Hostcult

My Top 8 Best OpenSource Software

2015-05-06T21:38:00.000+01:00

Hey im doing a top something post hehehe, well these are some of the opensource software i use to build websites, its not all i use, and i don't use just opensource software, but as of now these are the ones i use more often, and most likely will use something else only if they don't fit the bill, this of course excludes awesome stuff like Linux or , so here is my list:

1 - Wordpress
The almighty god of all that is blogging, wordpress has grown a lot over the years, but unlike projects/software like firefox, openoffice/libreoffice, pidgin, gimp... they haven't really had a bad run or started to deteriorate a bit, its been constant good improvements, and even quirky issues are normally resolved without much of a hitch, its most powerful feature is the way it is structured although now it has automatic updates, its core is completly independent from the design or the content, upgrading manually 99% of the time envolves just switching the code, the second best thing is the plugin system that is also independ from the core, turning a bad plugin off is just a question of renaming the plugin folder, these and the almost infinite range of functions you can add make wordpress the number 1.

2 - Zenphoto
Also known as the worst themed gallery software, i really can never get myself to use any of their themes, they seldom are updated and the ones that are officially supported are kinda lame-o, but who cares, their themes are remarkably simple to build, but the best feature of zenphoto is how automated it is, you dont need flash uploaders or running scripts to create thumbnails or do any kind of weird jumps and hoops to upload your photos, nope, you just upload them anywhere you want it to the album folders, and if its a new folder zenphoto will create a new album if its a new picture, the zenphoto will add it to the album, that simple, and guess what, thats what i want with a gallery!

3 - VestaCP
Ahh VestaCP you have a bit of a bad rep, but i tell you this, between all the opensource hosting panels software, i kinda have the impression that you are the only one that cares what the users want, maybe you and KloxoMR, don't get me wrong webmin/virtualmin and the rest are all pretty good, but for some its just a secondary product or just a layer for a LAMP stack, but with VestaCP although i wouldnt say they are on the cutting edge, they do provide a nice clean easy product that at least is growing to a direction i approve, like apache with nginx proxy ^_^

4 - MyBB
Its what forum software should be, its light, its expandable its simple to use but still full featured! I wish i used more, now i dont have that much forum sites, but the only one i have was moved from SMF > PHPBB > BPRESS > MYBB and now i think it is in its rightfull home, great software.

5 - Tiny Tiny RSS
Awesome opensource alternative to the much dead Google Reader, its light fast and simple to use, its great if you want to manage your own stuff.

6 - Drupal
The ten pound mamoth of the bunch is drupal, although this somewhat popular CMS lacks in extensability/backwards compatibility/easyness it more than makes up for it with the ability to do anything! want a social network... BANG! done! want a voting site, oh wait no a voting site with flying eagles that shoot videos and then convert them to pictures of your reaction with your webcam, well im not sure... but if any CMS can Drupal can, so i normally use it when wordpress isn't good enough or i want to create something really unique.

7 - Vanilla
I wanted to love it, but although its layout and features are excellent one thing or another have made me skip vanilla or quit on vanilla, still it doesn't change the fact that its pretty good and works pretty good.

8 - Pydio
Its a file manager/file sync, I've been testing it out as an alternative to dropbox, its great and much lighter and faster than say owncloud, its a great piece of software and its not higher on the list cause i haven't been using it for that long time to say its the best ever!

Best Security Practices for Wordpress

2015-04-04T17:14:00.000+01:00

Dont look surprised when your wordpress site is hacked, is wordpress security so weak?

No, not really, its just popular and as such there are more vectors to attack its security, still as a heavy wordpress user i can give you some good tips to keep your site secure, ill divide this into setup the site and securing the site, once you should only need to do once, the other its best to be ongoing, im also assuming that you have your server setup correctly and secured as well as your wordpress is up to date and your computer is secure as well, if those are good, then what i say bellow will keep you 99% safe!

Secure on Setup

On wp-config.php when you install on $table_prefix = 'whateveryouwant' put a random string! - This will prevent mysql injections that might target the default wp_ table prefix (if already installed use something like phpadmin to go into the database and change the prefix there and then add it to the wp-config.php file)
On wp-config.php under define('WP_DEBUG', false); put define('DISALLOW_FILE_EDIT', true); - This prevents editing of php files under wordpress, most people dont edit them anyways (i just login with sftp and edit directly), so people trying to exploit will have more difficulty doing so
Use a strong password - I know its silly to say but a strong unique password with lots of letters, numbers and characters is always a good thing.

On First Login

Login with your default admin account, create a new account with admin privileges and then delete the old admin account - This prevents login requests or brute-force that would go directly to account number 1 or admin account
Disable user registration, go the options panel and disable user registration - If you dont intent for other users to post, there is no point in allowing registration.
Install only the Plugins you Need - Even if disabled, only have plugins and themes that you need, they could be used

Security Plugins to Install

BruteProtect or Login LockDown - To Prevent login attempts and brute force attacks (or in alternative find a Two-Step Authentication plugin).
Install a Clean Theme - Make sure you get a nice free theme from Wordpress.org or a paid from a good provider and keep it up to date, the more complex the theme the more likely it will have code that might become insecure, so get a good one and keep it updated.
Advance Automatic Updates - Will keep your wordpress install and plugins up to date!
Akismet - It comes with Wordpress for a reason, before it, wordpress comments were horrible and plagued with tons of spam.

Extra!

Please pleassseeee make backups, dont trust your webhost, make your own, thats the only true way of being 100% secure, use a plugin for it, i like BackUpWordpress and Keep Backup Daily, but any you like will do!
Use Cloudflare or Incapsula - These give pleanty of extra features, like cdn but they also filter and protect your traffic from a lot of nasty stuff on the web.
Wordfence or Better Wp Security - If you want more heavy security, its totally optional and in my opinion if you are well locked down they dont add anything!
Use htaccess to lock in wp-admin if you are the only user, search for this on Google pleanty of sites explaining.
Use Wordpress Jetpack plugin it protect you from some security flaws and it will help on automatic plugin installs, plus a ton of other things
Use Mx Toolbox or Sucuri Site Check to check if your site has been exploited!

The best rule of all is to be prepared for the worst, have backups and check from time to time to see if your site is up to date and everything is running fine, most of these are automated but its best to always keep an eye and if everything breaks just clean everything and put back a backup :)

Dreamhost Hosting Review

2015-03-17T16:14:00.000+00:00

If you don't know who Dreamhost are, just write Dreamhost on Google :D they are one of the largest hosts nowadays and up until recently I was a big fan and a client for over 10 years, wow! 10 YEARS! So as you all know i tend to only review hosta i stopped using, so why have i left Dreamhost?

First lets start with some history, for a while Dreamhost was the home of a bit of weirdly offbeat hosting, their hosting setup was unique, their culture was unique, their services were unique, also it was one of those hosts that gave you freedom, even when you screwed something over or abused some of the services or just didn't have your wordpress well setup they were lenient and most of the times helpful, it wasn't about oh its your fault or i cant do anything, it was a matter of helping you out even if it was your fault, their hosting was weird but cool, you never cared about how much space you were using or resources cause it just worked!

And from a very affordable price you had a ton of extras to play with it was a playground feel and something very unique on the hosting industry, it reminds me of when Gmail started, you just had so much to work with now, even with kinks you always forgave cause... well lets just say it... Dreamhost was awesome!

And although i had move most of my sites and apps to vps/cloud/dedicated hosting, i still was very happy with my Dreamhost account!

Was? Oh yeah since about 2 years ago, they changed and a lot and besides the culture part... well it was fun but its not the essential, the change was in their network and features, the moved from a clustered type of hosting where i have to say it had the occasional downtime but overall it was fantastic speed and resources to a plain basic shared hosting setup one that is very stifled on resources, a hosting account that at its max had 20+ sites all running a lot of traffic, including a buddypress social network and a forum, now cant handle 2 wordpress sites at the same time without giving 503 errors.

Now compare that with a test vps i have that also has 2 pretty new wordpress sites but getting there, this vps is KVM with 256mb of Ram and 1vcpu, is it awesome, no? but after a well setup (nginx/apache/mariadb) its running those 2 sites like butter its almost native speed, while on Dreamhost you basically traded that slight instability for basic performance, those 2 sites load slowly and i guess any more php sites and my account would die, by the way i was paying 7$ a month on Dreamhost and i pay 1$ a month on Atlantic.net and altough Dreamhost "gives more" like control panel, backups, the most important part, the hosting is pretty weak!

The fact is that shared hosting on Dreamhost is dead, they want people to move up to VPS, to their Cloud Offerings, to their Specific Wordpress Offerings or Dedicated, they went were all the other hosting companies have been going since... well forever! They give you a great offer on shared hosting, but the shared hosting is so restrictive that any usage above a very low margin will probably need to upgrade, thats fine, but that wasnt the Dreamhost I sign up for!

