Binary Turf

Blazing Fast build of Firefox 3.6 beta1 available

Shivanand Sharma — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 16:58:55 +0000

Blazing Fast builds of Firefox 3.6 beta 1 are available now. The PGO builds utilize the profile guided optimization like the Firefox 3.5 series. However what’s different about it is that during the profiling, the browser runs the Sunspider javascript benchmarks. This series of synthetic javascript benchmark I believe does a more accurate simulation of the stress tests during the test or profiling phase. No surprise, Mozilla is still trying to target breakthrough speeds for the final build.

As you know the Blazing Fast builds are optimized for specific processor. However this is done without compromising on any browser feature. Thus what you get is a fully functional browser performing at blazing fast speeds. Head on to the download page to get your copy.

© Binary Turf. Read and subscribe to our other blogs AdvancedPhotography.Net, Maverick Saint, Tech Support.

Using Wordpress μ (Mu) for Multiple Domains

Shivanand Sharma — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 20:48:20 +0000

Wordpress μ (pronounced Mu) is a port of Wordpress built to run multiple blogs off the same installation. That’s what Wordpress.Com uses to run all it’s blogs. While all is Hunky Dory for the regular requirements, things take a twist when you want to run wordpress blogs off Wordpress μ on multiple domains like www.domain1.com, www.domain2.com,www.domain3.com off www.domainmaster.com. For a brief background, most of the webhosts provide you the ability to host multiple domains under the same account. So just in case you want all these domains to run off a single installation of Wordpress μ here is a step by step approach.

Assumptions for Installation of WordPress MU (WPMU)
- You have licensed the domain names adblogsense.com to use as the multiuser account master and photographysimplified.net to use as the first blog. [Of course these names are fictitious and you'll need to get your own.]
- You have a hosted account with HostGator (or similar setup).
- You will install the WPMU files and will want to be able to refer to them by browsing to http://www.adblogsense.com or to any blog you install.
Get and prepare Wordpress μ
NOTE: Be sure to read the caveats and discussion on the download page.
- Download latest copy of WordPress MultiUser (latest at this time is wordpress-mu-2.8.4a.zip) from http://mu.wordpress.org/download
- Unzip the downloaded file into wordpress-mu folder
Create a database on the host
- Log into the cpanel – http://adblogsense.com/cpanel
- Scroll down to the section called Databases
- Choose MySQL Databases
- Create a database
- Create a database user (admin) with a password
- Add the user to the database
- Assign user permissions as you see fit
- Be sure to record the names that were assigned to the database, user, and password. You’ll need them a little later.
Create an email (Optional)
Create an email account in adblogsense.com and change your gmail settings (or other email server settings) to allow you to send and receive mail with this address. Or you can just use your existing email address.
Upload: Using an FTP Program move contents of the wordpress-mu folder (not the folder itself) to the root directory of your multiuser account (adblogsense.com) , that is, directly into the public_html folder. There is about 7.1 MB worth of files but just remember that they are only installed once and can be used to host one or more blogs. Ten blogs would not require 71MB worth of WordPress files only the original one time install of 7.1 MB.
Install Wordpress μ
- Login into http://www.adblogsense.com
- You will be presented with the WordPressMu Installation Screen
- Under Blog Addresses, do as recommended. Click the radio button to the left of Sub-domains if it is not already selected.
- Under the Database section, insert:
  - Database Name
  - User Name
  - Password
  - Database host – almost always called ‘localhost’
- Under the Server Address, leave it as shown. Our example would show ‘adblogsense.com’
- Under Site Details, insert a good title for your site. Ours could say ‘adblogsense.com Blogs’. That feels a little rough so you may change it slightly to adblogsense Information.
- Then insert an email address (perhaps the one created above) where you want to get notifications from this site.
- Click on the Submit button and voila, the first part of the installation is done.
- NOTE: Notice that you probably have some disquieting news warning you about “Wildcard DNS could not be configured correctly”. Not to worry! We’ll take care of that soon.
Login as admin
- Your assigned admin name is ‘admin’ and you have a strange looking password. Copy the password.
- There are a lot of warnings and instructions on this page. Ignore them.
- Click on Login
- Enter the login name and password and you are magically transported to the dashboard.
- If you are or are not offered a chance to change your password, go ahead and do so.
- There may be a message at the top of your page that sends you to your profile to change the password OR
- You may have to select the Users link on the left, mouse over ‘admin’ and choose edit, then scroll to the bottom of the resulting page and type in a new password. Then click on Update Profile.
Install the domain mapping plugin
- Be sure that you are logged in as THE administrator of the account. If you’ve created another user name, even if logged in with an administrator ability, you may have problems continuing.
- Click on the Plugins link on the left of the dashboard page.
- Click on Add New.
- In the search box, enter ‘Domain Mapping’.
- Click on Search Plugins button.
- On the returned page, click on the Install link to the right of “WordPress MU Domain Mapping”.
- You may get a message saying that this plugin has not been tested with the version of Wordpress you are using. Ignore it and press the Install Now button.
- Click on the Activate Plugin link.
- In the box just under the title Manage Plugins, click on the Activate link so that ‘normal’ users may be able to see the plugin.
- Then at the bottom of the page, click the checkbox to the right of the word ‘Plugins’.
- Then click on the Update Optons button.
Install the first blog – will be photographysimplified.net
- Go to adblogsense.com/cpanel
- Choose subdomains icon shown under the Domains label
- Enter an asterisk to get a wildcard address of ‘*.adblogsense.com’
- Press Create button
- Press Go Back link after receiving confirmation that the subdomain was created.
- Get IP address of host server. HostGator shows its IP address (74.52.112.3 – just and example) on the left side of the home page.
- Choose Addon Domains.
- Enter photographysimplified.net in new domain name
- Click into Document Root textbox and delete everything after the / of public_html/
- Choose a password
- Click on Add Domain button
- Return to adblogsense dashboard
Add a New Blog
- Click on adblogsense Dashboard
- Click on Site Admin
- Click on Blogs link
- At Add Blog, type name of domain (photographysimplified) to form photographysimplified.adblogsense.com
- Add Title and Email
- Click on Add Blog
- Go to backend (aka dashboard) of photographysimplified by mousing over its domain name and selecting ‘backend’
- Click on Plugins
- Click on Installed
- Click on Activate for Domain Mapping
- Look under Tools label and Click on Domain Mapping. Note the instructions about sunrise.php. We will deal with them in the next step.
Do Some House Keeping
- Using FTP again copy the file ’sunrise.php’ from the public_html/wp-content/plugins/wordpress-mu-domain-mapping/ folder into the public_html/wp-content folder. This means that the sunrise.php file supplied with the Domain Mapping plugin replaces the sunrise.php file usually installed by WPMU.
- Use a Text Editor to uncomment sunrise.php at about line 87 of the wp-config.php file
- Back to the Browser one more time
  - Go back to the adblogsense dashboard, choose Tools then Domain Mapping.
  - Add the IP address for your hosting service, in this case, 74.53.172.3 for HostGator.
  - Add New Domain www.photographysimplified.net and click Add Button

