After several experiences in missing to read important stuff written in small fonts, I thought to write a little about the experiences. This might help some.

Example 1:
If you go to several super foods, health foods website, they say “as seen on CBS, Oprah” etc. I went on to reading what their claim was. Noticed that in smaller fonts, it is written elsewhere on their website – According to CBS, consuming fiber content is very good for the heart. Hence our product that is rich in fiber is very good. CBS has never approved or promoted this product, but still the logos of CBS and other major entities remain on their site with mis leading claims. If we don’t read carefully, we will think that these products are actually approved/promoted by CBS and Oprah and others.

raman amplifierмека мебелonline casinoExample 2:
I recently went to a self service car wash hoping to save some money. It said $3 for car wash. I was excited. Swiped my debit card and started washing my car happily – presoak, foam, rinse, spot free rinse, dryer and everything. When I returned to the billing equipment, it showed $11. I was shocked. Then I happened to read the small fonts, which said, $3 for 4 minutes and so on. I took 15 minutes and hence the $11.

Especially in the US, marketing covers a lot of facts or hides them in small fonts or under labels. So its better to be careful. Try to read the small fonts, find the catch.

After my experiments with flat files and php for Pritlog, when I came to find out that Sqlite would be much more performance effective compared to flat files, I am starting to think if I should move to Sqlite for Pritlog.

As an initial test, I tried using a table with 5000 records. Did all common operations like read, update, search. These operations completed in an instant. Absolutely no performance issues. Users would not even realize that there are 5000 records being accessed. I am impressed.

Sqlite databases are simple files created on the path you specify. Hence, I would think, we can move these around and get the same functionality. Mobility is one thing I would like Pritlog to always have.

I have posted on the Pritlog forum to see the responses from the testers/users about moving to Sqlite.

After releasing the beta version of Pritlog 0.412, I started doing performance tests on Pritlog using varying number of posts. When I reached over 500 posts, I started noticing performance issues and slow response times. Crossing 1000, it almost was not responding.

This is when I started searching for a better solution for using flat files in PHP. I came across the following solutions of using flat file databases in PHP. These use SQL to retrieve rows from a flat file. Very interesting. But the performance did not improve any as these were still flat files. Anyway, these are interesting and can be very useful.

* http://www.txtsql.com/ – (has an admin like phpmyadmin)
* http://code.google.com/p/phpsimpledb/
* http://sourceforge.net/projects/ffdb-php/
* http://lukeplant.me.uk/resources/flatfile/

Below link has some discussion about flat file db’s.
http://www.usenet-forums.com/php-language/393159-pure-php-flat-file-databases.html

In many places, I found that Sqlite is recommended for speed and performance. It is much more superior than flat files and also, it is installed by default on most php installations. Hence no separate server install or software required.

My wife and I – love the taste of grilled food. As we dont have that kind of backyard space for a real grill, we tried to grill using the oven, but this never tasted that good.

Once my friend suggested George foreman’s grill. I have never heard that name before. We found a small version of this for about $25. This small version could grill 4 servings at once. This was enough for the two of us.

This is an electric grill with a little tilt so that any extra oil flows off of the fish/meat. The grilling can be done completely indoors.

We started with Salmon and it came out very well. Almost like the taste of a regular outdoor grill. It removes lot of oil/fat from any meat that we grill because of the tilted design. In the last few weeks of using it, we have grilled salmon, chicken. Yet to try steak.

But for those of you who love the taste of grilled food and start off with a small one, this is ideal.

I wanted to write about my recent experiences with this highly dangerous company. I don’t think they can operate with such fraud intentions within the US. But they still are. I need some tips on how to report such companies.

Here are the events that happened:

July 8: A marketing person from Mpingi calls me stating that they have this wonderful phone plan for $35 a month which has unlimited local calls and unlimited calls to a chosen number in India. He said that I could try this service free for a month and use these unlimited minutes.
This person takes my credit card and stores it in his database saying that once you cross this month, you will be charged the regular monthly fee of $35.

July 8: A second person calls to confirm my details and states that you have 250 minutes to use in your first month and did not mention anything about what will happen if you cross this.

July 26: The device for voip is delivered.

Aug 14: I try to contact customer service. I get to hear music from their toll free number for an hour for 3 days. I try to get the support online and finally get them through after this 3 days.

Aug 17: The guy at Mpingi states that if I cancel, I have to pay the 1st month’s service plus some additional charges. Total would be $46. The guy at Mpingi convinces me that the support problems were temporary and I can continue with their service. Unfortunately, I get convinced.

Aug 17: I cannot make any calls from the Mpingi phone. I cannot get customer support online again.

Aug 19: Finally get to talk to customer support and request service cancellation. This time, they say, I will have to pay around $80 for cancellation. Also, that I have to send back the equipment within 7 days. I sent it to them in a expedited post that weekend.

Aug 29: I receive a mail from Mpingi with a return label to use to return the equipment. It is also stated that if things are not done as mentioned, they would consider this equipment sold to us at $99.

You can see clearly all through this how Mpingi has beed clearly changing the amount I owe, not being honest.

PLEASE NEVER FALL FOR THIS COMPANY. THEY ARE A BIG FRAUD COMPANY.