Dreamhost could easily put nginx in front of apache, or just tweak their shared hosting to be as fast and streamlined as possible but they of course have no incentive for that, when you sign up for their vps you can do that yourself so they can do it, it reminds a bit of my issues with webfaction and their weird limitations...

Also i tried 2 times their VPS platform, the first time was a bust well mostly because their shared hosting was still in the old platform so it was literally moving to something worst with more limitations in everything, the second time around it was better but for that price and performance i expected a big leap from the shared hosting, i was using the shared mysql but than again why would i need to pay for vps and then for vps mysql, its just plain not good.

I also asked to be moved in the last 6 months to another datacenter and they did it, but nothing changed, still plain boring performance and hosting, this wasnt a easy decision i really liked Dreamhost, my kind of hosting, but they arent anymore, and so i move to bigger and better things, so to finalize this... yeah i left and im not going back, and sorry to say that ill probably also pass on their cloud offerings, burn me once... ok stopping the rant >_< sorry sorry, here is a resume :P

Dreamhost Strong Points

Awesome Control Panel
Basic Hosting Feature Set
The Shared Hosting Price is Alright
Good Network

Dreamhost Weak Points

Shared and VPS Hosting has Weak Performance
Shared Hosting Increased its Limits
The VPS Hosting Price is Expensive
Lost Some Extra Features
Its Price point has lost Value (You dont get the same bang for buck you once got)
Lost part of its Nerdy/Tech Culture and Charm
Uncertainty Regarding New Features (Adding then removing features)

WP Super Cache Vs W3 Total Cache Vs WP Fastest Cache Vs Hyper Cache Vs Quick Cache Vs Wordfence Security

2014-12-20T21:47:00.000+00:00

Yes i know plenty of wordpress cache plugins comparisons posts, but i went around checking those and most are just a matter of opinion and taste or had some good data on performance both on the frontend and the backend of wordpress, my sites tend to have some optimisations built in mostly on the server so even with plugin there is some cache going on both on php and mysql as well as using nginx as a reverse proxy for the static files.

So i went ahead and made a basic wordpress site with one of the official themes and some random content, good enough, then checked some of the memory consumption and speed inside wordpress with the P3 Plugin and used Gtmatrix and Google Pagespeed to check the performance on the page, i also checked server side but as far as i can tell all the plugins didn't use enough resources to be negligible, so what are my findings:

Performance Comparison of Wordpress Cache Plugins

Cache Plugin	Memory (sec)	Speed	Size (KB)	Requests	Pagespeed
No Plugin	0	5.49	965	32	75/100
WP Super Cache	0.084	5.0	962	33	75/100
W3 Total Cache	3.6	11.33	965	33	75/100
WP Fastest Cache	0.083	4.7	757	30	90/100
Hyper Cache	0.008	5.0	961	32	75/100
Hyper Cache + Autoptimize	0.097	6.7	690	24	90/100
Quick Cache	0.04	4.93	961	32	75/100
Quick Cache + Autoptimize	0.1	5.44	696	24	91/100
Wordfence Basic	0.15	6.97	965	33	75/100
Wordfence Falcon Engine	0.14	5.63	762	34	90/100

Notes: I've added Autoptimize to the cache plugins that don't have the ability to combine and minify code, to see if it helped. Also note that all of these results besides pagespeed are averages i did test 3 times to make sure, although gtmatrix does use random servers to check so the speed part can be a bit off, so dont take it literally its more important the size and requests as well as overall pagespeed ranking for true performance, yes i know i could have used a fixed server but i wanted a more normal usage scenario.

No Plugin

Like i said above by default my sites work and cache well enough to rate a standard 75/100 on Pagespeed, also enabling by default gzip and other small wordpress tweaks help too, still its only here as reference point, of course most wordpress sites would rate a bit lower.

WP Super Cache

I've used it a lot in the past, still i've moved on to other cache plugins because its a bit like W3 Total Cache, it has become with time less user-friendly, from all the plugins it was the most troublesome to turn on and to turn off (leaves a lot of stuff behind) also with default settings it didn't cache much, also one of the reasons i left was that sometimes updates would kill my sites, its still a standard but i think its not good enough anymore.

W3 Total Cache

This one is WP Super Cache on steroids, im sure its awesome since it has everything and then some, and although a bit easier to setup than it used to be, its kinda one that need a lot, i mean A LOT of pampering, it should only be used on large sites and sites where you control the server side and can enable the caches that W3 will use, also on my test and with default settings on it clearly was the worst plugin of them all, probably cause i should have changed something somewhere.

WP Fastest Cache

Although this plugin kinda broke a part of the wordpress backend (probably a css out of place), it was one of the most complete and simple plugins and you can see that it did a pretty good job and i didn't even enable all the functions, it incorporates pretty much everything you expect in a small package, however 2 things keep me from using it, first there is no control over the html/js/css minify, and from my experience most my sites would break if i cant tweak this (Autoptimize does give you that control) the second is that the panel tries to ping ipinfo.io i don't like plugins that do stuff like that.

Hyper Cache

The one I'm currently using on most of my sites, its simple clean and to the point and as you can see it does its job, besides one nagging issue when the plugin or wordpress updates the plugin seems to stop working and you get the "You must save the options since some files must be updated." still unlike WP Super Cache the site doesn't stop working, so it a safe and good plugin with very low memory consumption.

Quick Cache

I like this one, its has a nice panel, its simple and it worked just fine, still some of its best features are hidden away for a premium package and well that makes it under perform, i would understand if these features were more high end stuff like using CDN's or tweaks around server side, but things like minify should be part of the basic feature set and as such this plugin is comparable with Hyper Cache but with more resource usage.

Extras to Consider

Wordfence Security

Its mostly a security/firewall plugin for your site that also has a caching plugin built in, so why not try it out, it has 2 settings so i tried them both, the basic and their so called falcon engine, i did see a improvement and it worked fine, still its of course a much bigger plugin that does a lot of things besides the caching, but if you are looking for both a security plugin and a cache plugin, this might be good for you.

Autoptimize

Its a plugin that minifies html/css/js and combines it, it can do it both on the head or move those scripts to the end of the body to help the page load, its also very flexible and you can skip files or tweak so it doesn't break your site, some of the other plugins had these features or part of it, but this plugin gives you complete control and as such is a nice combination with other caching plugins.

So what was my choice?

Ill keep using Hyper Cache, it works well, the feature set is good enough and it doesn't break my site ever, when i need to give a bit more i add Autoptimize or if its on Cloudflare i just tweak the html/css/js from there, it was my choice about a year ago when i move away from WP Super Cache and as far as i can tell it still was the best choice.

Webfaction Hosting Review

2013-12-08T20:22:00.000+00:00

So I was a user of Webfaction hosting for a year, and nooo don't take my dramatic image that Webfaction sucks! Hehehe it just sucked a little but it failed quite a bit, lets start from top shall we.

Webfaction is a shared hosting provider, it kinda sits between traditional shared hosting and running a VPS/Cloud/Dedicated hosting, its basically shared hosting with the basics plus lots of the resources and freedom of having control of most of your account, sounds great? Yeah i thought so too!

After some issues with some of my hosting i decided about a year ago to keep a part of my sites on dedicated and some on shared hosting, so Webfaction looked like my perfect choice for a shared hosting provider (my end goal was 3 Webfaction accounts), still before singing up with I sent a e-mail with some questions, one of those was regarding the PHP and if that would run from the memory on the server or if it was included since their site doesn't state that clearly, i was told that i wouldn't need to worry about PHP since that was part of their setup and thus outside of my personal memory, only if i installed my own apps would i use up that memory, great!

So moving some of my sites over i had to get used to their control panel and system, that has some particulars compared with other shared hosting, but nothing too complicated and in some sense pretty cool, like the ability to run folders with just Nginx for example (bypassing the heaving Apache), still it took a while to move things over (about 8 sites, with 10GB of data, 5 MySql databases), performance wise it wasn't all that good, i had some downtime (3 times at least) and weird issues like blazing speed one moment and crawling and timing out the next, after some back and forth with support (that although reasonably fast they are very bland with replies and tend to not give details on issues) and about 3 months in and more talking with support the server was moved to Cloudlinux and that would fix the issues.

And yes it helped, kinda, now i wasn't getting those server wide glitches but started getting out of memory issues, were support sometimes telling me its my fault and other times telling me it isn't a issue and shrugging it off, and that was my normal operation with Webfaction for another couple of months, with my sites going down all in a row, i had 8 sites on Webfaction, because i never had outstanding hosting, I moved the only important site out, but still the performance wasn't improving, 2 of the sites were placeholders and the rest were smallish static or wordpress site, the total traffic per month was like 5GB to 10GB and around 1000 visit per month for the combined sites, my contacts with support always started with me asking what was the issue and they say that PHP was running and had to be terminated and me replying that i was told PHP wasn't a issue and i don't understand why PHP is running out of memory if i barely have visitors, and finally shrugs or promises that it would magically get fixed.

