CustomPCSoftware.com

PMI

Alexander Alfimov — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 22:34:28 +0000

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

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

Alexander Alfimov — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 10:36:11 +0000

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.

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Free SSCC barcodes generation service launched!

Alexander Alfimov — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 21:58:50 +0000

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).

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

Alexander Alfimov — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 21:14:39 +0000

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.

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Joomla vs Drupal performance tests: new winner

Alexander Alfimov — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 20:29:23 +0000

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?

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Free online batch UPC validator

Alexander Alfimov — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 22:30:46 +0000

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.

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Открыта вакансия PHP-разработчика

Alexander Alfimov — Mon, 12 May 2008 15:00:05 +0000

Компании срочно требуются PHP-разработчики. Основные требования:

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

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

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MySQL tip: why are my joins so slow?

Alexander Alfimov — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 21:14:30 +0000

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.

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PHP 4.x annoying bug related to $this keyword

Alexander Alfimov — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 23:05:34 +0000

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.

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Drupal, Wordpress and Joomla!: performance tests.

Alexander Alfimov — Sat, 10 Nov 2007 10:44:16 +0000

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:

StartServers 5
MinSpareServers 5
MaxSpareServers 10
MaxClients 20
MaxRequestsPerChild 0

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?

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