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Site slowdowns - Hosting fund

I've noticed over the last few weeks that the site is intermittently timing out a lot. I am on an extremely fast fiber optic line at the office so I know it isn't my connection. Have others experienced this lately?

I am not posting this to complain. Instead, I 'd like to float the possibility of users donating some cash to help Peter with the costs of hosting the site and potentially upgrading the server or connection as needed in the future. Obviously, this is up to him, but he could set up a Paypal account to which we could send donations. Even a few bucks from various users would help. In any case, I am just throwing this out for discussion.

By ColombianoGringo on Mar 18, 09:41 in Friendly Talkzone.

ColombianoGringo says on Mar 18, 09:42:

Badump

tejasmarcos says on Mar 18, 09:50:

free signup for all users. marked trolls must pay $5 to renew their names in order to stay active. let the trolls carry the expense...

or, advertising fees for users who advertise their products, real estate, websites, etc.

god is in your head

robi666 says on Mar 18, 09:52:

Before paying, I'd like to know if part of the money are going to the International Sex Forum or whatever it is called...

"I am a citizen of the most beautiful nation on earth. A nation whose laws are harsh yet simple, a nation that never cheats, which is immense and without borders, where life is lived in the present."

ColombianoGringo says on Mar 18, 09:53:

Well. He already has Google ads. I actually forgot about those since I block all ads with AdBlock plus and NoScript. In any case, I'm still willing to pony up to help.

tejasmarcos says on Mar 18, 10:07:

CG - tell me more about adblock. how can i take a look at that for myself?

god is in your head

ColombianoGringo says on Mar 18, 10:13:

It is a plugin for Firefox. Adblock Plus allows you to block individual images, flash animations, etc. It also allows you to block entire domains. For example, you can block the domains of ad companies like doubleclick.com so you never see their ads on any site that you visit.

NoScript is another useful plugin. It allows you to block scripts, ActiveX, Flash etc from running without your explicit permission.

With both plugins, you can exempt certain sites and like a popup blocker, it will remember your settings once you select them.

Between these two plugins, you can pretty much completely protect yourself from adware/spyware and all kinds of other annoying and potentially harmful scripts. You can download them all from the Firefox website under the extensions section.

tejasmarcos says on Mar 18, 10:16:

dude, good info. i have neglected fully utilizing all firefox has to offer. i need to get on the ball and start doing that. it makes alot of sense these days.

god is in your head

robi666 says on Mar 18, 10:18:

You guys using Microshit have an hard life...

ColombianoGringo says on Mar 18, 10:19:

Yep. Since I am a programmer, I get people asking for help all the time with their spyware infested PCs. I tell them all that the only real solution is to reformat your PC, reinstall Windows and use Firefox with Adblock and NoScript on any potentially suspect site. The ones that listen never have problems again. I know that their are spyware cleaning programs out their, but unless you really know how to go in and clean you registry, etc. it is very difficult to completely clean many spyware programs.

robi666 says on Mar 18, 10:21:

I am writing on a five years old Powerbook, still doing good, never reformatted, only upgraded. Never had any problem with ad-shit, nor viruses, never had to install anything or spend time on that. Never used anything to clean it, nor optimize. Do you guys still use something like the Norton utilities?

tejasmarcos says on Mar 18, 10:23:

macsnob....

CG - what kind of programming do you do? independent?

god is in your head

ColombianoGringo says on Mar 18, 10:24:

What do you use robi? A mac? They're great for home users and pixel pushers, but if you want to do any serious work in the business world, the reality is that Windows is still required.

If you think macs are so easy, just ask our system admins about all the hassles they have administering macs and related hardware. We have several racks of Apple Xdrive arrays for our HD editing suite and the admins spend a lot more time hassling with those. We have even had Apple factory engineers down to work on these system and they can't get them to do work correctly with the macs running Final Cut Pro.

So, like I said macs are great for home users and design types, but they are not as flawless as the "believers" have been have been convinced by Apple's marketing team.

Robi, I am still running Windows 2000 at home and I have never had a virus, nor any spyware. I also haven't rebooted my PC in many months. If you know what you're doing, PCs are great, otherwise a mac isn't a bad idea. The main hassle is that 90% of the software out their is not available on a mac.