This kept going on, at one point support wasn't even able to determine what was the PHP file that brought the site down (apparently support doesn't have access to logs or Webfaction doesn't make any logs of these issues), but since it wasn't always the same domain even i was unsure, suffice to say it was a pretty miserable experience, so after 7 months in, i quit Webfaction and moved everything over to another one of my VPS (and yes the performance has been fantastic and PHP runs like a dream), i paid yearly so my fault there, so here is a resume of what i think are the strong and weak points of Webfaction hosting.

Good Points

Feature Filled Hosting Platform, from php, python, perl, git, django.... you name it.
Good Control Panel, although tricky, after you get used to it, it has some great features.
Good Hosting Specs, with plenty of space and bandwidth.
Lots of Control, of your hosting with shell account and the ability to run your own software
Good Fast Network, at least in their Amsterdan location that i used.
Really Good Community, they showed a lot of ways to go around issues and some of the things you can do on the platform.

Bad Points

Support isn't Knowledgeable, at least of their platform or lacks any real access, they are polite but i needed answers, not shrugs and reboots, especially when they say its a issue on my side and then point me to a "optimize your site" article as a solution for a plain Wordpress site that received 10 visits that day and was able to crash my entire account!!!!
Monitoring the Server wasn't Proactive or Fast, every-time i had a issue even if the entire server was down it seemed like a surprise to support (and i don't go running for support, I normally wait 30min or more just encase its some reboot or small glitch), not too sure what they are monitoring :/
Although told otherwise PHP is considered an App, so every time it runs it takes memory from your account (in my case between 30Mb and 60Mb, so i had 256Mb of RAM at the time = i can only run around 5 instances until their prevention tools shut me down), so if you have 1 site you are good and you can run multiple PHP processes, if you have 5 or 6 like me, or if you have a very popular forum or Wordpress site, you will get shutdown FAST (check Webfaction's "tools to prevent server high loads" and "cgroups" and "Cloudlinux")
It doesn't use Standard Configurations, so you get some issues and incompatibles with some scripts, of these 4 its a issue you can fix easily by searching the forums.

So to summarize, Webfaction likes to compare itself as a superior VPS, but it really isn't! a quality VPS is unfortunately superior (at least in availability of resources), even a smaller one, the now 512Mb of RAM on Webfaction isnt superior to a equivalent VPS, were you can run a LAMP (+Nginx) stack with 150Mb of RAM and plenty of space to run PHP and anything you want smootlhy, its just a bit more work to setup hehehe, i would say if you have just a couple of sites and you want a good shared hosting with more freedom than the average Shared Host than Webfaction is a nice choice and like Webfaction likes to say hosting for developers (so expect issues?!?), but if you want to run critical software or if you need your sites to run smoothly, then Webfaction is unfortunately not the best choice.

Moving Away from PointDNS

2013-10-20T11:15:00.002+01:00

[ Rant Warning ^_^' ] Since i have most of my domains on ResellerClub and from my tests on DNS performance, ResellerClub DNS is like me hosting my own DNS (it will be slow and probably only on one location), its kinda the bare minimum, so I've used other DNS services, but ended up going with PointDNS, it had the basic features and pretty good performance, but since they got bought/sold/merged into Copper, they have been changing more and more of their basic features!

I don't mind adding new features and asking money for them, that's perfectly reasonable, but going back on previously free features is where i draw the line, i feel cheated, well not in the sense that i have to pay (altought now i do!), but in the "you got me here with these features" cheated (ie i would never have used PointDNS if they didn't have these features).

Taking back features is like going back on your word and so i have lost confidence, they decided to make their e-mail redirects paid, but since i only need hosted DNS for less important domains or 3rd party hosted domains (like hosted in Blogger, Tumblr...), that feature is pretty helpful for me, so I'm moving away, I still think they have a pretty good, clean and reliable DNS service, but at this point even using ResellerClub or hosting my own is a better alternative, as of now I'm moving to NameCheap DNS!

Positives of PointDNS

Clean Layout
All the Basic Features
Reliable DNS Service

Negatives of PointDNS

Inconsistent Layout
Inconsistent Pricing
Turning Standard Features into Paid
Lack of Support/Manual

Update: A Couple of days later they send a e-mail cutting from the 10 free domains i used to have to just 1, gawd, no respect for customers, they give 30 days to decide... extortionist much?

Review of Tresorit "Secure" Cloud Sync

2013-09-13T19:54:00.000+01:00

In my quest for some good secure cloud hosting/sync aka Dropbox clone, ive tested and used a lot of diferent cloud sync providers, might as well start posting my findings, today im starting with TresorIT, coming from Hungary, being their main features their client side encription and any folder can be synced.

So lets start with the install, I installed it on a Windows7 Laptop, that went fine and started fine, standard stuff here, i do note that this soft is installed on a very strange place (it installs on AppData instead of Program Files), also it created a ton of .tresor or .tresorit hidden folders, a bit weird but nothing much.

On running its a bit bare with information, username and password (so i assume the client side encription is done with that password) and off it goes, syncing away, however there is no way of knowing what is it doing, also its not as fast as say Dropbox or Skydrive, but the worst thing is that if you turn it off and delete a file and then turn the program back on... it wont retrieve the file from the server... so whats the point here?

That is pretty much standard syncing operation (if the software is not online at the time of the deletion you bring back the file from the server or if there is a new file update the file on the server, you dont erase the file on the server), so basically if there is corruption or you accidentally delete a file, or if you need to retrieve a file from the server online you are screwed, so what are you syncing for?

Yeah as of now TresorIT is pretty much useless, if you want syncing without protecion of data you might as well choose Bittorent Sync, its way safer (cause you at least know more about the security than blindly trusting TresorIT), its way quicker (on LAN its Blazing!!!!) and well if you delete something you are also screwed anyways!

TresorIT Advantages:

Stable enough Software
A presumption of security

TresorIT Disadvantages:

Basically if it stores files in the cloud, yet there is no clear way to access them if you need them (so what the point?!?!?)
Lack of information on syncing
Not the fastest of the bunch
Weird Instalation on Windows 7
Contacted Community and Support about issue, didnt get any reply from support >_< meh cryptic organizations dont give a nice vibe!

If you reeeeaaalllllly need to check them out, its TresorIT.com!

Use Mega for Mega Backups

2013-07-05T19:23:00.000+01:00

So Mega is not just for Sharing!

You know Mega! If you don't, you probably don't read much tech news, the very much hyped product of Megaupload founder, its basically (at least for now) a Megaupload clone, a filehost, just cleaner and easier to use with encryption built in, so why my glee of Mega?

Well i do backups of everything, from my android to my computers to my websites, backups is just part of everyday life, sure its mostly automated but its one of those things that are important especially when you invested so much time and money on your data, still there are times, especially with my websites that i need some long term storage, my backup box stores about 3 copies of all of my sites and that takes a lot of space, but these copies are rotating so if there is a slight issue, such as creeping corruption or some deleted file, those backups can become useless.

So besides my current setup, i have the need for less used/long term backup storage, but why dont I use amazon s3, amazon glacier or another alternative, thats true, but i want a simple system for backups something i can just, grab a couple of files and load it there just in case from time to time, also old dumps from my android or random files that im sure i wont need anytime soon, its not essential stuff, no need to run another system.

Mega boasts their encryption on the client side (while others like Dropbox and Google encrypt on their side, what that means is if Google or Dropbox wants they can see your files), still as with all these companies its a matter of trust, if you trust these companies to do what they say they do, however for this particular case all my site backups are encrypted and compressed so its a mute point although still a point for Mega.

Mega is just a plain better filehost, its super simple to use, the files are backed up (at least in 2 places), the uploads go without any problem (compared with Dropbox or Box or Gdrive web uploads that do hang up from time to time), the files stay forever (at least that's the official policy), there is no filesize restrictions even though most backups are only 100Mb or so, there are some that are 1 or 2GB in size, no problem with Mega, and if i ever need to download, its blazing fast, enough said! Im sold and so should you!

Just as a broad comparison why Mega is better than most other filehosts:

General Filehost - No security, no reliability and a tendency to lose your file in a whim.

General Webhost - Better reliability but again no security, and they tend to not like you hosting big files.

Rapidshare - They change their policy constantly and its always for worst, i was their paid customer for 2 separate times and both i got screwed, never again.

Mediafire - They say they are a cloud hosting company, but well they dont guarantee that files are kept, only if a file is popular, unusable for any kind of reliable file hosting.

Dropbox - Great and reliable if you pay them, if you dont pay them you are a second class citizen, also their service only works great with their desktop client, no point.

Skydrive - They scan your files, that says it all, plus, can you trust Microsoft?

Google Drive - They want a perpetual license for all your files, plus, can you trust Google?

As a sidenote...