With all this done your blogs should be up and running. You can repeat the required steps from 9,10,11 to add any more blogs. New wouldn’t you like to use the Thesis Wordpress Theme – Developer Edition on Wordpress μ powered blogs? Watch this space for the next in series.

© Binary Turf. Read and subscribe to our other blogs AdvancedPhotography.Net, Maverick Saint, Tech Support.

FoxClocks for Firefox

Shivanand Sharma — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 19:06:49 +0000

This is a guest post by Anil Atluri of SHOW. Anil Atluri is a creative writer and has experience as a content creator, freelance soft skills trainer, columnist, HR professional. He has more than 500 articles to his credit – apart from others (ghost writing).

I am a freelance content provider and I have clients from all over the world.

I had this invitation from a potential client sitting there in my inbox. All I know is that my bid caught the eye of this client and I needed to schedule an online interview. All I have is the name of a town and the continent, that I read about during my school days and that was decades ago.

Well, Google would spew out the “local time: place” but that is not good enough for me. I have other clients in several other time zones. I believe in the dictum that “service is not good enough”. “Dazzling Service” is a must to win, retain and continue to serve if you want to keep your client happy.

I need to make sure that I have enough of rest to deliver them all that I promised to deliver, the best FIVE S*T*A*R stuff that I promised them to expect from me.
That’s when I came across this 706 kb FoxClocks addon for my favorite Firefox browser. FoxClocks is an extension developed by Andy McDonald.

With close to three million downloads it is a winner no doubt. Once you add it to your arsenal of addons, it sits pretty snugly on the status bar.

I configured it in such a way that it would display the country flag, the City my client lives in. It shows the local time in a 12 hours format and the day. A beautiful tool that helps me schedule my interviews without any conflict with my other appointment, with the other clients living in other time zones. It is amazing how much you can customize it to.

All I have to do it hover my mouse, over the icon that is sitting on my lower left side of the status bar of my Firefox browser and out pops out the little tooltip. A mouse over displays all the details I have configured it with. Colors and formatted font like bold, italics, regular.

