Computer Science Stuff

When your server is getting pounded by large amount viewers utilizing your website or you just want your website to load up faster there are two simple techniques you can use that will take you a long way:

1. Compress your images
2. Compress your code

Images – this is something that is very common to use up a lot a bandwidth, if they are not placed in the right format. I use Photoshop and the save for web function they have which can be located under the file on the menu. Of course photoshop cost money but there is a free alternative you can use. I found a website http://www.imageoptimizer.net/Pages/Home.aspx which can optimize your pictures for you! If you decide to do it by the bulk you can download the program off their website.

Code – I use php to code most of my applications and wanted to find a simple way to make it load up faster. Well I have found a simple solution and this is through enabling gzip compression for php. Just put these two lines of code into your php.ini which is your php configuration file found on your server, thats if you have php 5 or higher.

zlib.output_compression = On
zlib.output_compression_level = 6
To make sure it is active, type in your website into this Web Optimizer. It should say congratulations this page is compressed for main domain name. And thats all, with gzip compression enabled it will decrease the size of your code by 80%!

Popularity: 16% [?]

Updated On: 11/16/2008

You can download it here in plain text format

1. google.com
2. yahoo.com
3. myspace.com
4. youtube.com
5. facebook.com
6. live.com
7. msn.com
8. wikipedia.org
9. ebay.com
10. aol.com
11. craigslist.org
12. blogger.com
13. go.com
14. amazon.com
15. cnn.com
16. espn.go.com
17. photobucket.com
18. flickr.com
19. microsoft.com
20. comcast.net
21. adultfriendfinder.com
22. wordpress.com
23. nytimes.com
24. imdb.com
25. ask.com
26. aim.com
27. about.com
28. weather.com
29. pornhub.com
30. fastclick.com
31. rapidshare.com
32. mapquest.com
33. pogo.com
34. apple.com
35. foxnews.com
36. youporn.com
37. redtube.com
38. att.net
39. walmart.com
40. adobe.com
41. megavideo.com
42. vmn.net
43. reference.com
44. doubleclick.com
45. bbc.co.uk
46. target.com
47. rr.com
48. nfl.com
49. netflix.com
50. sportsline.com
51. livejournal.com
52. answers.com
53. washingtonpost.com
54. careerbuilder.com
55. ign.com
56. hulu.com
57. zedo.com
58. att.com
59. bestbuy.com
60. verizon.net
61. googlesyndication.com
62. foxsports.com
63. disney.go.com
64. dell.com
65. typepad.com
66. cnet.com
67. hi5.com
68. xvideos.com
69. linkedin.com
70. gamespot.com
71. veoh.com
72. usps.com
73. livejasmin.com
74. tribalfusion.com
75. playlist.com
76. xnxx.com
77. latimes.com
78. monster.com
79. imageshack.us
80. ning.com
81. tube8.com
82. fimserve.com
83. deviantart.com
84. gamefaqs.com
85. msplinks.com
86. tinypic.com
87. imeem.com
88. clicksor.com
89. nbc.com
90. thepiratebay.org
91. tagged.com
92. quizrocket.com
93. ups.com
94. reuters.com
95. bankofamerica.com
96. watch-movies.net
97. abcnews.go.com
98. chase.com
99. dailymotion.com
100. download.com

Popularity: 18% [?]

When analyzing your website statistics you break it down into four categories:

1. Visits
   
2. Pages
3. Hits
4. Bandwidth

Visits

Usually called unique visitors, this is a deduction of how many “people” visited your site. Usually based on IP address and sometimes other factors as well. This is always an estimation since there is no accurate way to measure that. Therefore different stats programs could come up with different numbers using the same log file. I use awstats and another stat program to gauge how many people come to my website.
Example: A visit from User A at IP address X would count as one unique visitor, regardless of how many pages they viewed or how many hits they generated.
Usage: Great metric to estimate the number of unique people that visit your site. Your reach.

Pages

How many pages have been viewed on your website, ignoring embedded images and such.
Example: Let’s say your homepage, index.html, has three images on it. When someone visits your homepage, the server will record 1 page view.
Usage: Useful metric to determine how many and what individual pages of your site are being viewed. Helps you guesstimate the number of pages each visitor views each time they come to your website.

