Hi,
I spend a few hours recreating the main mageprojects.com site in pure css. The result is visible here: http://mageprojects.com/PureCSS/ and works in Firefox 3.6, Chrome 4 and Safari 4.
Note that there is actually just one image on that entire page and that’s the header image with my logo in it. Everything else you see on that page is done with css only! I even had some css animation effects in it but since that’s chrome only i left it out for now.
Just made it to show you the power of CSS.
Feel free to browse the page source and use it to your liking.
Mark.
Hi,
Playing a bluray video in Linux is kinda awkward so that’s why i make a small howto that describes just that.
I’m not aware of any other methods to play bluray movies with (custom) subtitles like described below. If you know another (better?) method please let me know.
Before you start, make sure you can mount your bluray image which can be done with the following line:
mount -o loop -t udf /path/to/image.iso /media/bluray_image
Or you have a bluray drive with the disc inserted.
Note: the bluray menus are not usable yet in Linux. only playing the video file is possible at the moment.
First you need to have the mplayer svn version. I used this one from arch linux.
I assume you know how to compile it and get mplayer working.
Once it’s compiled and installed you need to go to your bluray drive or the mount path and then in the folder:
BDMV/STREAM/
Now if your running compiz or any kind of 3d accelerated desktop environment then you have to append:
-ao gl
to the play line (comes later) otherwise you can just use:
-ao xv
Now the final play line would be (assuming your still in the BDMV/STREAM/ folder):
mplayer -vo gl 00000.m2ts
I used -vo gl because i use an accelerated desktop but replace the gl with xv if you’re not using an accelerated desktop. The file: 00000.m2ts was the one that was the biggest for me (well over 6 GB). the name might differ in your movie so make sure check the name before trying to play it.
Now for the subtitles.
Since bluray menus are still not possible in linux you have to just download the subtitle you want. So, go to your favorite subtitle site which provides .srt subtitle files and grab the one you want. Now there is one issue with playing those bluray movies. Somehow mplayer “thinks” it starts playing at minute 10 while the movie plays from second one. This causes your subtitles to begin playing from 10 minutes thus resulting in the wrong subtitles at the wrong time. There is a nice little trick in mplayer that can be done to “prevent” this. Just let your subtitles delay 10 minutes like so:
-subdelay -600
And a subtitle can be loaded with -sub <filename>
The resulting line to play a bluray movie with subtitles is:
mplayer -vo gl -subdelay -600 -sub subtitle.srt BDMV/STREAM/00000.m2ts
That’s what worked for me when playing ripped bluray movies.
Hope this works for you as well.
Goodluck,
Mark.
Hey,
Sorry to say but there is no progress since my last post. I tried to make the admin interface (just basics) working in IE but it’s kinda hard to get it working in ie6. And to get that working i spend roughly a full day of trying to get ie6 running under linux (wine) or in a virtual machine (kvm) both failed and worked but never worked long before crashing to never be able to start again thus resulting me in re-installing that shit again.
What i’m going to do now is completely ignore IE (all versions) and make it work in FF. Once it’s all done i will take another look at IE. The user side interface of MageDB works just fine under IE. the admin is just a problematic one.
That’s it for now,
Mark
Hi,
Last post was about making tough decisions between a SplStack vs Array + array_reverse and now i think i’m just going for a stack when php 5.3 is used. This is just for the title buildup which is hardly ever bigger then 5 entries, but a stack is just where these kind of things are good for (LIFO, Last In First Out).
Now for the admin panel.
I haven’t been extremely busy with magedb but did made up a first mockup of the admin panel (sadly can’t show the image because wordpress is having a: “no i don’t want to upload images” moment.. but the start is here. The way i’m going to make the admin panel is with a horizontal tabbed navigation and as soon as you click and of the category’s you will, right below it, see the sub ctegory’s you can access. For example:
File Management
| Add file | Delete file | List file |
Kinda like that. Only then with nice icons and probably some more options. Probably also a “Rebuild file cache” and some others. I hope to have the majority of the admin panel done by tomorrow.
That’s it for now,
Mark.
Hi,
Oke, now i’m kinda getting crazy by my own benchmarks:
Array VS SplFixedArray — SPLFixedArray
Execution time: 0.022745132446289 — Memory: 8801432
Array VS SplFixedArray — Array
Execution time: 0.037898063659668 — Memory: 17849424
Stack VS array_unshift — Stack
Execution time: 0.000594139099121 — Memory: 128952 — banana999
Stack VS array_unshift — Unshift
Execution time: 0.035573005676270 — Memory: 176440 — banana999
Stack VS array_unshift VS array_reverse — array_reverse
Execution time: 0.000366926193237 — Memory: 176440 — banana999
What you see above is very interesting. Lets first look at the Array VS SplFixedArray one. If you look at the execution time you see that the SplFixedArray is roughly 1 third faster then a normal array. Now look at the memory part. SplFixedArray is more then twice as efficient as a normal array in terms of memory and it’s even 1/3 faster then a normal array! So i will use it when available like said in my previous post. And i think i will use it in every place where possible. the performance numbers speak for themself.
Now that SplFixedArray one was already on my list to use because i roughly knew the performance boosts it gives but the real decision part that’s breaking my head is the stack benchmarks. The first stack one is the most memory efficient and, after further benching it, becomes faster then the array_reverse one if you add in 100.000 elements (those 3 stack ones have 1.000 elements). The second stack one (array_unshift) is the one that i was using till just 30 minutes ago. I knew it was slow but i didn’t know how i could fix it. Turns out making a normal array then using array_reverse is exactly what i needed to fix it. Now the issue here is the SplStack (first stack one) is a nice object and doing exactly what i want, but is slower then a normal array followed by array_reverse when filled. So what do i need to choose here? lower memory, not the fastest way and nice object (SplStack) or fastest option, little more memory and no nice object (array followed by array_reverse).. I tend to choose the array + array_reverse option and that’s mainly because the data in this array will probably be never more then 10 elements. In case you want to know. I use this in the category class where i calculate the title array and that is the link part that allows you to go back to the parent category (up until the root category).
Now for the updates
Category class is updated to be a lot faster with bigger arrays (removed the use of array_unshift). The cache abstraction is nearly done. All that’s left to be done in there is the file based caching.
That’s it for todays progress,
Mark.
