The refresh of the new 11.6″ and 13.3″ Macbook Air last July 2011 has introduced more powerful Intel Core i5 and Core i7 processors into the line-up. I got the 4GB RAM, 128GB SSD Core i5 Macbook Air 11.6″ to test out. See full review after the jump.
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I completely forgot that my Philippine Passport will expire in August 2011. I was meaning to renew in back in March after my last travel in Singapore. If not for Nokia’s invitation to fly to SG again, I would have completely forgotten it.
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There was a story in the Guardian UK that claims the Philippine’s is becoming like China in web censorship and I agreed to do an interview for an article as a rebuttal saying that the Philippines is among the most liberal in terms of general internet activity and social media and that there has been no cases of the government using its power & influence to pressure sites like YouTube, Facebook and the likes to its advantage.
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The Google AdSense Team announced yesterday that AdSense for Feeds is now live and rolling. Good news to those who have tons of feed readers as they can monetize that traffic too.
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With about $1 billion in annual revenues, the Philippines is tied at No. 8 with Canada and Taiwan for the largest revenues from pornography in 2006. This is according to the Internet Pornography Statistics report by Jerry Ropelato of Top Ten Reviews. For a poor 3rd 2nd world country, that’s something, huh?
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Been receiving emails from readers and fellow bloggers about the alleged hacking of 3 government agency websites, namely the DOJ, PNP-CIDG and ITECC. Investigations were being done by PLDT (or Infocom, the webhost), the DOJ and the management of Enchanted Kingdom. What would have seemed like a hack was actually a server glitch.
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[ Digg this! ] I was just chatting with Andrew of Alleba over YM while helping him deal with his blog being dugg.
So here lies the problem:
His sites are hosted on DreamHost, one of the more popular hosting providers around. When he found out that his post way back in September about creating a Web 2.0 logo Photoshop tutorial got dugg and was about to hit the frontpage, he immediately informed DH about it and they in fact responded that they will monitor the site’s activity. Fast forward this evening, the post went to the front page of Digg getting around 1,000 diggs at the moment and tons and tons of traffic. The tragic thing was, despite the warning, his site still went down.
Ok, so done is done, DH isn’t still answering his cry for help. What to do? What to do?
Here are some steps, assuming you are running on a database driven WordPress blog, I thought would help solve the problem:
- Login to your Control Panel and disable the dugg page. You can do this by renaming the file or the post slug. If you can’t do that, try disabling read permissions to the page or the folder/directory it is on. This will give you some time to prepare for the switch to a static HTML version. Disabling the page will prevent your site from going down if the exponential flow of traffic from Digg still continues.
- Create a flat HTML file out of your dugg page. You can do a quick Save As HTML in your browser if you want the shortcut version (get a copy of it from DuggMirror when needed). Name it accordingly and upload it to your site. If you can’t access your FTP when your site is down,you can use another existing site you own, hosted somewhere else.
- In your .htaccess, create a rewrite rule to redirect the old URL to the new one. The format looks like this: RedirectMatch oldURL newURL. Re-enable the orginal page or protected folder. The clicks from Digg should be properly re-directed to the static HTML version. The server should be able to handle this traffic now (note: Apache can handle a thousand times more requests than mySQL).
- But what if you can’t do anything since your site is down — no admin panel, no ftp, no nothing? What you can do is re-point your domain to a new account or a new server. This will offload the traffic from your existing account as all they will get is page not found.
- Create a new account on another server. (Assuming you have access to one or have a friend who can share his hosting account with you.) Re-point the domain to that new server by changing the nameservers.
- Create a single HTML file with the exact copy of the Dugg page. Edit your .htaccess so that all incoming traffic is redirected to this page.
- Since majority of Digg’s traffic is from the US, domain re-propagation on that side of the Internet should be fast. My experience is within 5 minutes. Traffic should be trickling in shortly.
- Once that’s done, your original account should be free from the overload. You can go back and do bullet #1 and re-point the domain again.
