Club Linux Coffs Harbour

Decent web hosting at a price is difficult. There's no shortage of competition on price, but the 'decent' bit seems quite a bit harder.

Low priced hosting is shared hosting. That means you get, typically, a share of an Apache server, usually with quite a few other people, maybe hundreds.

First of all, a big HELLO to all of you at Club Linux! It's great to still receive the monthly meeting notices and get and idea of what you're up to, and if I'm ever back over that way, like a bad smell I'm sure to turn up again. :)

It's been a while, I know, but you see I've been busy...

I've always been annoyed by slow websites, and even more annoyed by full page refreshes in the browser just to get something you didn't really want to see anyway. So, out with the AJAX!

A bit over a year ago now, I started a project to get my openPC Labs website improved before updating it. I'm afraid it's still not updated because in the process things developed into something much bigger.

I wanted to use AJAX techniques for the site to get the responsiveness I yearned for. I also wanted to fix up the navigation so that the location bar, history and bookmarks would work.

At the time, there was very little support for browser navigation in AJAX. I stumbled on one system called Really Simple History. It was open source, but a bit buggy and a bit too slow for me, I just didn't feel comfortable with the way it was done.

So I started to roll my own..... BIG mistake.... just over a year later I might be able to start updating openPC Labs!

To cut a long story short, Xanjax and xanjax.org were born.

Yes, That quick!  My previous backyard ISP, a local unit of odd fellows that had no idea what service meant, shut me down on the 6 july.  I rang Optus and fiddled around with them until they finally stuffed everythig up causing me to cancel my request.

 

Optus sent me a letter which I recieved on 27 July, it was post marked 26 July and the letter was dated the 24 July The letter stated, amongst other things, that if there were any changes to my request for boradband to contact them prior to the 24 July.  Hmmmm! 

 

I've just had a friend ask me about webcams, which I've never used before. This document claims "many cameras work out-of-the-box". Does anybody have any real world experience with this? Brands of hardware to recommend or avoid? I notice Ubuntu has Video4Linux installed by default, and a great big button marked "Detect devices" in the Ekiga video preferences dialog. Is it really that easy?

I found this link on slashdot or somewhere like it. It shows some tweaks you can make to firefox.

http://www.lifehack.org/articles/technology/15-coolest-firefox-tricks-ever.html

The most important one to me was making FF quicker. I've pasted this one in here.

12) Speed up Firefox. If you have a broadband connection (and most of us do), you can use pipelining to speed up your page loads. This allows Firefox to load multiple things on a page at once, instead of one at a time (by default, it’s optimized for dialup connections). Here’s how:

There is a possibility that I will be involved in setting up a web forum. I'm doing some research so that I can at least assess proposals and make some.

So far, it looks to me as though Simple Machines Forum is the best software to use. I am perplexed over the issue of hosting.

I would appreciate any thoughts anyone can offer.

I've been dithering about this for a while now, but I've now got to get some VoIP hardware for work, so I can't put it off any longer. Can anybody recommend any VoIP hardware they've had good experiences with, either for use with Ekiga, or stand-alone? I hate shopping.

Linux Edge looks at a very early and not-ready-for-prime-time version of the Hula Mail and Calendar Server, or at least it's web interface. Nat Friedman of Novell launched this project over a year ago, touting it as the mail and calendar server people will actually enjoy using. The caught my attention, as every existing product in this area that I've tried could most diplomatically be described as "challenging" to deploy (and not in a fun way).

YouTube is great. It provides an easy way for non-technical people to share video clips. The downside is that it does so by streaming the video in a proprietary format. That's bad news for people with low-bandwidth Internet connections, or who want to avoid using proprietary or (depending on local laws) legally grey media players. Wouldn't it be great if you could download videos from YouTube and watch them at your leisure in a friendly file format? Well, you can using a couple of simple command-line tools...

I've started listening to a new(ish) podcast called FLOSS Weekly, the second episode of which features Mozilla's Ben Goodger. I was interested to find out that the much-maligned Firefox 1.5 "memory leak" is (mostly) the new page-caching feature. The trade-off for a blazingly-fast back button is a bigger memory footprint. Ben talks about this in his blog, and Mozilla's "Frequently Questioned Answers" on memory issues tells you how to disable the feature if low memory usage is more important to you than speed.