Hey,
I just made the MySQLi use of MageDB a little more effective. Previously it was duplicating some code to make arrays out of database requests. Now one function is making all the array decisions and the rest makes use of that one function resulting in cleaner and more easy to understand code.
That was the most minor thing. Another thing i added in is array profiling! quite handy when you’re developing but for the avarage user of MageDB not of much use thus it’s off by default.
The last thing i added in is quite complex. In PHP 5.3 you have a new MySQL backend called MySQLND (nd == native driver) which is, when enabled, used for mysqli, mysql and pdo_mysql. If it’s not enabled the ‘old’ default of libmysql is used. That’s one of the changes in PHP 5.3 one which i can use in MageDB. When MySQLND is enabled i have the function: fetch_all() in mysqli which is putting a query response in a array. Now this is probably not turned on on every php 5.3 server so if that’s the case i’m going to use SplFixedArray which is just a bit faster then a normal array but twice as memory efficient! So, that’s a big win win situation for you as a user and your host as a sever owner. So there you have it. 2 php 5.3 features are already in MageDB and will be used as soon as your server has it. Buth features that i user are (still) backwards compatible with at least php 5.2.
And an idea for some future version. Right now MageDB is MySQLi only and just MySQL will never be supported anymore since that is just ugly stuff. But i do think of supporting PostgreSQL but that will be quite hard since queries are not exactly the same on both database vendors.. most are the same though.
And last but not least. MageDB updates will from now on be here a lot more or faster since the next week is going to be a MageDB scripting week.
Till next post,
Mark
Hey,
There actually is no progress to report but there is some news.
The delay in MageDB is actually good. When i posted the delay i didn’t knew PHP 5.3 was going to be released today and i’ve never tested MageDB with php 5.3 before so i smell a nice opportunity here.
So what does this mean? Well first of all i have a hard week right now (school stuff) and am done with that coming friday. So just because of that there will be no progress until friday. Another major factor is the php 5.3 release that is scheduled for today (as of this writing it’s not released yet and has just been released) and i am going to wait with big magedb progress until php 5.3 is released. As soon as that happens i will install it, run magedb on it and see how it works and if it needs fixing somewhere. I will (right now) update the MageDB progress on www.mageprojects.com because it’s a lot more finished then described there.
So, more news after php 5.3 is released and after (or on) next friday.
Thanks,
Mark
Updated one minute after initial post with php 5.3 release link
Hi,
The transition to MageHost UK is complete.
So far i didn’t encounter any issues yet, but i’m sure i forgot to set a few file permissions which will be fixed as soon as i notice them.
In case your wondering. O-Todo is also back online and seems to be fully functional besides the friendly url’s.. I broke that somewhere some months ago and still didn’t fix it.
That’s it for this “tweet” like message,
Mark
Hey,
Switched to another host
Yesterday i told you i switched to a USA host and was planning on moving mageprojects to there. Now i kept on searching for a EU based host and fount one that’s asking just one pound more then i paid with media30 and is providing nearly double the features of them. I now have 12.5GB hdd and 125GB bandwidth available for just 4.99 pound (6 euro). This new host is also in the UK like Media30 was and helped me a great deal to get started. The PHP APC extension was missing and they installed it right away. So my impression with them, MegaHost UK, is quite good to begin with.
Move is tomorrow
Now that i have a new and good host in england i can finally start merging Mageprojects to that new host. The site MageDB (.net and .com) are already hosted on there. It COULD be possible that mageprojects is going to be offline for one or 2 days because the global dns servers still have to add the new dns information. I believe this is called “propagation”. So don’t worry when it’s off. It will be back.
Not going to make the deadline
Well i can’t say i like this but it’s a fact. You’ve all saw the list that’s still on the drawing board and add to that a few very tough exams i have in the coming week that really needs a lot of attentions.. So i won’t make it to release Beta 1 this week or early next week. I will try to make a few parts for a release ASAP.
Next post will be from the new host,
Mark.
Hey,
I’ve been on a domain registering spree the last few days. I’ve registered MageDB.net and MageDB.com where the .com domain redirects you to the .net one. The purpose of that .net domain is going to be to just host MageDB and possible services (like MageDB hosting solutions) all centralised on that one domain. A added banifit is ofcourse that a full domain name with the same name as the script looks a lot more professional then a simple subdomain on my projects domain. For now this blog remains on mageprojects and magedb news will be posted on this blog, but in time i might create a new seperate blog on magedb.net for magedb only news.. who knows.
And, yes, i’ve added google adsence advertisements on MageDB.net just to see if it works out well and ofcourse to make some money once that domain is actively hosting MageDB.
Now for the new hosting. I found a new “home” at BoostVisual. They are cheap and from what i’ve seen so far offer nice hosting solutions. The speed is great with them as well which isn’t always the case for me when downloading stuff from servers in usa. The only think i’m waiting for before i can migrate this blog to there host is the php MySQLi and APC extensions to be installed. As soon as that’s been fixed i will start migrating my all of this to that host.
Now for some tine MageDB news.
I had quite a lot of trouble getting my category class working for menu navigation and also some annoying cache issues which is now all fixed. Now here is a start of the features that are not going to make beta 1 but will likely be in beta 2:
- Search engine friendly urls
- Comments in file view
- ajax based file rating in file view
Features that are not implemented yet but should be in the first beta release later this week or early next week
- Full admin panel
- search (sql based not highly optimised one)
- statistics (basic ones)
- [ done ] working category’s (template is here.. code is here partly)
- [ W.I.P. ] ability to: download, rate, report and mail a file
- upload a file (also part of the admin panel)
- apc abstraction because right now magedb is not working without apc (needed because with APC is the only way it’s working now)
- settings for various magedb things (needed for the header mostly)
- writing a logger to for example log mails being send (needed for mail a file aka mail link to friend)
- “intelligent” spam detection for mails send and also for comments when they are here (needed for mail a file aka mail link to friend)
- Tagcloud (yea, i will go go with the hype around this.. i don’t really see a benifit but well, you’re going to get it)
I will update those last 6 features here with a [ done ] tag once i’ve made them.
// note to self :: am i ever going to make that big list in just a few days?
That’s it for now,
Mark
Hi,
Quite a lot is going on in and around MageDB. Lets start with the Tables.