Box - Actually pretty good, my account with them is several years old and i never lost a file, still they have a pretty stiff filesize limit of 250Mb, so not ideal for what i need, but outstanding for small files backup!

PS: Cant wait for Mega Sync Application for Windows/Mac/Linux!

Dropbox Clone Copy Launches with free 5GB Promotion

2013-04-07T21:21:00.003+01:00

Yeah i know this could be seen as a infomercial so you guys will click on my Copy.com referral link (and we both will get 5GB for free), but i am very interested in cloud hosting and i do try a lot of them, i use it daily for my backups, for business and for sharing (i'll make another post later on with more details), so testing new cloud storage is important to me, since i do have some issues with the ones i use currently.

My Cloud Providers

Dropbox (Free 20GB) for syncing of work material, its absolutely flawless, but it tends to bog down from time to time (burst of CPU) and also although secure its not encrypted and i know i could do it myself and in some ways i do, but with encryption on my side there is a risk of corruption and data loss, so i avoid putting there anything that is really private, mostly work files, stuff i need on the run or that im currently working on! (Update a day or so after posting this, Dropbox decided to cut a chunk of my referrals, wtf is with that after years! they go back on referrals! thats fucked up, ill probably make a post about it tomorrow, but for today they lose their link on this post and worse, my trust).

Box (Free 50GB), i always liked Box, their web interface is really good, but the best is that my account has like 5 years and all my files are still there, i should like delete some, but the combination of 50GB and never deleting a file ever, makes it perfect for small backups and old webfiles, their sync app is pretty bad, so i dont use it (tried it twice).

Mega (Free 50GB), what? MEGA!!! yep, as it seems the fact that your files are encripted and they dont delete files and they have backups and they dont have file size limits, makes mega awesome for website backups, sometimes if its a database heavy site its pretty small, but if its a media heavy website, its gonna get huge, so mega is awesome for that and yes i do encript all files myself, so no security issues there! and super fast upload and download!

I do have a owncloud instance but i only use that to sync my music, maybe if i encript it and make automatic backups, ill use it more ^_^'

Cloud Providers i Tried and Quit!

Cubby, pretty good cloud hosting, with local sync and web sync, but with their change to a paid service they basically cripled every free user to a less than useful service, before it had some interesting features now its way less usefull, that and a touchy sync (sometimes it syncs, sometimes it doesnt and says everything is synced...)

Rapidshare, this one is going down the drain, i dont know what they are thinking, i was still barely using them, but the last files i had there died a couple of weeks ago for no reason, no point using them for anything.

Mediafire, good for sharing, horrible for backups, your files dont stay if they are too popular or not popular enough, im not sure why they keep saying they are a dropbox clone, they are a basic filehost.

Skydrive, searching your files for images or whatever is beyond me, i dont care if its automatic, any host that searches your files is not a host that i will ever use.

Google Drive, im slowly moving away from Google services, but i did try it and it worked ok, i didnt liked they changed their pricing at the time, but i dont care cause i dont want to use, that and their terms of service that give them a lifetime license to your stuff, again shit beyond me.

So how about Copy?

Well I've only tried for a few days, but its very similar to dropbox (thats a good thing), lightweight and i like their android app, worked great for now, quick syncing, i did wished they did something diferent, instead of a pure clone, still if i get more than what i have in dropbox you never know hehehe.

So yeah i put in this post my copy and my dropbox referral use it if you are interested in signing up youll get extra space, ohh and here is my Copy referral https://copy.com?r=ROh9ws (If you sign up you will get an extra 5GB!)

Google and Reader Demise

2013-03-17T10:49:00.000+00:00

What can i say that hasn't been said, Google decided to drop and kill Google Reader a not so mainstream Google product that was loved by pretty much every geek, developer and tech journalist, and for good reason even if RSS never went mainstream (its mainstream just by other means, apps like Flipboard use RSS) its still a very important part of the structure of the web, however the points i want to focus on is Google's latest attempts at streamlining their product line and how that is putting Google's of alienating the very people that support Google.

Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me

This isn't the first time Google has dropped a popular or semi popular product, but on doing so its neglecting all the users that invested their time on that product, it created distrust and in this case by going after Google Reader it really doesn't matter if they back-down, I've and most are moving on to greener pastures, the broken promises of Google App Engine and basically pushing everyone that had a free account to paid and overcharging on top of that, Google+ forced real name policy basically blocked me and most of my friends (that aren't really tech savvy) and a large segment of the tech community to dismiss Google+ pretty much forever and now with the death of Google Reader I'm starting to move from distrusting Google (mostly for privacy concerns) to one of not trusting Google to keep their promises and doubting the longevity of their entire product line, why should i care about Google products if they can randomly be cut down? I wont be fooled again...

Google is a new social/media company

This new Google has good things, but they are starting to get too few and far between, i used to trust Google, now i get excited with stuff that moves me away from anything Google related, Firefox OS, secure chat and new search engines that give me privacy and protect my rights, i dream about a fully encrypted webmail to ditch gmail for good (the last Google product that i use daily, yep i rarely use Google search anymore... sorry Firefox >_< ), Google as changed from a product oriented company to one more interested in gaining users and providing media, they want to be Yahoo (and look how that turned out), by pissing users they go to competing products, why use blogger? when you can use better and more innovative services like Tumblr or Wordpress that care for your privacy and rights that you can contact support and talk with real people when you have an issue, why risk with Google they already killed Picnik so Picasa in on the way, in a couple of years Google will be just Google+ but by that time the "influencers" have moved on and with them everyone else, sure there will be People that same way there are still people in Flickr or use Yahoo searc... coof coof Bing, but most wont be and wont care!

Readers Demise is Google's Demise

Google Reader to me is pretty much the last drop, I'm tired of it really, so i will be slowly moving away from Google products, not because of Reader, but the accumulation of clear signals from Google, their moto "dont be evil" has already been distorted to the point of being meaningless, the safe bet nowadays is to hedge your bets and avoid Google's Products you are probably using too many of them already and opening yourself to more problems and issues, the love affair with Google is over, i want a divorce! Sure this isn't the end far from it, hell this blog is still written on blogger, but its for sure another step and i for one am glad i wont be so dependent on Google.

As a side-note and to not make this just a rant I've been trying some alternatives to Google Reader, ill probably post a more detailed review when i find something good, ohh and the new Dig team is making a feed reader hehehe yeah that was the best joke i got from this idiotic move from Google.

1kpl.us > still pulling feeds, interesting layout, pretty quick, i like the sparsness
netvibes.com > oldie but still good, the problem is that its just good enough, the layout/speed/features are meh
theoldreader.com > looks reasonable, but still pulling feeds, slow and i cant judge it yet (still they are overloaded, so its understandable)
newsblur.com > looks pretty good/speedy/original, but i dont like their fremium model, slow updates and low feeds (used to be 64 now its 12? make up your mind) if you dont pay up its a bellow any rss reader average, naaa ill give this one a skip, i prefer a fremium model where you get something sweet extra for paying not a crippled basic account

Siglas - Sigla Database, Acrónimos, Abreviatura e Símbolos

2012-09-15T15:59:00.002+01:00

New site, Siglas (means Acronym in Portuguese) this one is a portuguese database for acronyms and abbreviations and other kind of small information, its quick and easy and simple to use!

Nulo Simple Weather

2012-09-02T18:21:00.001+01:00

A quick 2day hackathon later! and here is Nulo Weather! Its a simple weather site, i know i know its nothing new, but i thought i could make something a bit better, a mix between overly simple (does it rain or not) and the abundance of overly complicated weather sites out there.

Its simple and plain, it shows the weather now, today and tomorrow, it uses geolocation to try and give you your weather right away but you can search any city anywhere to check its weather.

The good... humm it runs pretty quickly and looks if i say so myself pretty spanky good!
The bad... its unfortunately not perfect, with the lack of a decent weather API's im using Yahoo Weather API (probably with time ill have to change), although good its still a bit wanky and not 100% responsive, also the geolocation isnt perfect and if no city is presented you are greeted with a random city, but if its a strange city Yahoo Weather API might just fail and you are greeted with a empty page... oh well ^_^'

So yeah go check it out and see if you like it! ^_^

Incult - Search Scientific Books and Documents

2012-08-26T20:03:00.005+01:00

New site! Yay! Welcome to Incult yep snazy domain, its a pretty cool and simple science search engine, the cool thing is that it caches copies of the works so you can always find the books and documents you need, for now we are focusing on public domain works, but in the future we will add also free documents and everything in between.

Other cool features is that if it doesn't find any book on the database it will use google search (focused on the best book and documents sites) to give you some good alternatives, so win+win.

