This summer I haven’t posted as I was out riding across the TransAmerica, TransAm, #acatransam! The trail took me from Yorktown, VA to Portland, OR. See the trip, with notes and pix on Google Maps or TrackMyTour.
I am decompressing at present and haven’t even cleaned or performed maintenance on my Rivendell Atlantis: Home 4,143 miles, 0 flats, original tires! It was a sweet bike to take on the road and saved me!
Ubuntu Restricted Extras
sudo apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras
Installs Java, Flash, fonts, codecs. Very useful.
I have been using Steve Gibson’s http://www.grc.com utilities and services such as ShieldsUP! from back in the beginning of Internet Time. My favorite recollection is actually exchanging emails on some point in the mid 90s. I actually contributed in an extremely minor way! I also remind myself that there are some solid lessons to learn from his website and from the various postings over the years from Steve and I recommend it for any serious student of Computer Science. The comments are reminder that one is responsible for one’s own education and if one has the tools to check, one should. I find both of these invaluable insights.
I had not tested my recent firewall at ShieldsUP and just did. I also found the following:
Welcome to ShieldsUP!
If you have not visited for some time, please note that:
Our new Perfect Passwords facility is used by thousands of people every day to generate ultra-high-quality random passwords for securing WiFi and other services.
Our weekly Security Now! audio podcast has covered every security issue you might have. These mp3 audio files are freely downloadable, and since we have transcripts of every podcast, you can use our sitewide search to find any podcast by keyword.
Website security is a big deal, in the shop today I am testing out Websecurify which is an automated web application security scanner. A quick shoutout to Muhammad Usama Alam at Smash!ng Apps that gave this one a quick review and brought it to my attention . You can find the code hosted on Google Code. I ran it against one of my wordpress sites and it did give some useful feedback as well as a great volume of feedback that I will need to wade through to determine what steps I can take to resolve the issues. I can see that if I coded my own website the tool would be of greater value. I will keep my eye on this one.
I subscribe to the belief that constant monitoring for performance improvement is counter productive. At the same time, I am old enough to remember when each adjustment made a difference to constantly scarce resources. At irregular intervals which occur after I notice something slow in the page being rendered in the browser I wait for an article addressing overall performance.
Today it was an article on the new Google Tool Page Speed which led me to tweak my WordPress servers and my Moodle servers. The initial article referenced a site from Google Code entitled “Let’s make the web faster” which led me to not only look at page speed issues from a settings standpoint but also to add an overall PHP Accelerator which I thought I had in Fedora 10 but forgotten to move forward during upgrades last year.
A great deal of the settings that were easily addressable existed inside the WP-Super-Cache plugin that I use in all my sites. I then added a PHP Accelerator, settling on APC after reviewing performance comparisons and maintenance strategies. Somewhere along the way, gzip compression was enabled, and tested working and then it became disabled and although I uninstalled APC and rechecked gzip values it remained disabled although overall page performance improvements did not appear compromised. Making a mental note to check into this the next time I take a minute and check out my server performances. Something clearly stumbled into the compression routine and I will need to sort it out.
UPDATE: I found a number of ACL errors that affected more than just the caching plugins by checking out everything thoroughly, and this gave me a better set of practices to install and maintain WordPress self-hosted sites. I also had trouble with super caching, but solved that by setting AllowOverrides in httpd.conf correctly. I like to learn. The remaining itch to scratch is just what is going on with the compression.
