前几天去了一趟日本。度假，玩，看看传说中这个让祖国人民又爱又恨的国度是怎么样的。

小时候读过很多历史书（初中的时候是历史课代表），觉得其实在亚洲史里面，其实中国人最喜欢讨论的除了华夏五千年文化，就是日本的历史。一方面是因为亚洲历史真的很少能有可圈可点的事情（没错，咱们阿三兄弟有泰姬陵，阿富汗的同胞们还曾经有巴米扬大佛，可是这里面的故事似乎还不够凑字数的，对南亚和西亚历史的了解方面的了解大家可能大部分时间还是停留在唐玄奘去西天取经和丝绸之路这两件事情上），另外一方面和中国有着这么长期的紧密联系的国家在历史上实在是不多。从像中国虚心学习的遣唐使到最后屠杀我亿万同胞的小鬼子，除了日本也就是越南能这样了。

对，我不是哈日族，没办法，天生的对流行文化不敏感。

可是我始终是觉得看历史要客观。

没错，918我记得，731我也记得，南京大屠杀的纪念馆我也看过，当然还有现在的钓鱼岛，甚至连台湾的李前总统都要攀上日本这个亲戚，指望台湾如果哪天独立了以后他还可以去弄本日本护照和全世界说他是天皇的子民。

当然我也看到了天朝的抵制日货的闹剧。

落后就要挨打的道理大家似乎都在历史书上看到过，可是没人写下来为啥中国落后了。

日本其实在历史上并不是一直强大的，没办法，就是大洋中间的一个小岛，离哪里都远到不得了，要不然也不会有鉴真和尚六次东渡的故事。甚至直到明朝万历年间，好不容易举国之力去攻打朝鲜，结果最后直到丰臣秀吉去世（在日本历史上丰臣秀吉可能算的上是头号武将了吧）还是被明朝的几万军队打回了老家。

历史书上告诉我们的是明治维新使得日本强大起来了。

明治维新到底做了些什么呢？其实说白了就是崇洋媚外了一把。

没错，日本人从学中国人变成了学欧洲人。从宪法到军队到工业技术，整个把欧洲的给抄袭了一遍。如果那个时候有知识产权这一说的话，估计日本人就要被告到连家底都没有了。

当然并不是说日本就没有闭关锁国过，他们禁止基督教传播了几百年。也不是说他们没给欧洲人坑过，安政条约，神奈川条约，日本也曾经是人为刀俎，我为鱼肉的日子。

可是他们能够放下这些，甚至放下自己的传统，来迅速的接受新的事物，然后让自己更强大。

今天的日本在很多方面看来和中国有很多相似之处。不谈文字这些比较肤浅的东西，就说说经济。日本人愿意存钱是全世界出了名的，甚至在今天这种负利率的时代还有很多日本老人把钱藏在床底下，导致了钱发霉变质。两个国家也都不是资源大国。没错，中国是地大物博，可是人口基数也大。地域发展的不平衡也更不要说了。中国的年轻人都想去北广上，日本的年轻人也都想去大阪东京这样的大城市。在一些小城市里，年轻人都很少能看到。

至于今天中国人说买遍全世界，其实也就是90年代初日本人所做的事情。东京八九十年代的楼市和现在北京上海的也差不了太多。日本的股市在80年代末的时候有着巨大的泡沫（索罗斯赌对了机会可是赌错了时间），现在中国股市的疯狂估计恐怕没有人不知道。

那个时候日本有索尼，松下这种领先全世界的企业为日本的经济撑腰，现在的中国也有华为联想这些高科技企业给中国的经济打气。

从政治层面上面来说，两个国家都是一党独大的状态。自民党可以为国家的发展做一些短时间可能不是很让人看好的决定。共产党也可以一句话就让国企改革，几百万人的铁饭碗说没就没（当然对社会的长期发展是有好处的，可是也不小心给国外的路边站着很多声讨共产党宣扬法轮功的大妈们）。

