Posts Tagged ‘now’

Mysql-Learn Your Indices

Thursday, July 24th, 2008

Often your choice of indices will make or break your database. For those who haven’t progressed this far in their database studies, an index is a sort of hash. If we issue the query SELECT * FROM users WHERE last_name = ‘Goldstein’ and last_name has no index then your DBMS must scan every row of the table and compare it to the string ‘Goldstein.’ An index is usually a B-tree (though there are other options) which speeds up this comparison considerably.

You should probably create indices for any field on which you are selecting, grouping, ordering, or joining. Obviously each index requires space proportional to the number of rows in your table, so too many indices winds up taking more memory. You also incur a performance hit on write operations, since every write now requires that the corresponding index be updated. There is a balance point which you can uncover by profiling your code. This varies from system to system and implementation to implementation.

2Checkout now accepts Paypal. And so what?

Saturday, June 21st, 2008

Not too long ago, 2Checkout added Paypal Express Checkout to their checkout process “by popular demand“. The essence of this blog post is to examine the impact of this on the web hosting industry.

Online payment systems are very popular with web hosting [and domain name registration] companies. Paying online speeds-up the order process for getting a new web hosting account and leading the pack of online wallets is Paypal. Aside Visa and Mastercard credit/debit cards, online wallets like Paypal have become increasingly popular online. What makes Paypal even better is that it can function as a 3rd-party credit card payment processor. Paypal has thus been enabling several Small-Office-Home-Office [SOHO] businesses worldwide to accept payment online.

That said, Paypal is not available in every country and available in some countries on a “Send money only” basis. This makes accepting payment online via Paypal very difficult for online merchants in such countries where Paypal is not fully functional or not available at all. The fact that 2Checkout now includes Paypal as a checkout option empowers millions of online merchants [web hosts included] to accept payment from Paypal’s over 130 million users. Several leading global brands have increasingly been adding Paypal as payment option on their respective websites, in recent times.

According to 2Checkout’s blog post on this issue:

This will allow customers to pay for products and services with the funds in their PayPal account, even if the supplier does not have their own PayPal account and only uses 2Checkout.

The PayPal payment option will be available for all non-recurring orders in the following currencies:

* Australian Dollar (AUD)
* Canadian Dollar (CAD)
* Euro (EUR)
* British Pound (GBP)
* Japanese Yen (JPY)
* U.S. Dollar (USD)

2Checkout is much easier to join and use though they would verify your information if they have any reason to suspect you/your business.

In case you’re a web host helping your clients with e-commerce solutions, the e-commerces scripts under Fantastico (if you’re using CPanel) have modules that allow merchants to accept payment via 2Checkout. CubeCart, OSCommerce and Zen Cart are all available for installation via Fantastico and there are several other equally good e-commerce shopping scripts out there that integrate well with 2Checkout.

Do you run a web hosting business? How do you accept payments online? Has the addition of Paypal to 2Checkout’s checkout process had an positive/negative impact on your web hosting business or online store? Share your thoughts here and now.

Firefox Speed Tweaks

Wednesday, June 18th, 2008

Yes, firefox is already pretty damn fast but did you know that you can tweak it and improve the speed even more?

That’s the beauty of this program being open source.
Here’s what you do:
In the URL bar, type “about:config” and press enter. This will bring up the configuration “menu” where you can change the parameters of Firefox.

Note that these are what I’ve found to REALLY speed up my Firefox significantly - and these settings seem to be common among everybody else as well. But these settings are optimized for broadband connections - I mean with as much concurrent requests we’re going to open up with pipelining… lol… you’d better have a big connection.

Double Click on the following settins and put in the numbers below - for the true / false booleans - they’ll change when you double click.

Code:
browser.tabs.showSingleWindowModePrefs – true
network.http.max-connections – 48
network.http.max-connections-per-server – 16
network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-proxy – 8
network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server – 4
network.http.pipelining – true
network.http.pipelining.maxrequests – 100
network.http.proxy.pipelining – true
network.http.request.timeout – 300

One more thing… Right-click somewhere on that screen and add a NEW -> Integer. Name it “nglayout.initialpaint.delay” and set its value to “0”. This value is the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it receives. Since you’re broadband - it shouldn’t have to wait.

Now you should notice you’re loading pages MUCH faster now!

Eliminate Ie’s Autocomplete Reminder

Wednesday, June 18th, 2008

AutoComplete: Some people like it, some don’t. Those who don’t like it turn it off. Those of us who turned it off are now constantly being prompted to turn it on. By now, we despise it! How do we turn it off completely, with no more pop-ups asking us to turn it on?

It does seem that Internet Explorer really wants you to use AutoComplete. On a system with AutoComplete turned off, it will prompt you from time to time, asking to turn it on again. A Registry tweak will prevent IE’s “helpful” reminders. First, close all IE windows.

1. Launch REGEDIT from the Start menu’s Run dialog.

2. Navigate to the key HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Control Panel.
Note that this key may not be present in its entirety. You may need to create the Internet Explorer and Control Panel subkeys. In the right-hand pane, look for a DWORD value named FormSuggest it will probably not be present.

3. In that case, right-click in the right-hand pane and choose New | DWORD Value from the pop-up menu. Name the new value FormSuggest. Whether you found it or created it, double-click this value and set its data to 1.

That should terminate the annoying reminder.