Tables are back
At first when i started with magedb (late 2006 early 2007) i was under the impression that tables where just bad period. That opinion got changed roughly a year ago when i read something like this somewhere: “Tables are not intended for defining how a page looks. Tables are here for lists of data so use it for lists and use divs for page layout stuff.” so when i made the category and file view in MageDB i remembered that. The result of that is that tables are back in MageDB (if you search the internet on MageDB and tables you will find me posting on some blog that i removed tables) and are kicking asses there. As a result of tables being back the MageDB browser support could be from Internet Explorer 6 and up. I usually don’t support IE6 but in this case where i wide range of people could use this script at some point in time it seemed wite to me to support as much browsers as possible with as little javascript and css tricks as possible. Right now i use NO javascript tricks and NO css tricks and it works fairly well on IE6. Some parts do not work on IE6 but that will have to be fixed by using the famous IE7 javascript file which makes ie6 act mostly like ie7. this is done through conditional comments in html so that other browsers see it as.. comments and do nothing with it. Only IE knows it and does something with it. Microsofts way of telling they screwed up big time in ie and a possible way of making it all a bit better.
MageDB hosting
This is right now just an idea but something i’ve been thinking about a lot lately and something i really want to provide with magedb. Perhaps some of you remember paFileDB? they had an option to buy “paFileDB hosting” which was optimised (right?) for use with paFileDB thus giving you the ability to have hosting that was sure to work with paFileDB and had support from the creators. I tend to do roughly the same thing. I don’t plan on buying a dedicated server and put hosting on it becasue that’s not just one server if you do it good. That’s going to be atleast 2. 1 for backup one for the accounts. My idea now is to allow you to register for a simple free account on mageprojects on which you can host your files, screenshots and have your database on. It’s NOT meant as hosting where you host your site on.. only your database with the graphical interface (MageDB). That idea would be the free plan. The paid plan (yes that’s going to be there if i do this at all) will allow you to run your site from that account, will allow you to buy a domain along with it, will get you access to probably cpanel and will give you support for MageDB. That’s going to cost you some euros per month. Right now i’m thinking of something around 15 euros per month.
Mageprojects server move
A few days ago i received a message from my host that they where attacked and are going to stop providing hosting packages and giving all there customers 2 weeks to move there sites to another host or everything will be lost (they didn’t said the last part but i can guess that) so i’m right now hunting for a new hosting provider. Finding one in the netherlands (my home country) or some in europe that’s equal or better then the package i currently have seems extremely hard to find (6 gb space, 60 gb bandwidth for just 4 pound in uk) so i’m right now looking at hosting in USA to see if that’s going to work out. Whatever the results are. Mageprojects will have to move to another server within now and 12 days.
As for MageDB progress. None happened yesterday but last sunday the file view was nearly finished (only thumbnails left to do). And in the very near future i’m going to make a blog post here with the features that are in MageDB right now, those that will get in there before i release a release candidate and how the features are in the end MageDB 1.0.0 release. For now i do intend to release a beta later this week (depends on the admin panel) and during that beta new features will still be added. During the release candidate cycle there will only be bug and feature fixes but no new features at all. The release planning so far:
MageDB Beta 1 (0.8.0) — later this week or early next week
MageDB Bera 2 (0.9.0) — unknown (and only if needed)
MageDB Release Candidate 1 (0.9.5) — unknown
MageDB Release Candidate 2 (0.9.6) — unknown (and only if needed and as you can see in the release numbers i can go till rc 5 ^_^)
MageDB Final (1.0.0) — somewhere in July i hope
So a lot of stuff is going to happen with MageDB and Mageprojects.
Till next post (on perhaps another server),
Mark
Hi,
I started theming MageDB with the following goals in mind:
- clearly vissible where you hold your mouse regarding file/category lists
- easy and intuitive interface
- easy to use
- easy for the eyes
- color variation but not to much
- Works in all major browsers + ie 6 and 7
NOTE: the “There are no…” text is there just for me to see how that looks. In this case both those lines should be gone.
And the result of that is this:
Things i still have to do in the layout:
- Improve the login/password/go fields
- minor css fixes
- Make a file view, download view… and everything else i can think of.
The rough lines are done now. Right now it’s all just a mather of fine tuning before i can start on the administration panel. And then, once that’s done, MageDB is finally ready to get an release candidate release! And i hope i’m at that point by the end of next week.
Btw. sorry for the ugly downscale of the image above. WordPress seems to be a bit broken on my site. If i can’t get it fixed fast i will probably reinstall it.
That’s it for now,
Mark.
Hi,
first a list of the current requests per second all benchmarked on my personal pc:
PHPBB : 100 requests per second
paFileDB : 1200 requests per second
MageDB : 2000 requests per second
MageDB without MySQL : 2600 requests per second
Clean php file with only ‘hello world!’ : 3800 requests per second
Clean html file with only hello world : 6000 requests per second
Oke, now what is all of this? First look at the clean php and html ones. Clean html file means just 1 line of text and that’s able to get 6000 requests per second on my pc. That benchmark is quite useless for comparision. The interesting one is a clean php file with 3800 requests per second. That means that my pc can have 3800 requests per second MAX with php. The lighter MageDB is the more requests per second it can handle. What i’m doing right now in MageDB is caching every object i make in APC and retreive that one from the APC cache next time a visitor looks at MageDB. With this technique the requests per second shoot up from roughly 1400 to 1600 which is already quite impressive. now to get more requests per second i took a close look at one of the biggest request sucking piece: Dwoo. That one took 600 request with my last blogpost. In Dwoo i noticed i added a Compiler class while it wasn’t even needed. That one class sucked up ~150 requests per second. Disabling that one meand my 1600 went up to roughly 1750 requests per second. Then i had found a bug in Dwoo that caused a lot of stat calls and most of them with “no such file or directory’ so i fixed that one up which improved the requests per second by another rough 100 resulting in 1850 requests per seond. Add to that a cached category lookup system that fetches his category data from APC and doesn’t need to recalculate everything all the time which added yet another requests per second boost of 150 resulting in 2000 requests per second! that’s really fast!. Then i want to investigate a little to see the next big request sucker. That one was surprisingly MySQLi. It takes up 600 requests per second! So by now so much was cached that a query wasn’t even needed anymore so i disabled MySQLi in MageDB for a minute to see how fast it would be. And that was a major boost of 600 requests per second resulting in 2600 requests per second for MageDB. The big issue i have right now is that MySQLi doesn’t have to be included always when the requested data is in the cache but in other cases a few queries will have to be done. So i need to find a way to include MySQL when there is a need for MySQL. If that’s implemented and working then those 600 requests that MySQL takes will be wasted a lot less. Now i ofcourse can’t cache every single thing since a database in MageDB could contain thousands of files thus looking at a file will probably still be a query call but the very main page of MageDB is going to be extremely fast for PHP to parse and that will probably keep your host happy ^_^.