所以说，其实我们和日本有很多的相似之处，甚至从某种角度上面来说30年以前，日本曾经走过今天的中国在走的路。

那么为什么我们不能够借签一下呢？师夷长技以制夷，这个在清朝就有人明白的道理，为什么放在今天的中国那些狭隘的爱国愤青们反而不能理解了？

说说我在日本看到的几点吧。第一是整个社会都在努力，很小的孩子自己跑着赶地铁，中年的大叔们也是从一班火车冲刺似的去了另一班。晚上的下班高峰不是五六点，是八九点。这里也得顺便的提一句，他们也很注重对小孩子的独立性的培养，四五岁的小孩就在繁忙的地铁和公车上自己背着和半个自己那么高的书包去上学，换车也毫不含糊。

第二个是日本人的认真，他们的认真似乎到了有些刻板的程度。在湘南坐单轨（那里的单轨是吊在顶上的，和缆车有点像，有兴趣的同学可以去试试，其实在地少人多的今天向高空发展确实是一个不错的策略）的时候就在驾驶室的后面坐着，驾驶员到了每站走下来，然后车门关了以后上来，检查控制（对，是真的把手放到控制键边上看而不是随便的扫一眼），甚至手势，一系列做的一丝不苟。每天重复几十遍，每年重复几万遍，也没有任何人在监督着他，可是他的动作一样也没有落下来。至于日本公共交通的精准到分钟，我想我更不用多说了。

当然这种自觉性也不仅仅只是对工作来说。江之电很多车站都是没人看管的，上车之前在车站拿IC卡刷一下，下车之后再刷一下。车站没人看管，车里面也没有人查票，可是大家还都是认认真真的刷卡，上车，下车，刷卡。当然很多国人归咎这种情况是因为日本人有钱，没必要省几个子儿，其实现在在国内又真的有几个人上下车买票买不起的呢？

说到这点我还想到了在日本碰到的一位东北大娘和她女儿。大家都知道很多日本的神社进去的时候都是要拖了鞋子以示尊重。一般都是以木板为界，没木板的地方穿着鞋子，到了有木板的地方脱下鞋子然后把拎着鞋子走到鞋柜放进去。

这对母女是一直冲到了木板的台阶边上开始脱鞋子（就这么在众目睽睽之下），边上大家就开始用中文告诉他们，这应该是站在地上脱好了再拿着走）。他们没有任何回应。好吧，可能是华裔吧，听不懂中文？结果两位脱完之后开始用标准的东北腔普通话交流了。过一会卖门票的跑出来了，拦住他们问他们有没有票，先用英文问，还是没有回应，然后卖票的女生又用生硬的中文问了一句。然后这一对互相看了一眼对方，说了一句，这里还要票啊？然后继续坐在台阶上穿上鞋子在木板地上往出口走去。

在一些地方我看到有些不能乱扔垃圾或者是不能乱坐这一类的标识牌都用中文写着（当然绝大多数时候是英文，日文，中文和韩文四种语言）。很多国人就说是歧视中国人啊等等。其实有时候我们自己也得想想，为什么会这样？没错，这些人都是少数，可是有的时候很不幸的就是一粒老鼠屎坏了一锅粥的情况。

第三点就是日本人的热情，在大阪买东西，一个小店的小哥在付款的时候POS机慢了一些，结果和我道了半天歉，最后还给了我几个设计的蛮好看的小袋子做礼物，虽然买的东西才区区上千日元。虽然说我是顾客，可是不管是在亚洲还是北美，真的能服务成这样的除了那些让人割肉的名牌店，我还真的很少能看到。

而且日本人的热情和自己从事的工作无关。在街上拦住一个路人问路，经常他们都会很仔细的想着英文词告诉你应该怎么走，有时候实在想不起来了还会带着你继续走。甚至就是在日本人之间，虽然我听不懂他们的语言，可是他们的谈话举手投足之间你都能感受到一种热情。小时候以为日本动画片里面大家讲话那么high都是剧场效果，去了日本才真心发现不是。

日本的人口老龄化比中国严重，老人比例比中国多，可是日本的老人却很少倚老卖老。公车和地铁上面都有优先座位，可是很多老年人也宁愿站着也不去坐。好几次也看到一些背驮成弓型的老人们做一些力所能及的工作，努力不成为社会的负担。

没错，尊老爱幼是中华文化的美德，可是作为老人，在这样一个老龄化严重的时代，是不是也得多为社会做一些贡献，少成为一些负担呢？

当然，并不是说日本的一切都很好。上半截电梯下半截楼梯的奇葩事儿或许真的是在日本才会发生（我很好奇日本的残疾人们都是怎么活下来的），更不要说生活压力大而又没有宣泄的渠道导致各种各样的奇人的出现（日本的地铁站里真的有防止痴汉的广告牌）。

