Image via Wikipedia

Wordpress is crap, but it is the best crap we can get. When your website, with Wordpress sitting in the back, starts to pick up traffic, it will slow down and become unresponsive. Adding hardware will help, but correctly implemented load balancing and load distribution across more than one computer can be tricky and expensive. Trying to optimize Wordpress and the web server itself usually gives better short-term results. In the long run even this won’t help and it will just postpone the inevitable, you will have to cluster in one way or another. I am not going to talk about clustering and load balancing today, I will focus on optimizing your Wordpress. Newbie friendly, yet hardcore, meaning that I will provide explanation for all the complicated stuff.

What is slowing you down?

This is essential question with all optimizations. Figure out what is causing the slowdown! I have worked in IT for all my life and I was called to help with optimizations on all sorts of things. Let it be a local network or some internal database for a service provider, the procedure is always the same. Figuring out bottle necks and getting rid of them.

With Wordpress, there is no big secret, PHP is slowing you down¹. The first thing you can do, is to try to localize the bottleneck. It could be the new plug-in you just installed and it turned out that it does not scale as it should. Get rid of it or go around it. As with the most Wordpress installations the slowdown will be more global. Everything will be slow, sluggish and unresponsive.

Optimize where it makes sense

Second thing that you need to be careful with. I had the pleasure of working with people who spend weeks on optimizing a function that was perhaps called once every few hours. Don’t go and optimize things that are accessed rarely, for example the ‘My Life Story’ page on your blog. No real need unless it is blocking the site and you are sure that it is the cause of your troubles.

Wordpress plugins that will help you

Now, lets take a look at couple of Wordpress plugins that will greatly improve responsiveness of your blog.

WP Super Cache – Properly configured Super Cache plugin is a must. Since we know that PHP is slowing us down we need to take it out of the equation. This plugin will generate static HTML files and with a little help of the web server it will serve those static files to non-logged in visitors if they didn’t post any comments on your site. This accounts for the majority of the traffic.

Getting rid of the dynamic stuff is probably the most important thing that you can do and it will also matter the most. PHP is eating a lot of your resources away and compared to this, serving static pages is easier than eating pancakes.

WP Minify – Scripts and style sheets can become quite large and you will probably end up with more than one of each. Minifiying them means erasing all the extra characters that are there for readability. Web browsers usually don’t need them.

Here is an example of ordinary CSS that comes with Sociable plugin and below it is the minified version:

div.sociable { margin: 16px 0; }

span.sociable_tagline { position: relative; }

span.sociable_tagline span { display: none; width: 14em; }

span.sociable_tagline:hover span {

	position: absolute;

	display: block;

	top: -5em;

	background: #ffe;

	border: 1px solid #ccc;

	color: black;

	line-height: 1.25em;

}

div.sociable{margin:16px 0;}

span.sociable_tagline{position:relative;}

span.sociable_tagline span{display:none;width:14em;}

span.sociable_tagline:hover span{position:absolute;display:block;top:-5em;background:#ffe;border:1px solid #ccc;color:black;line-height:1.25em;}

It might not seem much, but CSS files and JavaScript files can grow pretty big. TWM website has CSS that is larger than 12kB, properly minimified is just a bit more than 9kB. Three kilobytes less for server to send and for the client to process.

WP Minify will, before the page is displayed, catch all the style sheet and java script files, glue them together, minifty them and then output them. The good part is that Minify plugin can work together with Super Cache plugin. Minified versions of your files are then cached and sent to the clients.

Make sure you run some tests before you start using it. Minify doesn’t work with slightly hacked Zemanta plugin² and WP-Cumulus plugin³ for the pretty tag cloud. So make sure that it doesn’t make a mess with any of your Java Scripts files or it could in theory mess up your Style Sheets too.

Warning: If you are adding extra CSS or JS files in the configuration interface that need to be minified make sure that text area where you enter file names doesn’t end with an empty line. It will break the plugin.

So much for the Wordpress

Not much more can be done in Wordpress itself unless you are determined to hack into it. You could do that, but then you will have to do it each time you upgrade Wordpress. And you will want to upgrade every now and then. Now, comes the hard part, optimizing general page performance. We did great with minifying everything and serving it as static content and this will matter the most on the server side.

The question now is where else can we gain some speed? Where are we losing precious CPU cycles and sometimes even more precious bandwidth? Maybe if we try to minimize number of requests to the web server itself?

