Windows Web Hosting, Web Technologies, etc
Archive for June, 2007
Easy Panoramic Pictures with Panavue
Jun 27th
One of the greatest things and worst things I ever did was purchase a digital camera. In the past 4 years, I’ve built an online photo gallery of over 4GB and close to 8000 images. I’m certainly no expert at digital photography and don’t really have the patience to become one, but I love “the cool stuff” and this blog post is about The Cool Stuff.
Like everyone else with a digital camera I love to stand in a spot and take a series of pictures in hopes of firing up Photoshop and stitching them together. Then when I get back home to the computer and decide to fire up photoshop, the reality that I know absolutely nothing about Photoshop or how to stitch a series of pictures together cleanly enough that they don’t look like a bunch of pictures just glued together hits home and I soon realized no only did I look like a dork spinning around trying to get a series of pictures but now I’m dork with a bunch of pictures from standing there spinning around!
I asked a friend of mine (who is a digital camera and photoshop guru) what’s a great, easy to use (and ideally cheap) application for creating panoramic photos from a series of separate shots. The application he recommended as easy to use (and affordable) was Panavue image assembler from panavue.com (at $64 it’s moderately affordable).
So as they say, a picture’s worth a thousand words and here’s a few of the pictures created with Panavue using default setting and pretty much just clicking “NEXT, NEXT, NEXT, FINISH”. I’m sure as I spend more time creating more panoramic shots I’ll learn how to use it and how to create better pictures.
Chicago February 05
This picture was created from two different shots pasted together. I found creating shots from 2 pictures really gave the best results.
The above picture was created from these two pictures:
Greece 2006
Which started out as these two pictures
Buckingham Palace 2006
This is actually pretty interesting. Look at the lady with the white blouse and gray hair walking towards me and then at the lady smoking to the right of me. It’s the same person!
These are the pictures that created this great view:
Washington DC Spring 2007
This was taken from our hotel at the Mandarin Oriental in DC. It’s overlooking the Treasury (that’s the money factory on the left) and was composed from two separate photos.
At the base of the Washington Monument.
In the Mall by the Smithsonian.
Key West Summer 2007
I know with a little effort and tweaking the settings of the application these images could come out even better. Now in a couple of them you can see where the images blend together (especially in Buckingham Palace and the Key West daytime picture above. However, I think the pictures really show just how powerful this type of application can be and just what kind of great pictures even an amateur like myself can take with a digital camera and a little digital photo cleanup.
Blogging From The Tablet PC
Jun 19th
This Blog article is a test to see if blogging via ink is usable. What I’m finding is my bad handwriting is picked up pretty easily. However I have a hard time with lowercase g’s. considering I type close to 100 words a minute this is much slower. I’m using windows Live writer and a HP 1100 tablet pc. Ok that’s about 5 minutes this article is done. It’s too slow for me.
Here is an ink Blog image so you can see my writing.
This is Y
writing. yes
it’s had to
read
So I typed er wrote “This is my writing. yes it’s hard to read.” And the PC did a decent job reading it. Probably better than you. I’d say it’s very promising technology . . . . . Go Vista!!
Okay that’s as far as I could bear writing on the screen. It’s great for taking notes or jotting down tidbits but I’ve been typing since the 7th grade and it’s just much faster for me, even with huge hands a little tiny 12″ laptop. I do have to say overall the attempt was pretty good. That was really my first experience using ink on the tablet and it’s very impressive stuff. I’m looking forward to sharing more of my experience with tablet computing. I think the coolest thing is that you can close the laptop and suddenly it becomes a 12″ DVD player that’s very ergonomic. Although the recognition in the above image was less than good it was pretty decent all things considered. I’m sure as I get more familiar with the tablet and pen, I will become more aware of my and the PC’s little intricacies and we’ll work better together.
Performance Tips for Your Windows VPS running Virtuozzo
Jun 19th
Here’s Jess’s top 10 tips and tricks to help optimize your Windows VPS server running on Virtuozzo.
- Disable Indexing Service.
Unless you’re using the FrontPage search bot you generally don’t need indexing service running and you should disable it. - Defrag your drives.
Disk I/O is king, especially in a VPS and you should be regularly defragging your drives in your VPS just as you would in a physical server. - Don’t run antivirus in the VPS.
Antivirus should always be run from the host node and on our servers it is. We use either AVG or McAfee on our hardware nodes. This doesn’t mean you have to accept virus infected emails. Configure your mail client to allow a suitable delay in email delivery (I recommend 60 seconds if you can, otherwise 30 should be sufficient) and the hostnode antivirus will take care of the rest.Smartermail installs clamd these days and I recommend you disable it and not use it. It’s proven to be quite the resource hog.
- Don’t run spamassassin.
Disable spamassassin checks in your VPS when running Smartermail. If you absolutely have to have spamassassin running with your VPS you should run spamassassin on a Linux dedicated server or vps and remotely connect to it in smartermail, this works great and allows you to make use of threading. - Enable Windows Firewall and secure your VPS.