A must addon, for all of you who would like to know your contact’s local time, without leaving your browser and time zone. I strongly recommend FoxClocks.

This is a guest post by Anil Atluri of at SHOW. Anil Atluri is a creative writer and has experience as a content creator, freelance soft skills trainer, columnist, HR professional. He has more than 500 articles to his credit – apart from others (ghost writing).

© Binary Turf. Read and subscribe to our other blogs AdvancedPhotography.Net, Maverick Saint, Tech Support.

ColorfulTabs: Javascript namespacing in addons

Shivanand Sharma — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 16:02:05 +0000

Namespacing has become an important issue as the number of addons grows. Putting it in very simple terms, as the number of addons grows the chances of “two different addons using the same global variable/function” increases. This can lead to conflicts. Additionally many of the simpler addons inherit (or reuse) publicly available code possible from Mozilla developer sites. Thus the chances only multiply. A more detailed coverage can be found in the article Respecting the JavaScript global namespace.

ColorfulTabs is a very old addon and has evolved with the times. Thus I recoded everything from the ground up when developers got aware about the namespacing issue. However as it was, during the course of development and due to the relatively complex code, new variables were introduced. It was thus important to clean up the code and additionally verify compliance with coding best practices.

An excellent tool for finding variables and functions in the global namespace is the Reviewers’ Extensions which is easy to use and lists all the variables in the global namespace. You can use it to track how other addons in your profile too and find out which are the ones introducing the most noise.

© Binary Turf. Read and subscribe to our other blogs AdvancedPhotography.Net, Maverick Saint, Tech Support.

Wishing all visitors a very happy diwali

Shivanand Sharma — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 15:52:59 +0000

May the festival of lights bring you lots of luck and prosperity. Happy Diwali!

© Binary Turf. Read and subscribe to our other blogs AdvancedPhotography.Net, Maverick Saint, Tech Support.

Happy Diwali

Review: Dell Precision T5500

Shivanand Sharma — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 18:23:57 +0000

I received my Dell Precision T5500 on 4 Sept 2009. It’s only been after so many days that I’ve found time away from it to actually sit and write about it. This review is a tale of my experiences with what Dell is today and all that I had to face to get this system to get it actually working. Let’s start with the configuration.

Configuration

Processor: Dual Xeon E5520
Memory: 6GB DDR3 tri-channel 1066MHz ECC SDRAM
Harddrive: Dual 250GB in Raid 0 (Possibly western digital)
AX510 Sound Bar
Dual 2408WFP UltraSharp(TM)24″ Widescreen Flat Panel LCD Monitor(Analog&DVI)
Dual 512MB PCIe x16 nVidia Quadro FX580, Quad Monitor DisplayPort,DVI
Additionally to support this beast I purchased a APC Smart-UPS 1500VA UPS

The Dell Precision T5500 falls under the workstation category which indicates that more thought has gone into the system design and component selection for maximum stability and class performance. Unlike the consumer or business machines, the workstations are targeted to the user seeking excellent performance, system durability and stability. Coupled with dual 24″ Dell 2408wfp monitors this is the dream machine I always wanted to buy. The choice of components was quite challenging as Dell doesn’t allow you to configure this system online and I had to call a sales agent to configure it over the phone. As a result I made several calls spanning over a week. I was attended by different agents everytime and none was able to configure it. Sometimes there was a parts mismatch. At other times someone promised to send me a quotation but never actually did. Finally I did receive a quotation. I had to negotiate and review every little alteration and configuration comparing the price difference and specs. online while I spoke over the phone. A terrible thing Dell does to its customer purchasing high-end machines. The sales agent are not tech savvy either and have to reach out to another sales agent to get the queries answered. And despite all my effort I was shipped a machine in a desktop orientation. Anyways, here’s my take on the choice of components:

