Recently, my wife and I purchased a digital SLR Nikon D40 camera. We figured it was about time to start taking more quality photos, and we were tired of the point ‘n click ‘n wait-for-it cameras. The Nikon D40 is a 6.1 megapixel camera, and we bought it with the 18-50mm lens and the 50-200mm lens. It isn’t the newest model on the market, but because of that we found it at a pretty good price on .

I uploaded photos from our maiden voyage to the Wild Animal Park, and you can check them out at . The photos from San Francisco were not taken with the D40, but with our ol’ Powershot A510, so keep that in mind.

Edit: I moved our photo gallery to a Picasa gallery:

has developed a high definition video delivery system on top of Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud, and makes it easy to deploy a video community with a branded cialis uk video player, direct webcam recording, fast branded cialis uk video, a full-blown API for developers, and – not to mention – an infinitely scalable architecture.

From the Infinovision homepage: “Infinovision defines the next generation of web based video delivery systems. Manage and add scalable, high definition, branded video to your web site in minutes using the Infinovision enterprise class video delivery system.”

Definitely worth a look, so make sure to .

For the past several weeks, I have been working with Joomla in a clustered environment. We have a single load-balancer running HAProxy that sends requests to two web servers synchronized with unison. One server is a hybrid and includes both the MySQL database as well as Apache2/PHP5. The other web server is strictly Apache2/PHP5. We have been renting two super fast dedicated servers temporarily until we acquire some new hardware, so I had to make do with what few servers I had.

branded cialis ukHaving written this blog post almost a full year ago, I have since then completely switched all of my Joomla websites to the automatically : Scale My Site. Since doing so, we haven’t had to deal with HAProxy, load balancing, or anything with regard to scaling due to the hosting cloud’s seamlessly clustered environment. I highly recommend anyone reading this article right now to check out to get load balancing/scaling for your Joomla website without breaking a sweat.

The load balancer is located at our own colo. I followed the tutorial on to set up two servers at our colo in an ActivePassive fashion using Heartbeat for redundancy.

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Since I’m using only two web servers and one needs to serve database requests, I decided to set weights in HAProxy so that the hybrid server receives half as many requests as the dedicated web server. Here is an example of what my haproxy.cfg file contains:

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global
    log 127.0.0.1 local0
    log 127.0.0.1 local1 notice
    maxconn 4096
    user haproxy
    group haproxy

defaults
    log global
    mode http
    option httplog
    option dontlognull
    retries 3
    redispatch
    maxconn 2000
    contimeout 5000
    clitimeout 50000
    srvtimeout 50000

listen webfarm 63.123.123.100:80
    mode http
    balance roundrobin
    cookie SERVERID insert nocache indirect
    option forwardfor
    option httpchk HEAD /check.txt HTTP/1.0

    # Stats
    stats enable
    stats auth admin:password

    # Web Node
    server SBNode1 63.123.123.101:80 cookie Server1 weight 20 check
    # Web + MySQL Node
    server SBNode2 63.123.123.102:80 cookie Server2 weight 10 check

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Many people understand that it’s a super big pain to work with the administrator control panel in a Joomla clustered environment. First of all, you’ll keep getting kicked out every few page requests, even while using sticky/persistent load balancing. Second, working with backend WYSIWYG rich-text editors is nearly impossible. I figured out how to do it, and here’s what I did.

1. Decide upon the management node
2. Give the management node a public host entry in DNS (e.g. node1.yourdomain.com)
3. Open configuration.php for editing
4. Locate the “live site” variable ($mosConfig_live_site)
5. Replace with “http://” . $_SERVER["HTTP_HOST"];
6. Save

Using the current host as the live site allows you to use node1.yourdomain.com as an access point for the control panel. You branded cialis ukwork in the control panel without doing this, but you will run into tons of problems with rich-text editors and custom components that request the live site URL in their underlying code.

branded cialis uk Recently, I implemented a load balancing solution using HAProxy that used the ACL system to send all traffic with /administrator/ in the URL to one “master” node, and it provided a way around the Joomla configuration change mentioned above. Check out this for more info.

If you are running XenServer 3.2.0, then you have a built in Debian Sarge image. If you happen to want to upgrade an instance to Debian Etch (the latest stable build as of February 1, 2008), you should follow these steps. It isn’t a simple apt-get dist-upgrade command as other websites may have you believe. The following steps are a summary of what commands I performed while following the official upgrade guide.

If you aren’t running a XenServer instance, then I would suggest following the official guide yourself to prevent anything bad from happening (). My instance that I used for this installation was a fresh install of the Sarge image, so I won’t be going into any special circumstances that may need to be addressed by those who have installed a whole load of extras.

Let’s go!

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Go to and select a mirror. I happened to choose http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian as my mirror because I’m in the United States.

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deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian etch main contrib

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rm /etc/apt/preferences
mount -o remount,rw /
aptitude update
aptitude upgrade
aptitude install initrd-tools
aptitude dist-upgrade
aptitude update


See? Not so hard. That is all I needed to do to upgrade my XenServer 3.2.0 Debian Sarge instance to Debian Etch. I am not saying these simplified steps will work for everyone, but for those few that have the same type of setup as we do, these instructions should simplify the upgrade process. Please comment with questions and/or suggestions… and if all else fails, use the official guide!

