, generic in nature, but intended for use in speeding up dynamic web applications by alleviating database load. Memcached is an in-memory key-value store for small chunks of arbitrary data (strings, objects) from results of database calls, API calls, or page rendering.

That said, installing is a no brainer as well. On Ubuntu you simply need to do the following:

apt-get install memcache
apt-get install php5-memcached

That’s it. Your system takes care of the rest and you will have your first memcached server up and running. Of course, the final step will be to restart apache in order for php to pick up the changes.

Now, memcached alone is of no good use, if your code/application can’t work with it. Thus here I’ll outline 2 examples.

WordPress: Memcached with the W3C total cache plugin

First off, if you aren’t using the awesome W3C Total Cache plugin you should now run install the plugin immediately (just search for w3 cache in the plugin section of the wordpress administration). Even if you are not using memcached it will boost the performance of your WordPress site manifold.

Now, to enable memcached for your WordPress site is as simple as selecting the memcached option for the cache. with the plugin you can even select what you want to place into the memcached cache. Quit slick.

Configuring phpBB to use memcached

Actually it took some time to figure this out, since the setting were not so apparent, so I’m hopping this helps others also. phpBB by default used the local disk for caching. This can be chanced in the config.php file in phpBB folder. Open it and ADD or change the following lines:

$acm_type = 'memcache';
@define('PHPBB_ACM_MEMCACHE_HOST', 'localhost'); // Memcache server hostname
@define('PHPBB_ACM_MEMCACHE_PORT', 11211); // Memcache server port
@define('PHPBB_ACM_MEMCACHE_COMPRESS', false); // Compress stored data
$load_extensions = 'memcache';

Especially the last line with “load_extensions” is important. Save the file and restart apache. Now phpBB will use the memcached server(s). Alone on a board with 800 users I have seen a massive speed improvement.

That’s it. Next up is to get all my CFML apps to work with memcached

Here is a great talk from Jason Fried, co-founder of 37signals, on bootstrapping and getting your company up and running. Really worth seeing.

Steve Johnson talks on “Where ideas come from” gives a good overview how people and especially where they get their ideas from. I personally have been a long time fan of creating an environment where one can cultivate ideas instead of working like a horse. He just emphasizes that socializing creates ideas and being together with others brings out the best. Enjoy.

No no, I haven’t converted to the “other side”, but I had the need to extend my Windows Server 2008 VMWare image from 20GB to 40GB. Extending the virtual disk was a piece of cake (thanks to VMWare) but extending the disk on Windows Server 2008 was kinda “difficult” until I found the following description.

The reason why you can not simply extend the startup volume of your Windows server is that it won’t allow you to extend the startup volume in the GUI tool of the Administration under the disk management application. Fortunately, the engineers added this option in the command line tool “diskpart” since Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 or Windows Server 2008 R2. These versions of Windows ship with a more enhanced version of diskpart.exe that supports partition extension for bootable disks.

In order to extend your startup volume you have to do the following;

Open a Command Prompt and type: diskpart

Type: list volume

Remember the volume number (#) of your volume!

Type: select volume (the number from the above step)

Type: extend

This is it and you don’t even have to reboot. How about that for a change

Most of you probably remember the UI of the movie “Minority Report”. We all thought that this would be way cool to interact with our machines like that. Well, good news. The future of the UI is here. The makers of the movie did not only show us what could be done, but also allowed the guys to develop it.

In the below talk, John Underkoffler demoes the UI he and his team has been working on and compares it to the same revolution that once the Macintosh set off when it was introduced. I especially like the quote: “I think it is time that we ask the same of technology. Technology is capable off, expressing and being {…} with a certain generosity. And we need to demand that…”

I’ve been a vegetarian all my life and so it comes natural for me. I have never had the desire to eat meat, thus the discussion, why it is difficult to stop eating meat is hard to understand.