Optimize your theme

Get rid of all the theme images if you can. That means, not getting rid of them entirely, but put them in a single static bitmap and then use it as CSS sprite. This will greatly reduce the number of requests on your web server. The whole procedure is too long to describe here, but Google will return plenty hits on CSS sprites. The theme you see here had more than twenty images and we were able to merge all of them in to a sprite. Now CSS is taking care of displaying the correct part of the image. Client has to make only one single request to download the bitmap. In our case the bitmap was also smaller than all of the images together. Win – Win!

Keep your redirects at minimum

Redirects are a convenient way to point the client in a different direction. If you change the permalink of a blog post, Wordpress remembers that. Them it performs a 301 redirect to the new address if someone tries to access the old one. 301 is an HTTP response code that is followed by a new URL and tells the client to go look to the new address for content. It is also called a ’search engine friendly’ redirect. This is because search engines will most of the time remember that the location was moved permanently and they will use the new address.

Because of this, each redirected page will generate two hits on your web server. Avoid redirects and use them only when necessary.

Use trailing slashes

Make sure that you are using trailing slashes. When you are referencing something on your blog, a category for example, the URL should have a trailing slash. If it is lacking one Apache web server will automatically create a 301 redirect and add a trailing slash. And we learned above that redirects are not good, especially not the ones that are really unnecessary.

Right:

http://www.twm-kd.com/category/computers/software/

Wrong:

http://www.twm-kd.com/category/computers/software

Enable compression

Compressing plain text content can reduce payload up to 70% or even more and this saves precious bandwidth. Keep in mind that compressing small files, smaller than couple hundred bytes, can actually make them larger! Also if you are having CPU problems and your CPU can’t cope with the load, then you need to turn off the compression, but you will need to test this.

There is an option for this in WP Super Cache plugin. If you are not using Super Cache you will have to enable compression manually. To enable this across the site add the following line to your apache configuration:

        SetOutputFilter DEFLATE

        BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4\.0[678] no-gzip\

        BrowserMatch \bMSI[E] !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html

        # Don't compress images

        SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \.(?:gif|jpe?g|png|swf)$ no-gzip dont-vary

If you are using Ubuntu Server or Debian GNU/Linux distribution then you will have to enable mod_deflate:

$ sudo a2enmod deflate

This will enable module deflate. Make sure that there are two symlinks in /etc/apache2/mod-enabled, deflate.conf and deflate.load. Then you will have to restart the web server.

Optimize your database

MySQL database can scale pretty well, but it has few problems here and there. One of them is not storing the data as efficiently as possible (for reading) and tables can get dirty. You will need to optimize them. If you are using phpMyAdmin for administration then you can do if from the main database view by checking the tables you want to optimize and then selecting optimize below in the operations. We here at TWM prefer the command line:

$ mysql -u user -p wordpress

mysql> OPTIMIZE TABLE wp_options;

+-----------------------+----------+----------+----------+

| TABLE                 | Op       | Msg_type | Msg_text |

+-----------------------+----------+----------+----------+

| wordpress.wp_options | OPTIMIZE | STATUS   | OK       |

+-----------------------+----------+----------+----------+

1 row IN SET (0.02 sec)

mysql> OPTIMIZE TABLE wp_posts;

mysql> OPTIMIZE TABLE wp_comments;

Which tables to optimize? You can check this with SHOW TABLE STATUS; the data_free column will tell you how much space is allocated and not used by the table. With a lot of inserts, updates and deletes these numbers can grow and you want to avoid that. Depending on the traffic you will need to run optimize once a week or once a month.

Take care of proper caching of your static files

Your blog is more or less dynamic, but there are certain parts of your blog that are static and browsers can cache them. Images and theme files are two things that you can cache properly, even Wordpress itself could be cached, but we mostly took care about them with Super Cache. Once I write a blog post, add images to it and publish it, I rarely change images that were attached to the post. That is why we can safely say that all the uploaded images can be cached for at least a year. Add the following lines to the .htaccess file in /wp-content/uploads directory:

ExpiresActive On

ExpiresDefault "access plus 1 minutes"

ExpiresByType image/gif "access plus 1 years"

ExpiresByType image/png "access plus 1 yearss"

ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access plus 1 years"

ExpiresByType image/jpg "access plus 1 years"

Now you set the expiration date to one year in the future for all the images. If you decide to change an image inside the post just keep in mind that you will have to rename it, otherwise clients will not show the new image, but the old one that they still have it in the cache. Unless the client is specifically told to reload the page. For Firefox this is performed by holding shift key while clicking on the reload button.

