Technical stuff » News

Youtube now integrates your Google-managed account automatically

Georgiana — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 13:11:13 +0000

After searching on Google, even if not logged into YouTube, now you get in directly with the Google-managed account that you are using. Finally!

E-Commerce Industry Infographic

Georgiana — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 08:40:46 +0000

Great informative infographic on the e-commerce industry.

Unfortunately Romania is in the list of the least growing countries. We should fix that!

Infographic by – Conversion Optimization Company Invesp

Review of the digital advertising ecosystem

Georgiana — Mon, 17 Jan 2011 09:13:56 +0000

A great presentation from Scott Brinker.

Digital Advertising Ecosystem 2010

Premature Optimization with Ilia Alshanetsky @ Dutch PHP Conference | Notes

Georgiana — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 11:33:21 +0000

-> demonstrate the user concept with an imperfect solution that does the job, optimize along the way
-> tune the right portions of the application, not over-engineer from the very beginning
—> scale the scope to the nature of the problem

-> simplify
—> less code does not mean that it’s faster
—> PHP doubled the # of LOC in a few years but it’s faster, not slower

-> hardware [HW]
—> since it’s cheaper, maybe throwing HW at it this might get it faster & buy you time to find the solution to the problem
—> SW development time to optimize might be more expensive
—> CPU bottlenecks & RAM issues are easier to solve lately
—> drives, the well-known bottleneck, have also received SSD [measurements show it's a lot better]

-> HW caveat
—> might only temporarily solve issues
—> DB saturation
—> non-scalable code [this is NOT the same as high-performing code]
—> network bottlenecks [latency]
—> extremely low # of sessions per server [Smarty: 50 reqs/sec]

-> optimization
—> start by trying to make the code faster without modifying a LOC [this way you avoid introducing new bugs & QA cycle, easier deployment]

-> how PHP works in 30 secs
—> each require/include triggers compile+execute
—> compilation is expensive
—> opcode cache [if the file is not changed, you get it from the cache]
—> APC vs Zend’s solution vs X-Cache

-> in-memory cache
—> do the PHP sessions in memcache instead of filesystem

-> ways of caching data
—> complete page [caching proxy, e.g. Squid; pre-generate; on-demand]
—> cache the parts that are really slowing down the page [example using memcache for SQL results caching]
—> partial caching of code [example using memcache for results of a function call; cache TTL of 1h]

-> output buffering
—> Apache’s SendBufferSize should be the same as PageSize
—> tcp_wmem | affects everything on tcp-ip
—> tcp_mem |

-> use profiling to understand the real bottleneck in the code, without the “educated assumptions”
—> Xdebug & XHProf [last one comes from Facebook]
—> Kcachegrind

-> code that generates notices / errors is slowed down by them, because resources are allocated for them, even if you don’t see them

IE6 no more

Georgiana — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 18:21:11 +0000

When people unite in order to achieve a goal, things are possible. IE6 is eating up our development time much more than it should. Moreover, it’s counter productive to keep a website’s functionality list short just because less than 20% of its users are using ancient browser.

Let’s support the IE6 no more initiative by including code like this on our websites:

Ubuntu 9.04 (codenamed Jaunty Jackalope) announced

Georgiana — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 09:49:45 +0000

Tomorrow a new Ubuntu version will be released, 9.04. From the announced features, the ones I like most is the shipment of OpenOffice 3 (finally!) and a lot of feature enhancements to improve the user experience. The release nots are here.

Wayback Machine data center storing 85 billion web pages since 1996

Georgiana — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 21:16:01 +0000

ComputerWorld article.

Oh boy, make sure you write maintenable code

Georgiana — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 14:08:24 +0000

It’s a nice story, just never ever do this.

Form submit from JavaScript

Georgiana — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 13:50:52 +0000

Be careful: if you want to submit a form from Javascript using something like

this.form.submit();

document.forms[ myFormName ].submit();

and it gives you a nasty error like

submit is not a function

don’t despair, just:

look at the HTML source code:
change the name of the button to something else, like:

That’s all!

Now the explanation: the browser confuses your submit(); call with the button object, which has no such action.

The browser acted just like you were explicitly calling

button = document.getElementById( 'submit' );
button.submit();

Yahoo announces to anonymize data after 90 days

Georgiana — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 18:39:53 +0000

Yahoo! annnounces that all data collected will be anonymized after 3 months, from current 13 months. This is one of the first successful hits to Google, which “needs” data for 9 months, after cutting the previous period in two this September.

In our world of customized online services, responsible use of data is critical to establishing and maintaining user trust. [...] We know that our users expect relevant and compelling content and advertising when they visit Yahoo!, but they also want assurances that we are focused on protecting their privacy.

Anne Toth, Vice President of Policy and Head of Privacy.

It is mandatory that such companies respect our right to browse the internet as anonymous as possible, while using their services. There are better (but definitely more expensive) methods out there to make search results better.