可是，做为一个在一块狭小的岛屿上面存在，发展，甚至到现在成为全世界最大的经济体之一的国家，他们还是有不少中国可以学习，借签的地方。甚至于他们犯的错误，也可以让中国在发展的道路中少走些弯路。

因为其实中国和日本，虽然几千年来都是磕磕碰碰做着邻居，其实有那么多的类似。

Yes, unlike some privacy freaks, I do have a Facebook account. And yes, I like to check out my Facebook from time to time and have it on my phone so that I can see the latest status update from my friends.

However, it becomes really annoying when I am constantly getting notifications about someone invited me to play a particular game or take a particular test. And this is without the knowledge for most of your friends since they were just offered to connect their games to Facebook for x extra bonus points or goodies or connect to Facebook to get the results of some tests, without knowing what, by “connect”, means.

So how can one disable those annoying notifications? Well, the easiest way is obviously to remove your friend from Facebook, but it is not necessarily the best approach since as what I have mentioned above, the “inviter” may not really know he/she was sending you the messages.

Therefore, a slightly more complicated way is to block the invitations on a particular app, and here is how you do it. I will use Candy Crush Saga as an example since it is one of the games that I receive a lot of notifications on.

Say here is how my notifications are like:

As you can see, I got a few of those notifications. Now if you move your mouse on the circle towards the top right corner of these notifications, you will see a cross, move your cursor there and you can see the option to turn off the notifications:

Now click on the cross and you will get a warning message:

Click on Turn Off and you will turn off the notifications of this particular application:

If you want to turn off notifications for other apps, you can always click on Settings:

Now click on the edit button next to the App requests and activities to expand the menu:

And you can start turning off the notifications one by one.

I have not found a way to mass turn-off all the notifications for all apps, if you do, feel free to share.

I was pretty excited when I received my Raspberry Pi last week as a replacement for my aging Tonidoplug V1 since due to its lack of support to the newest OS distributions (other than ArchLinux, which I am not too familiar with).

I am using 3.6.11+ Linux, which at the time of writing is the latest Raspbian (Raspberry Pi + Debian) “wheezy” image that is available online.

 cat /proc/version
Linux version 3.6.11+ (dc4@dc4-arm-01) (gcc version 4.7.2 20120731 (prerelease) (crosstool-NG linaro-1.13.1+bzr2458 - Linaro GCC 2012.08) ) #456 PREEMPT Mon May 20 17:42:15 BST 2013

You can always download the latest version of the Raspbian image here.

For storage, I used an old Drobo with four WD Red 3TB drives. Thanks to thin provision in Drobo, I was able to create two 8TB partitions to store my data. As my Drobo has crashed recently, I had to format it with the Drobo tools program to create the partitions.

Raspberry Pi was able to detect partitions using fdisk, however with a warning message:

Disk /dev/sda: 8796.1 GB, 8796093022208 bytes
256 heads, 63 sectors/track, 1065220 cylinders, total 17179869184 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1               1  4294967295  2147483647+  ee  GPT

WARNING: GPT (GUID Partition Table) detected on '/dev/sdb'! The util fdisk doesn't support GPT. Use GNU Parted.

Disk /dev/sdb: 8796.1 GB, 8796093022208 bytes
256 heads, 63 sectors/track, 1065220 cylinders, total 17179869184 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdb1               1  4294967295  2147483647+  ee  GPT

When I simply tried to use mount, it does not quite work:

mount /dev/sdb /media/Data/
NTFS signature is missing.
Failed to mount '/dev/sdb': Invalid argument
The device '/dev/sdb' doesn't seem to have a valid NTFS.
Maybe the wrong device is used? Or the whole disk instead of a
partition (e.g. /dev/sda, not /dev/sda1)? Or the other way around?

Trying to mount sdb1 gave the same results:

mount /dev/sdb1 /media/Data
NTFS signature is missing.
Failed to mount '/dev/sdb1': Invalid argument
The device '/dev/sdb1' doesn't seem to have a valid NTFS.
Maybe the wrong device is used? Or the whole disk instead of a
partition (e.g. /dev/sda, not /dev/sda1)? Or the other way around?