Using lightweight web servers

You could use lighttpd and php fast cgi binary to render Wordpress, this is an alternative solution but it needs more detailed description. Lighttpd is a replacement for Apache 2 web server. It is small and fast, but it lacks support for certain fetaures. Wordpress can run with lighttpd, but you will need to deal with different URL rewriting rules that need to be fixed for SEO friendly permalinks and for Super Cache to work. This can be done, but it will be the subject of another post.

Client side optimization

We pretty much dealt with the server side and not much more can be done there. We can still do some optimization for the clients. Web page rendering is a process that is quite complex and web page developers can (and should) help clients with rendering. A very good tool for benchmarking load time and render time of your web page is Firebug add-on for Firefox. Combine it with Google’s Page Speed add-on and you have everything you need to help you with optimizations.

Optimize your images

Try to avoid HTML or CSS resizing of images. Bigger images will need more time to download and then browser will have to resize them. Much easier is to resize them first with some resizing and optimizing tool. You will also get better results and better quality.

Avoid third-party service providers

Wordpress can be extended by a number of plugins, add-ons, themes and various other hacks. The problem with third-party service providers is that their services usually come with some cost. Clients will have to contact their servers and download their content which might not be as optimized as your web site is. This also means that the clients will have to perform at least one extra DNS lookup which takes some time and will need more requests to fetch all the content.

No complicated CSS

CSS rules are very inefficient sometimes so try to avoid too much nesting and don’t use eval in CSS. Avoid things like this:

Wrong:

#mylist ul li ul li {

  font-style: bold;

}

Right:

.inner-list {

  font-style: bold;

}

.outer-list {

  font-style: normal;

}

Use class selectors, they will make CSS a little bit longer, but client will render it much faster. If you minify it, the difference will be just a few bytes. Unfortunately you are limited with Wordpress here. Writing efficient CSS for auto generated sidebar widgets is a pain since HTML returned by Wordpress isn’t something they should be proud of. However, it is somewhat manageable.

Also make sure that you don’t have any leftover CSS rules in your file and you are not using it. Note that Page Speed will tell you that you have a lot of unused CSS, but keep in mind that not all of the CSS is used on the first page or on the other pages in your blog. Splitting this code in separate files is an idea that we didn’t try yet.

Speed, this is what you need

Load time for an average blog, with a decent internet connection⁴, should not be much more than a second or two. When there is no other traffic on the site. This should be a general guideline. When you start picking up traffic your server should be able to scale and if you are lucky enough the first bottleneck will be your network and that is good enough to shift the blame to your ISP, right? ;)

Next stage would be offloading static content to a third-party provider or a different server that you have dedicated for serving static content. Replacing Apache2 with lighttpd web server could also be a next step then in the end we will have to separate web server and database server. We will describe all this in one of the future posts here.

1. Author of this text firmly believes that PHP should rename itself to LOL, reasons will be provided at some other time
2. Using Zemanta loader in the blog footer.
3. Here at TWM we still can’t decide if we want to keep this plugin or not.
4. And hardware that wasn’t assembled by Moses

Related posts:

1. Wordpress plugins you need to survive ...
2. Zemanta plugin and Wordpress 2.7 ...
3. Linux Tips Aggregated – 1 ...

Did you ever have any problems with Eclipse? With initial versions of Galileo¹ and in previously released Gynamed there was a problem with preassigned keyboard shortcuts on some locale’s². The problem that Eclipse created when using Slovene keyboard layout was that while programmer wanted to type the ] key, Eclipse run File Search action.

Slovenian users are not to blame that their keyboard has ] key mapped to AltGr+G key combination. And Eclipse developers could browse through Wikipedia to discover what obscure keyboard layouts exist.

Any competent programmer will notice that with the default key mapping Eclipse guards programmers from using too many arrays since typically array is marked with [] key combination. They are advancing object oriented design and programming. But in some cases arrays actually make your code faster and optimize memory usage and fragmentation.

To discover how to remedy the problem read on.

Fortunately Eclipse has built in keyboard mapping manager. Until Eclipse developers don not remove the mapping or replace it with something more appropriate you can do the following:

1. Open Window->Preferences->General->Keys
2. Sort table by Binding and find the one that is bothering you³. Unbind all commands that are bind to the combination. If you don’t know which combination you should be searching for use Binding text box and type in the key that is bothering you.

There you have it problem is solved. File search gone by removing the CTRL+ALT+G or AltGr+G key combination from Eclipse key mapping. If you can not live without the combination you could replace it with something more appropriate.