Hope this helps.
This one suggestion is for everyone and I can’t stop repeating this : Always, always notify your hosting provider if you are expecting a huge volume of traffic on your account. They could suspend your account to prevent the rest of the sites on the shared server from going down as well (preventive measures). You provider will also be able to prepare for this and maybe even help you along the way.
Unless you’re on a dedicated server hosting your own single domain account, don’t always blame your provider that your site went down most of the day and you lost tons of traffic because you didn’t inform them ahead of time. Even gargantuan web hosts like DreamHosts and Media Temple are prone to Digg/Slashdot effects. Yup, despite MT’s claim that their grid server (gs) is impervious to such tsunamis, I personally witnessed one blog hosted by MT suffer from this.
In the last two weeks, I saw two of our servers being pounded to death because of Boingboing and just early today, Digg (You guys know who you are. *hehe*). On a shared hosting environment, this could be disastrous.
What could happen?
- Your site would crawl due to massive number of visitors in a short span of time.
- If you’re running on a database driven-site/blog like WordPress, mySQL might max out and crash.
- You’d ran out of bandwidth and get suspended by your web host.
What you need to do to prepare for this?
- Inform your web host *before*, NOT during or after you got dugg or slashdot. Remember that in a shared hosting environment, all other sites hosted on the same server will suffer the same fate.
- If you have WordPress, you may want to install the wp-cache plugin. It can greatly reduce server load.
- If you can, convert the page to HTML or static page so mySQL won’t choke and Apache can take the extra load or user connections.
- If you have lots of images or downloadables, host them elsewhere temporarily, like Flickr or PutFile, to reduce bandwidth consumption and file requests.
Lastly, prepare for some huge bills from your webhost afterwards. People usually think being dugg or slashdot could translate to more earnings. What they forgot to take into account that the bandwidth consumed in that short duration could practically put a hole in their pockets.
Got an email from Jeff Veen announcing the acquisition of MeasureMap by Google:
As an early user of Measure Map, I want to share some important news with you.
Since its inception, my colleagues and I have seen tremendous potential for Measure Map to influence how people blog, and how they understand participation on the Web. We have always expected it to be big, and as such, our desire was to give Measure Map its start and then send it out into the world to grow and evolve into a strong, meaningful application.
Through the dedication of a fantastic team, along with your tremendous support in the form of feedback, feature requests, and overwhelmingly positive comments, have built a product that is fundamentally different from every other analytics application available today. We’re both grateful and proud.
So I said there was news, and here it is: I’m writing you to announce that Measure Map has been acquired by Google, effective today. For the near term, you will see no difference in its operations. In the not so distant future, you can expect great things from this acquisition. We couldn’t be happier to find such an ideal home for Measure Map, and are thrilled at the possibilities.
While this is a milestone for all of us at Adaptive Path, this sale does not affect how we operate, nor will it alter the structure of the Adaptive Path organization. Adaptive Path is still here, stronger than ever, and it will be for a long time to come. Above all, we remain committed to the principle that superior user experience inspires innovation and creates business advantage.
Thank you again for your input, your time, and your support of Measure Map. Should you have any questions or comments about any of this, please do not hesitate to contact me.
For more information, please see our post on the Google Blog:
[ http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/02/here-comes-measure-map.html ]
Sincerely,
Jeffrey Veen and the Measure Map and Adaptive Path teams
Google already has Analytics but it’s too bulky and unweildy for a regular guy. MeasureMap is something more blogger-friendly and blog-relevant. I was just a bit disappointed with uptimes as it seems not able to take on the load even while on alpha.
With Google taking charge of MeasureMap, expect better scalability and more blogaholic features.
Ever since I had that hacking incident with my Paypal and GMail account, I’ve received lots of emails on how to be more secure with online accounts and doing transactions (the incident was published in the Inquirer). So when I sat down with the reps from Visa, it was also the topic at the lunch table, among other things.
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