Just when I was about to give up, I remembered the warning message, how about I just try to use GNU Parted? Turns out if I use parted -l rather than fdisk -l, I see a much better picture:

 parted -l
Model: TRUSTED Mass Storage (scsi)
Disk /dev/sda: 8796GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: gpt

Number  Start   End     Size    File system  Name                          Flags
 1      17.4kB  134MB   134MB                Microsoft reserved partition  msftr                                                                                                 es
 2      134MB   8796GB  8796GB  ntfs         Basic data partition

Model: TRUSTED Mass Storage (scsi)
Disk /dev/sdb: 8796GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: gpt

Number  Start   End     Size    File system  Name                          Flags
 1      17.4kB  134MB   134MB                Microsoft reserved partition  msftr                                                                                                 es
 2      134MB   8796GB  8796GB  ntfs         Basic data partition

As you can see, when Windows formatted the partition, the first partition was marked as Microsoft reserved partition with a weird partition type of msftr and the actual data partition is on the second partition.

Therefore, if I do:

mount /dev/sdb2 /media/Data/

Now I can finally mount everything properly. And df -h is now showing both of my 8TB partitions:

 df -h
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
rootfs           30G  2.2G   27G   8% /
/dev/root        30G  2.2G   27G   8% /
devtmpfs        212M     0  212M   0% /dev
tmpfs            44M  856K   43M   2% /run
tmpfs           5.0M     0  5.0M   0% /run/lock
tmpfs            88M     0   88M   0% /run/shm
/dev/mmcblk0p1   56M   19M   38M  33% /boot
/dev/sdb2       8.0T  891G  7.2T  11% /media/Data
/dev/sda2       8.0T  1.7T  6.4T  21% /media/Backup

In summary, when you are mounting a gpt partition, please use parted –l to check the actual data partition (the one with the huge disk size) and mount that specific partition number to the mount point.

吃了晚饭，决定出去走走。

不知道为什么，可能就是因为这是一个晴朗的天气。在加拿大，晴朗的天气似乎是一种奢侈。或许也可能是想走走。毕竟，老人们常说，饭后百步走，活到九十九嘛。

夕阳西下，洒在市中心的高楼上，把每一栋楼都映成了黄色，甚至就连那本来有些土气的老市政府的大楼，也在这金黄色的光辉的照耀下变得高贵起来。

迎面过来了一对中国人的母女，妈妈的脸上已经有了一些倦容，可是女孩子却手里拿着一个DV，兴奋的跳来跳去。看，她被正在敲响的钟声所吸引，正仰着头，拍着那高高的钟楼，似乎想看看里面到底有些什么东西弄出了这么大的声音。

很快就走进了金融区，周围的高楼马上挡住了所有的阳光。可是又有什么关系呢？在金融区工作的人是没有时间享受太阳的温暖的。

前面走着一对印度夫妇，父亲一手抱着婴儿，母亲一手推着手推车。年轻的夫妇似乎正在为什么生活上的琐事所争论不休。丈夫似乎已经有些懒得去争论了，妻子说了一会也赌气不作声。

终于又站到了金融区的中心，天天上下班都走过的地方却在这么一个假日里如此的安静，缺少的是匆匆而过的人群和似乎永远都看不到头的车流，多的却是一些拿着相机四处拍照的游人们。就连平时街口带着一条大狗的流浪汉似乎也不见了踪影。

可是市中心就永远是市中心，就算是没有人的大街上，那些高楼也散发这他们的庄严。真不知多少人的梦想在这里开始，又有多少人的追求在这里结束。每天我们在这里疲于奔命，却时常不知道自己到底是为了人生而奋斗还是为了糊口而挣扎：

太阳又落下去了一点，在外面到处寻找食物的鸽子们也倦了。是时候回家了吧，我想。

Recently, I have got tired with the little space that Dropbox has and decided to explore my own options, a few potential candidates came up, SparkleShare was the first one to consider, except somehow I got the impression that the product is still pretty much in a beta stage and is relatively new and unstable. Hence I decided to take a look at OwnCloud, which seems to be a more mature product with a relatively larger user base.

