FarhanFaisal

Today I discovered a very slow loading of a few website of mine. For apache, I have reading through and made some tweaks and optimization to make it perform better. On database, not much that I’ve done. I use mytop, a mysql health monitor just like top in linux system. Its shows a few queries hanging and queued.

Apache and mysql need a higher priority to serve the web faster, as fast as it could. I found a tutorial on renice, where we can change the process priority of process, and also for any process that belong to any particular user. The value varies from -20 until 19. The negative value only can be assigned by a superuser. The lower the value, higher the priority. For example, process with value -19, have a higher priority than a process with nice value -18.

to change the nice value, it could be as simple as :

nice -5 httpd
* this will change process httpd priority to 5.

You can also change the priority by user.

renice -5 -u mysql
* This will change the priority of all process that belong to user mysql to -5

renice -5 -u mysql -p 8918
* This will change the priority of all process that belong to user mysql and with PID 8918 to -5.

http://www.newlinuxuser.com/howto-change-a-running-processes-priority-with-renice/
http://jeremy.zawodny.com/mysql/mytop/
Renice – Linux man page http://linux.die.net/man/8/renice

Yesterday I spent some time to play around with Monowall. Monowall is an embedded firewall package, thats built from bare-bone version of FreeBSD. The whole package is really small, smaller than 12MB, it can fit into your CF card for your embedded project. I start to have a look into Monowall when my boss bring this machine into our office, an embedded box, Axiomtek NA-0042B. I couldn’t find any technical spec in detail of the product, even from the official Axiomtek website.

So, in my case, I’m using a generic-pc image, from one of the monowall mirrors. I load the image into another vmware virtual machine, load the image into a secondary image of the machine.

The disk is available for download here Monowall Disk for VMware. I’ve also prepared a complete vmware machine with monowall. Please download it here, Monowall VMware Image.. This machine have been configured with IP 192.168.1.254. Username & password are the same as default, admin and mono respectively.

I’ll have a look into IpCop and pfSense later. Never get my hands tired with them yet. Maybe some other Monowall derivative as well

http://www.farhanfaisal.com/?download=Monowall Disk for VMware (5.4MB), 143 downloads.
http://www.farhanfaisal.com/?download=Monowall VMware Image. (5.4MB), 129 downloads.

While figuring out how to manage my pics, and easy insert into my blog post, I found this plugin. Picasa LigthBox 2. This plugin will retrieve our public pictures from picasa gallery, and have an easy interface to include them into our blog post. Besides, it provides a overlay preview to our users, using WordPress Lightbox Plugin.

Just put the WordPress Lightbox2 plugin into your wp-content/plugins/, activate it in WordPress Admin page. Do the same thing for Picasa Lightbox 2 plugin. Put into your plugin folder and activate it. After that, you can see a small button to add new picasa photo.

http://bogde.ro/computers/picasa-ligthbox-2-preview.htm
http://zeo.unic.net.my/notes/lightbox2-for-wordpress/

Hai.. Long time again since my last post. Just updated something, for my own notes, and anyone who an share this.

Last few month I have bought a electronic prototyping platform, which contains a mictrocontroller Atmega168. The board I bought was iDuino, a derivative from another electronic platform, that is Arduino. They are open source hardware and software platform, where you can customize the microcontroller to do almost anything. But right now, I just can blink the light

This is the iDuino board, a similar version of Arduino Diecimila. I just use the Arduino programming software, Arduino tutorial to start with the board. The only reason I bought iDuino instead of Arduino because its cheaper

iDuino is a breadboardable version. So, you can test your own circuit directly on a breadboard. There are a few version of Arduino you can choose from, according to your project need. This iDuino is a good start, and surely I will learn alot from it. It took me almost 4 month to get started, because of busy work. From beginning, i start buying tools, completing my toolbox, and now i have the time to play around with it.

I bought a unsoldered board iDuino, it took me almost one hour to solder them, and test it the other day. The board is connected to PC using USB, utilizing FT232RL, the same as in Arduino. So, I need to install USB Serial Converted driver, provided in Arduino programming software package. Arduino software provided with some sample code, and sample wiring to get started. At first when I try to load up a “blink” code, it gives me an error,

[code]avrdude: stk500_getsync(): not in sync: resp=0x00
avrdude: stk500_disable(): protocol error, expect=0x14, resp=0x51[/code]

I search around, and found the solutions in Arduino forum. i just need to go to Device Manager –> Ports, there is a USB serial port. At first it was mapped to Port 15. Go to its properties, Port Setting, Advance, change the port number to something below 10. Then change the port in Arduino software to what you have change, through Tools –> Serial Port. Now I can start the coding and projects.

There is one guy who already proposing for a sumo challenge, in Ittutor forum. I dont know when I can get involve. I’m a newbie. huhuh.. Tunggu Bro Rizal, bagi saya blaja dulu