1. should be corrected in 3.5
2. Slovenian and Hungarian, if my memory serves me
3. In my case CTRL+ALT+G

Related posts:

1. Eclipse Code Assist / Code Completion / Content Assist hang-up ...
2. Eclipse Galileo and SVN support ...
3. XMLbeans scomp fails with “java.io.IOException: CreateProcess error=2, The system cannot find the file specified” ...

Image via Wikipedia

Data: “Lal, I am unable to correct the system failure.”
Lal: “I know.”
Data: “We must say goodbye now.”
Lal: “I feel …”
Data: “What do you feel, Lal?”
Lal: “I love you, Father.”
Data: “I wish I could feel it with you.”
Lal: “I will feel it for both of us … Thank you for my life …”

Three days ago Star Trek Online – Open Beta was closed. If you didn’t get into it and you still want to try the game, you will have to wait until Feb. 2nd when, so they say, Star Trek Online will open for general public.

As promised, we did take some footage and screen shots of ground action for you. It all starts when you you complete the space part of a mission. You will have to beam down to the planet or on the another ship/space station/whatever. Hardcore trekkies will notice that Starfleet protocols have changed again; captain is leading the away team, taking his bridge crew with him. Just like the good old Kirk times, who is running the ship in the meantime is unknown and really not important.

Every woman, every man join the caravan

Movement on the ground is similar to your average First Person Shooter¹ with a few exceptions. Keys A and D are used for turning your view to the left and to the right while Q and E are used for moving from side to side. This can be quite annoying and disturbing at times. The mouse is used for moving the mouse cursor and not for turning around. With cursor you will select targets. You can use mouse for moving the character too but it is rather cumbersome since it involves holding both mode buttons. While you move, your team will follow and when you stop they will form a W formation behind you if there is enough room for it. You can speed up your movement by holding the shift key. Your away team will follow as fast as they can, they will get lost occasionally and they will need some time to find their way back to you.

We had an impression that moving around the terrain is still a little bit rough on the edges and there are very little limitations on how and where can player move. No matter how steep the hill was, you were able to run uphill. You can also jump, but we didn’t really find it all that useful. Here and there you will run into an anomaly of some kind. You can scan it and you will usually get an item to pick up, keep in mind that Tribbles are cute but they do breed quite quickly.

SkeetKlingon shooting

Selecting a target can be done with clicking on it with your mouse or by pressing the TAB key which will cycle the available targets. This can also be configured in the settings menu², TAB key can cycle through targets currently on screen or through all targets in range. When you selected your target it is time to shoot. Different weapons deal different kinds of damage and have different secondary attacks.

Each crew member can be quiped with two weapons, personal shield, body armor and four other devices which can be anything from various battery packs and shield recharger’s to medical hypo sprays. Your character can also equip so called kit, which will grant you various special abilities depending on the type of the kit you choose.

Personal shield is something that will get recharged by itself after some time, you can also help with various shield recharger batteries. Your hit points can be cured with medi-kits or hypo sprays. Make sure that you have a science officer in your away team because they will automatically heal other party members.

All the enemies on the map are marked with red circles and you can quickly locate them. If your character is killed you can respawn at the last discovered spawn point and continue with your mission. Optionally if you are in a team with another human player you can call for help and they can use medical tricoder to revive you.

Depending on your skills, weapons and other affects you will deal some amount of damage to your enemy. If you are flanking them then more damage will be done. Most of the enemies are without shields and are not very hard to kill, do keep in mind that Klingons like their combat up close and personal and they will run towards you. You can try and hit them with the phaser rifle and knock them off their feet but that is really not a match for the Bat’leth.

Put more O in the STO

We suspect that this is because of Beta testing, but there was very little cooperative play that we noticed. Most of the missions were single person missions and we encountered fleet missions on rare occasions. Fleet missions are sort of fun but in the same way strange. When you enter the system with fleet mission you will get a countdown on when the mission starts. It usually takes up to five minutes for the mission to restart. Meanwhile you can fight with the enemy ships that are still present in the area and will constantly spawn so you don’t get bored too much.

The problem with fleet missions is mostly lack of coordination. Everyone wants to get their own share in killing so everyone scurries to the nearest enemy. The enemy then turns into five or six Klingon Vor’Cha class ships³ and you are pretty much dead and re-spawning. After some smack talking in the zone chat you are finally able to coordinate people and things go better in the next round. Unfortunately we didn’t have enough time to try things more thoroughly and this is something we will be getting into right after STO comes back.