Initially I was using an LAMP (Linux + Apache + MySQL + PHP) since it was given by my VPS provider by default, and seems rather easy to install. However, the performance was not good. Sometimes it took the server a minute for the web page to load up once after I signed in and to me that is definitely not the kind of speed I would like to see, so I have decided to explore an LNMP option, to use Linux + Nginx + MySQL + PHP-FPM to set up my OwnCloud.

Note that I have used Debian Squeeze as the OS to set up Owncloud, however as I have complied all the packages myself from the source code, these methods and tricks will essentially work on any Linux distributions.

As OwnCloud requires a few PHP libraries, I have decided to compile my own PHP installation and after some Googling online, here is one configuration that worked for me, note that because I planned to use MySQL as the backend, so I added some configuration options to include the relevant MySQL drivers. Also, I suspect some of the packages may not be necessary here, such as SOAP, but this is at least something that worked well for me. I used the latest PHP 5.4.8 package to compile but I suspect it should work on the earlier packages as well:

For those who are too lazy to type it out, here is the configuration options that you can use:

./configure --prefix=/usr/local/php --with-config-file-path=/usr/local/php/etc --enable-fpm --with-fpm-user=www-data --with-fpm-group=www-data --with-mysql=mysqlnd --with-mysqli=mysqlnd --with-pdo-mysql=mysqlnd --with-iconv-dir --with-freetype-dir --with-jpeg-dir --with-png-dir --with-zlib --with-libxml-dir=/usr --enable-xml --disable-rpath --enable-magic-quotes --enable-safe-mode --enable-bcmath --enable-shmop --enable-sysvsem --enable-inline-optimization --with-curl --with-curlwrappers --enable-mbregex --enable-mbstring --with-mcrypt --enable-ftp --with-gd --enable-gd-native-ttf --with-openssl --with-mhash --enable-pcntl --enable-sockets --with-xmlrpc --enable-zip --enable-soap --without-pear --with-gettext --disable-fileinfo

For everything else, I just installed as per the default configurations (you can take a look at the installation instructions here), note that I used www-data:www-data for PHP-fpm and if you decide to do the same, make sure Nginx is running as www-data:www-data as well.

Once this is done, download the installation package to your document root and decompress the package:

wget http://mirrors.owncloud.org/releases/owncloud-4.5.0.tar.bz2
tar -jxf owncloud-4.5.0.tar.bz2

Note that I used the OwnCloud 4.5 instead of the 4.0 version. Next you will need to change the owner of the package to www-data:www-data.

chown -R www-data:www-data owncloud

Next, I have added in a few configuration blocks indicated on the official webserver notes page to adapt to some customized configuration that OwnCloud would need to run WebDav and stuff, in particular, here is what I added:

  # deny direct access
  location ~ ^/(data|config|\.ht|db_structure\.xml|README) {
    deny all;
  }

  # default try order
  location / {
    try_files $uri $uri/ @webdav;
  }

  # owncloud WebDAV
  location @webdav {
    fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(/.*)$;
    unix:/tmp/php-cgi.sock;
    #fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
    #fastcgi_params HTTPS on;
    include fcgi.conf;
  }

Note that I have turned off fastcgi_params HTTPS on because I am not using HTTPS connection and SCRIPT_FILENAME is commented as well since it showed up in my fcgi.conf, which is a customized version of the fastcgi_params file, if you did not have a customized version of it, you will need to add the SCRIPT_FILENAME parameter.

Restarted php-fpm and log into the server, set up a user name and password and clicked on the Advance Options and select MySQL as the database, entered the MySQL credentials that I have created earlier.

I thought I was done, turned out not to be the case. In fact, this is what I am seeing once after I logged in:

So I started to look around to try to figure out why, and the first error I saw in my Nginx error log is this:

PHP message: PHP Warning:  Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in DOC_DIR/owncloud/lib/l10n.php on line 322
PHP message: PHP Warning:  scandir() has been disabled for security reasons in DOC_DIR/owncloud/lib/l10n.php on line 321

Where DOC_DIR is the document directory I upload my Owncloud installations to. The fix for this one is relatively easy, go to php.ini file (in my case it is at /usr/local/php/etc/php.ini but yours could be different depending on the PHP configuration options), edit the DISABLED_FUNCTION line to make sure scandir is removed, and restart your php process.

