The final release of Firefox 3 is due in June, the company said Wednesday during a roundtable discussion with a small group of tech bloggers.During the event, the key members of the Mozilla team, including CEO John Lilly, gave a quick overview of the product release schedule for the next version of the open source web browser.
According to VP of engineering Mike Schroepfer, the first Release Candidate will ship in early May. The RC1 stage is the point at which most of the larger extension developers re-work their code to be fully compatible with Firefox 3. So if your favorite extension isn’t yet working, you’ll only have to wait another month or so.
Right now, the latest Firefox 3 release is beta version 4. The Firefox 3 betas have about 700,000 users right now — a small but dedicated chunk of Firefox’s entire user base of 160 million people. The public release of Beta 5 will be out the first week of April (the nightly builds are available for testing now), and that will be the last beta release before Firefox enters the release candidate stage.
I would suggest everyone to refrain from upgrading until all Firefox 3.0 compatible plugins has been released! or end up in a world of pain and suffering caused by imcompatible plugins!
The developer of azureus have a wiki listing ISPs that block or scramble your torrent traffic, some of the worst ISPs are Comcast, Adelphia, Cablevision and RCN (I especially hate RCN).
Anyway, here is the list: azureus bad ISP list
A couple of days ago DreamHost datacenter went down for 2 hours in a major datacenter outage. Their company blog went down with it. It gave me a wordpress database error page. Interestingly, it uses “mysql.ithug.com” as its database server. I visited ithug.com and it doesn’t appear to be associated with DreamHost at all, other than the fact that it is also hosted by DreamHost. My theory is that “Stephen Reinhardt”, the owner of “ithug.com” is also the designer for “blog.dreamhost.com”. So when he designed and installed the blog for DreamHost, he used his own mysql server name and never changed it to anything else.
Media Temple GPU calculation is very inaccurate, but to its customer’s advantage. I found that in the past 20 days, my GPU statistics omitted 6 days, it simply says 0, when it should’ve been around 3-4 GPU per day. I wonder if this is a temporary problem. I don’t think anyone should worry about GPU usage anyway, I run a Wordpress site and various other sites for my clients on the Media Temple Gridserver, one Wordpress site receive over 10,000 uniques and around 20,000 page views per day. Only cost me around 3-4 GPU per day (all Media Temple customer get 1000 GPU to use per month). That means I will have to run over 10 such sites to be over the GPU limit. Keep in mind that DreamHost shut my site down when it first reached 4000 hits per day.
DreamHost does have its benefits though, especially for light traffic sites, they are:
intuitive domain control
cheaper domain registration
cheaper hosting price (DH $6/month vs MT $20/month)
unlimited database users
better user management
flexible naming scheme for database and db users
better control panel (in so many ways!)
better one-click install system
I wish DreamHost ease/functionality and Media Temple Gridserver scalability would just merge together and we will have the perfect web host.
I have been on the Media Temple GridServer plan for about 15 days now. So far these are the stats I have gathered:
Server Uptime: 99.99%
I use pingdom.com to monitor server uptime, so far it has been pretty amazing, only been down 5 minutes in the last 15 days. This is much better than DreamHost’s uptime. My site on DreamHost has been down for over 2 hours total, in the last 15 days.
Database Uptime: 97%
As I posted before, on the first day I moved my site to Media Temple, their database server went down on me, for over 3 hours. So I wrote a little script that perform a small SELECT operation on a dummy database every 10 minutes. So far I have noticed significant down time on Media Temple’s database server, average about at least 30 minutes per day! As I told their support people, their database server is simply constantly overloaded and not load balanced at all. (I suspect this is intentional, because they offer a “MySQL Container” product, which is basically an isolated virtual database server with guaranteed resources for $20/month). I believe they purposely overload their regular database server to get those frustrated customer to buy the “MySQL container” service.
Continue reading ‘Media Temple Grid Server and Database Performance Review’
I just received an email from Media Temple, announcing that they will be disabling “allow_url_fopen” on January 18th, 2008. I first came across this setting when I signed up and hosted at DreamHost. DreamHost already had this setting disabled for a while, because it is a serious security flaw that has caused many many compromised websites. I quickly found how to still grab remote pages and files with out using “allow_url_fopen”. The alternative is called the PHP CURL functions, which is much more secure. Both DreamHost and Media Temple support this function.
Here is a tutorial on CURL by DreamHost.
Wikia Search Alpha launched on Jan. 7th, 2008. I believe it is arguably the first major/mainstream Open Source Search Engine (OSSE). Their ranking algorithm will be completely open. The algorithm puts much weight on user based input, somewhat similar to wikipedia, where senior users influence policy and quality. Wikia will be a “trust based” engine, where a person with a lot of “trust”, “seniority” and “friends” will be seen as a reliable editor and source of site rank. This will be completely different from google’s approach, where relevant outbound links are the single most important factor for site ranking.
The Four principles of Wikia Search (similar to the 5 pillars of wikipedia?) are: Transparency, Community, Quality and Privacy.
This a truly exciting development in the search engine world. Will we have a search engine that is similar to my beloved wikipedia? I already signed up for the alpha test, but still waiting for the confirmation email, which seem to never going to arrive. I’ll post some more info as soon as I get in!