This is a must. Although the kernel is protected in your VPS, you’re still responsible for security in your virtual private server. Enable Windows Firewall and configure it.While on the topic of security you do not have to install OS updates, these are managed at the host-level. However you do need to remain aware of new updates and install them for any other server software you may have installed on your windows vps server such as SQLexpress updates, Smartermail updates, etc. If you’re using Plesk you can request support to update Plesk for you as it’s installed through an application template. Verify things like open-relay mail servers are not enabled, anonymous FTP uploads are disabled, etc.
- Whenever possible use an application template.
Application templates save memory and diskspace on your VPS. An example of this is the OS install on your VPS. With just Windows your VPS uses about 150MB of diskspace, yet a full install of the OS uses about 4GB of diskspace. In fact an install of Windows Server 2003 on almost every other virtualization platform will use 4GB of diskspace. This is a huge savings. - Close your Terminal Services sessions and logout, do not just disconnect.
Each active Terminal Services session uses about 20MB of memory. When you consider each VPS has generally 2 TS sessions (3 if you include the fact you’re able to TS into the console by using the command mstsc /console /v:YOUR_SERVERNAME ) and figure about 30 active VPSs on a machine that adds up to close to 2GB of memory that would be wasted memory on a server. - Some applications when installing may require you to connect to console port.
One such application is Windows Sharepoint Services 3.0. To connect to the console port use the command from dos: mstsc /console /v:YOUR_SERVERNAME where YOUR_SERVERNAME is your VPS host name. - Don’t forget that you can manage your VPS through the Virtuozzo Power Panels,
This includes tasks such as stop, start, reboot, backup, restore and even mount the filesystem without turning on the VPS. To access the management port go to: https://YOUR_SERVERNAME:4643/ where YOUR_SERVERNAME is your VPS host name. Remember when connecting to a port you have to explicitly type http://YOUR_SERVERNAME:PORT/ and not just type YOUR_SERVERNAME:PORT.There is a bug in the virtuozzo power panels that it may throw errors and say contact your hosting provider. If you get these errors the first thing you should do is go to preferences and set the timezone to your local time zone and not leave it to server default. This generally fixes that error and a bugfix is due out shortly from SWsoft to fix this known issue.
- Configure your SQL services or better yet use shared SQL. These days any web application is going to require a SQL database be it MSSQL or MySQL. My recommendation is use a shared SQL database on a shared database server. Today SQL hosting is pretty cheap (about $10/month for 100MB is the norm) and networks like ours use a dedicated gigabit network for internal traffic so any latency connecting to the SQL server would be offset quickly by the amount of memory and Disk I/O you’d save by not running SQL on your VPS. If you must run SQL on your VPS though then make sure you set a memory cap on the SQL service or you’ll find before long it’s using all your memory on your VPS and your apps will be starving for memory.
- What? 11? You said there was only ten. Consider this … The Bonus Tip: Backup, Backup, Backup.
With any server it’s important to have backup copies of your web content, databases and any information that’s vital to the operation of your websites and online business. This is the same with VPS servers. No matter what any host tells you, you should never rely on just one backup or on someone else to manage your backups for you. You should always maintain a local (as in, your local desktop computer in the office or at home) copy of your website and website details. I have heard horror stories time and time again of this and it always starts as “Well, I assumed THEY/HE/SHE/THEM/YOU/(Anyone else but me) was doing backups and they just worked!” What’s the problem? The problem is backups go bad, files don’t restore, media fry, drives fizzle and bits get lost. It happens and if anyone tells you it doesn’t happen don’t trust them, keep a local backup of your sites. Think about this, and we’ll use this scenario instead of thinking of exploding U-Hauls full of fertilizer or natural disasters. One day all of the employees of your hosting company pool in $1 for a lottery ticket and a chance to win a billion dollars. They hit the lottery and each walk away with $100 million (much happier story than that flaming u-haul truck). During all the celebrating, they decide to have a weenie roast in lobby of the building, the flames get out of control the building, the servers and the backups go up in flames. The new billionaires decide there’s no way they’re fielding those calls and take their new found wealth buy a island in the Caribbean and retire. All your backups with that host are lost and anyone that knows how to restore your backups is off searching for buried treasure in the Caribbean. It will take ages to ever restore your backups. But if you have a local copy of your data (even if it’s a week old or month old), you’ll be back online and able to rebuild your site within a few days. Backup Backup Backup.
Those are my tips. When it’s said and done the common sense solution is this. VPS’s have two resources they need to manage the most, that’s memory and disk I/O. Everything you can do to minimize or optimize your usage of these two resources will improve your VPS performance. I’d love to hear from anyone else that has any recommendations on how to improve the performance of a VPS/VE running on Virtuozzo for Windows.
AT&T offering DSL at $10/month for new subscribers
Jun 18th
It’s not really hosting related but if you’re like me, you probably have half a dozen friends that haven’t jumped on the broadband train just yet because of the price. Well thanks to the AT&T, Bellsouth merger you’ll now be able to get DSL for $10/month in all of AT&T’s 22 states they service.
What’s even more exciting than this is that they’re to offer an option to get DSL without requiring phone service. I know today many people that don’t have home phone service as cell phones are far more convenient these days. In fact if it wasn’t for my alarm system, I’d be among those people as I never use my home phone number.
You can find more information about it here. What’s most surprising are the reports that they have quietly introduced this without a press release or any sort of acknowledgement of it on their website.