Hits

How many objects are loaded up when a visitor comes to your website.
Example: Let’s say your homepage, index.html, has three images on it. When someone visits your homepage, the server will record 4 hits: one for the index.html document, and one for each of the three images it had to fetch to complete the page.
Usage: To see how many objects your server is loading up.

Bandwidth

This shows the amount of data sent from your server
Example: If your homepage is 14k plus 3 images at 12k each, then when a typical user requests that page they’ll pull 50k of bandwidth (14+12+12+12).
Usage: See your bandwidth usage.

Reading the numbers…

Example of everything together

Example of a statistic: 100 unique visitors, 300 visits, 1200 page views, 3600 hits, 2.2GB bandwidth

This means an estimated 100 different people have visited. Those 100 people visited on average 3 times each (300 visits / 100 uniques). During each of those 300 visits, those 100 people viewed an average of 4 pages each (1200 page views / 300 visits). Those 1200 page views generated and average of 3600 hits, or 3 hits per page. All together, 2.2GB of bandwidth was consumed.

2.2GB of bandwidth is a lot for that level of traffic. Unless they are movies, the graphics could be way too big. 3 hits per page view? are images being cached appropriately? Could signal some coding inefficiencies.

The number of visits being higher than the number of uniques is good. Means you have repeat visitors.

4 page views per visitor, how good/bad that is depends on the site. Measures the “stickiness” of your site.

Popularity: 13% [?]

For the past 4 years I have used the same web applications or the updated versions of them. I have used:

Dreamweaver – A great IDE for HTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP, etc which makes it easy on the eyes when coding.

Flash – For creating very animated websites and add spice to whenever your doing. Also can be used to display movies too.

Adobe Photoshop – For designing almost anything your mind can think of, but I use it for design layouts for websites, flyers and decorating graphics.

Now these tools are the best tools out there but the thing about it, IT COSTS MONEY!!!!

The new Dreamweaver CS4 costs:

• Buy US$399*
• Upgrade from US$199*

The new Flash CS4 costs:

• Buy US$699*
• Upgrade from US$199*

The new Photoshop CS4 costs:

• Buy US$699*
• Upgrade from US$199*

If you are a student you can get a 80% discount only if your school is on the Adobe list for discounts.

Now what about every body else that wants to design websites? What will you do when it is time for you design websites? Are you going to use Notepad? Well I have found solution for you.

I have found alternatives to all these expensive programs:

1. Quanta Plus (Dreamweaver) – Quanta Plus is a highly stable and feature rich web development environment. The vision with Quanta has always been to start with the best architectural foundations, design for efficient and natural use and enable maximal user extensibility. We recognize that we don’t have the resources to do everything we would like to so our target is to make it easy for you to help make this the best community based desktop application anywhere. Pretty much everything in Quanta is designed so you can extend it. Even the way it handles XML DTDs is based on XML files you can edit. You can even import DTDs, write scripts to manage editor contents, visually create dialogs for your scripts and assign script actions to nearly any file operation in a project. You can even look at and communicate with a wide range of what happens inside Quanta using DCOP.
2. OpenLaszlo (Flash) – Before OpenLaszlo 4.0, OpenLaszlo applications were compiled in .swf format to run on Adobe’s Flash Player. With OpenLaszlo 4.0 (OL4), we added the option of compilation to DHTML (browser-native JavaScript). OpenLaszlo 4 handles browser idiosyncrasies so you don’t have to.
3. Gimp (Photoshop) – It has many capabilities. It can be used as a simple paint program, an expert quality photo retouching program, an online batch processing system, a mass production image renderer, an image format converter, etc.

With these alternatives they are both for windows and linux and FREE!

Popularity: 14% [?]

For people who want to set up a database on their computer in a windows environment you have come to the right place.

The tools we need and what they are for:
MySQL database  -  This is the database for storing all of your data
GUI Tools – This allows you to view the status and information within your database.
MySQL ODBC Driver – This allows your code to communicate with MySQL database. The code you send is translated in a way that MySQL database can understand. Choose the driver for the language you are going to use.  For the C++ code I use the regular ODBC driver and wxwidgets library for ODBC database to connect which was pretty easy after reading the tutorial.