Please note that 2600 requests per second like at this moment for MageDB is extremely fast and is only possible in the most optimal condition. In reality it’s more likely that you get between 1500 and 2000 requests per second which is still 15 – 20 times faster then phpbb.
I also still have to make a caching abstraction to allow you to choose how you want to cache:
- MySQL
- File
- APC
- Memcached
where File based caching will probably be the default one. And in that case i will probably put as much information in one cache file as possible. Another possibility is File caching by default but as soon as the file is loaded in the memory it will be memcached for as long as possible and then just reloaded from the file once the memcached session has expired.
That’s it for now. More stuff will come probably later this week,
Mark.
I did a few size checks:
MageDB with Zend
MageDB without Zend
Zend
The results are yet again surprising to me.
MageDB with Zend is a freaking 20.0 MB
MageDB without Zend just is: 681.7 KB (note: this is WITH Dwoo! which takes up 495.4 KB of that 681.7 KB and that means MageDB itself (the core) is: 186.3 KB)
Zend alone is: 19.4 MB
Add to this the performance (in requests per second) loss i would have had if Zend was included and the size of the complete MageDB package.
That gives me enough reasons o just drop Zend.
So how am i going to replace Zend’s modules that i WAS using?
I where just 3 modules (that sucked up over 50 includes)..
- Db [ - Done - ]
Going to skip this all together, make a few functions to have nicely formed database arrays but that’s it. - Translate [ - Done - ]
Going to recreate it based on INI files or just a big PHP array. This is probably the hardest module to recreate out of the ones that i used - Registry [ - Done - ]
Going to recreate it - Autoload [ Not going to do before 1.0.0 ]
For now i won’t do anything with it. Dwoo is using it and that will stay but i won (yet) play with outoload for version 1.0.0 of MageDB
So now your all up to data again with the progress on MageDB. And i have some more work to do.
Cya,
Mark
Db update:
I’m not sure yet but i think i’m going to use the SplFixedArray for the Db. Banchmarks on the internet show that it’s a little faster then a normal array but twice as memory efficient. This does however make MageDB a PHP 5.3 or higher script! Stay tuned for more information about this Db part later this week as soon as i’ve done some tests with it.
Updates regarding “Done ” components + a bit more
For the Db component, i extended the MySQLi class (internal php class) and named it MageMySQLi. In there i implemented the fetchAssoc and fetchAll methods that you can also find in Zend_Db. Other then that nothing Db related (like query logs) is implemented. For now MageDB works again without any Zend components but with Zend LIKE components.
For the Translate component. I’m actually surprised of myself that i made that component in just roughly one hour. I made it static which means that “MageTranslate” (name of the static class) can be used anywhere throughout the code without any issues to make it global because static classes are per definition global. One thing i added that wasn’t even in the Zend_Translate module is a fallback language. For example. The default fully implemented language is going to be english for MageDB but if you add another language and use that language but one translation line is missing then it will use the fallback language which is set (by default but you can change that) to english.
Now for the registry component. That’s actually a lot like the Translate component. both are static thus global classes. The purpose of the MageRegistry is to make local variables accessible globally by putting them in a static class. You can see this as one big container where you put your stuff in. Your stuff alone without the container is hard to transport. When it’s in the container another route can be choosen and in this case it’s a open route to everywhere.
So that was one day of kicking Zend out of MageDB and replacing Zend’s components by self made small ones. This still leaves a few other components to be made:
- ACL component (for later MageDB version)
- Feed module for rss and atom feeds
- Log module for logging stuff in a database table
- Cache module for caching compiled templates
- Mail module for sending mails
- Compression module for compressing database backups
- And in time probably my own template engine
Btw. MageDB is right now faster then paFileDB with rougly 200 requests per second more for MageDB resulting in a total of 1400 requests per second! That is FAST!! compared to a lot of other scripts.
that was it for the edit,
Mark
Hey,
I did some major work on MageDB again. This time to make the code that i currently have more structured. And the results look nice.
For example the inclusion of sub pages on a page used to roughly take 40 or 50 lines of code (with all the if elseif elseif … else + checks + include lines) but right now that part is down to 16 lines with enters and handles 4 pages (view, download, post_comment and rate) this can be done in less lines but will become ugly or look strange.
Other things i did in MageDB was rechecking the input values if they where really safe. They where not thus i needed to fix that up. It’s now way shorter and a lot more strict.
For the rest i did performance testing of the current MageDB codebase. That is without the template engine (Dwoo) since i didn’t include that one yet. I came to very surprising results compared to the latest paFileDB (not downloadable because there site is offline and seems just dead). I had expected MageDB to run faster then paFileDB but sadly that’s not the case. In terms of requests per second (ab — Apache Banch) MageDB gets roughly 900 requests per second (lighttpd + php + APC module) and paFileDB gets roughly 1200 requests per second on the same setup! that’s roughly 33% FASTER then my MageDB script. But i do think that the current MageDB code-base is way more suited to heavy load then paFileDB was.
Anyway. that unpleasant surprise made me wonder what was taking up the resources so i installed XDebug and did some traces on MageDB and paFileDB. It turns out that MageDB had roughly 2x more function calls then paFileDB and is roughly 1.8x slower then paFileDB. Now what caused that?
Zend sadly is the source of the problems. I already found out that it’s including a shitload of classes (thus also files in zend’s case) and that alone makes everything run a bit slower. Then the parts of Zend that i use right now: Db (for mysql), Translate (to support multiple languages), Registry (nice way to have global variables in a clean way) and the Autoload for zend itself. Now my guess is that it’s including roughly 40 or even 50 files because 1 simple test with only 1 zend module being used resulted in 30!!!! classes (thus files) being included.
So what am i going to do about this? Well at some point in time i will just (again) drop Zend for being a time ans resource hog. I will only have to recreate the classes Registry and Locale and use just php’s mysqli without a wrapper. It’s not like i was planning to support anything other then mysql anyway although in the long run i would have liked sqlite and postgresql support as well. For right now i probably just continue where i left and keep zend in it for now.
