I was browsing yesterday when I stumbled upon Netcraft. They provide a lot of information like domain related information, and the uptime of that domain. They issue a monthly webserver survey that shows how many domains are active out there, and which web server are they running. Another monthly report shows the most reliable hosting companies out there.
How many websites are out there?
What webserver are those websites running?
The number of websites are 122,000,635 according to netcraft in their June 2007 survey 3.5% more than in May 07. This means that the number of active websites double approximately every 20 months (log 2 / log 1.035 ).
After running my website for two and half years, now I realize that this data would have been extremely useful when I was picking my first web host. I hope that other starting their websites can benefit from that information.
I’ve been using AMD’s dual core opteron on my server and it is a great buy, performace/price is excellent compared to intel. AMD will start shipping its quad-core Barcelona opterons for sale in Aug07. It looks like socket 939 boards are a better investment compared to 940’s as the number of cores are increasing constantly.
In one of my previous posts I described my frustration after hours of trying to make ecb (emacs code browser) to read php tags.
Today, I wanted to try the newest emacs version with gtk enabled. After downloading it, I compiled it on my UBUNTU machine with every thing enabled during the configure step (gtk, png, jpeg …etc) and I installed it in /usr/local just to make sure it won’t mess up the rest of my installation.
After playing with it for a little bit, I discovered that they embedded speedbar with the release, which was great. When I downloaded and installed php-mode and this time everything worked seamlessly !! speedbar now communicates with php-mode and exchanges the required tags.
Note that I also installed color-themes.el, I wasn’t able to find its website so I downloaded the file from the ubuntu website here.
So now I’m using emacs totally in development both in C/C++ and for PHP. Still I use VIM from time to time specially for editing system files.
All pictures of listings are now presented through an album instead of a large picture that pops up. This should enhance the user experience while browsing our website.
I’ve been playing lately with emacs trying to get more productive using it. The GTK and X versions do not understand the DEL key ! the solution is to add (normal-erase-is-backspace-mode) in your .emacs file.
There are two scripts that I always use with VIM:
1. Tlist (or tags list): It lists the functions, variables in all opened source files.
2. Nerd commenter: Provides easy comment to source code, the easiest way is using Ctrl+C in during insert.
I’ve been using vim for a while, and lately I tried to use emacs for editing my code. I discovered that emacs was a much better editor, that takes so much time to configure. It is highly configurable to the extent that it can take you days to customize it to the point that makes you happy. I liked the M-; fast comment shortcut in emacs, and its C-style indentation (corresponding to set cindent in vim)
Since I was trying to emulate the same environment I had with vim, I looked for something similar to Tlist, and I found an elisp program called ecb (emacs code browser), the provides that tags in the opened source file. I also found the speedbar from the cedet-tools website, that provides a similar functionality. Both tools were not able to browse php code, unfortunately.
Although I believe that emacs is a much better editor, at the moment the available plugins do not support PHP, which for me is very important as I do a lot of php editing. However, for C/C++ I will be using emacs (or xemacs) for developing as it is much easier to work with.
When it comes to the real estate market there’s dozens of opinions. I like to see charts and analyze numbers, so I will explain my point of view of the real estate market using my own analysis. Like any analysis in the world, it might be correct and there’s a chance that it is wrong - And you can consider that as a disclaimer.
Every month GCAAR releases a monthly statistics that shows how many new listings came on the MLS, and how many contracts did we have, and how many settlements we had by the end of that month. Those numbers are from the MRIS MLS. One of the categories they present is Montgomery County single family homes, which includes both townhouses and detached units.
I ran a monthly analysis starting from January 2003. For each month I calculated the absorption rate, defined as Settlements/New listings. This is not accurate but close to the real absorption rate and the reason is that settlements during that month happened due to listings in the past months. I took that as an indicator of the probability that a listing sells.
For every month, I calculated the relative absorption defined as the ratio between this months absorption, and the absorption of the same month a year ago. In essence, if this number is greater than one it means that the possibility that a listing sells at that month is higher than the previous the same month a year ago. If less than one, it means that the possibility to sell a listing is less i.e. the market is slowing down. The lower the number, the faster the market is falling. The lowest point in this curve would define the slump i.e. the time in which we saw the steepest fall.
Remember, this curve starts at Feb 2003, ends April 2007. A month is missing at the start and the end because there’s a three months moving average with a sliding window centered at each month.
Any one would notice that according to the method I used, the steepest fall was on Feb 2006. That does not mean that Feb 2006 had the lowest sales prices, because the curve continued to be less than one after i.e. absorption continued to drop, as well as prices due to large inventory. However, on March 2007 the curve passed 1 up, and down again in April. If the curve continues to hop up and down close to one, this means that the market is stabilizing as absorption rates are neither falling down nor going up. In my opinion one of the reasons that led to that curve going closer to one is the fall in new home sales from builders.
The absorption rate in April 2007 was 36%, and in my opinion the number we need to see for the market to turn back into appreciation is 80% !
Since the chart does not show the future then we just have to keep analyzing :).
Every day of the week sees a different traffic pattern. For my website for example Mondays and Tuesdays are the busiest. Websites of other nature and other geographic targets will see different patterns.
I always wanted at the start of the day to have a rough estimate of the traffic. twatch provides and estimate, and I guess it is just a linear estimate. I used the hourly bandwidth output from awstats and calculated the cumulative percentage over the day. By this way, at the end of noon (just when the clock turns one), I divide the number of sessions (or page views) by 0.4 - which gives a rough idea of how many sessions or page views I’ll see that day.
