manalang

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  manalang 12:06:52 pm on December 3, 2003 | Comments | # |
  Tags: lamp

  When I was hosting this site on my own server at home, I had mod_gzip and mod_deflate installed. But since I switched to a 3rd party host (modhost — great host by the way… cheap too!) I no longer had the ability to compress my HTML before it went out to a user’s browser.

  By the way, for those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about, compressing your pages before it streams to the browser can increase the speed of your page load time for users on slower connections. The size of an HTML page can go down quite a bit — this page went from around 30kb to ~7kb after it’s been compressed.

  Without mod_gzip or mod_deflate, what’s one to do? Well, luckily, my pages are written in PHP. PHP has a function (ob_gzhandler) that will compress your page for you. The nice thing about ob_gzhandler is that it first determines what type of content encoding the browser will accept (”gzip”, “deflate”, or none at all) and will return it’s output accordingly. So, by enabling this, all browsers are still supported. Below is an example of how this works:

  This should be a compressed page.

   

• manalang 09:01:37 am on November 21, 2003 | Comments | # |
  Tags: lamp

  Is Microsoft Linux in the Wind? An interesting article in Yahoo! today regarding some speculation around a Microsoft version of Linux.

  Speculation that Microsoft might build a flavor of Linux into Windows Server 2003 has been rife since May, when the company said it was licensing the Unix source code and patent from the SCO Group.

   

• manalang 10:35:19 am on October 8, 2003 | Comments | # |
  Tags: lamp

  I settled in with the penguin several months ago when I decided to put up this Red Hat webserver. However, this webserver is just that, a server. I don’t use it as a desktop… it’s strictly an HTTP server. I’ve been itching for a different operating system for a while now. Currently, I run Windows 2000 and XP Pro at work and Windows XP Pro at home. I’m tired of Windows. Years ago, I used to have a Mac (LC II). I loved it, until it was obselete. Then after college, I moved to OS2 with Windows emulation (yeah, the company I was working for just didn’t get it… I remember a paper memo the CIO sent out stating that the “Internet was a passing fad” and that it was not going to be “an important technology in business”). Then after a few years, I was living in a Microsoft world. It was cool for a while. But now, I’m itching for something more.

  So, since I don’t have any other machines to play around with and don’t care to pump money into Apple for one of thier spiffy looking Macs, I’ve decided to take the poor man’s approach to making a “Switch”… I decided to take the Knoppix route.

  Knoppix is a Linux distrubution that’s bootable from a CD-ROM. All you have to do is download the ISO image from their website, burn it to a CD, then boot your machine from that CD. The amazing thing is it boots faster than Windows 2000 on my laptop. Most of the software I need is already installed and configured… even Wi-Fi support works the first time I turned it on! And if you’re itching to add other apps or change the config a bit, you can store your configuration onto another device like a compact flash card (which I already happen to have for my laptop).

  This is definitely the poor man’s approach to making a switch, but the nice part is I don’t have to dump $2,500 USD for a 15″ PowerBook and have to regret it later when it’s obselete. Computers are like cars. They depreciate the minute they come of that showroom floor.