ChrisDevBox

Since the creation and launch of Wikipedia back in 2001 many people from all over the world have been busy collaborating, adding and updating content on this very popular wiki web.

The wiki concept started a long time ago back in the early 1990’s, nevertheless, Wikipedia, even though it hasn’t been around too long, it is by far the biggest and most active wiki on the web.

The amount of valuable data that has been accumulating on Wikipedia is already in the millions. The biggest challenge now is making all of that data relevant and meaningful to users exploring and searching for information.

Most people arrive into Wikipedia via Google… for example, if you do a quick google search on pretty much anything you’ll most likely get Wikipedia at the very top of the search results. That’s due to Wikipedia’s huge link popularity and page ranking (Different topic).

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In order to make Apache .htaccess work on your servers you also need to add the AllowOverride directive inside

The first of these is performance. When AllowOverride is set to allow the use of .htaccess files, Apache will look in every directory for .htaccess files. Thus, permitting .htaccess files causes a performance hit, whether or not you actually even use them! Also, the .htaccess file is loaded every time a document is requested.

If you are running a big site and you are concern about performance then you should start by removing .htaccess files and moving them to your config director.

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I know, is not an easy thing, just don’t go with your gut feeling, make a solid assessment based your own experience, market, location and type of project (Just to keep it simple).

Most programmers will lean towards their favorite programming language and will give you a biased opinion. Some are more objective and willing to see beyond their comfort zone.

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Earlier post: http://www.chrisdevbox.com/blog/2008/06/09/youtube-video-downloader/

This is a simple and easy tutorial on how to retrieve (in real-time) all your videos from break.com and put them on your website using JavaScript.

In real-time meaning a call to break.com’s WEB API will be made every time you reload the page.

Now, this is not a feature they have exposed to the public yet, but it is there in case you are nerdy enough to figure it out. So this is really a good ol’ innocent hack

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Cookies are great, I eat them all the time, however, this article is about a different type of cookie. Browser /HTTP cookies. The big question is: Are HTTP cookies good or bad. I keep getting this question from non-techy people and some techy people “think” they know the answer… (Including me! jk)

I don’t have the right answer, but I’ll clarify things for you, and then you can make your own judgement whether cookies are good or bad.

Is really how you used them. In the hands of a sloppy programmer HTTP cookies can be VERY bad, but if you are a good and detailed-oriented programmer, cookies are going to be VERY good (sometimes!)

“The term “cookie” is derived from “magic cookie,” a well-known concept in UNIX computing which inspired both the idea and the name of HTTP cookies”. - Wikipedia In a nutshell, cookies are text files stored in your computer containing data that’s typically set by a server.

In order to truly understand cookies you also need to understand HTTP packets and a little bit of how the internet works. I’ll cover a little bit of everything here.

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PHP has a built-in function that can decode a JSON string and turn into an object or an object tree and is called PHP-JSON. This is very helpful for when you need to integrate or mashup with other application such as the google APIs. Here is a quick simple example:

<?php
$json_str = ‘{ “name” : “chris”}’;
$obj = json_decode($json_str);
echo $obj->name;
echo “\n”;

The above will return:

chris

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For all super DB geeks out there, you can now try the new SQL Server 2008 Release Candidate 0.  I recommend you install it on a virtual machine (Just in case).  Anyway, here is the link.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=35F53843-03F7-4ED5-8142-24A4C024CA05&displaylang=en

I’m going to review and provide more details on a different/new post.

Here is the official website (Bookmark!)

http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2008/en/us/default.aspx

Microsoft has just released a new memcached-like application (Or service) which allows for distributed in-memory storage capabilities and can be used within any .NET Framework project (Console, ASP.NET, etc)

In their own words:

“Velocity” is a distributed in-memory application cache platform for developing scalable, available, and high-performance applications. Using “Velocity,” applications can store any serializable CLR object without concern for where the object gets stored because data is cached across multiple computers. “Velocity” allows copies of data to be stored across the cache cluster, protecting data against failures. It can be configured to run as a service accessed over the network or can be run embedded with the distributed application. “Velocity” includes an ASP.NET session provider object enabling storage of ASP.NET session objects in the distributed cache without having to write to databases, which increases the performance and scalability of ASP.NET applications

In the past we’ve had to store data using their native wrappers, custom applications or even memcached with .NET wrappers, but they were all limited to one machine. Even their session state server was limited to one machine and for session data only. This type of innovation is a step forwards towards helping web architects scale their .NET applications.

Here is a link to download the package

And here is the MSDN link for support

I didn’t find a lot of code samples out there, so if you find any please post a comment share it with us.

Chris

This is a cool little utility I created after getting more than a few requests from friends and family asking me: How can I download the YouTube FLV video, so I can use it in my “school” project… (Notice the quotes around school?).  Anyway, what you do with the video is up to you, just don’t do anything illegal like starting your own YouTube video site using videos from YouTube!  Here is the link to the download utility

http://www.chrisdevbox.com/tools/get_youtube_video_download.php

Enjoy, and leave a comment if you like it!