As of now the database is still being worked on, we have just a basic web scraper working, so its still gonna get more improvements, but for now like the death star... it is fully operational! ^_^

Review LibreOffice 3.6 Vs OpenOffice 3.4 Vs MsOffice Vs iWorks (on Win/Mac/Linux)

2012-08-13T12:13:00.003+01:00

So there was a lot of confusion and some complaints about my previous faceoff OpenOffice vs LibreOffice, some stuff was deserved (not providing the test files was silly, but i did use office documents so i couldn't without messing with them), making a strange graph with strange values, not including the other operating systems even though the results were close, so I'm fixing all of this on this review, it will be simple and similar in point (comparison of performance for a small business office), because im doing this review as much for me as anyone else, in an office setting, were performance is the most important thing followed by a responsive layout and good formatting (stuff like compatibility or features are not as important since all of the software here has the features we want and used for years!).

This is the setup i will be using (and yes i wont be using my ssd powered hardware, because i dont have any at the office):

Windows 7 - Intel T3200 2Ghz (2 Cores) - 3GB - HD 7200RPM.
Ubuntu 12.04 - (with gnome classic of course, unity?... please...) Same specs as Win7, its dual boot.
Mac OSX 10.6.8 - Intel Core 2 Duo 2.4Ghz (2 Cores) - 4GB - HD 7200RPM.

The files i will be using are (you can get them here):

Small Excel File - 44KB
Large Excel File - 3.3MB
Small Doc File - 80KB
Large Doc File - 22MB

Why no OpenDocument (.odf or .od) or Office Open XML (.docx or .xlsx)? Well cause 90% of our files are .xls or .doc and normally when we receive in any other format, we convert it to .xls or .doc (Office 2003 format), as well as LibreOffice 3.5 (what we are using now) can pretty much open any file-type, so i'm aiming to what we normally use.

For the software, all operating systems are up to date, i've disabled as much software as i can from all of them prior to the tests (that means, anti-virus, dropbox, etc), also on windows 7 im using Ms Office 2003 and on Mac im using Office 2008 and iWork 09, the reason being these are the only ones i own and its mostly for comparison purposes, all installations were on the typical settings and on Mac i did close the software every-time, so hot start was with the program fully closed.

Libreoffice and Openoffice need to do some tweaks on first run, so i did first runs with no files just to finish that, also for each cold start, the measurement is the time of the first run of the file (this time around, no averages!), time is as follows 1:15:30.45 (1 hour, 15 minutes, 30 seconds and 45 centiseconds), also only added the CPU on the large .doc because that was the only one that freaked out the Office's, on all the other files CPU dropped to 0 or very near it after loading.

Windows 7

Small .xls

Large .xls

Small .doc

Large .doc

cold

hot

mem

cold

hot

mem

cold

hot

mem

cold

hot

mem

CPU%

LibreOffice 3.6

21.0

5.12

46.3MB

7.38

6.30

50.7MB

6.67

3.85

44.6MB

1:18.88

1:18.71

124.7MB

OpenOffice 3.4

9.64

4.60

36.7MB

5.57

4.89

39.2MB

5.99

3.53

32.5MB

2:13.42

2:14.91

114.3MB

20/30

MsOffice 2003

1.83

0.72

3MB

1.71

1.05

8.6MB

2.40

0.79

9.9MB

6.36

5.45

25.2MB

Clear winner here is MsOffice 2003 blazes past LibreOffice 3.6 and OpenOffice 3.4, still its kinda weird that altough nitpicking, its OpenOffice that still nudges past LibreOffice and takes second place, and even on the large .doc where it took almost 1 more minute to load than LibreOffice it still was way more responsive after loading, while LibreOffice was hanging and lagging hard (using a full core) and it also crashed on shutting down.

Mac OSX 10.6.8

	Small .xls			Large .xls			Small .doc			Large .doc
	cold	hot	mem	cold	hot	mem	cold	hot	mem	cold	hot	mem	CPU%
LibreOffice 3.6	14.11	10.94	124	11.94	11.58	133	12.71	10.83	131	39.71	39.44	222	100
OpenOffice 3.4	15.40	11.96	125	12.81	12.55	133	12.81	11.56	125	3:03.75	3:04.01	204	2
MsOffice 2008	40.60	15.38	151	19.55	18.80	171	19.90	17.31	177	18.57	17.76	183	6
iWork 09	1:55.53	10.1	199	15.61	15.63	188	8.66	6.21	171	4:31.28	3:28.0	479	45

First things first, the winner here is pretty much LibreOffice 3.6, still it seems to struggle hard on the large .doc, it hangs hard and has a hard time with it (although it opened the file surprisingly fast) the biggest loser here is iWork, since not only does it struggle to open files but between all the Office's it was the only one that had bad formatting, MsOffice 2008 was good enough on everything.

Ubuntu 12.04

	Small .xls			Large .xls			Small .doc			Large .doc
	cold	hot	mem	cold	hot	mem	cold	hot	mem	cold	hot	mem	CPU%
LibreOffice 3.5.6.2	5.16	2.82	36	5.03	4.04	42	5.06	3.11	30	1:13.32	1:14.02	46	6
LibreOffice 3.6	6.86	4.13	38	6.47	5.43	43	5.28	4.06	34	41.89	41.73	90	108
OpenOffice 3.4	10.19	4.37	35	6.11	5.82	44	5.16	4.29	27	2:58.73	2:53.53	80	110

WTF! All 3 Offices performed really great, the winner here is LibreOffice 3.5, but not by a wide margin, and on the large .doc all of them suffered on one thing or another, LibreOffice 3.5 had bad formatting on the large .doc, but was pretty responsive after loading, LibreOffice 3.6 and OpenOffice 3.4 were both lagging hard and made it almost impossible to view or edit the large .doc.

Conclusion

Here is a quick chart of best performance (with whatever operating system works best) for the small .xls and .doc, what we get here is that if you want best performance it depends a lot on the operating system, for Windows 7, MsOffice 2003 blows past the competition, its by far the best, i actually even enjoy the "lazy loading" that it does with the large .doc where it doesn't load it all at once but opens pretty fast, besides that OpenOffice 3.4 kinda still works best than LibreOffice 3.6.

For Mac your choice is LibreOffice 3.6, it works like a charm, next up would probably be MSOffice 2008 just cause it has good compatibility and kinda treats all files equaly, but overall Mac OSX 10.6 is pretty disappointing for Office Performance with nothing loading faster than 10 seconds.

For Linux (Ubuntu 12.04), apparently LibreOffice 3.5 is freaking king, still OpenOffice 3.4 and LibreOffice 3.6 run pretty good too, they feel native and run almost like MSOffice 2003 on Windows 7, super fast and slick i barely see the annoying splash screen (ie any application that has a splash screen just means its going to be slow)!!!, i also like to point out that I'm using the same computer for Windows 7 and Ubuntu 12.04, so yeah great performance for all.

As a side note, in my office its all Win7 machines, mostly cause some of the software, like accounting software is windows only and there are no alternatives, so using another operating system would be troublesome even if doable (virtual machines and such), but this performance on Linux does give me pause, especially with how Linux nowadays does play fairly well with windows networks and windows computers, and with LibreOffice and OpenOffice seem to fairly stagnated in performance on Windows, going for Linux might just do the trick.

Should You Use Hotlink Protection?

2012-07-28T17:02:00.000+01:00

This is a quick post about something that has troubled and intrigued me over the years, should you use hotlink protection?

What is a Hotlink?

First of all if you don't know what im talking about, its pretty simple, when someone visits your site, their browser downloads all the pictures, text, code to make the page show up, but what happens if someone copies the url of one of your images and puts it on their page? then when someone goes to their page, it will show up your image on their site, so effectively you are giving away bandwidth to someone else.

Sounds bad, right? That is when hotlink protection comes up, there are different ways of doing it, but its basically just a couple of tweaks to the software/code/server to block anyone besides your site from using your content...

The Rise of Social and CDN's

There was a time when bandwidth and hosting was expensive (like in Australia heheheh), where hosting a image or video was costly, but nowadays we live with a different set of rules, hosting and bandwidth is pretty cheap, not only that but a lot of the social websites depend and interconnect with the content on the web (facebook, twitter, pinterest, etc... are very popular because they provide a platform for sharing content, and sometimes that content is in your site).

I kinda think that whats important now is to have good content and popular content, so things like someone hot-linking are no longer a issue of cost, but one of opportunity, its also a type of problem that nowadays can be easily fixed with the use of CDN's or cheap hosting.

Hotlink protection is also another form of a walled garden, and although suitable for some types of sites, most would gain more from being open and easily accessible, search engines will appreciate and users even more, so... should you use hotlink protection, im kinda inclined to say no! not anymore ^_^.

Why Am I Moving Away from Google Analytic's

2012-07-19T12:11:00.000+01:00

Oh Urchin how far have you fallen... the old Google Analytic's interface is dead and now we are all forced into the new interface, not that i care that much and yeah the new interface as a huge bunch of new features, like real-time stats, multi-channel funnels, social stats, mobile stats and a bunch of other neet stuff, thats cool, but that's not all...