1. First download the MySQL database, GUI Tools and the MySQL ODBC driver from http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/.
2. Install the MySQL database first and remember your root password with standard settings
3. Next, install the GUI Tools so you will be able to view and manually modify your database with ease.
4. Next, install the MySQL ODBC driver, after that you need to add the ODBC to your list.
5. For Windows XP go to control panel -> administrative tools -> odbc
6. For Windows Vista go to control panel -> odbc

7.Under User DSN click add.. and go to the MySQL driver you have installed and click ok.
8. Next check to see if you have connection properly
9. Use a program to test the connection between your code and MySQL database.
10. Now test it out by connecting your code to the database and you will be done. Depending on the language you use, they usually have a basic tutorial to allow you connect to the database.

Popularity: 16% [?]

Last week a co-worker and I were talking about different computer languages and what employers look for when hiring computer scientist. At some point in the middle of our heated “discussion” my co-worker begin to tell me about an interviewee from a small startup company told her about a person they had just hired to do some work with a Biztalk server. Then she went on to tell me that this company offered the person $600,000! Now I don’t know about you but I had never even heard of Biztalk up until that point so like with anything else I googled it. I found out that Biztalk is a Microsoft product first released in 2000 for Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) solution, with built-in support for XML and SOAP. It offers integration with Visual Studio .NET (so if you’re a .NET wiz you might want to look into this). Which means with Biztalk companies can integrate information from many different applications like with no problems. In a nut shell Biztalk takes applications that can’t “talk” to each other and gives them the capability to do so. Sound interesting right and with a payday like $600k who wouldn’t want to look into Biztalk right? Well Biztalk isn’t that wildly used and doesn’t offer that many positions out there (even thought when I last checked there was 475 Biztalk developer positions on Monster.com). This brought me and my co-worker to ask ourselves: Would I rather be a specialist and work with a little known technology for a big payday at the risk of not finding a position, or would I rather be well versed in a well know technology that is impossible to master but with many job opportunities? Me personally I believe in making yourself as marketable as possible so whatever will give me the most opportunities is what I’ll go for. What about you? What side of this discussion are you on?

Popularity: 22% [?]

Well this is an easy question to answer because there is no such thing. Sorry to have to tell you that but there is no way to possibly create a resume that will please every recruiter and get you any interview. Why is that you ask, because every recruiter is different and have their own personal prefaces. I know this because I have been to many different seminars and conferences and one on ones sessions dealing primarily on resumes, which has taught me no matter how good a resume is there will always be something that a recruiter can see to change or modify. What you need to keep in mind is that they are only telling you to modify your resume to meet their preference and not to make a resume that can be universally accepted. With that said how do you create a “living” resume that can please most recruiters? Well here are some tips to making a successful resume that will increase your chances of getting you that interview you want.

• Don’t use a resume template. Why, because everyone else is. Recruiters have seen the same layout hundreds of times. If you create your own then that will cause them to stop and take notice because it’s something they haven’t seen before.

• Remember to try and keep your resume to the point and concise because recruiters take on average only 30 seconds to read a resume.

• Only add an objective to your resume if it is very specific otherwise it is just unnecessary fluff that will make your resume longer then it needs to be.

• In an effort to fit your resume on one page never use a font size smaller then 10 because if the recruiter has a hard time reading your resume they will just skip it.

• If you have limited work experience it is okay to add non-technical jobs to your resume if you can speak on that position in a positive light in an interview.

• Make sure that anything you put on you resume you are ready to speak on in your interview. I have gotten questions on the craziest thing from my resume in interviews.

• If you have published or developed any websites add those to your achievement section and bring them up in your interview.

• If you have any applications that you have developed place them on a CD and attach it to your resume. This will allow you a chance to showcase your skills.

• If you are one of the many IT professionals that have yet to receive a degree, place your education section at the bottom of your resume.

Now these are just a few tips that can set your resume apart from the rest of the field and give you a better chance at getting the interview that you want. Remember your resume only gets you the interview it’s the interview that gets you the job. If you have a great resume and a terrible interview then your not going to get the job you want, But don’t worry I’ll go over some interview tips in a future article. If you have any question or are looking for any advice or just want me to take a look at your resume and give you some feed back, you can e-mail me at me_conwell@compscistuff.com.

Popularity: 18% [?]