But as it seams, there are a lot of people who understand why being a vegetarian is a good choice (environment, health, etc.) but they have difficulties to follow. Here Graham Hill talks about a way of doing it, which could work for you too.

Give 5 minutes of your day to his talk, you own it to mother earth. Let me know if it works for you.

Given gMail has one of the best web application interfaces (for its usage) and can sit happy in your browser tab, it is after all still a web application and can not interact with your local address book, offers no drag and drop possibility and desktop notifications.

Furthermore, Gmail offers some really useful features like threaded conversation view, saving of chats, starred items and archives. Features that anyone who has used Gmail for more then one day has come to love and cherish. Since, those functions are just so useful many are just using Gmail in the browser, after all it is free and it works.

Still, I set out for a quest to find a desktop client and an iPhone app for gMail for the obvious reasons mentioned above and… …to say upfront, I found (for me) the perfect Gmail experience on the Mac and on the iPhone. So, read on…

Synching
We as Mac users like our iCal and our Address Book. They might not be the perfect solutions, but to be honest, they are the best we have and they come with MacOS X and are tightly integrated with the system. Thought, Apple made some improvements to iCal (adding WebDAV) and subscribing to other calendars it does not come close to experiences that some have with Outlook and Exchange server. Let’s not even talk about the Address Book which is somehow closed in itself (yes, I know you can lookup LDAP, but does a private person have LDAP installed?). What we (I) really want is to have a easy synchronization of my Calendar (iCal) and my addresses (Address Book) with Gmail. It is not too much to ask, right?

The desire to do so, is fortunately not only mine, but also that of the developers of SpanningSync. In short, SpanningSync allows you to sync your address book and calendar(s) (yes, more then one) with your GMail contact/calendars. Best of it all, you don’t have to do anything at all to make it work, simply install it, set it up once and forget it. From then on SpanningSync, syncs everything in the background for you.

For me, not one thought crossed my mind not to get it. They offer an annual license or a onetime license.

iPhone & gMail

Besides browsing to the mobile gMail site within Safari and then save it as a book mark site (which then appears as a custom app on the iPhone) there are two gMail applications, one is called iGmail and the other Mailroom.

Honestly, I have been using iGmail for some time and even slashed out $5 for having it work with my Google App account. But recently I experienced random lockouts, as such that I could not login anymore (even after restarting the phone) and once I was able to re-login I experienced random crashes. Another thing is that on slow connections (like on EDGE) the application did not work at all. Obviously, I was looking for an alternative.

Today, Mailroom had gotten the top spot on my iPhone. Mailroom is by far the best gMail application and works every time I have to use it, be it on a slow network or not. Mailroom does even more then the “normal” gMail mobile site. Some of the things are;

• Multiple Accounts
• Threaded Messages
• Using Local Address Book
• Offline Support

Personally, I don’t regret for once second that I bought Mailroom. It works every time and does what it promises.

Desktop & gMail

Of course, you can have your Apple Mail set up with gMail over IMAP (recommended) or POP3, but for me Apple Mail does not work so well. I like the gMail interface, but still want the desktop feeling and the convenience of attaching any document by drag/drop. The only application that offers me all that is Mailplane. I can’t say anything else, then that Mailplane does all the things you are accustomed to from a desktop application and some more. That and the user interface from gMail makes it a clear “must have” for any serious gMail user.

Some of the benefits of using Mailplane are;

• Having notification (Growl)
• Drag & Drop attachments
• Having different account and switch to them on the fly
• Individual formated signatures for each account
• Access to Address Book
• Create screen shots within Mailplane
• etc.

The Conclusion

Having a perfect workflow in sync with gMail, MacOS X and iPhone is something that can easily be achieved with the outlined tools above. For me, my current set up works flawlessly for many months now and supports me 100% in my work. In short, I use SpanningSync for having my calendar and address book in sync with gMail, iCal and Address Book. On my iPhone I got Mailroom and on MacOS X I use Mailplane.