So my reason to drop Google Analytic's is simple, unlike what Google might want you to believe, the service is not free, Google gets a lot back from "offering" Google Analytic's, it can increase its tracking of the internet, even if anonymous, its still more power to Google's big brother machine, also its a way like Google Webmaster to find more about the web, who links to who and how, its also a way of pushing its Adwords business, still I'm not that paranoid and i did feel like what Google offered was a pretty simple and advance stats tool.

So yeah... my real reason to quit is their re-design, the new Google Analytic's has lots of awesome features, but unfortunately it completely and absolutely sucks if you have more than 1 site, the new design didn't just add stuff it removed a lot of old stuff and made the whole interface slower and clunkier, here are some of the stuff i hate on the new Google Analytic's:

The Whole Stats Engine is Slow - Maybe because of the real-time stuff, I've seen it drag down page load even with asynchronous loading (that just means it doesn't block other page elements, it still takes some time to load).
The Interface is Slow - Its kinda going a bit of the way of Gmail, you keep adding stuff and the beautiful Ajax becomes a dragged out process, if you see small yellow "loading" markers or full page "please wait loading", then the ajax interface isn't helping at all.
The Interface is Confusing - Quoting the Google Analytic's team "We are particularly proud of the attention to detail that our user experience team has put into making the interface easy to use, understandable and beautiful", hummm Google? hello! your user experience team sucks! beautiful... well maybe, it does conform better with Google's now passion with grey and orange, but easy to use and understandable that's just funny, now, to do the exact same things that you used to do, you have to click 3 times more, stuff is hidden or on different places, it also has a lot of stuff laying around and 1/3 is always junk (links to news and help and other Google products...).
You Cant See Aggregation Stats - Ohh yeah have more than 1 site? you used to be able to know how your network was doing, now you cant... why? its not that hard to add it.
You cant see Simplified Stats of every Site - There is no way to give a quick glance on all the sites you have, see like before 2 or 3 simple metrics, like visitors, pageviews and trend (if you your visitors are up or down), no you get white space for your trouble.

But don't trust my word, here are some examples of what i'm talking....

Google Analytic's Dashboard

What am i supposed todo with this? its a huge blank page starting at me, has no value, no data, just a bunch of junk... so anyone starting Google Analytic's does so with at least 1 extra click!

Joking! you need 2 extra clicks to go anywhere, brilliant stuff here!

Domain Stats Page

What is this... madness!!!! Yep that's the main page, filled with... lots of redundant junk, badly organized and slow as shit, yes i know you can customize, but come on!!!! i have 70+ sites and 100+ domains, am i going to customize every single page to make it bearable?

Ohh you wanna change the domain? its just a easy 4 step process!

So to sum it up, i call this one a FAIL! the new Google Analytic's is new eye candy with new features, but for that they destroyed the usability and good old features, that coupled with slow speed and awkward interface kinda killed it for me, I'm moving to Wordpress Stats and Statcounter, i know i wont be able to see aggregated stats but at least these ones are cleaner and quicker and i can always add later on a quick stat package for my entire network.

New ICANN Internet Extensions?

2012-06-18T18:37:00.001+01:00

So the freaking "we rule the web" ICANN has decided to start launching custom TLD, encase you dont know what i mean, its simple, ICANN is the organization in charge of regulating the domain name space (like most of the domains in the internet, .com .net ....), and they decided that anyone with money can have their very own .horny or .smartypants, so we can have a im.horny ... gawd that beautiful!

So why do i think this another ICANN farce!

ICANN is a Bullshit Organization - When you sell the .com and .net business to Verisign without any kind of oversight, that says everything, ICANN is a business not a organization, they dont care about the internet, they care about their bottom line, the real cost of a domain registration is negligible, its cents, but they charge everyone 10$ for any domain!

Custom TLD's are a basic Shake-Down - The same way when new TLDs launch or new TLDs are de-regulated there is always a landgrab from thousands of companies that simply want to protect their brand/identity by having every single domain, so any new TLD will always have a couple of thousands sales guaranteed.

The are already vanity TLDs - Opennic has .geek, .free, .bbs, .parody, .oss, .indy, .fur, .ing, .micro, .dyn, .neo for free? yeah fucking free! why? cause it doesnt cost anything to add a TLD despite what ICANN keeps saying! Go to your hosts file on the computer and change google.com to 127.0.0.1 and sudenly when your write google.com on your browser you get nothing (cause you are bypassing your DNS and telling your computer that google.com is in your computer instead of the web) thats what DNS is! poiting a number to a name, that is ALL.

There are pleanty of TLD's already - Yes and un-used, there is plenty to choose (.info .us .eu .me .biz .xxx .asia .mobi .... besides all the country domains), adding more will just make everything even more confusing, whats the point? how will it help any internet user? it wont, nowadays we are already getting stuck on the... its confusing.com? nooo its confusing.org or maybe confusing.de, cant remember the site, but with these TLD's you will have such gems as .lol or .youtube ... so its www.youtube.com or www.youtube what? where?

What am i supossed to do with this - Cause only rich people and corporations can get their very own TLD's what is everyone supposed to do about it? Go and buy domains under these idiotic TLD's? Fuck that shit...

Blogger Changes for Worst

2012-05-13T17:02:00.002+01:00

Ok, I admit it! I use Blogger, actually i use it on 2 of my sites (this site! and on ecchi), the reason for that is mostly legacy, that and they are 2 fanboyish sites, where i randomly post random stuff, so there is no big need for more control or whatnot, they exist mostly as scraps and places to vent, after all thats why sites like Blogger, Tumblr or Wordpress.com exist, to make it easy as pie to publish content, or so it would seem.

So why am im not enjoying the new Blogger? its a much needed refresh after mostly years of neglect! True, and change in my view is mostly always a good thing, but this new blogger feels and seems like change for the sake of change, like when Adoble launches a new product line or Firefox launches a new version (both have a tendency to instead of improving the old to push the new), so what are my gripes?

The Blogger Dashboard

Clearly the new dashboard is a remake of the old one, thats fine with me, also there are some good things about it, showing some micro stats and some quick links (although those were also on the old layout), thats good! if you have 2 blogs, but if you have 20, its pretty shitty! the whole design, is so wide and white that you are lost in it, it takes so much room that only 5 blogs appear.

Also the new dashboard is incredibly slow, everything takes a couple more than it should, Google sees html as slow, AJAX is the way of the future, everything updates itself, its all seamless and awesome!!! well No! Not really, the whole thing is a mess, its like when you click on a link on a html site you feel the microseconds to jump to the next page, its like a snap feeling (page refreshes to show a new page), here you have the slow drag feeling, the page doesn't refresh but it loads... eventually.

Also whoever designed this was high on orange and on wasting space, from the top down, first grey bar you have the blogger logo and on the other side my nickname and some links to edit my profile or google account... great use of space, especially on 2 features that... humm everyone uses all the time?

Second bar you have my nickname again and the title! my blogs! oh how sweetly irrelevant, on the other side of the bar you get 2 drop-downs, one for language (something i like to see all the time and change constantly to keep myself fresh) and options, of course all of these options are absolutely positively super duper handy! Here they are:

Blogger Help - The first option? I think this needs no further comment.
Send Feedback - Hum? Im seeing double, in the bottom there is a button saying the exact same thing, hell that button is on every page!
Connect to Google+ - Yes we all know Google hates Orkut.
Old Blogger Interface - My favorite option! i think it should have its own button and be called "Go back to the new new blogger, its the same as the old but still better than the new", ohh maybe thats too much text for a button, but im glad it made it into this crowded options menu.
About New Look - For when "Blogger Help" and "Send Feedback" is just not enough!

Then you get the blogs displayed, of course to create a new blog, you just click the button "New Blog" you cant miss it, cause that tiny button is taking a 1\3 column on the left side, I also like the responsive design tweaks, but just if you have 1024px or lower screen, if you go higher you just get extra empty space... how responsive of you.

They also decided to continue including the reading pane (basically a poor man's google reader), who uses this? Let me think of a time i needed to get into my blogging software to read other peoples shit? hummm suffice to say its not practical, its not nice, its basically throwing random feeds at you. Ohh and of course it takes half the screen and there is no way of minimising or closing it, you just have to try and use a bit of imagination, and think of a blogger dashboard without that oversized rss widget!

The new dashboard also hangs/goes into a infinite loop if you try to login forcing https, yeah, who wants encrypted logins... what do you have to hide, blogger guy! no one reads your cat blog anyways!

The Blogger Editor

Did i say the dashboard was slow? sorry i mean everything is slow, its slow in firefox, safari and even google's chrome, its slow by design, if you concentrate and listen... listen really well... you can actually hear the screams of javascript dying, thats how slow, unresponsive and obnoxious it is!

But when it eventually loads something, you are greeted with even more white and orange, its like writing in a Sunnny D comercial, its so refreshing that im actually becoming orange blind.