A little bit of PvP that we did was not really enough to call it testing but we managed to gather two things from it. First, PvP seems to be consensual and you don’t have to accept it if you are not up to it. Which means no grieving and ganking like in EVE-Online. Second, when you accept the fight a large number of ships can jump on you and blow you to pieces pretty quickly. Getting away from this kind of ganking can be a bit tricky, but still manageable and it appears you don’t lose anything in the process.

And now, the conclusion

All in all Star Trek Online is not a bad product. It has enough star trek elements for an average trekkie and it isn’t too hard core for other people. Beta had its quirks and problems, it also had a very good bug fixing team. We reported couple of bugs and they all got fixed in a matter of days. If you know that Orion slave girls have green complexion, that Andorians can’t turn blue if you choke them and if you know what Gagh is, then Star Trek Online is a must. You will be able to distinguish Federation phasers from Klingon disruptors just by listening to the sound, you will meet few familiar characters in-game and the immersion that the game is offering is the closest thing to the Star Trek universe that you will ever get.

Qapla’!

1. Ground action is in a third person perspective.
2. Settings can be overwhelming and confusing at first, since there are a lot of them!
3. Something big bad and ugly.

Related posts:

1. Star Trek Online – Characters and Space Combat ...
2. Star Trek Online – Exploration with a touch of epic space battles?!? ...
3. Startrek Online, a replacement for EVE Online? ...

If you are using xmlbeans on Windows to bind your schema to Java types then you are probably using a tool bundled with the distribution called scomp or Schema Compiler. For schema compiler to work you will need to correctly setup computer environment by installing JDK. You can follow through the following check-list to detect if any additional installation steps are required on your machine setup:

• Start->Run->type cmd and type java in the command line. If no error then your setup is correct; otherwise setup JAVA_HOME and add %JAVA_HOME%/bin to your Path environment variable and try again.
• Start->Run->type cmd and type scomp in the command line. If no error then your setup is correct; otherwise setup XMLBEANS_HOME and add %XMLBEANS_HOME%/bin to your Path environment variable and try again.

Then run scomp. Depending on your wishes you will probably wan’t to create a .jar file of the Java types scomp compiles from schema files. I used the following command line:

scomp -d schema -src src -out my_schema_1_0_0.jar ./schema/mySchema.xsd

where mySchema.xsd file was stored in ./schema folder.

If you get my_schema_1_0_0.jar, by some coincidence then kudos to you, but most likely you will end up with something similar to this error:

Time to build schema type system: 1.282 seconds

Time to generate code: 18.687 seconds

java.io.IOException: Cannot run program "C:\your current path\javac": CreateProcess error=2, The system cannot find the file specified

java.io.IOException: CreateProcess error=2, The system cannot find the file specified

java.io.IOException: Cannot run program "C:\your current path\javac": CreateProcess error=2, The system cannot find the file specified

 at java.lang.ProcessBuilder.start(Unknown Source)

 at java.lang.Runtime.exec(Unknown Source)

 at java.lang.Runtime.exec(Unknown Source)

 ... 6 more

BUILD FAILED

Read on to solve this problem.

Yay!!!  There is a problem in your Path environment variable. Let’s try to troubleshoot. Did you install JDK? If you did not then install it. If you did you probably installed it by accepting default installation values. It was installed to C:\Program files\Java\jdk<version>.

The problem is “Program files”. See the space? Java does not like spaces in the command line. As in any other programming language, space represents additional argument to the program. You could try to replace the C:\Program files with classical 8.3 old MS-DOS format, which 1980 users love so much. Execute dir /x in C:\ and replace your “Program files” with PROGRA~2 or PROGRA~1 or whatever Windows thinks “Program files” maps to in your JAVA_HOME and Path environment variables. I am guessing that this will not win me a gold star and you are still reading the next paragraph. And I promise you that if you click one of the Support Us links on the right side you will have three less starving wise men in the world¹, and you will feel content with your self by clicking on it². But your Path environment variables are now setup correctly.

Now you could search the web and find the answer. Use 2′5 hours of your precious time and crack this. Or you could read documentation for scomp. By being smart and reading documentation for scomp you will discover that scomp can solve this Windows nightmare for you. By using the -compiler parameter in command line you get something like this:

scomp -d schema -src src -out my_schema_1_0_0.jar ./schema/mySchema.xsd -compiler C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.6.0_03\bin\javac.exe

Problem solved.

