26th Nov 2009

PMI

Started studying at one of the PMI offices to get a PMP. Looks very interesting and promising so far. More feedback later.

Posted by Posted by Alexander Alfimov under Filed under Project Management Comments No Comments »

30th Sep 2009

(mt) — mediatemple.net, our new hosting provider

It wasn’t easy, but we’ve finally found good hosting provider. After trying several companies (including godaddy.com and minivds.com we’ve found (mt). Mediatemple.net beats all of the companies we ever tried working with. Most of the times you don’t even need to create a ticket request, they have all of the information you may ever need in their knowledge base or forums (available for registered users only). I must also admit their website beauty, forethought and professionalism.

Note: This is not an advertisement or a referral link post. I’m just sharing my own experience of dealing with the company which has Sony and VW among its clients.

Posted by Posted by Alexander Alfimov under Filed under Other Comments No Comments »

18th Mar 2009

Free SSCC barcodes generation service launched!

Have you ever tried to search for free SSCC (UCC/EAN-128) barcodes generation services or programs? If yes - you should know there were NO free programs to create SSCC-18, postal code barcodes or shop code barcodes.

We’re happy to announce beta version of the completely free SSCC barcodes generation service. It’s very easy to use, just call it using URL like this:

http://custompcsoftware.com/sscc/sscc.php?sscc=[SYMBOL]&ai=[AI]

where SYMBOL is the SSCC code itself, AI is an application identifier (see here for full list).

Examples
1. Create SSCC-18 barcode:

http://custompcsoftware.com/sscc/sscc.php?sscc=00112233445566778899

2. Create ship to postal code barcode:

http://custompcsoftware.com/sscc/sscc.php?sscc=54720&ai=420

Contact us by leaving a comment here if you need to integrate this into your application (no matter what programming language it’s written on).

Posted by Posted by Alexander Alfimov under Filed under Barcodes, CMS, Other, Publishing Comments No Comments »

16th Mar 2009

Publishing-related software. What tool can make you happier?

Hi! I’m just wondering if there is a tool you’d like to have for free or at little cost like UPC validator, ISBN10 to ISBN13 converter, bar code generator (e.g. SSCC-18)? Leave a comment - there is a big chance you’ll get your tool. For free.

Posted by Posted by Alexander Alfimov under Filed under Other, Publishing Comments 1 Comment »

10th Mar 2009

Joomla vs Drupal performance tests: new winner

Recently we tested latest versions of Joomla and Drupal. Results (see below) are very… very interesting.

1. Target systems
Joomla 1.5.9 (native SEF, native settings)
Drupal 6.10 (native SEF, native settings)

2. Hardware
Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU E8200 @ 2.66GHz, 4GB RAM

3. Software
Linux 2.6.27.12-78.2.8.fc9.x86_64 SMP
Apache Version 2.2.9
PHP Version 5.2.6 (mod_php)
MySQL Version 5.0.51a

4. Methodology

Localhost Apache Benchmark (ab) queries, 10 000 times with concurrency level of 5.

The target page is single article.

5. Results.

Drupal (caching = off):

Time taken for tests: 369.477 seconds
Requests per second: 27.07 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 184.738 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 36.948 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)

Drupal (caching = on):

Time taken for tests: 48.988 seconds
Requests per second: 204.13 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 24.494 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 4.899 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)

Joomla (caching = off):

Time taken for tests: 522.661 seconds
Requests per second: 19.13 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 261.331 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 52.266 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)

Joomla (caching = on):

Time taken for tests: 390.130 seconds
Requests per second: 25.63 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 195.065 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 39.013 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)

6. Summary.

Non-cached Drupal 1.4 times faster than Non-cached Joomla.
Cached Drupal 8 times faster than cached Joomla.

Turning on cache speeds up Drupal for 7.7 times.
Turning on cache speeds up Joomla for 1.3 times.

Drupal wins?

Posted by Posted by Alexander Alfimov under Filed under CMS, Drupal, Joomla Comments No Comments »

10th Jun 2008

Free online batch UPC validator

I have created batch ISBN to ISBN13 converter some time ago. Here is another useful tool — online batch UPC validator. Please leave bug reports and thanks (if any :) ) in comments.

Posted by Posted by Alexander Alfimov under Filed under Other, Projects Comments 6 Comments »

12th May 2008

Открыта вакансия PHP-разработчика

Компании срочно требуются PHP-разработчики. Основные требования:

  1. Опыт работы в веб-программировании не менее двух лет
  2. Возраст не младше 21 года
  3. Знание ООП и отличий между PHP 4.x и PHP 5.x
  4. Желательно проживание в г. Харькове или г. Сумы

Подробности можно узнать, оставив комментарии к этому сообщению либо по ICQ: 142806591

Posted by Posted by Alexander Alfimov under Filed under Other, PHP Comments No Comments »

30th Mar 2008

MySQL tip: why are my joins so slow?

Never! Never join tables on fields with different types. Say, you have one table with `zip` varchar(5) and another with `zip` int(5). As a result of …left join … on a.zip=b.zip you will get perfomance loss up to 1000 times.

Posted by Posted by Alexander Alfimov under Filed under MySQL Comments No Comments »

02nd Mar 2008

PHP 4.x annoying bug related to $this keyword

Did you know PHP 4.x cannot take reference from $this? So, code below won’t work:

$reference = &$this;

It took me about 30 minutes to figure out what exactly was wrong with my code. So, I hope this post will help somebody else to avoid the problem.

What I did to fix it. Just added another property named “reference” to class and initialized it right after creating class instance. If anybody knows another way - please let me know.

Thank you.

Posted by Posted by Alexander Alfimov under Filed under PHP Comments No Comments »

10th Nov 2007

Drupal, Wordpress and Joomla!: performance tests.

Hi!

Today I’d like to share some interesting results of performance tests for 3 most popular CMS/Blog systems: Drupal, Joomla! and WordPress.

Tests were done on dev debian machine using Apache ab utility.

MySQL settings:

| join_buffer_size | 131072 |
| key_buffer_size | 16777216 |
| key_cache_age_threshold | 300 |
| key_cache_block_size | 1024 |
| key_cache_division_limit | 100 |

| query_alloc_block_size | 8192 |
| query_cache_limit | 1048576 |
| query_cache_min_res_unit | 4096 |
| query_cache_size | 16777216 |
| query_cache_type | ON |
| query_cache_wlock_invalidate | OFF |

Apache settings:

<IfModule prefork.c>
StartServers 5
MinSpareServers 5
MaxSpareServers 10
MaxClients 20
MaxRequestsPerChild 0
</IfModule>

All systems have about 20,000 articles and 200+ links on page.

Versions: drupal 5.1, wordpress 2.2, joomla! 1.0.12

Results for ab -n 200 -c 4:

drupal-sef-no-aliases:
Requests per second: 2.43 [#/sec] (mean)

drupal-sef-20000-aliases:
Requests per second: 1.21 [#/sec] (mean)

joomla1-no-sef:
Requests per second: 2.75 [#/sec] (mean)

joomla1-patched-opensef:
Requests per second: 1.87 [#/sec] (mean)

wordpress-numeric-permalinks:
Requests per second: 0.65 [#/sec] (mean)

wordpress-date-name-permalinks:
Requests per second: 0.64 [#/sec] (mean)

Larger number means better performance. Joomla rocks?

Posted by Posted by Alexander Alfimov under Filed under CMS, Joomla, MySQL, PHP Comments 4 Comments »

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