Here however there is a somewhat better use of the white space, but still their "responsive design" leaves a lot to be desired, their sidebar on the left side only minimizes if your screen is small, if its large its always open, no choice, also on the "Compose" side of things you have a tiny tiny box to write, while on the "HTML" you have a large box, and going back and forth actually loses formatting (a space written on html is not translated into compose, you literally have to put the html tag for space or paragraph), thats just silly, the HTML part on a editor is not really to edit html its to tweak the code of a post...

Also your infinite image posting options, not that its a bad thing, i prefer more than too few, its just a bit confusing, like you dont know if you are posting images on Picasa or Blogger (or is that gone?) from Picasa or from Google+ or from your webcam, where do those go? into Picasa or Google+, i dont know... maybe i shouldn't touch it more!

The New Themes / Dynamic Views

Should i mention those weirdly, barely functional, cooliris wannabe clones (being cooliris kinda a apple coverflowish clone), javascript infilled, bloat hazardous new themes?

Who had this great ideia? Hummm? I bet it was the same guy that designed the new blogger, he just went nuts on a power-trip, the new themes are simply not good, they break a lot of function and usability for the sake of fancy effects, blogs are to be read and enjoyed, not to be wowed by fancy sliding effects, although nice, they add little to nothing for the reader/visitor, it actually makes it worst.

These new themes are slow! - You betcha, a theme that has a loading icon is already a sign of bad things to come (like a software with a splash screen), especially when blogger staff says they load 40% faster... what? ohh you mean after the long loading signs it becomes faster? ohhh no? it must be one of those "perceived faster", or maybe a sidebar is 40% of the design, if we kill a sidebar... 40% faster! by the way the screenshot on top of a dynamic view loading was super easy to take, no need to hurry before it finished loading...
These new themes are not easy to navigate! - They aren't! Sure the fonts are nice and readable, but you can choose any font for your blog, but try and navigate anywhere on a dynamic view... let this scrolling quest begin!
These new themes are all basically the same! - They are and half of them aren't even that nice, and most are made for a specific kind of formated posts, so any average blog will look like shit in them!
These new themes have crippled search! - Try it on a average sized blog... i dare you! ... to find anything...
These new themes have no sidebar! - So they basically want to push oversized, slow jazzed up tumblr themes on everyone... nice...

We all know Google quit the "Dont be evil" some time ago, and although i still use some Google products i cant say i trust them all that much, for sure me, like most of you will stay very clear from things like Google+ and Google Drive, as i would never sign up my cat to Google+ , if not the subpar facebook clone, the risk of his account getting banned and all his cute kitty pictures being lost forever... NOOOOO!

But when did Google stop making clean, simple and fast designs? Google Search is as bloated as ever, sometimes i have difficulty searching cause im writing something and instant is firing off and pages are loading and i realise that i cant even concentrate on what i was searching (and yes i know you can disable it, but how many times have i disabled instant or safe filter to have them show back on later on, even when im logged in!), what happen to the mili-second clean pages of search? what happen to clean, simple UI's and focused design on one thing that does one job awesomely well!

Well, yeah the new updated Blogger sucks, its slow, buggier, way more complicated than it should be, not that user-friendly and overall a disappointment, and most likely when this new blogger turns into the official one, ill have to pack my bags and move over to tumblr, apparently the only sensible offering on the market today.

Note: Why no Wordpress.com?, well I also have some minor issues with wordpress.com since they seem in comparison with blogger and tumblr, the ones that offer less options and flexibility, ohh and worst! they are way more picky about the kind of content they let you publish (the 2 blogs i had there were "suspended" at one point or another), yes i know its their choice and platform, and yes they eventually un-suspended me, but that just makes me stay away.

Note 2: As I wrote this post on Gmail and copy pasted to Blogger, im sure Google tracked that action down, later today some Google manager will look at that log and think ... humm this should be on the next Gmail build! so just after the Gmail+, Google will launch the brand new Gmailer+ hey and its a success already, from day 1 it has a bazzilion users! Blogging right from your Google+ i mean Gmail, ahhh you know what that means! Humm now that i think about it... at least it would be a better Blogger!

Apache OpenOffice 3.4 Vs LibreOffice 3.5.3

2012-05-09T15:36:00.000+01:00

So I've been using LibreOffice on multiple computers on the office, as an obvious alternative to Microsoft's Office, now the reason for moving from OpenOffice to LibreOffice was purely because Oracle is probably the most untrustworthy company in the world (i joke, i joke, but they surely seem a very anti-opensource company), so with the spin-off LibreOffice and especially because they were joining with Go-oo, i thought the move to LibreOffice was the right one!

See my main concerns (and probably like most other users) with Office software are:

I need basic Office Functions (Writer/Calc/Presentation);
I need compatibility with Microsoft Office documents;
I need Performance (Opening fast, closing fast, editing fast, if possible low memory and low cpu)!

What i noticed first with my change to Libreoffice is that it was slightly slower than OpenOffice, i thought it was a bit strange since Go-oo was a bit faster than OpenOffice, still the difference dint seem much at the time and i put if off as the excuse from the LibreOffice camp that the focus right then was on code clean up.

So now that OpenOffice practically died off at the hands of Oracle and was handed down to the Apache foundation to try and become a more open source project again, i kinda would like to give it a go, at least to see how the performance is, so with OpenOffice 3.4 just coming out, lets make a comparison!

Basic Office Functions between OpenOffice 3.4 and LibreOffice 3.5.3

Well there are already a lot, especially on the LibreOffice side of things, but not all are for the better, sure LibreOffice has more tricks and features, but most are to my view (the view of someone that wants a basic office software for a business) mostly irrelevant, also Libreoffice color change is kinda obnoxious, who wants fluorescent green/blue/yellow documents icons? Besides that, i would say in basic office functions OpenOffice and LibreOffice are on par.

Office Compatibility between OpenOffice 3.4 and LibreOffice 3.5.3

Well almost the same, even tough here i kinda have to give a nudge to LibreOffice, since it has way less warnings and quiz options while opening Microsoft Office Documents, the OpenOffice "oh jesus christ i see a macro" warnings are a bit of a overkill and annoying, but yeah they both work pretty good with Microsoft Office documents.

Performance between OpenOffice 3.4 and LibreOffice 3.5.3

I'm using pretty modern computers (multiple core cpus, 4GB ram, fast 7200rpm hard drives), one with Windows XP the other with Windows 7, yes I'm not going to compare on the Mac or Linux cause I'm not using them on the business side, also although this isn't all that scientific, I'm going to take some precautions, my scheme will be installing/rebooting, running cold/running hot, also I'm not tweaking any of them for performance, this is out of the box performance, on both I'm only installing the writer/spreadsheet/presentation programs, on both I'm disabling quick start.

The small.doc is 40KB, the large.doc is 25MB with plenty of formatting and embedded images and graphs, the small.xls is 45KB and the large.xls is 4MB with 20 sheets lots of calculations and graphs.

Note: I've removed the cold start, since they both acted pretty much the same, if starting cold, it adds around 16 seconds whatever the document and whatever the software (that sucks on both software's). I also removed the Windows XP graphic cause it was kinda the same, although all a bit slower than on Windows 7, but that computer is also a bit slower than the Windows 7.

So as we can see, OpenOffice has better performance once warmed up, especially on the large.doc, the difference in opening is huge! Almost half the time to open, and with smaller files it also consistently outperformed LibreOffice, also OpenOffice was very responsive on the Large.doc, while LibreOffice kept hanging while i was scrolling or editing, also for the same document Libreoffice used 43MB of RAM, while OpenOffice used 35MB of RAM.

So now i'm not sure if i should move all my computers back to OpenOffice or if i should wait for LibreOffice 3.6 in a month's time, but i do hope that both distributions start focusing on performance, i think if OpenOffice keeps improving its performance like this, that it really doesn't matter the clean code and all the nice bells and whistles of LibreOffice, most business will make the decision on performance (literally the biggest reason to buy Microsoft Office is performance) to stay with OpenOffice or go back to it, just like me.

Note 1: Seems i should have published the documents i used in this comparison, sorry about that, my fault! but like i said in the comments they were random office documents, i promisse ill make a better comparison when LibreOffice 3.6 comes out!

Note 2: Also the Windows XP computer has Microsoft Office 2003 (the only office i have ever bought) and all of the files i tested open INSTANTLY! and in COLD START! even the huge 25MB file, although it seems in that one it only loads the first 6 pages, but scrolling down it keeps showing the rest pretty quickly and smoothly, soo i would add that in the performance department LibreOffice and OpenOffice have still a long Long LONG way to go, even in 2012 they are no comparison in performance to a 2003 software.

Cloud Storage - Skydrive's Storage Claims

2012-04-30T12:06:00.000+01:00

Guess I'm back to talking about cloud services, still this time I'm on Skydrive's tail, when this new Skydrive was announced on the MSDN blog, there was something that i found odd, the reason Microsoft decided to give 7GB of free space to new users, the reasoning being that 99,94% of all Skydrive users only used less than 7GB! Ill even give you their graph!