Note: If you have huge .xsd schemas then you will have to boost memory external Java compiler can use. Use -xm 512m or -xm 1024m to successfully compile your schema.

1. not really, but maybe we will get that dinner at some time
2. really click on the support us button on the right and try it out

Related posts:

1. Singing a singular design with Singleton ...
2. Eclipse runs “File Search” when pressing AltGr+G ...

Image via Wikipedia

Star Trek Online was one of the more, if not the most, anticipated games¹ here at Three Wise Men. That is right, we are all trekkies, we are sure that miniskirt uniforms were dropped because crawling in Jefferies Tubes could become a bit awkward. We also know that crossing replicator power converter with plasma manifold isn’t something you should do if you want to keep your plasma relays in a working order.

Star Trek Online has a very startreky feeling with an LCARS-like user interface and you will run into all kind of Star Trek lingo during the game. You begin with creating your character that will be a member of Klingon Empire or United Federation of Planets. Picking up a career in Starfleet or Klingon empire gives you three options: Engineering, Science and Tactical represented by yellow, blue and red color of the default uniform. If you are a fan of Star Trek then you already know what we am talking about. Next stop is selecting your species and Federation gives you standard compliment of Humans, Bajorans, Vulcans, Betazoid and few other less known species, Klingon empire on the other side offers Klingons, Orions, Gorns and so on. Yes Gorns, you can in fact be a member of the very same species that James T. Kirk got in trouble with. If you are not happy with the offer you can always let your imagination wild and create your own species.

Leveling, Ranking and other earnings

Building up your character is the basic of every role-playing game. You have to build up your skills, stats and who knows what else, to get better in the game, to make a progress. Right now in Star Trek Online you will be grinding on four different things which can be earned during encounters in space or on the ground and you can also get them as mission rewards for completing the missions.

Skill Points – Used for building up your personal skills.

Officer Points – Used for building up your bridge officer’s skills.

Starfleet Merits – Used mostly for buying bridge officers, teaching them new skills and promoting them.

Energy Credits – Used for buying personal equipment and ship components. Money that can be traded forth and back for various items.

There are five different ranks in the game and each has ten grades which gives us fifty levels that you’ll need to chew through. After earning new grade you can spend your earned skill and officer points on skills for your character or your bridge officers. When you gain new rank you can get access to new skills, ships and you can also promote your bridge officers, unlocking their new skills.

In space no one can hear you scream

However, they can hear your ship explode. Strange, but true. Combat in Star Trek Online is relatively simple. The goal is to orient your ship so that as much of your weapons are facing your enemy. Then you fire them all. You have to keep doing this until your opponent (or yourself) is still alive. Space is somewhat 2.5D, it has some height but it is limited and you can quickly reach the top or the bottom of it. While fighting you will also have to take care of your shields and manage your energy.

Weapons – All of them have their own firing arcs, beam weapons mostly cover larger 250 degree firing arcs and you can maneuver your ship so that fore and aft weapon can both fire at your enemy. Projectile weapons will cover 90 degree arcs and you will have to face your enemy almost head on to be able to fire them. Beam weapons will do more the damage to shields while projectile weapons will do more damage to the hull.

Shields – Every ship has four shields: fore (front), starboard (right), aft (back) and port (left). They will protect your ship’s hull from the weapons fire. However all shields have a bleed-through percentage – the amount of damage ship’s hull will suffer anyway. Once the shields are gone most of the damage is inflicted to ship’s hull.

Hull – Amount of hull left is displayed in percentage and when it reaches 0% your ship explodes. Take care of your shields so that your hull won’t suffer. It is always a good thing to have an engineering bridge officer that can dispatch repair crews that will fix some of your hull.

Energy – Your life. If you ran out of energy your ship will stop, shields will go down and weapons will stop firing. The amount of energy that you have is very limited and you can distribute it in four different areas: weapons, shields, engines and auxiliary. First three are self explanatory. Auxiliary power is used to power up some of the ship systems that you can use during the fight to gain some edge. For example: with tachyon beam skill you use deflector dish to drain enemy shields and the effectiveness of attack will increase if you have more auxiliary power available.

Crew – Depending on your level and rank you can recruit bridge officers. You can assign them to tactical, engineering or science stations on your ship and use their special abilities while flying in space. You can also pick them to go with you on an away mission where you are again able to use their ground abilities.

And the rest?