I then tried to refresh the page and hope for the best, but again to my great disappointment, the page looked almost the same. So I tried to dig into the error log again and this is what I found:

2012/10/21 21:45:08 [error] 28179#0: *7 open() "DOC_DIR/owncloud/remote.php/core.css" failed (20: Not a directory)
2012/10/21 21:45:09 [error] 28179#0: *9 open() "DOC_DIR/owncloud/remote.php/core.js" failed (20: Not a directory)

This appears to be a path problem which means the rewrite regex has to be fixed, and after some Googling, this post came to rescue:

Basically, you will need to add the following Nginx configuration to the server block:

                location ~ ^/owncloud/remote.php(/.*)$ {
                        fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(/.*)$;
                        fastcgi_pass unix:/tmp/php5-cgi.sock;
                        #include fastcgi_params;
			include fcgi.conf;
                        #fastcgi_param HTTPS on;
                }

Again I made some edits to make sure it matches with the kind of set up that I have:

So here is how everything looks like in the end:

server
        {
                listen       80;
                server_name MyOwnCloudURL;
                index index.php;
                root  DOC_DIR/owncloud;
		client_max_body_size 1000M; # set maximum upload size

                location ~ ^/remote.php(/.*)$ {
                        fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(/.*)$;
                        fastcgi_pass unix:/tmp/php-cgi.sock;
                        include fcgi.conf;
                }

                  # deny direct access
                  location ~ ^/(data|config|\.ht|db_structure\.xml|README) {
                    deny all;
                  }

                  # default try order
                  location / {
                    try_files $uri $uri/ @webdav;
                  }

                  # owncloud WebDAV
                  location @webdav {
                    fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(/.*)$;
                    fastcgi_pass unix:/tmp/php-cgi.sock;
                    include fastcgi_params;
                  }

                location ~ .*\.(php|php5)?$
                        {
                                try_files $uri =404;
                                fastcgi_pass  unix:/tmp/php-cgi.sock;
                                fastcgi_index index.php;
                                include fcgi.conf;
                        }
		}

And this time, I hit refresh button on my browser again and everything worked!:

The calendar page appeared to work too!:

In conclusion, a few things you have to fix for a LNMP stack to work with Owncloud:

• Compile PHP with all the required libraries
• Enable scandir() function
• Change the rewrite for remote.php
• UPDATE: As per comment below, here is another potential fix: set cgi.fix_pathinfo=1 on /etc/php5/fpm/php.ini, thanks Mbembi for the comments and Christos for the confirmation!

Of course, the usual stuff such as change the ownership remains, hopefully this little guide will help you to get through the pain to get OwnCloud working and have your own storage on the cloud!

In the previous post, I have mentioned briefly about speed up your self-hosted WordPress blog by hard-code some of the PHP queries. Unfortunately as soon as that is done, my little blog start to go crazy: everything was squeezed at the left part of the screen, making the blog so ugly that even I have no intention to look at it any longer.

After a few trials and errors (disable all plugins and re-enable them one by one), I noticed that the issue only occurs when W3 Total Cache was enabled, and as soon as it is disabled, ZAY Blog looks nice and pretty again.

At first I thought it was a CDN issue, so I put ZAY Blog in development mode in Cloudflare (so that it does not cache anything from the website) and also purged the cache from MaxCDN, no luck.

W3 Total Cache is a complicated plugin so I really do not intend to crack open the code and see how it worked. So I had two options: 1. Google around and see if anyone else had the similar issue before or 2. remove the plugin.

Option 2 is out of question since W3 Total Cache is such a beautiful piece of work and in fact is the only plugin that I know that support both MaxCDN and Cloudflare nicely. So I went to option 1 and after half an hour of searching, this post saved me.

Basically, you will need to turn off the automatic minify and run it in manual mode, or essentially disable that functionality.

After I switched to manual mode and re-enabled the plugin, everything started to show nicely and I can use Cloudflare and MaxCDN again!

I guess moral of the story is: 1. Google knows everything, and 2. Sometimes the seemingly complicated problems have the simplest solutions, don’t give up and you will be able to find it.

I know I have not been updating this blog as actively as I should, obviously an excuse would be “I have been rather busy”, which is almost an universal excuse, another reason for it was because ZAYBlog loads so slowly.

