Technology

Installing NGINX, MySQL, PHP-FPM & XCache on CentOS 5.3 HOWTO

This post is pretty technical; if you don't consider yourself a geek, you'll likely want to skip it.

Apache is the most popular web server in the world. That doesn't necessarily mean its the best for all tasks though.

NGINX ("Engine X") is another web server. NGINX has been gaining quite a bit of popularity recently as it seems to run more efficiently than Apache, enabling less powerful web servers to handle a larger number of requests. This higher efficiency has made NGINX very popular in the virtual private server (VPS) scene.

I have a few VPS I use for experimentation / pet projects, and recently decided to give NGINX a try. But why stop there with the experimentation? Why not install XCache & PHP-FPM as well?

NGINX
yum install nginx
(The config file will be installed to /etc/nginx/nginx.conf - check it out, much cleaner than httpd.conf imho)

PHP-FPM
../configure --with-libevent=/usr/lib --with-fpm --with-mcrypt --with-zlib -
-enable-mbstring --with-openssl --with-mysql --with-mysql-sock --with-gd --with-
jpeg-dir=/usr/lib --enable-gd-native-ttf --without-sqlite --disable-pdo --disabl
e-reflection --with-mysqli=/usr/bin/mysql_config --with-curl --prefix=/usr/local
/php --with-config-file-scan-dir=/etc/php.d

XCACHE
./configure --enable-xcache --with-php-config=/usr/local/php/bin/php-config
make
make install
cp xcache.ini /etc/php.d/xcache.ini
vi xcache.ini
zend_extension = /usr/local/php/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-20090626/xcache.so

Blackberry and Parallels Desktop - Solution to make them work together

Parallels Desktop is a neat piece of software which lets you run both Windows and MacOS at the same time (on an Apple Computer). There is a pretty annoying bug in Parallels though which doesn't allow you to sync your Blackberry via USB - after of hours looking through the official parallels forum, I decided to try a different approach, and sync the blackberry via Bluetooth.

 In order to enable bluetooth on your parallels installation you must install the official Mac bluetooth drivers (Apple actually makes windows drivers for bootcamp installations). So, with Parallels running, pop your OS X CD in. Go to start -> my computer -> CD rom drive. Right click on the CD rom drive and click open. Double click the Drivers folder, then Apple folder. Double click AppleBluetoothEnablerInstaller.exe, and double click AppleBluetoothInstaller.exe . 

Now outside of the virtual machine (back in MacOS), go to the Parallels menu - Click the Devices menu, then USB, then Apple-wireless. That will enable your bluetooth in windows, which should now have the Apple drivers loaded and install nicely.

Now that you have bluetooth enabled on your Windows installation, you can setup your Blackberry to connect to Blackberry Desktop without fuss. Yay! 

Basic Online Marketing Skills Review: CSS / Cascading Style Sheets

If you're an old school web guy, you would have learned to design web pages in a grid-system using tables. This can be problematic for a number of reasons, the most basic of which is your website will load slower as a result, as although each page may contain the same design elements, the web browser has to download the design at every page.
Enter Cascading style Sheets (CSS). CSS seperates the display layer from the content layer of the website - in other words, you load the website's design once, and then only load new content at each pages.

Take that iPhone! Multi-touch interface from Perceptive Pixel

[kml_flashembed movie="http://youtube.com/v/he-j1BbZf58" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

Wild - right out of Minority Report. And available for purchase TODAY! Check out http://www.perceptivepixel.com/ for more info.

One interesting point up for discussion is there are no standards established yet when it comes to multi touch interfaces - therefore moving your hand on the iphone could have a different effect than moving your hand around on a perceptive pixel display. This introduces an interesting design problem, akin to having different key layouts on the first keyboards. Dan Saffer first wrote about this concept on his blogpost A Call to arms for interaction designers.

Apple DRM-free music = entrapment?

The BBC reports that Apple is getting in a little hot water with the launch of their new DRM-Free tracks on iTunes.

DRM stands for Digital Rights Management, and refers to the technology which prevents you from copying songs bought on iTunes to a large number of your friend's iPods.

Apple recently announced they are removing DRM from songs provided from record label EMI. What Apple forgot to mention in their initial press release was that in place of the digital rights management, they would associate your personal information with each downloaded music file.

So its now easier than ever to share your iTunes-purchased music with friends - it's also much more likely you'll get caught for doing so.

New Mediaist has been slashdotted!

Yes, that is the smell of geek in the air - welcome slashdot brethren!
I was able to survive the traffic jump even though I'm on a cheap Godaddy hosting account. The reason? Cache!

The reason why many websites crash when bombarded by traffic is because most websites aren't actually "static" - but rather are created on-the-fly from a series of records in a database. In other words, each time you visit the website, you are in fact asking the website to query a database and retrieve some information. Therefore, if too many people visit the website at once, the database receives to many queries, and everything just crashes.

The solution to this problem is a caching layer: a system which detects which web pages are being regularly accessed, and creates a copy of the information requested from the database for these web pages, so the database doesn't have to be called each time a user arrives.

For word press, the software which runs this blog, caching layer is available via this plug in.

Human Computation and the ESP Game.

As I understand it, human computation is looking at the human's brain "downtime" (i.e. playing Freecell at work) as "free cycles" which can be utilized for computational tasks too complicated for computers, but easy for humans. Luis von Ahn, the speaker in the Google Video, is an assistant professor in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University. He has developed something he calls the "ESP Game", which is a small example of using human computation to develop a better image search website.

Very cool stuff.

Check Browser Compatibility - Online

Here is a neat quick tool which allows you to test your web design in different browsers - online. Very handy, as there is nothing which bugs me more than a big professional website which just plain doesn't work in Firefox or a 6 month old version of Internet Explorer.

New Media Tech Review: Vividas Online Video Delivery

As cool as Youtube, Dailymotion, and similar flash-based video sharing services are, the video quality they provide still leave much to be desired.

Sure, the “postage stamp” sized video of the 90’s have been
enlarged. But where is the full screen, high quality, no download IPTV
technology I have been promised all these years?

I’ll tell you where it is - at Vividas.com .

What is the secret?

(New Media Blogger unravels the hot documentary self-help film “The Secret”.)

It has been featured on Oprah, Larry King, and Ellen. The Secret is
the hottest new craze in self help. It’s also an example of great
marketing.

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