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Website Page Caching
Created at 07:14 AM on Thursday July 2nd, 2009

I've implemented page caching on the website. Pages are now built and then stuffed into the SQL table with a time to live of 10 minutes. If the page gets a hit before the TTL expires the web server will serve the cached page instead of rebuilding it again. Since most of my content doesn't change this works out pretty well. A page that normally takes 0.043 seconds to build only takes 0.005 seconds to serve in its cached form, a considerable improvement.

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Earth & Beyond Stress Test 3
Created at 02:55 PM on Sunday June 14th, 2009

If you played Electronic Arts Earth & Beyond back in 2002-2004 you might want to take a look at the Earth & Beyond Emulator. At the time of this writing they're running an open to the public stress test (Stress Test 3).

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Egypt's O'-Niner Miner 1.2.7 Released
Created at 02:23 PM on Sunday June 14th, 2009

For those using my mining application (written for A Tale in the Desert (ATITD)), I've released a new version that addresses several bugs and adds quite a few useful features. Please take a look here.

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Website Optimization
Created at 07:13 AM on Tuesday June 2nd, 2009

This website should be a tad bit faster. I've optimized it based on suggestions from an application called Yahoo! YSlow. While this site was pretty well optimized to begin with there were a few places it could be better.

The biggest savings were in image optimization. Most of the images were already compressed and optimized using jhead and optipng; but amazingly Smush.it was able to shave off a little more (1-3% on large images, about 13-25% on the smaller ones). It also converted a few gifs into pngs. (This required altering the sites CSS and possibly breaking the site on older browsers but what the heck, most people should be using a modern browser anyways).

By far the most time consuming change was enabling "expires headers" that are set in the future. Normally this is a quick and easy change but in my case it required rebuilding the apache httpd to include mod_headers (I keep apache trimmed down; only building in the modules I use/need).

Some optimizations it suggested like using a content delivery network (CDN) or disabling E-Tags (all my content is on one server) didn't apply to me.  But overall it was able to offer some decent suggestions to shrink the site slightly and hopefully speed it up by having the content more readily cached.

Small update:

Additionally applied a suggestion or two from Googles Page Speed. Such as rearranging some script orders. Doubt it'll make much difference but you never know. ;)

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Search Added
Created at 08:07 AM on Wednesday May 13th, 2009

I've added search functionality to my website using mnoGoSearch.

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ATITD Section
Created at 07:00 AM on Wednesday May 13th, 2009

Since I've started more game related applications (other than just RMT) I went ahead and created a page dedicated to the game.

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Gaming again
Created at 07:24 AM on Friday April 10th, 2009

My wife started playing A Tale in the Desert (ATITD) again. Somehow she managed to drag me back into the game. ;) We used to play during Tale 2 several years ago. It's now on its fourth telling (T4).

I've been working on an expanding the scripting language in "Rogarians Macro Thingy" (A customized macro program specifically for ATITD. ATITD is one of the few games that allows macroing as long as you're watching it. IMHO the game REQUIRES using macros because there is a lot, A LOT, A LOT of clicking involved....) So it's been a good coding exercise as well. :D

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Comments Fixed
Created at 07:09 AM on Monday March 30th, 2009

A bug when submitting comments has been fixed. (Thanks Reddy)

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MyEnTunnel 3.4.1 Released
Created at 09:46 AM on Thursday March 26th, 2009

A new version of MyEnTunnel has been released that fixes a long standing bug dealing with named pipes. Additionally, the profile menu option is now available even if no profiles exist.

(Note: The unicode version does not contain the fix; I will try to build 3.5.3 shortly.)

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Accessing IBMs UniVerse from PHP
Created at 06:02 PM on Sunday February 22nd, 2009

At work I needed to connect our backend database (UniVerse) to PHP.  The following link shows how to achieve this using the UniObjects COM object on a WAMP stack: Accessing IBMs UniVerse from PHP (or as I like to call it: Head to Keyboard Smashing 101).

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