The things i have to do now before i can start working on the admin panel:
- Making a very strict and fast category caching system since category calculations are heavy on php(recursive checks and thus a lot of loops) and on mysql(i’m grabbing all category data at once…).
- Including Dwoo as the template engine
And btw. My goal in requests per second on my hardware and the above named setup is to have 1000 requests/second on every page that MageDB has. Just for comparison, phpbb has just a pathetic 44.97 requests/second and that is with the above mentions setup! Note: just having APC installed is a rough x2 or even x3 speed improvement.
That’s it for the MageDB news,
Mark
Hi,
First: What is the biggest problem in html/css that we currently have?
Well, let one div be equal in height as some other div. When the height positions are absolute that isn’t an issue. When both can vary, lets say a menu and a content div, then it becomes a big nightmare for web developers. There are a lot of ways to solve that issue. Some say faux columns, some say tables and others use javascript grid library’s. All those solutions will just work fine but won’t fix the issue. The issue is ilustrated in the image below.
The image above is exactly what is possible today with divs. The menu div (in this case) can’t auto adjust to the height of the content div.
And this is what we want:
Note: the vertical text says:
div#menu
{
.....
stretch-with: “div#content”, height;
.....
}
Now my proposal would be to add a “stretch-with” property in css which allows you to say:
“this div (menu) should be equal in height as that (content) div”.
The properties within stretch-with would be: [element name] [how to stretch] [how much of it]
So that would result in: stretch-with: “div#content”, height, 100%;
Perhaps also a pixel value instead of percentages… not sure if that adds value to this idea?
I would say that 100% is default so no need to supply that so you get: stretch-with: “div#content”, height;
In normal text this would say: stretch this element to the same height as div#content.
Now how is this different from the “Advanced Layout Module” that is a working draft over at W3C?
Well they use ASCII to define the entire layout in css. That might be a little overkill and not even what you want. I certainly don’t want to specify my entire layout in ascii art. All you want in pritty much any case is to have some div be as high as another div. This proposal does just that and nothing more. Also this idea might be a lot easier for rendering engines to pick up because it’s a lot more simple then the Advanced Layout Module and it’s not making css much harder to understand or even make artwork from it.
Now all that needs to happen is the top rendering engines to implement this idea. Those are:
Trident (internet Explorer)
Gecko (Firefox) + a lot more gacko based browsers
Webkit (Safari) + a lot more webkit based browsers
Presto (Opera)
Making a Javascript implementation for this (just to test how it works) is probably extremely easy as well because it’s just not much to implement and not extremely complex.
Let me know what you think of this idea,
Mark.
Update: It’s “Template Layout Module” instead of “Advanced Layout Module”. Sorry for the confusion it might have caused. Not changing in the text above since i submitted it to a few places.
Hi,
Right now i’m about done with the details of a file in MageDB and how complex it’s going to be in the coding. It’s becomming quite heavy because i’ve decided to do all file related stuff in file.php or include files that do it.
For example. If you rate a file that is done by rate.php but done through file.php. Same for file downloads. they are done with download.php but done through file.php thus file.php gets extensive.
You can see this like sub pages of the file page like this:
file
- rate
- view (this is just the file and all it’s details and is what you see when you click on a file)
- download
- rating
- comments
By now you might wonder what the milestone is. Well, the file part, though not done yet, was the biggest issue till this moment. That part is roughly done in raw coding which mkes all the user parts roughly done in coding. And that means that i can start by making the admin part. Now don’t think that there is anything to show because there isn’t besided printed arrays. I’m not even including the template engine in magedb yet!
So again some nice progress in MageDB.
Till next post,
Mark.
Hi,
In the last few days, specially the last few hours, i’ve testes out some “new” technologies from the Zend Framework. I was already planning on using Zend for the DB an Cache and perhaps a few others but now i’ve discovered the features of: Zend_Regitry and Zend_Translate.
The Registry object is a smart way of accessing variables globally in a nice way (through the use of a static class). I was always wondering how i could get rig of global variables in php in some cases or adding extra getters/setters to classes in order to give them the data they need. Zend_Registry seems to be providing a nice new clean way for global variables.
The Translate object is really nice as well. That object allows me to make MageDB a multi-language script. I did a few tests with it and it seems to be working very nice. The language files where going to be gettext files but that seemed a bit annoying to make so i picked a ini based style.
Now for some other MageDB progress. I am currently working on building up the file view page. And just to give you an idea of how this was going under paFileDB:
They fetched the raw sql data in php and practicly dumped that to smarty where a loop was done to display it all where they manually looked up for every possible setting. That is all fine but the issue there was that it required if/else statements in the templates! and that’s something you want to avoid as much as possible just so that making a new theme is as easy as possible.
Now MageDB is doing it a bit different. In php all data is fetched, like in paFileDB, but i loop through all the data in PHP, filter/modify it all i want, make a nice array with all the new data and that array will be pushed in the template engine (Dwoo). Sadly this won’t prevent all if/else statements but it will prevent a lot from being needed in the templates because they are all already done in the php code. Things where if/else statements are needed are with the screenshots. I can’t give a array of marked up screenshots because that would be html inside php and that’s exactly the thing i try to prevent in MageDB by using a template engine.
All in all the progress isn’t going fast, but coming along quite nicely in this rate.
I will post some more progress sometime later this week.
Cya,
Mark
Hey,
Since paFileDB seems to be dead (see for youself) i got more interested in putting more attention to MageDB.
It’s not the first time that i spend a few hours on making MageDB possible but up until now it never was much more then some work on it before giving up again. So i’m doing things a bit different this time.
For starters i’m going to drop all promisses i made about previous MageDB versions. The one i’m making now is going to have an entirely new structure and this also means that (for now) the plugin based MageDB is off. that would take way to much time and is way to hard to “just” do. What i’m doing now is first getting the most importand parts to work. The pages and the categories. Both are working fine at this time. Next up are the:
- files
- download possibility
- login
- admin
keep in mind that admin is HUGE. that consists of:
- add/edit/delete files
- add/edit/delete categories
- add/edit/delete users
- settings for MageDB
- database backup and restore tool
- and probably some more
And once that’s done it’s time for user priviledges and making them work. That part is huge on it’s own. After that it’s:
- theming a default MageDB
- make a install script
- make a conversion script from paFileDB to MageDB
- make language files for multiple languages or the possibility to have it
Update: if you want to see the progress so far click here it will bring you to the MageDB todo list on O-Todo. I didn’t fill in everything because i will have my hands full with the parts that are in it now.