Character creation and progression so far is good. Space combat is not too difficult and not too simple. We were asking ourselves if Star Trek Online can measure up to EVE Online, well it can’t. They are two completely different games with different target audience. STO is trekky enough for an average Star Trek fan and simple enough for an average Joe Random player. EVE Online is just too hardcore with too much of nano-management for players that don’t spend all their free time in the game.

How about away missions, player interaction, co-op missions, player vs. player encounters and other important aspects of multi-player games? So far we haven’t picked up enough play time and we didn’t go much further than away missions and couple of fleet missions, you can expect a new blog post about these things Soon™! For now you can enjoy few screen-shots and in-game footage.

Live long and prosper. ;)

1. We promise not to mention Star Craft 2 or make jokes about Duke Nukem Forever

Related posts:

1. Star Trek Online – Away Missions ...
2. Star Trek Online – Exploration with a touch of epic space battles?!? ...
3. Startrek Online, a replacement for EVE Online? ...

We know, so far, that Star Trek Online will not be ONLY about space battles. Players will also be able to experience exploration, diplomacy, star ship crew micro management, ship upgrades and more. Although some reports from closed beta test mention only space battles we hope that this means that closed beta tests were focusing on space battles and space battle systems while open beta test will expand to ‘Space the final frontier … ‘.

With the end of closed beta test, Cryptic studios also announced the names chosen for Tier 5 Starships. They are:

• Emissary class for Tier 5 Cruisers
• Dervish class for Tier 5 fleet Escorts
• Destiny class for Tier 5 Science Vessels

The following video shows how will exploration look in the Star Trek Online.

UPDATE: We successfully downloaded installed and played the open beta. It looks quite nice, the interface is something that you will have to get used to. Still there are few bugs and glitches here and there.

Related posts:

1. Star Trek Online – Characters and Space Combat ...
2. Star Trek Online – Away Missions ...
3. Star Trek ...

After almost a year of rumors and guessing, on the 7th January, 2010, Sony announced that it is dedicated to bring the 3D experience  to consumer homes. Announcement was made at Consumer Electronics Show (CES). As seen from announcement 3D will be integrated into most aspects of Sony’s product line meaning consumer electronic devices, TV and movie content and game devices.

The latest information is really interesting because it means that PS3 will be able to play stereoscopic games. The update which will enable stereoscopic game play will be available through PS3 update which will be available sometime in the summer 2010. Playback of “Blue-ray” discs with 3D content will also be able on PS3 with later updates.

Read more for additional information about first experience with 3D stereoscopic games.

Now that the wait is over and we know the plan and release dates I asked my self: Was there any actual gamer experience at CES with 3D stereoscopic game play? As it happens some of the games that were played on the PS3 in 3D stereoscopic mode were MotorStorm: Pacific Rift, WipEout HD, Gran Turismo 5: Prologue, Super Star Dust HD and Dark Void. Online gaming magazines and gaming sites are full of reviews so I am sure you will not have trouble finding them, but if you don’t the overall score from Kotaku is that Super Star Dust rocks, Gran Turismo is playable but could be better and Dark Void is not really what was expected. Kotaku explains that Dark Void developers were pushed onto 3D stereoscopic train and it looks that they got more negative press than expected. Overall testers were pleasantly surprised. At this time it is still unknown if stereoscopic effect is transperently added to the games by PS3 or do the games need additional updates of game engines.

For consumers to fully experience the stereoscopic 3D you will naturally need active shutter glasses which will have to synchronize with television display. Television displays will have to be able to produce frame sequential HD resolution image. For more friendly consumer orientation check the following video and start a separate saving account.

Related posts:

1. Sony annouces new PlayStation 3 and a price drop ...
2. Sony hurries with Playstation 3 Firmware update (v3.01) ...
3. Blizzard kills LAN support in Starcraft 2 ...

Image by Patrick Keogh via Flickr

There was some some construction work on the blog for the past week or so.

We have made theme improvements and web server speed optimizations which will provide quicker loading times and less load on the web server.

Hopefully your reading pleasure was not disrupted, but if it was we sincerely apologize and hope that you continue to support us¹.

1. by clicking on the adverts and coming back for more geek stuff :P

Related posts:

1. Playstation 3 Firmware update (v3.00) ...

Image via Wikipedia

File sharing has a long history and I will start with the time when I first got into it. At that time I was using ZX Spectrum 48k and games were distributed mostly on magnetic tapes packed in plastic boxes more commonly known as compact cassettes¹.