Neet, but something seems off, and some things do come to mind...

Skydrive was a crippled service, less we not forget but the fact that Skydrive wasn't that popular, was that you had 25GB but you could only upload files through a web form, you had like 100Mb limit for file size, stuff like that, with this... of course the vast majority didn't have the time or patience to upload a lot of files to Skydrive, its completely different from the service that Skydrive is offering now!
25GB was the calling card, the reason you had so many users in the first place was the 25GB, even though it was hard to use the space, people like big numbers.
There will be some storage envy, even with pretty spanky awesome lower storage price tiers and older users being able to have their 25GB, people that before ignored Skydrive because it was a crippled service, will now just compare it with Dropbox, Google Drive and such, hell with Dropbox you can get way more than 7GB with referrals, and Dropbox is still the superior service!
7GB is a weird number, it IS! 8GB or 10GB would be better, or better yet, keep the freaking 25GB, if most people just use 7GB there would be no harm at all! RIGHT!!!

As a sidenote I've tried this new Skydrive and i must say it works pretty well on windows 7 (on mac it sucks bad, since its only available to lion), comparing with Dropbox that uses like 60/80 Mb of Ram and about 2/3% CPU, Skydrive uses about 10/20 Mb of Ram and barely touches CPU, it also runs pretty smoothly, so good job there Microsoft, shame about the storage shenanigans.

Google Drive and Cloud Storage

2012-04-28T18:44:00.005+01:00

So Google just launched Google Drive and although this has been quite a week on the cloud, and the response from the web to "Google's Dropbox Clone" has been mostly "meh", i do understand the sentiment, it is basically a Dropbox Clone, sure it has some new features but those are mostly baked into Google Docs already, so what is my view on this Goggle Docs+ i mean Google Drive...

Oh Shit it does Sync!

That's awesome if it was released in 2006, its 2012 now and there are plenty of sync everywhere including cloud services, some more simple, some more fancy, but that's pretty much the service, Google launching it now, feels and seems like an afterthought, because Microsoft and Apple went into it, they better do it as well, also it pretty much does only that, its a sync engine for Google Docs and that service although cool is not that awesome and it doesn't replace at all using a local office software.

Oh Snap Google Owns Me!

So most of us are loyal and use a lot of Google Services, i know i do, and the day some algorithm in Google decides to suspend my account for some random reason (ie a bad Google Adwords ad, or putting my nickname on Google+ or whatnot), and of course i can trust the non-existent Google support to help me out, so yeah, using Google nowadays should be done with a backup/alternative always in mind.

Worst! Google unfortunately resides in the USA the home of such nice things as the Patriot Act and the reason why a lot of companies don't host any personal/private information in the USA, cause its too easy to just go into your files, you need warrants and judges to go to your home to check your computers, but going to your cloud files... hummm not so much, and with the latest CISPA, it will just get worst, if banks/governments dont trust putting anything inside US borders, why should we trust Google with our stuff? (ie i know most other cloud hosting are on US, im just stating the fact that Google is also).

Oh Jeez i have to Pay!

So Google launches Drive and decides to updates its storage price, and the web gives a sigh...

If Google Drive was launched with the previous storage prices it would have been an awesome cloud hosting mini revolution, i would see people using and integrating Google Drive in lots of different ways just to find uses to that cheap pricing on storage, but no! the new prices are 4X or more expensive than it used to be, and now its price is just on par with the cheapest of the pack, so why choose Google Drive? Not on storage price!

Its a Google App Engine all over again, they start with a really cheap price and then when people start using it they change the rules of the game, so if anyone is already deep down on Google Services and needs more storage, they will have to pay 4 times or more just to have THE SAME STORAGE THAT THEY USED TO HAVE! its ridiculous and in my opinion its another huge fail from Google.

But wait it gets worst, now with the new storage prices, Google Services have all different storage limits, like Gmail has 10GB, but Drive has only 5GB and Picasa has 1GB what? but Google+ Photos is unlimited, its ridiculous and besides making it more complicated it also kills the gmail "you never have to delete an e-mail ever again" popular slogan, cause now gmail storage stopped growing... thats just sad T_T so sad...

Oh Wow it kinda Sucks!

Ok so Google Drive is syncing to Google Docs, but...no not really, since your documents formated with Google Docs wont sync, yeah thats right, they will only live only on the Google cloud, so when Google kills your account those files will be lost forever, nice file sync Google, its mostly one way... plus at least in my opinion, not supporting linux is just another silly mistake.

Also Google's new "all services have the same terms of service" makes Google retaining/granting ownership or license of any material you upload, unlike competing syncing services, if you put something on Google, even if you delete it later on, Google still owns some rights to it, i know! its fucking embarassing and ridiculous.

Oh chucks i quit!

So whats my take on this Drive... humm ill skip this one, it kinda just makes me dislike Google even more, the old Google ignored users, but this new Google just doesn't respect its users, Google's moto "dont be evil" is pretty close to becoming moot.

Ultimate Adblock Privacy List

2012-02-20T16:15:00.004+00:00

[ For you guys that know how this works, the filter subscription url for ablock plus is http://p.oito.eu/privacy.txt ]

I was having a chat the other day about privacy and how the value of facebook is around not only the people/clients, but also everything you/upload/say on facebook is property of facebook and even when you are online all those like buttons, means they are still tracking you and selling who you are and what you do to the highest bidder...

That got me thinking, first thing i did was "clean up my facebook account", ill still use facebook its a great site and communication tool, and i know facebook works like a subversion repository and everything you do is recorded for all time, so my clean up is purely esthetic, but still this way not only is my facebook a bit cleaner but its also a reminder for me to not add more personal stuff there...

Next i searched around for that privacy protection, from Noscript, to an improvement on my hosts file (mine is already a beauty to behold, but more on that on another post), but i realized that i could use the awesome adblocking extension, adblock plus to do that job, especially cause i want for instance to block facebook or twitter buttons, but i dont want to block facebook or twitter, so i searched around and actually found they already have a couple of nice "privacy" filters, i put "" cause although good, they aren't as cutthroat as i want them to be, that took me to my next step....

My very own privacy filter for adblock plus, it isnt huge and its not all encompassing, i have no big issue with small vendors or even a big vendor knowing a bit about me, my issue is they know too much, so this adblock filter is more of a privacy crippler that in conjuction with my hosts file and adblock plain list, makes my web oh so much more wonderful and safe!

How to Install this Beauty

Its simple, get yourself a good browser like firefox or chrome (remember both these browsers already track some of what you do, so if you want to go private all the way go for SRWare or something), then find on their respective Add-Ons/Extensions sites Adblock Plus and install it, then on the adblock plus options you will see a Filter Subscriptions, just add a new one and put whatever name you want, like "Awesome Privacy List" and put this url ~~http://p.oito.eu/privacy.txt~~ and thats it! It will update itself once a week when i add or remove hosts, the original list is part my personal choices and the awesome privacy lists from Abine and Privacy Choice.

Note: Well this was shortlived! but mostly cause a few friends pointed out that other people were already doing this, so why should I! hehehe sorry, so check out Fanboys Anti Tracking+ Annoyances as well as Adversity! Its the ones i use and they kick ass!

Oito Mini Services

2012-02-19T16:00:00.013+00:00

Over the years i've created some tools to help me out or just for fun, i had them all over on s2r.org, but i thought with the creation of oito.eu, it would be nicer to share those tools with everyone, the idea was always for them to be simple and fast, hey you might find them useful like i do!

oito.eu/ip > the most plain find your ip ever!
oito.eu/qr > quick and dirty qr generator, based on google's qr api
oito.eu/htm > full featured html editor, for those times where you forgot what was that tag
oito.eu/host > pulls the ip and hostname of a site
oito.eu/up > the most plain is this site up ever!
oito.eu/whois > fast simple whois
oito.eu/http > this one is to make quick checks on a site's headers and stuff

Update on the Anti-Spam Txt

2012-02-18T12:41:00.002+00:00

In the never ending fight against spam, i decided to update my imageboard anti-spam list, but im also centralizing it and caching it (cdn and stuff on our oito.eu mirror domain), so its easier and quicker to use and update, so now the spam list is here at http://p.oito.eu/spam.txt just copy it over to your own spam list or just use as an extension! Voilá bad-guys gone!

As a note, it mostly includes common bad hosts,spam sites,short url providers and overall nasty sites that have spammed one of our image boards on one time or another, also if you think your site is wrongfully added to our spam list, then just send us a mail on the contact page and if you are right, we will remove you at once!

New Site - Yokatta

2012-02-16T15:39:00.000+00:00

Hey hey new site, i introduce to you yokatta.org, its a plain and cute anime/japanese inspired wallpaper site! Always wanted one muhahahaha ^_^