- Matt

Soon after I opened my own Dreamhost account, my company needed an external hosting environment for Joomla instances, and I recommended Dreamhost. I mentioned it supported unlimited domains, MySQL databases, etc., and had a large amount of space/bandwidth for any of our sub-projects within the company. They even have a One-click install for Joomla! It sounded like a low-cost solution, and seemed to be perfect for what we needed.

…or so we thought.

For the past week, I’ve gone through a phase to reorganize all of my domains/projects. I moved most of my websites to a new that offers unlimited domains, subdomains, MySQL databases, FTP accounts, shell accounts, etc., and so far it’s been great!

I have also been making a shift to for a few significant website projects. My employer () has started using Joomla! for a few big projects, and since I’ve taken the lead on most of those projects, I’ve been able to work with it a lot lately. It’s good stuff… for the most part.

I’ve been working constantly to get some of my current projects into live. is the next great programmer’s website, and I need to finish development as soon as possible. I also have a few other projects that I’m working on side-by-side How to Code, so hopefully some of them will break through the surface soon.

If you have ever wanted to convert an existing HTML-based website to an ASP.NET website, but you didn’t like the idea of losing the “page rank” of those pages, I have the solution. Recently, a friend asked for help on this subject, and since we couldn’t find sufficient information online, I am putting the steps to do this in my blog. In this first case, we wanted to use ASP.NET on long-standing pages that had .html and .htm extensions, but this can apply to all other extensions.

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The first step is to tell IIS what system you would like the extension to map to.

1. Open your existing website in IIS
2. Browse to the Home Directory tab
3. Open the Application Settings Configuration (you should see a list of existing application mappings)
4. Click “Add”
5. Browse for the .NET Framework you want to use (e.g.: C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\aspnet_isapi.dll)
6. Enter the extension (such as .htm)
7. Limit the mapping to specific verbs (e.g. GET,HEAD,POST,DEBUG)
8. Check Script Engine
9. Uncheck Check that File Exists
10. Click OK and close IIS

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The last step is to update the Web.config for your website so that ASP.NET knows how you want to manage these new extensions. You will first need to add in a new HttpHandler inside of the System.Web node:

<httpHandlers>
<add verb=”*” path=”*.htm” type=”System.Web.UI.PageHandlerFactory”/>
</httpHandlers>

Finally, we will need to add a buildProvider:

<buildProviders>
<add extension=”.htm” type=”System.Web.Compilation.PageBuildProvider”/>
</buildProviders>

Now save the Web.config file and run your ASP.NET -powered, non-standard-extension page!

For more information on BuildProviders,

Good luck!

Matt branded cialis uk

One of the first problems I had when installing Funambol on Debian Linux 2.6 was that I did not want mobile device users to have to use the long URL associated with the default sync server settings.

I wanted to change this:

http://www.mydomain.com:8080/funambol/ds

To this:

http://sync.mydomain.com/

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1. Connect to your sync server via SSH.

2. Change to /opt/Funambol/tools/tomcat/conf/Catalina (your path may vary).

3. Make a new path called sync.yourdomain.com.

4. Copy everything from localhost into sync.yourdomain.com.

5. Change to “sync.yourdomain.com”.

6. Open funambol.xml for editing using your favorite editor.

7. Change context path from “/funambol” to “/”, and make sure docBase=”funambol”.

8. Save funambol.xml.

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9. Change to /etc/apache2/sites-available.

10. Copy the file “default” to a new file called “sync”.

11. Open “sync” for editing, and replace it with the following:

NameVirtualHost *
<VirtualHost *>
ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost
ServerName sync.yourdomain.com

DocumentRoot /var/www/

<Directory /var/www/>
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
AllowOverride None
Order allow,deny
allow from all
</Directory>

ProxyRequests Off

<Proxy *>
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</Proxy>

ProxyPass / http://sync.yourdomain.com:8080/funambol/ds
ProxyPassReverse / http://sync.yourdomain.com:8080/funambol/ds

ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/sync-error.log

# Possible values include: debug, info, notice, warn, error, crit,
# alert, emerg.
LogLevel warn

CustomLog /var/log/apache2/sync-access.log combined
ServerSignature On

</VirtualHost>

12. Save and close “sync”.

13. Change to ../sites-enabled

14. Create a symbolic link to the new “sync” file:

ln -s ../sites-available/sync

15. Change to ../mods-enabled

16. Create symbolic links to the proxy mod:

ln -s ../mods-available/proxy.load

ln -s ../mods-available/proxy_http.load

17. Change to ../sites-enabled

18. Remove 000-default

19. Reload Apache2 configuration: /etc/init.d/apache2 reload

Remember that this is Open Source, and so your results may vary. If you found that your configuration required different steps, make sure to explain them in your comments to benefit future Funambol users. If you have questions, please comment as well.

The reason I created this blog is simple: some problems have difficult solutions but no one publishes them. It may be a “right of passage” mentality that keeps members of the more-experienced-than-you class from not posting solutions to everyday IT problems. They had to work through it. Why shouldn’t you? I think we can change that. One blog at a time.