ColombianoGringo says on Mar 18, 10:28:

TM,

My day job involves developing software for use in TV, radio and print production. The company I work for does worldwide marketing media for the music industry. Our clients include the Rolling Stones, U2, Shakira, 50 cent, Britney Spears, The Eagles and everyone in between. We do TV, radio, print and internet commercials for these people. I write a lot of software for a/v production, encoding, distribution, production management etc. On the side, I have started a few companies with some business to business web applications I created over the last few years.

robi666 says on Mar 18, 10:35:

CG, you know what? System administrators are a bunch of loosers nowadays. They get a Microshit certification and they are SA...
Unix? What the fuck is that? They never heard about RFCs.
A serious and well prepared guy will make all those machines work smoothly, much better that any Compaq, HP, Dell...
The only, and I mean only, reason to work with a PC is being a "slave" programmer, have to deal with the fake programming shit, like VB and similar. Because industry use PCs.
When you need to touch the core... than you cannot do that.

I had a bunch of crazy guys working for me, we did some great job, and let the world go its way...

ColombianoGringo says on Mar 18, 10:39:

Did you miss the part about how APPLE FACTORY ENGINEERS could not get their network storage systems to work with Apple Macs running Apple software? Also, we have lots of Linux and other variations of UNIX running in our environment so our admins know their shit.

I'll take my extremely well paid "slave" programmer job where I can come in at whatever hour I want, I am not supervised much and can take tons of vacation to go to Colombia every few months. If I have to use Windows and Visual Studio, then so be it. I'm happy, my clients are happy and that's all that matters. Platform jihad is for people with nothing better to bitch about. Capable people take the tools at hand and make them work.

Simon says on Mar 18, 10:43:

Oye CG, que lenguaje usas para programar? C++, SQL, C#, o Java?

"Qué te calles, coño!" -- Capitán Vidal (Laberinto del Fauno/Pan's Labyrinth)

robi666 says on Mar 18, 10:45:

Perfect CG, I am not arguing about job. Job is job. I worked on things such Remedy software (does it still exist?), working on Visual Studio was not that bad.

I am sorry to hear that about Apple Engineers. When I was working, Apple was just beginning to target Enterprises server farms. Never used one of those machines.

I know one day we will agree on what I said.
I do not really care about Apple or anyone, I promise myself to not talk about it anymore and you're making me do that... :)

ColombianoGringo says on Mar 18, 10:49:

Si, Si, y Si.

Joder. Desde joven han sido BASIC, Assembly, Pascal, VB, C/C++, SQL, , C#, Java y otros muy específicos a ciertos sistemas. Es que yo llevo programando desde como los diez años. Mi taita era programador y me enseño desde niño.

Te cuento una historia. Cuando el era bachiller en Colombia, trabajaba en el Banco Cafetero. Un dia en los sesentas, llegaron y les dijeron a todos los empleados que iban a poner un "mainframe" y que la IBM iba a dar un examen para ver quien servia para aprender a programar. Pues mi papa era apenas un cajero porque era bien joven. Cuando se registro, todos los "hijueputivos" se burlaron diciendo que para que un peón tomaba un examen tan avanzado. Pues te cuento que el y otro joven eran los únicos en todo la compañía que pasaron el examen. Todos los hijueputivos se rajaron y tuvieron que tragarse las burlas.

Simon says on Mar 18, 10:52:

Yo me quedo con el SQL sobre los C, es mucho más fácil, pero bacano que te gusta. No conozco bien a Java todavía.

"Qué te calles, coño!" -- Capitán Vidal (Laberinto del Fauno/Pan's Labyrinth)

ColombianoGringo says on Mar 18, 10:54:

Pero es que SQL de verdad no es un lenguaje de programación en si. Es "Structured Query Language" para hacer "queries" a bases de datos. Yo si lo uso, pero en combinación con algún otro lenguaje.