Processor: When buying a high-end system like this you essentially have to have a big budget. Yet you are on a budget. The Xeon E5520 is a processor from the Xeon 5500 series. It doesn’t tout high frequency operation but lies somewhere at the bottom of the higher end. It’s the cheapest of the quad cores in the series, supports hyperthreading amongst a host of other features. Essentially this is the implementation of the Core i7 technology for Xeon. No extreme editions but multi-coring (a word that I coined myself). This ends up showing 16 logical CPUs to the taskmanager.
Memory: The Xeon E5520 operate on 1066MHz which goes with the memory I chose – no bottlenecks. At the time, I thought 6GB would be more than required.
Harddrive: I started with dual one-terabyte drives in RAID 0. But you can’t rely on a RAID 0 for data reliability as it doesn’t have any redundancy. All the data is split and stored spanning over two drives. Read and write speeds are extremely fast on a RAID 0. I had to cut it down to 250GB each so that I can cut the price and only use the drives for the operating system and some other frequently used data. Rest will be stored on DVDs or a better storage device in the future.
Video: I’m not a gamer. Not quite true because I’ve burnt my eyes red playing Mario. But today’s games scare me. I’m a web developer and like accurate performance. I went with the dual Nvidia Quadro FX580.
Monitor: I’ve read a lot of good reviews about the Dell 2408WFP wide-color-gamut monitors. 24″ is the size that I was looking for. But honestly I’ve never liked a machine since I quit my full-time job. I used a 17″ dual-monitor setup there. You never want to come back to a single monitor once you’ve use a dual-monitor setup. The dual 2408WFP is a costly but excellent choice.
Sound: With my 10000W PMPO music system hooked up to this machine I didn’t care for sound. But the Dell AX510 soundbar came as a pleasant surprise.
UPS: The max power requirement for this model is approx 980 watts. Add two monitors and printer or so. Add a buffer of 15% which roughly equates to 1500 watts. But 1500VA is not equivalent to 1500watts because there’s something called power factor. Luckily the T5500 I configured didn’t have such humungous power requirements – no extreme end CPU or video cards.

Rest of the hardware was the usual stuff, the network adapter the 16x DVD burner etc.

Dell Precision T5500 out of the box

The dual monitor configuration was not available so the extra monitor had to be purchased separately and was delivered a week earlier than the system. The system was delivered in multiple boxes and I was so disheartned to find out that at the end of the day I did miss a minor detail configuring the system – they shipped me the desktop orientation and not the mini-tower orientation. With the buildings growing vertically due to lack of space and the Precision T5500 being pushed as “dual core performance in a small footprint” I was at a loss of words to see this thing demanding horizontal space on the small desk in my small office. But that wasn’t the last thing to hurt me. The front bezel of this system read T3500 – the cheaper system with only a single processor. I knew I was having a bad day.

I took my time arranging the system parts and through the cables. I turned it on and it didn’t start. It was a loose power cable. It then started but didn’t boot to an operating system even though I purchased it with DOS. I took my time installing the OS and all. And finally the system came to life.

Performance

Good news and bad news. The DVD burner only burnt at 4x and needed a replacement. The front bezel teased me with the T3500 label. I had it replaced only to find that the new bezel missed the Intel Xeon inside label. I’m not a benchmark freak but I did test the system to my satisfaction. This system was willing to take anything that you’d throw at it. And then it would laugh back at you. I compiled a Firefox PGO build which only lasted about over an hour and a few minutes. Generally it took me 4-5 hours to do the same on my dual core 2.0GHz 4GB machine. All through this the CPU didn’t go above 20%. However the memory did get saturated while linking thanks to the memory hog that Windows is. I’m even willing to upgrade to 12GB but I doubt if that will suffice. If you need any specific benchmarks just ask or comment. The Windows Experience Index on this machine was 5.9 on Vista for all components. It stayed at 5.9 on Windows 7 pulled down by the harddrive performance while it stayed at 7.7 for the CPU and memory, 6.4 for all graphics and 5.9 for the harddrive. The performance is perfectly acceptable for casual gaming and I can always try a take or two till I surrender to those horrendous ghastly looking monsters.

The wide gamut monitors are less than a treat out of the box. But with proper tuning the colors come to life. Perfect for photography and multimedia the Dell 2408WFP is a great monitor with great connectivity. My Philips 29″ TV 29PT9421 ditched me a month back. I hate to get the faithless thing repaired and the Dell 2408wfp is a good working substitute.

Overall

The time I spend doing my research prior to buying and otherwise tell me that todays operating systems are still trying to come up to challenges like utilizing the power or multi-cores, multi-threading etc. Snow Leopard promises moves in such direction and Microsoft has been silent on Windows 7 playing it down. It’s a cat and a mouse game where the hardware and the software are always trying to catch up with each other. For now the multi-core wins. I’m sure this system will last me about 3 years beyond which it will still be usable as a fast desktop but will run short of warranty or perhaps go end-of-life for the manufacturer. It’s a good investment so long as I can make use of it.

P.S. – No photographs for this system as it’s fixed into a lot of cables in a tight slot under my desk. However on the inside too it’s tightly shoved with all the components with an additional CPU raiser for the extra processor. If you want you can request photographs through comments.