And a little bit more technical. With paFileDB a lot of checks (for example to show or hide the viewall link) was done in the template files. Back then when i saw it i didn’t know how things like that where supposed to go. Now i’m still not sure but i’m going to prepare all the data for html in the PHP scripts and send them to HTML to do as much in HTML in as little code as possible to keep it readable. if statements in HTML (and other template specific settings in HTML) make it needlesly hard to understand for persons that want to make there own theme.
About the default MageDB theme.. don’t expect it to be extremely pritty with a lot of AJAX in it. That stuff will come as well but probably not in the first stable release.
And once that’s done it’s time for a 0.1 or 0.5 release (beta or release candidate). This is all just to let you know how the progress is at this moment. Let me be clear about it that i do want to release MageDB (under GPLv2 or GPLv3) because of the simple reason that there is no decent file download script around now because the biggest and best one (paFileDB) died.
So stay tuned this time. The progress will go rapidly and something will be visual in the comming days.
Till next post,
Mark.
Hi,
Lets do the same order as the gnome release notes only with my opinion about them and of the items that deserve a little more attention.
Brasero
Brasero always seemed to be the burning tool to use under linux. Or the one most used. It didn’t made much sense to have nautilus-cd-burner (which has been removed in gnome 2.26) while most people preferred brasero. Brasero is also integrated in nautilus (go to
Brasero screenshot
Brasero in nautilus
Totem
This is a good example of a feature that might be required by some people but is useless for most. Quote from the release notes:
While GNOME’s Media Player already has the ability to display subtitles for a movie, this still required you to have the subtitle data available. As of GNOME 2.26, this restriction is gone. Using the new subtitle downloader plugin, the Media Player will automatically find subtitles for you.
I don’t understand why they bother to add in features like that (and remember they did add in youtube support in either gnome 2.22 or 2.24) that are pointless for most people. This should be just a plugin that you can download somewhere but not a new feature mentioned in the release notes.
Updated sound preferences for PulseAudio
Now this is an interesting one! PulseAudio is in Fedora since release 8 and ubuntu has it since 8.04 so it was about time that those volume controls where going to work with PulseAudio instead of against it (or so it seemed sometimes). Sadly the application that gnome posts in a screenshot is nowhere to be found on my ubuntu 9.04 Beta (fully updated) machine so i can’t really say more about it without seeing it for myself.
Multiple monitors
If you have just one monitor you probably don’t care about this but it’s something that was divided in the past. Ubuntu had it’s own application to get this. Fedora had one and there where a few others floating around. Far from an ideal situation. Now Gnome has updated his display program to support multiple screens. This was all possible with the xrandr command line tool but a graphical frontend it quite handy for things like this. It’s becoming a nice tool now and way more centralized then then it used to be.
Epiphany
This browser for (and by) Gnome looks clean but has a lot of potential. I will write a bigger article or perhaps a review about this one later. What they added here is Firefox’s “Awsome Bar“… it looks funny and seems to be running fast from what i’ve seen so far. It’s definitely a browser to check out and see if you like it.
Epiphany - Note the wrong render of the legend box. That's bad and ugly! (no issue in Firefox)
Overall Gnome 2.26 impression
With the previous 2 releases (2.22 and 2.24) i found the release notes weak and more useless stuff that was added then useful stuff. Back then it seemed (to me) that they added what was popular at the time. Google had just bought Youtube and they felt some need to implement that in Totem. This time they did also include stuff that strikes me as useless but the majority seems to be useful for everyday Gnome usage. This release was a good one, despite the additions that i rather didn’t see, for Gnome although not much changed visually. This seems to be the release i’ve been hoping for since roughly 2.20. A release where they finally fixed the things that needed fixing and add the things that are needed.
Next in 6 months: Gnome 2.28
There are already some ideas for the next Gnome version. At this moment only the Artwork section for the next gnome has been filled in and that looks promising. If you want to have a look at it click here.
I hope you liked this small review of interesting new and updated Gnome 2.26 features.
Till next time,
Mark.
Hi,
After hours of testing i finally found out how to get my microphone to work under ubuntu.
The thing that i had already working “out of the box” is that you could talk in your microphone and you would hear it come out of your speakers but somehow it wasn’t recording it when i tried to record the input from the microphone. So once i got it working i started writing this howto so that others can get a microphone (and skype) working as well. This howto should work in any linux distribution since it’s not ubuntu specific. It is gnome specific so i don’t know how well this works (if at all) in kde.
The first thing i did (and you should do as well) is open a console (ALT+F2 -> gnome-terminal or xterm).
Now type this:
[sourcecode]
alsamixer
[/sourcecode]
now you should see something like this:
My advise would be to just put all at max EXEPT for the values that contain anything like “boost”.. i put them up to test with and it didn’t really improve microphone quality or made it louder. It just made it sound horrible and it was even affecting the normal playback sound as well.
Now once this is done press TAB in that alse mixes stuff. You should now get the properties for “Capture” (seen at the top left corner in those few lines of text) devices:
I’m not sure if anything here helped getting it working but i turned all “boost” things off and the rest on. Feel free to tweak those settings a bit to see if they actually do something with the microphone.
Now, once you’ve done this, you “should” have your microphone setup currectly and it should just work. There are just a few more issues. When you start recording your microphone imput you most likely don’t hear anything when you play it back. That’s because the “Sound Capture” setting in gnome’s sound settings is set wrong.
So open the gnome sound settings: System -> Preferences -> Sound and you should see this:
The way to test if your microphone is actually working is by clicking on the “Test” button behind “Sound capture”. Press test and talk in your microphone. If you hear yourself with a slight delay from the speakers you have it working. If not try every option in the list (in the screenshot it’s on “ALSa – Advanced Linux Sound Architecture” between the “Sound capture:” and “test”. one of them should be working. Also note that there seems to be double values with exactly the same name but they do act differently! atleast that was the case for me.
Once you’ve done that and you found one that seems to be working (the right one for me was: “HDA Intel something…” which was in the list twice. the top one did it for me) then you can start recording your microphone if you want. Try it out in gnome-sound-recorder but i won’t go deeper in that stuff.