Now for every listing we show the area of its land in acres, displayed as ‘Acreage‘. The field was already in our database from long ago, we just had to make some corrections in the code to be displayed. The land area field will be displayed only if it was present in the listing as some listings do not have the acreage of the lot.
Stallman’s why details a lot of reasons why would one release a free software under GPLv3. One reason is thwarting Microsoft’s future attempts to collect royalties or threaten the open source community.
In essence if a distributor distributes GPLv3 code to his clients/customers, he grants them a conveyable patent license. And so their modifications to the code once released will convey the patent license to every recipient.
I believe GPLv3 is a great work to come. It is still under review and comments from the public till the end of this month.
Like every programmer out there, all of us tend to commit their code in branches. As time goes, we solve bugs in those branches, and that does not mean that changes stop in the main branch (trunk). After a while we usually need to merge all those little updates done in those version specific branches, back to the main branch.
Usually, we know which files we touched and so we know which files need to be merged. Sometimes things get little bit tougher when many files have been touched, and it is hard to remember which ones.
I will try to summarize my experience with those four tools (xxdiff, kdiff3, kompare and meld) in terms of two files merging. If you want to do three way merge, then you’re only left with kdiff3. I never tried that with kompare nor meld i.e. I don’t know if they even support it.
xxdiff
That’s one of the very simple tools, with a very obvious interface. One of the advantages that I like about it is that it is very easy to use and fast to learn.
xxdiff can diff directories recursively. So if you have a CVS or Subversion tree, you can compare two sandboxes together. There is no option in xxdiff to ignore directories. That means it will compare all the CVS directories and files, a thing that I don’t like. However, there is a simple hack about this. In xxdiff options, you will find a place to write the command by which you diff files. I created a shell script and called it mydiff, which passes the first two parameters to the diff program. However, it greps all the output except any line containing CVS.
#!/bin/bash
diff -q -s -r $1 $2 | grep -v CVS
You can save those lines in ~/mydiff and inside the xxdiff options use /home//mydiff instead of the recursive diff command. A feature that makes xxdiff very simple to use is the ‘n’ button, which jumps in the files to the next mismatch.
xxdiff uses some color coding for segments included in the merge. I was able to figure out the meaning of the color codes after I did some menu selections - not the simplest way to show the functionality, but it works.
kdiff3
In my opinion, kdiff3 is the best when merging two files only and not a tree. I use it a lot when I know the pair of files that I want to merge. When trying to merge a tree, kdiff3 use color coding (red, green, yellow), which is not intuitively understood unless you read the docs. I consider it the best when merging two files, but second xxdiff and meld if merging directories. xxdiff and meld will be better choices if you want to merge directories or two sandboxes of two branches.
kdiff3 replaces the two panes in xxdiff & meld with two column in a table having icons. Some may find that better than the two panes, but I personally was not comfortable working with those icons instead of the two panes.
It has the advantage of meld and xxdiff of being able to merge over the network or more specifically using protocols handled by kioslaves components of kde. Examples include merging files (or trees) on two different computers from a third.
I face this when I’m merging files from my sandbox lying in my Linux box, which is allowed to run specific versions of software with someone’s else’s code on his Linux box, using my colinux on my windows machine, which I run all the software with the most recent versions on :), and so it runs the latest kdiff3. The merge is usually over ssh or using the fish:// protocol in KDE.
kompare
kompare has a very nice interface. It is actually the most entertaining to work with. The way it draws the comparison between diffs and shows where lines should be inserted from one file to the other is the best of all of them. If you’re merging two files and you know which files you are merging, it is good to use.
When merging trees, kompare shows only the mismatches in a very small rectangular area. It actually draws a tree inside a scroll box, which is very tiny to work in. The fact that it only shows mismatches and does not dedicate a whole screen for file mismatches made it harder for me to use when merging two cvs sandboxes.
The same network merging pluses in kdiff3 are also in kompare due to being a KDE application and thus using kioslaves.
meld
This is currently my most frequently used merging tool. It is more mouse friendly and less keyboard friendly. In comparison with xxdiff, it is very similar even the interface except it is hard to guess the keys. If you use the mouse it will be a very easily used merging tool. It draws sections and shows positions of merging in a similar way to kompare. Merging or copying portions of code is accomplished by clicking two little arrows in front of every section.
It also compares directories and shows them in two panes. The directory listings are drawn in GTK trees with arrows to open every branch. It responds to right clicks of mouse, which shows a pop-up menu to copy directories when comparing directories. When comparing CVS or SVN sandboxes meld shows buttons to ignore directories used to manage the sandbox.
Although I use meld frequently to merge CVS sandboxes, it cannot be used to merge trees or sandboxes over sftp or ssh. Unlike kompare and kdiff3 that use the kioslaves of kde to be able to open and read files and directories over various network protocols.
(Allegedly) Microsoft was behind the SCO / Linux suitcases. Now Microsoft is very upfront in their attack to Linux. Because the attack involves patents, Microsoft is focusing on the US - not in Europe, which in my opinion they won’t dare to do it there.
If Microsoft wins its battle the outcome will be depriving the US businesses from the benefits of free software - nothing will happen in the EU because the battle if there is one, will end up in US courts, and so the result is not enforceable in the EU.
This is really amazing. I believe that microsoft spend money & time on research, but how will they benefit people with that? This is a great technology …. Just watch
Washington DC homes for sale are now up and running on the website. Yesterday I fixed a BUNCH of bugs. Originally, I assumed that county names in our area were unique. Now I realized that Washington-MD collides with Washington-DC. In the future, Frederick-VA would have collided with Frederick-MD too although I don’t have yet Frederick-VA on my website.
).