ColombianoGringo says on Mar 18, 10:56:

Robi, No sweat man. I am simply not a zealot for any particular platform. I have used everything from Commodore 64 to TRS-80, VMX-VAX, Mac, Windows, Irix(SGI Unix), Solaris, etc. As I said, it's not the tools, it's the person using them that makes the difference.

robi666 says on Mar 18, 10:56:

I'll put CG and Simon on ignore... :)

robi666 says on Mar 18, 18:12:

PepeA on the ignore, too. What a bunch of crap...

robi666 says on Mar 18, 18:13:

The greatest step on os. Just for lovers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXT

RAAAY says on Mar 18, 18:16:

.

Pepe.......you should ask that Robi guy about computer stuff.............I have him on ignore so I don't know if he has seen this post..........

.

.........Its useless to argue with ignorance

Peter (Moderator) says on Mar 18, 23:45:

Also, you can click on "my account" and then just uncheck the checkbox that says "advertising", this way you'll see NO ads as long as you're logged in. No need for adblockers here!

Poor but snappy

robi666 says on Mar 19, 02:38:

Geeee... " They would then arrogantly say it was a Mac"... funny... take it easy... you're on a crusade... it makes you look like another Mr. Gates in Colombia. And Colombia is full of them... already

I just noticed... the PC vs. MAC ads... the PC guy seems familiar...

ColombianoGringo says on Mar 19, 07:44:

Peter,
I don't use the ad blockers specifically for your site. I simply have the google ads domain restricted and it blocks anything from that domain regardless of the site it is on. That is a nice feature you put in to allow users to turn off the ads.

vladimiro says on Mar 19, 19:23:

Linux is important for hosting web apps because if you get large numbers of people using your app you can scale it cheap, and fast with cloud computing services like Amazon EC2 (linux virtual machines on demand ).

The cost for hosting a web app with hundreds of thousands of users, like for instance SalesForce.com on windows machine is prohibitive for a small business, but even a one man shop working part-time could do this on Amazon EC2.

rocinante says on Mar 19, 20:58:

My 2 cents Nerd Alert - Robbi ignore me too...

The big financial firms of the world run all their real time transactions and huge databases on an IBM x/OS Mainframe with DB2 as the main database. Windows? Mac? Are you kidding me?

These companies use for their non transaction/Legacy systems (When not running IBM Websphere directly on the mainframe) UNIX servers. Trading systems are traditionally in C/C±± running on UNIX for 20 years and they are still developed like that today. If you are running Websphere on a Mainframe/UNIX, trading/execution/confirm/settlement/clearing systems can run directly by receiving trade messages (via SWIFT for example) into MQ, convert to XML from SWIFT format, drop back to MQ as message driven beans and consumed by core JAVA apps wunning on Websphere, listening to that MQ queue. Websphere is a logical webserver (by IBM) running on 4-6 box server clusters where each server has 24 CPU chips handling all of this. Everything gets logged by the JAVA web app to DB2, trades are updated through their lifecycle and confirms are sent back to the message sending bank/broker/exchange all in under 4 seconds. Your Mac is still saying "would you like to go to iTunes?"

For the large financial institutions Linux (multi CPU) server clusters can come close if you decouple the web piece off the mainframe but most big houses go UNIX here and pay the big bucks. Sun Unix Machines - mid range - start at USD$80,000. That's just one box that looks like the box you have at home. Wanna buy a mainframe box? Starts at about a million dollars. These prices don't include a lot. There is a reason these machines cost so much just for the hardware (we're not talking disk storage and monthly license fees) and there is a reason to this day IBM gets 25% of it's revenue from their mainframe business. That's 25% of big blue. IBM is soooo smart and I won't get into all the reasons BUT all these companies that started to "upgrade" from legacy mainframe CICS green screens and develop web apps are able to use existing mainframe code because Websphere allows JAVA programs to call CICS mainframe programs (via CTG) - so big companies can use their legacy code/business logic that has existed for years and encapsulate it into an MVC architecture - on a MAINFRAME! Can you fukin' believe it folks?

If someone were to tell this to a C±± programmer back in 1995 he would have coffee coming out of his nose from laughing so hard.

None of this will ever happen on Mac or a Microsoft machine/platform.

Visual Studio based apps (C#, dot.NET) that do run on Windows boxes have their place in Fortune 500 companies but they are not the real critical powerhouse 100% availaiblity apps handling big traffic.