APC Smart-UPS 1500VA USB

Play Nintendo games online with JSNES – a javascript based emulator

Shivanand Sharma — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 16:18:56 +0000

Ben Firshman has come up with an NES emulator written completely in JavaScript. At the first thought it never occurred to me how it could be possible to do something such hardware centric low-level programming in JavaScript. However upon reading further I found that the emulator used the canvas element to draw the frames. The emulator runs pretty well in Google Chrome thanks to its fast rendering of the canvas element. However it is painfully slow on Firefox.

Anyways check out JSNES and some old time games (preferably while you work for your boss)…:). Head on to JSNES homepage.

Coming Up: Dell Precision T5500 Review

Shivanand Sharma — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 14:46:24 +0000

Dell precision T5500

Update: Read the full Dell Precision T5500 review here.

Quick one here. I ordered a Dell Precision T5500 Workstation on 14th August 2009. Still waiting for it to arrive. Here are the specs in short.

Dual Quad Core Intel (R) Xeon (R) Processors E5520 2.26GHz,8M L3, turbo, 5.8GT/s QP
Dual 250GB SATA (7200RPM) Hard Disk Drive Raid 0
Dual 512MB PCIe x16 nVidia Quadro FX580
6GB (6×1GB) DDR3 SDRAM Memory, 1066MHz,ECC
Dual Dell(TM) 2408WFP UltraSharp(TM)24″ Widescreen Flat Panel LCD Monitor(Analog&DVI)
Rest is the usual ethernet/mouse/keyboard and the likes.

Apparently you could make out two workstations out of these parts. I hate to work any longer on my Precision M90 mobile workstation which has faithfully accompanied me as my first and primary computer for over three years now (yes I never owned a computer before that). Most of my time is spent Googling Dell Precision T5500 reviews or making calls to BlueDart trying to track the shipment. The delivery is already overdue and thus my disinterest in work for the last few days. I love to hear your comments on how you see it pitched against the Mac Pro and other workstations in the segment.

Firefox Crashing? 4 simple solutions.

Shivanand Sharma — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 02:45:44 +0000

Today I came across a Digg article “I Want To Love Firefox 3.5, But It Keeps Crashing On Me“. It made me wonder how in this age of technology would a mature browser be so vulnerable to crashes. Guess what – as a matter of fact 80% of the affected users are complainers and only 20% are doers. Mozilla has a rich ecosystem of support and resources. But it’s easier to follow some simple steps to figure out what is at fault.

“Firefox is crashing” means a lot of things to lot of people. But to narrow it down to Firefox, you really must see if you can simulate the problem in safe mode. Someone is more likely to believe that it’s Firefox at fault if it still crashes in safe mode.
But it is possible that it was not Firefox after all which was allegedly responsible for the crash. It could be one of your addons. Most of the addons at Mozilla are tested and approved. But the vicious mix of addons brings in new angles to the story. Two perfectly stable addons could create issues when used in tandem. Additionally there’s a list of addons with known problems. Try using Firefox with these addons disabled.
Further it could just be one of the plugins. I had Firefox crash whenever I refreshed Gmail (the entire page). After doing some searching I found it could be the “Google Talk Plugin” I disabled the “Google Talk Plugin” and additionally “Yahoo application state plugin” which I believe have no business in the list of plugins. That fixed the crash at once.
And by all means if it really comes down to it and you find it really is Firefox that is at fault, take the following actions:
1. Note the circumstances when Firefox crashes – does it happen at random or a particular site or when you execute a particular task?
2. Can you reliably simulate the crash at will?
3. File a bug with the relevant information at Bugzilla.
4. Additionally ensure that you are using the latest stable version of Firefox.

Essentially the point I’m driving is to be more aware of what’s really happening to your browser and being able to fix it than just tweet – hey Firefox keeps crashing on me.

ColorfulTabs 3.9.3

Shivanand Sharma — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 10:55:26 +0000

Fine-tuning the colors can be fun. Now you don’t have to stick to the preset shades of colors. You can lighten them or darken them. You can even make them stronger. That’s what the latest version of Colorfultabs v3.9.3 is all about. There are a lot of new feature requests and I’m working then one at a time. I hope you like this release and enjoy. All the feedback goes to the forums.

Binary Turf

Blazing Fast build of Firefox 3.6 beta1 available

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Review: Dell Precision T5500

Configuration

Dell Precision T5500 out of the box

Performance

Overall

APC Smart-UPS 1500VA USB

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Play Nintendo games online with JSNES – a javascript based emulator

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Coming Up: Dell Precision T5500 Review

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