How slow? If in case you have been to ZAYBlog for the past two days, loading the index page, on average, took almost a minute.

So, I was looking into optimizing this little blog and after hours of Googling and seeking advice, it basically comes down to a few points:

Get rid of as many of function calls as you can in the themes

WordPress is designed to work with any websites and could be easily configured. Unfortunately a side-effect of this kind of extraordinary flexibility is that everything is pulled from configuration items and from the database. An example would be this:

<div id=”logo”><a href=”<?php bloginfo(‘url’); ?>/”><img src=”<?php echo get_option(‘simplo_logo_img’); ?/>” alt=”< ?php echo get_option(‘simplo_logo_alt’); ?>” /></a> < ?php echo get_settings(‘blogdescription’);?></div>

As you can see, there are FOUR php function calls just to get the logo on the top page! Is this really necessary since we hardly update the header nor the logo? Obviously not.

So how about change it to something like this:

</p><pre><div id=”logo”><a href=”http://www.zayblog.com/”><img alt=”ZAY Blog” src=”Logo.png”></a> Blog of ZAY</div>

As you can see, no PHP function call is necessary and unless you need to change the file name of your logo or change your website name (which I have not been changing for years), there is hardly any needs to update this.

Another example is here:

<title>< ?php wp_title(‘&laquo;’, true, ‘right’); ?> < ?php bloginfo(‘name’); ?></title>

Which we can obviously change it to something like:

<title>Wonderful Blog of ZAY</title>

And so on.

Remember, a lot of these PHP function calls needs to make query to the database, which takes time, avoid them at all cost.

NOTE: There seems to be an issue with W3 Total Cache and the hard coded title and headers, I will discuss that in more detail in another post.

Get a CDN

What is CDN? CDN stand for Content Delivery Network, which, in the most general term, is to cache the static contents in your websites to their servers around the word so that your website will load quickly. If you prefer free stuff, Cloudflare would be an ideal option as it is free and is also served as both a DDOS and privacy protection layer and a DNS service, on top of being a CDN, since essentially the real IP of your server is hidden behind the their powerful servers.

If you have a bit more money to spare, then MaxCDN has provided a great paid option. For ZAY Blog that you are reading right now, thanks to W3 Total Cache, I enabled both MacCDN as well as Cloudflare and it definitely speed up this blog quite a bit.

Delete all the junks

After running this blog for more than four years now, I have tried and tested at least 50 plug-ins to make it better. However, some of the plugins did not turn out to be suitable for my blog and I just removed them.

So once you hit delete, you would think everything is gone, correct? Wrong, there are still files hanging around as a result of the removals. Therefore, it is up to you to go in to wp-content and remove the stubborn files that just refused to go away.

Sometimes the plugins also create database tables, and were not deleted when the plugins are uninstalled. In order to fix this issue, you can either go into MySQL yourself, or, if you are not a database guru, run this plugin might be able to help you somewhat (Disclaimer: I have not used it and therefore not sure how effective it is).

Obviously, along the way you might have tried to deploy some themes as well, remember to remove them if you are no longer need them.

Just remember: If you are not using something, then it is junk, and if it junk, you get rid of it from your WordPress installation as soon as possible.

Final Trick

So I looked at the code, removed the junks and set up the CDN, the blog still took a long time to load and the CPU indicator on the CPanel goes directly to the red zone whenever I hit on refresh. What happened? I could not figure out why so I had to use my ultimate weapon: reset.

Basically, I deactivated all the plugins and set the theme back to the default Twenty-Eleven theme. Then, I first switched back to the current theme, hit on refresh, CPU usage stayed low.

Good, then I enabled the plugins, one at a time, and hit refresh on my browser every time I enabled a plugin and check the CPU usage on CPanel every time I load the website as well as note the time that the blog is loaded. For the first 15 or so plugins, the blog continue to load in pretty fast and there was no spike in the CPU usage. However, once I enabled PHP Speedy, which is no longer listed on the official WordPress plugins directory, the CPU usage shoot to 100% when the website was loading. Without any doubt I quickly disabled the plug in and removed it and kept on testing (since I was not sure if PHP Speedy was the only one which caused the issue) and the website loaded relatively fast without too many issues.