Vladimiro, you are right runinig Linux is cheap and scalable because you can add run of the mill PC servers machines to the cluster (web server cluster and DB cluster) and toss a load balancer up front of the webservers. I ditto you on the Windows machines not handling heavy duty transaction processing.

While I'm ranting Goldman Sachs in 1996 decided to handle the Y2K problem by not fixing their mainframe COBOL code - they were just going to dump the mainframe and all their current systems and write everything new using the then Windows technologies running on Windows machines. In late 1998 they realized that it wasn't going to work - Windows couldn't handle it - wasn't even close even when they souped up the machines to the hilt. So they got caught with their pants down and in the 11th hour had to hire mainframe Cobol consultants paying $120 an hour and the poor folks were working 60 and 70 hour minimum weeks, weekends, from home.... If you left at 8PM to go home people looked at you like you were screwing them over for leaving so early. I did not work there. By the way Goldman Sachs is Mainframe/UNIX shop - still.

"World economic indicators point to a democrat winning 2008. It will surely be Obama. Peso 1400 by November" Feb 5, 2008

rocinante says on Mar 19, 21:28:

"On the other hand, the distinctive nature of these [mainframe] systems means that they often excel in real-world installations. A cluster based on IBM's latest mainframe, the z990, can handle 13 billion transactions a day, according to Big Blue. Statistically, an IBM mainframe should go down only once every 50 years or so, according to Charles King, an analyst at the Sageza Group. For a multinational bank, that's probably an important number." http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9584_22-5186020.html

That's 13 billion TRANSACTIONS - not instructions. Doing a stock market trade of buying shares of IBM would incur about 2-5 transactions (depending on how the system was written) by the brokerage firm.

"World economic indicators point to a democrat winning 2008. It will surely be Obama. Peso 1400 by November" Feb 5, 2008

rocinante says on Mar 19, 21:29:

I swear I'm a hit at parties.

"World economic indicators point to a democrat winning 2008. It will surely be Obama. Peso 1400 by November" Feb 5, 2008

CatGirl says on Mar 19, 21:38:

CG: "I've noticed over the last few weeks that the site is intermittently timing out a lot. I am on an extremely fast fiber optic line at the office so I know it isn't my connection. Have others experienced this lately?"

Yes I have noticed this too

robi666 says on Mar 19, 21:41:

Ok, just back...
just to be clear, I never used an Apple in an enterprise application.

My field were internet services and server farms development for ISP and Telecoms. Platforms Solaris, Linux, and Windowshit. Figure out yourself which platform could give you the most problems.

If you have a problem on Linux, you patch it. If you have a problem on Windowshit, you call Microshit.
If you have a problem on Apache, you patch it. If you have a problem on IIS, you call Microshit.
if you have a problem on OpenLDAP, you patch it. If you have a problem in the Active Directory, you call Microshit.

Microshit, per definition, call the problem a feature or say "sorry, it will fixed on "Cairo" :)" Either way you're fucked and you'll have to explain it to the Marketing and take their scream.

A Mac is the best machine for personal use, since the development of Mac Os x. Never owned a Mac before.

RAAAY says on Mar 19, 21:44:

Go check the diapers..........

.........Its useless to argue with ignorance

robi666 says on Mar 19, 21:48:

I knew it was better not to post...
Ray, did you check the PC guy of the ads? Doesn't he look like someone you know?

RAAAY says on Mar 19, 21:51:

Maybe if he was a little smaller and fatter...?

.........Its useless to argue with ignorance

robi666 says on Mar 19, 21:52:

Yes, but the face... incredible...

RAAAY says on Mar 19, 21:55:

yes.............hard to imagine two people with the same ugly face.....

.

.........Its useless to argue with ignorance

robi666 says on Mar 19, 21:58:

LOL... Absolutely...

CatGirl says on Mar 20, 06:10:

Roci "I swear I'm a hit at parties."

jaja...actually Roci your information is very helpul. Gracias

tejasmarcos says on Mar 20, 08:14:

careful roci, you might soon be dubbed "general pbh consultant & advisor".

ufffffff!

god is in your head