Twenty years ago, give or take a few, violation of copyrights² wasn’t really a big issue in a country behind the iron curtain. Getting a new game involved borrowing the tape from a friend, going back home and copying that tape with a double cassette recorder that supported high-speed dubbing.

The other a more sophisticated way of getting a game was to tune your FM radio to a certain local radio station. Then you had to put a blank tape in a cassette recorder and press Record when they started airing the games³. Yes, the local radio station was in fact airing all sorts of ZX Spectrum games and you were able to record them on tape. This was the first method of file sharing that I encountered and by today this is the only one that is limited only by the range and not by the bandwidth. A billion clients can connect at the same time and perform a download.

Read on if you want to know more on how to set up the best BitTorrent client in the Galaxy. ;)

Many years later, in 2001, BitTorrent protocol was published and introduced to the public. Soon it became mainstream and de-facto standard for peer-to-peer file sharing. There are many BitTorrent clients available for many different platforms and picking your favorite might be a bit tricky. Here is the list of requirements and features that my client must have:

• bandwidth limiter
• download queue
• upload of .torrent files from local disk or remote locations (http)
• ability to run on a headless server
• ability to access it from remote locations, when you’re not at home
• immune to reboots

My setup consists of a media server – a computer that serves files to media clients. In my case the most commonly used media client is Playstation 3 and then VLC player on my workstation. I don’t want to perform downloads on my workstation since I reboot to GamingOS time to time and turn my workstation into a gaming station. After some consideration the only viable solution was a web-based torrent client. My media server is running Ubuntu Server and PS3 Media Server is used for serving files to Playstation 3.

TorrentFlux satisfied all the requirements and installation in Ubuntu is pretty simple.

$ sudo apt-get install torrentflux

You might prefer aptitude over apt-get, but the procedure is pretty much the same. You don’t have to worry about the requirements since apt will take care of everything. If you didn’t have MySQL installed then you will be prompted to create an administrator account. After that you will need to configure TorrentFlux. First you have to give TorrentFlux access to your database so that it can create MySQL username and prepare necessary database tables. Then you will be asked for default TorrentFlux username and password.

After that simply point your browser to http://yourmediaserver/torrentflux/ and you should be able to log in and review the settings. Make sure that paths for .torrent files and downloaded files are correct and that you have enough of disk space. If you did a standard install then all the lights in the settings should be green and you are ready to go.

Happy file sharing.

1. Back then piracy was not for soft-hearted types, it was for real men — it was almost a hardware business.
2. Piracy.
3. Storing data as a bunch of chirps and beeps on the audio tape was something very common.

Related posts:

1. Network boot and install of Ubuntu Linux ...
2. Linux Tips Aggregated – 1 ...

On the October 23, 2009 AuthenTec released information about update to Windows 7 driver infrastructure. About 2 weeks ago I noticed an optional update in Windows 7 update section. It read AuthenTec Inc. driver update for AuthenTec Inc. AES2810. I was pleased to finally get the final version of the driver.

Immediately checked it and started the 32Mb download procedure. Smooth download, smooth install. Went to Control Panel->Hardware and Sound->Biometric Devices and the  AES2810 was still available. I decided for clean setup so I removed my existing fingerprint data by clicking and confirming the Remove your fingerprint data dialog. Then I clicked on Manage your fingerprint data and waited for my password dialog. None appeared. Frustrated and angry about the stupid update I started to minimize the windows and was presently surprised by the TrueSuite login screen¹. Typed and retyped in password of my account and voila I was ready to enroll my fingers.

TrueSuite Application has changed a bit. Must say that it is simple and intuitive to use². You have 2 options. Enroll finger by selecting a finger to enroll and repeating finger swipe 3 times and delete an enrolled finger. Additional nifty feature is available when you enroll a finger.  When TrueSuite application is run through manage your fingerprint data call you are presented by the password login screen. But now you can use your enrolled finger to authenticate your self. No more password typing.

I repeated the update on both HP notebooks that I own. So I can confirm that the driver works for HP EliteBook 8530p and HP Compaq 2230s. Bravo AuthenTec. Now if you could only release data which would help to create or create a Linux driver then I would be in heaven.

1. I don’t know if that was my impatience or the on top functionality of login screen is broken, but I was unable to repeat this feature
2. not that I was complaining about previous beta version

Related posts:

1. Windows 7 login using AuthenTec AES2810 fingerprint scanner on HP notebooks ...
2. Windows 7 installation on HP Compaq 2230s (NN340ES) ...
3. Installing Windows 7 from USB flash drive ...