Yes, this is a tedious process but it ended up helping me resolve my issue, and I was really happy when ZAY Blog is loading fast again!

Conclusion

There are only two ways for a website to load fast: either you slim it down as much as possible by removing both unwanted/un-used code and plugins or you get rid of the buggy ones that slows down your code. CDN will definitely help to cache the request and therefore speed up the loading process as well. If you have a website getting millions of hits a day, having 100% CPU usage is not impossible and you should really consider moving to dedicated/VPS hosting. However if you blog is like what I have, then it really should not need that much juice to keep the website showing up in front of your readers.

I was attempted to set up Windows Live Writer for a friend recently, however he is behind a proxy using Windows authentication, therefore, we were able to run the downloader, Windows Live Writer was unable to connect to the blog and was therefore, we had this error message while trying to set up the blog service:

Error 407: Proxy Authentication Required

Fortunately, Windows Live Writer was developed within the .NET framework and the walk-around is fairly easy.

First, open up the directory where the Windows Live Installer was installed at, which, in my case, is C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Live\Writer

If you are not sure about that, right-click and select Properties, that will give you the folder path where Windows Live Writer was installed to:

In that folder, look a file named WindowsLiveWriter.exe.config:

Right click and open the file in notepad and this should be what you see initially:

Now add the following lines right after the <configuration> tag:

If you are using Windows-integrated authentication, this is what you should add:

    <system.net>
<defaultProxy enabled=”true” useDefaultCredentials=”true”>    </defaultProxy>
</system.net>

So in the end, here is how your config file looks like:

Save it and restart Windows Live Writer and time to enjoy the power of Windows Live Writer:

The matter is a bit more complicated when you are using your own proxy address which is not default or you have your own proxy credentials which is not integrated with Windows. There is a solution here which I have not tried and therefore can not verify it. Basically you will need to compile your own DLL and add that to the configurations.

So I know I have been lazy in writing stuff to this blog (The reason I gave myself is there is nothing to write). However, at least I decided to change the look for the site after having the same look for god-knows how long.

How does the new look sounds like? Good? Bad? Terrible? Feel free to comment below.

Yesterday, I came across this interesting article on TechCrunch where the author discussed the idea of gmail-lite, where we would write pretty much like Twitter-style emails.

Frankly speaking, I can understand the rationale of people writing short emails. After all, a not-so-busy person like me receives about, on average, perhaps 50 emails from work and another 20 or 30 emails in my personal email inbox. Imagine if every single emails is written in 3 lines and therefore, I can save, say, 20 seconds on average to read each of the emails, that is at least 70×20 = 1400 seconds, which is approximately 23 minutes, saved in a day!

However, as we all know, nothing in this world comes for free. So what did we sacrifice for those 23 minutes that we saved?

The answer is what I would like to call the interpersonal “warmth”.

Just imagine if one day you walk into a store, instead of being greeted by the salesgirls with words like “how are you doing?” or “what can I do for you?”, you are being asked directly with this:

“What do you want?”

or something like this:

“You can buy all your stuff here, cashier is over there, we accept Mastercard and Visa!”

Those words indeed save our time, aren’t they? After all, you walk into a store presumably you want to find something to buy and obviously in big departmental stores, knowing where the cashiers are or what credit cards they accept could save you quite some time.

However, would you like to visit this store again?

Now imagine everyone is talking to you like this.

Your boss will send a one line email to you:”progress report on project ABC please.”

Your colleagues will send a one line email to you:”conference call at 11am.”

Your friend will send a one line email to you:”party on saturday, reply yes to confirm attendence.”

Your loved ones will send a one line email to you:”dinner at home at 7, call if can’t come.”

…

Do you still want to live in such a world?

Obviously sometimes one line email is appropriate, such as the time if I am asking my colleague if he/she wants to go have lunch, I will perhaps just send a one line email like: “lunch downstairs?”, obviously sending something like “Dear Jim, how are you doing? Is everything good with your family?…” and so on would just be outright silly.

However, I want to be able to have the ability to write long emails when I need to, instead of confining myself to 160 words for every single email I write.

After all, we are human with emotions, which distinguishes us from the animals. If we are just able to use the most basic forms of communication, what is the difference between us and the computers that I am typing this blog post on?