Oke, by now your microphone should be working and you can record your microphone input and it seems to be working fine. If that’s the case then you now install skype (i used this link: http://www.skype.com/go/getskype-linux-ubuntu-amd64 which should be the latest x64 version) Open skype and go to the “Sound Devices” tab in skype.
For me the Sound out and Ringing was just fine but the Sound in was wrong. To get that one good you have to (sadly) test every option in the Sound in list and “Make a test call”… say something and see if it gets out of your boxes after the second beep.
This is how i got it working.
Here are my settings from the volume control stuff in gnome incase you might be interested in those as well.
Note for the image above: i have no clue why the microphone icons have a cross in there. i could turn them off/on whatever i wanted but the setting didn’t seem to be saved and didn’t seem to mather for the microphone.
It should all be working fine now.
I hope this howto has been helpfull for you. If you found another solution or have something to add to this feel free to post so in the comments.
Good luck,
Mark
Hey,
I was playing around with gnome and openbox (and compiz) and to my surprise i didn’t had any decorations in gnome anymore when i switched back to just gnome (no openbox nor compiz). I did a search on google to try and find the fix but sadly there wasn’t any good one. People with similar problems got the suggestion to add metacity in the gnome-session tool which should also work but isn’t the solution because it simply isn’t in there when everything is working and when you didn’t screw with other windows managers yet.
So i did a search on my other pc where it was all working fine to see where metacity really has to be enabled. It turns out that you have to be in gconf to do that!
But not on this gconf location: “/desktop/gnome/applications/window_manager” like what was suggested in ubuntu’s forums. You have to be in this location: “/desktop/gnome/session/required_components/windowmanager” illustrated by the screenshot below.
And make sure the key (selected row in the image): “windowmanager” is set to “metacity“.
You can access that same tool by pressing: ALT + F2 then type in: “gconf-editor“.
If you don’t have that tool or don’t know how to get it you can insert the metacity value directly with this line:
“gconftool-2 -s -t string /desktop/gnome/session/required_components/windowmanager metacity”
You can just enter that line in the run box (again by pressing ALT + F2).
Also note that if you encounter a bug like this, no decorations while you had them, and you didn’t edited files yourself but just installed and removed packages that your distribution provides then it’s a bug in those packages and should be reported. So if it’s not reported please do so to help your distribution get better.
I hope this helped anyone with a similar issue,
Mark.
Hey,
I searched way to long for this.
I found forums where stupid users reply with “why would you want to do this”…
Just freaking respond to the question. Some users just don’t respond on questions.
Now i found the solution and will post it here. Mainly so i know where to look next time but also for anyone that’s interested.
Here is how i did it:
1. Open Internet Options (start (orb) -> Internet Options (in the search field)
2. Go to the “Security” tab
3. Click “Custom level…”
4. Now you get the “Security Settings – Internet Zone” dialog. Scroll down till you see: “Launching applications and unsafe files (not secure)” and click on “Enable”
5. Click ok everywhere and your done.
Note that doing what i described in the above steps (illustrated in the screenshot) will work for and browser! Those “internet options” are just for files downloaded! they don’t have anything to do with Internet Explorer or Firefox or another browser thus applying this will solve it everywhere (for your user account only!)
That’s it,
Good luck
Edit: a normal full answer on the subject is also provided here
Hey,
After yesterday when i installed WordPress 2.7 i was interested by how the performance was going to be. So i ran a small benchmark tool called: AB (Apache Benchmark) and tested it locally.
I tested it on my notebook (Acer Aspire 5630, Core 2 duo T5200 1.6 Ghz and 1 gig memory.
The OS i tested it on was Fedora 10.
Changes i made:
- Enabled url rewriting in apache
- Turned on permalinks in WordPress
I did not install any other modules in WordPress. All just the default stuff.
Everything else is just the default fedora install for:
- Apache
- MySQL
- PHP
with no settings changed.
Now for the results:
Server Software: Apache/2.2.10
Server Hostname: localhost
Server Port: 80
Document Path: /
Document Length: 5081 bytes
Concurrency Level: 5
Time taken for tests: 86.132 seconds
Complete requests: 1000
Failed requests: 0
Write errors: 0
Total transferred: 5319000 bytes
HTML transferred: 5081000 bytes
Requests per second: 11.61 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 430.658 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 86.132 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate: 60.31 [Kbytes/sec] received
Connection Times (ms)
min mean[+/-sd] median max
Connect: 0 0 3.5 0 67
Processing: 194 430 69.2 432 688
Waiting: 181 418 69.3 419 688
Total: 194 430 69.5 432 689
Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
50% 432
66% 459
75% 477
80% 490
90% 517
95% 543
98% 569
99% 586
100% 689 (longest request)
Those results are.. kinda slow! With this new WordPress you can have (on my notebook hardware) just 11 requests per second. If you have a site that has 11 requests per second you have a populair site and your probably on your own dedi/colo server but if you are on a shared host this can be to heavy to run! In the old days when i had lame shared hosting a simple topsite script an a forum (Invision Power board) where banned to use because it took to much resources… this wordpress is surely heavier then those 2 scripts about 6 or 7 years ago!
I also looked at the CPU usage when running the benchmark. it was at 100% !!
WordPress is a nice user friendly script but they need to do something about there resource usage and for the next version get rid of the php 4 support.
I might run some more benchmarks later this month along with some profiling and how the WP-Super-Cache module can change things.
For now the conclusion is that WordPress 2.7 is resource hungry and probably not a good idea to run on a shared host I must admit that i’m running it on a shared host on mageprojects (where you read this now) and i haven’t got an angry mail yet from my host.. but then again.. i get just a few visits in here.
That’s it for now,
Mark
Hey,
WordPress 2.7 has a nice new feature to update plugins or even the core (wordpress) itself to a new/updated version.
I was always wondering how i could make a feature that can update a script without having the user go to the ftp and go through all steps. WordPress 2.7 found a nice way to do this. They simply ask for the FTP host, username and password and can then simply update it all with one click.
I’m definitely going to use that feature in the next php script that i’m gonna make. perhaps MageDB (again) along with the following interesting features of wordpress:
- Version checking
- Sortable admin modules (heavy javascript work) (also the “Screen Options”)
- Plugins (perhaps even there structure)
And i could go on with more nice features.
Those are just some ideas for new, yet to make, scripts.