You can see many more reports on the following websites of how people have been defrauded by them.

http://www.asteriskguru.com/tutorials/grandstream_handytone_486.html

http://www.mouthshut.com/review/General_Advice_on_Long_Distance_Telephone_Carriers-139156-1.html

http://www.ripoffreport.com/reports/0/303/RipOff0303628.htmколи под наем

htaccess files are optional configuration files used in Apache web servers that can be used to control the directories they are placed in and also the sub directories.

If your host allows .htaccess files, you may want to read the below articles and use the powerful techniques explained.

http://perishablepress.com/press/2006/01/10/stupid-htaccess-tricks/

http://www.askapache.com/htaccess/apache-htaccess.html

Try searching for .htaccess and there are tons of articles you will come across.

Believe me, you will be surprised at the numerous tricks that can be done using .htaccess files.

Some tips from the below link to read your apache log files using the simple grep command.
http://immike.net/blog/2007/07/12/grepping-your-web-logs/

Here are some quotes from the article:

Here’s what a line from an Apache log file looks like:
71.206.3.109 – - [12/Jul/2007:09:16:31 -0500] “GET / HTTP/1.1″ 200 33545 “-” “Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/419 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/419.3″

For a quick feel for how many visitors I’ve received for the day I use grep to find all of today’s requests, awk to extract the IP address, then sort and uniq to eliminate duplicate IPs (sort is necessary because uniq only works with sorted input). Piping the result through wc results in the number of unique IP addresses that have made requests:

# grep “12/Jul” immike.net-access.log | awk ‘{print $1}’ | sort | uniq | wc -l
1188

For a bit more detail, the following command will determine the 10 most requested pages (excluding css, js, gif, ico, png, and jpg files) and list them in order:

# awk ‘{print $7}’ immike.net-access.log |
> grep -ivE ‘(.gif|.jpg|.png|.ico|.css|.js)’ |
> sed ’s//$//g’ | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head -10

I read this interesting and very simple tip on how to convert your linux bash prompt to look like a dos prompt.

Here is the link to the original article.
http://www.linuxhaxor.net/2008/07/18/make-your-bash-prompt-look-like-dos-prompt/

Quote from the article:

Add this line to your .bashrc: PS1=’C:${PWD////}>’
This basically changes the format of your prompt, to look like a dos prompt.

I came across this good article recently. Please consider reading the whole article at the below link:
http://thinksimplenow.com/clarity/find-clarity-in-one-day

I am not a believer on meditation. That would be the only point I would not accept from the article.

The author begins the article this way:

Do you ever get so busy with the details of your life and the countless things you need to complete, that you end up feeling exhausted and disconnected?

The result: Your mind becomes clouded and unable to focus and you start to make poor decisions regarding your priorities. You end up working hard instead of working smart.

How to start:

Set aside quality time to enjoy and do the things you love to do, simple things like walking, hiking, watch people etc. Main point is to turn off all distractions like phone and especially all media. Enjoy everything that you are doing as you are doing it.

Ideas from the author:

• Brain dump: writing all your random thoughts down
• Hiking
• Biking
• Working out
• Book store (no magazines)
• Listen to music
• Watch people
• Sit on your patio
• Take 100 photos

I have tried atleast 40-45 distributions and wanted to write atleast 1 line about the below ones. The list is sorted based on the popularity as mentioned on http://distrowatch.com at the time of writing.

1. Ubuntu: Very stable and the most popular version. But since it is purely open source, the codecs required to play dvd’s, and some formats need to be additionally installed.
2. OpenSuse: Is very popular, but on my laptop, did not do a good job.
3. Fedora: Almost similar as OpenSuse. Codecs need to be installed.
4. Mint: This is Ubuntu with all required codecs and libraries and it is beautiful with Compiz working by default.
5. PCLinuxOS: This is based on Mandriva and has excellent hardware recognition.
6. Madriva: Additional codecs need to be installed. But works pretty well.
7. Dreamlinux: Had difficulty working on my wireless. Is beautiful though.
8. FreeBSD: Not Linux, but is very stable and popular as a server.
9. Puppy: My favorite distribution. Extremely light, Superfast and fully functional. Most friendly linux community.
10. Zenwalk: Worked okay on my laptop. But wireless did not work.
11. Slax: Lightweight and easily customizable. This started me off into Linux.
12. PC-BSD: User friendly version of FreeBSD. Worked well on my laptop.
13. gOS: Again a beautiful version of Ubuntu. Compiz and AWN is installed by default.
14. Elive: Most popular distro that uses Enlightenment as the window manager. My wireless did not work. Is a beautiful version.
15. TinyMe: Very lightweight version of PCLinuxOS.
16. OpenBSD: Claimed to be the most secure OS. But is not user friendly for the end user.
17. Kiwi: Ubuntu with all codecs and libraries.
18. Slitaz: Smallest, beautiful distro (under 30 MB now). Lacks wireless modules, extra codecs etc. Codecs/Flash can be easily installed.

Last but not least, here is a version I created based on Puppy Linux (my favorite).

• Macpup: This is a beautiful remaster of Puppy Linux.

If you would like to try out Linux, here are my recommendations:

• Macpup or Puppy: Actually, if you want to see the beauty and speed of Linux, try this.
• Kiwi or Mint: Stability of Ubuntu, with all required codecs, flash and libraries pre-installed.

One best part about the linux versions are that most of them have Livecd versions. You can boot using this CD into the OS and test it out. There is no need of an installation to test. Also, Puppy Linux (or Macpup), can be run from a livecd always, with your personal settings saved to the hard disk.