Mark.
Hey,
I recently tried to play a ASF stream under linux.
I first tried it the most obvious way for fedora users with a default installation is to install the livna repository (now merged in rpmfusion) and install the gstreamer bad and ugly plugins.
The Fedora version i used was: Fedora 10 x64 fully updated.
The Totem way (total failure)
So after the installation i tried to play the stream. At first everything seems to be fine… till after a few seconds. Totem starts buffering, plays a bit, freezes the image and buffers a bit, plays a bit, freezes the image and buffers a bit and so on. It plays about 2 seconds then freezes and buffers before playing for another 2 seconds…. you get the point.
Totem’s buffering is absolutely horrible! i tried changing various buffer settings in gconf and changed the connection setting in the totem options. Totem simply seems to ignore any changes. I just can’t get it working in Totem.
Because totem is so useless in buffering (kinda important for a video player!) i say that that player is just a complete waste of time for the gnome developers and a shame they can’t even properly fix buffering while they do add in useless features like youtube support. Without proper buffering that feature is as useless as totem is right now. To totem devs: get totem’s buffering fixed or remove it completely
The Xine way (total failure)
I haven’t tried a lot in xine to get this working but installing it on fedora and trying to play a asf stream with it is simply not working. Perhaps i missed somehing obvious. Just not working here.
The VLC way (failure)
VLC is starting the same as Totem. It shows some video. After exactly 10 seconds it keeps playing (or that’s what the time counter says) it does not play any sound or video. Kinda sad.. I would’ve expected VLC to just work. I didn’t investigate this problem further but i’m sure it can be fixed.
The mplayer way (working)
Finally a player that works. Or not really. At first it didn’t work at all. it throw 5 lines on the console about a million times and i couldn’t figure out why it was happening. After i asked for some help on the #mplayer channel (on irc in freenode.net) it turned out that the stream i was trying to play demands a player that sends a “valid” user-agent string. It got fixed (in my case) by adding this line to the mplayer config file:
echo user-agent=WMPlayer/10.0.0.4058 >> ~/.mplayer/config
The only bad thing is that it took me about 2 hours to find that out. Mplayer wasn’t exactly throwing any errors that indicated anything of a missing or wrong user agent.
So that’s how i got a asf stream working under linux. It took me a few hours but it’s working just fine now under mplayer.
I hope this helped anyone with a simulair issue.
Hey,
I was getting tons of spam on this blog lately.
Now i absolutely hate spam so i updated my blog to the latest wordpress version along with askimet protection. This blog should be about as spam proof as it can get without making it harder to make a comment.
Good luck,
Mark
You probably won’t guess what’s it gonna be right?
Stay tuned because it will come online later today!
And it’s all gonna be FREE!
This is the current way of package management with distributions:
- RPM
- DEB
- ebuild
and then some parts of deb’s or rpm’s are even sub devided in other distributions:
RPM
- PClinuxOS
- Mandriva
- Fedora
- And a ton others
DEB
- Ubuntu
- Sabyaon (Sorry, not a deb using system. Thanx, Patrick)
- Debian
- Again a ton others
This on it’s own isn’t a problem. The problem is that nearly each distribution is so much different that
the same package type (rpm) form fedora won’t work on mandriva or the opposite. And it’s the same case with the deb
based distributions. What you can conclude from that is that there is a huge ammount of people making packages
for distributions but that work das to be done a dozen times to get it working on atleast all the big
distributions (try to install the KDE4 packages from fedora on Ubuntu) which is just so extremely time
consuming and not effectively done at all! So that all has to change and that idea is comming now.
In order to change this all there needs to be one single big package database that works on all the
linux distributions. One compiling cluster and one management system for them. Now imagine that there
would be one place to do all that! that would solve the issue of not having a generic package type.
Now lets dig in this a little deeper. Imagine that you only would have to supply the following information
when submitting a new package for a certain distribution:
- Where files need to be saved
- What patched need to be applied
- Does there need to be an icon anywhere (desktop/menu)
- And some generic package information
Then let the cluster compile it and search for files it provides/requires and which ones need to go in the %files
directive (in rpm atleast) then you don’t have to worry about it anymore and making new packages would go a lot
faster if the compile cluster could determine those things. For that it also needs to be ble to determine the code
it’s written in, what includes are being used and a ton of other things to check but that’s all possible. Extremely
hard but possible to make and would probably require years before it’s complete. Now the best thing would be that
if a package has been added to the database that any other participating distribution in that database can also use
that same package without making any modifications. Oke.. it (should have) the ability to include it’s own patches
or things like that.. Example: If you would make a K3B package for a EU based distribution you can just include the
mp3 support (and some other things) but if you make it for an USA based dist those things will likely need to be
turned off because of possible patent lawsuits. But in general the idea is that you have one place for all of it
and any dist can use it once it has been made once!
Now for this to happen a few other things need to happen first.
- All distribution (that participate) need to agree on the locations where they place files (libraries, images etc.)
- They all need to make deals on the standards they want and don’t want to use
- NO bypasses to fix something that another dist doesn’t have yet.. if it means it could break packages
- And i’m sure there is a LOT more
This will also have a few downsides for dists that participate.. they will all have to make the same changes in order
to stay compatible with each other so that all those packages can still be used on all dists but i’m sure that
it’s something that the dist people can work out. There will also be dists that will likely refuse to join because
they simply disagree with some of the choises or whatever reason.. but i expect that to be just a handfull of
dists (mostly the paid ones i guess).
Hey,
Gnome 2.22 introduced quite a few new features and not all of them are working nicely.
The automatic adjusting of the brightness in Gnome 2.22 is a good example of a horrible feature. The idea is good but it simply isn’t working out, at least on my notebook, so therefore it’s best to just turn it off.
In the “Power Management Settings” is a option to turn it off, or that’s what you would think judging the name. The setting is: “Dim display when idle”. Turning that off won’t help a bit. might be a bug, might be intentional, but it’s not working.
The real trick to turn this setting off is in the gconf settings. In your distribution install the package: “gconf-editor” (in fedora it’s with “yum -y install gconf-editor”).
Now press ALT+F2 and type: gconf-editor. The editor will popup. Now go to this location: /apps/gnome-power-manager/backlight/enable and you should see something like this:
Uncheck the “enable” and your done. No more irritating backlight changes.
Hope that helped for you,
Mark.