I use AdSense on 1 of my websites and a while back I discovered some things about this service from Google.

One thing that I think is awful and shows how big corporates ONLY care about money was that I knew a website that was banned (black listed) by Google because they were “violating Google’s terms of services” by helping people buy and sell text link ads and now when I search for the name of the site, it doesn’t show up in normal search results. The messed up part is that this particular website bought AdWords ads and their name shows up in sponsored links section right on the top of the search results.

This means 2 things: 1 - Google doesn’t care much about what you do when you pay, 2 - You can BUY the first spot on Google SERPs!!!

What they could do is to check the URLs against their banned list but…

The other thing about AdSense is this: Have you ever clicked on an AdSense link with confidence? have you ever seen anything valuable in those links?
Many of them are links that take you to irrelevant pages and many of the people who buy these keywords have so much money that they want the traffic in anyway they can, by bidding on keywords that have nothing to do with their pages.

This could be very bad, you are sending your visitors away with AdSense in the first place, but sadly you are sending them to pages that are not good.

It’s unfortunate but it’s what it is for now.

You might know already that there are some issues with transparent GIFs but PNGs don’t have those issues.
The problem with transparent PNGs is that Internet Explorer doesn’t like them so much and gives them a funny background.

So here is the solution that works great:
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/bobosola/index.htm

A while back, I wrote two posts about Microsoft and I wrote them when I was upset so it might have offended people.

To be honest with you, I was a fan of Microsoft and their products up until Internet Explorer 7 came along.
I installed it on two computers and I had to disable all the addons other than the essentials in order to make them run smoothly and without so much issues.

Right now, my Internet Explorer process grows until it’s 1GB in size!!! and it then gets so slow or crashes and I loose all my open tabs and what ever I was doing.
It also crashed every once in a while for some reason and it’s still not standard compliant.

About Windows Vista; we also bought four computers with Vista and every single one, without an exception had issues right out of the box, big issues that I think Microsoft should have known about but shipped the product anyway.

Honestly, this is disappointing for me, because I liked Windows and it’s openness and the ability for everyone to write great applications for it and it’s huge documentation on Microsoft website.

I also think that Microsoft contributed a lot to the industry and I hope that this is not the end of it.

I’m a software developer and I don’t consider myself to be the best one but I know one thing, we don’t EVER ship until we fix all the obvious bugs, if we did, we wouldn’t have any clients right now.

Good Luck

If you have this problem on *nix systems, these are the things to look for:

1 - Make sure your line breaks are \n not \r\n you can set this in almost all editors, you will have to either select *nix like line breaks or \n somewhere in your editor preferences.

2 - After the first step you will have to make sure that your FTP client uploads the files in ASCII format and this will insure that \n will stay \n.

3 - If it still doesn’t work, make sure your Python script’s permissions are 755. You can try:
chmod 755 your_python_script.py

Or use your FTP client to fix this. (Refer to it’s documentation but usually you can right click on the file, on your server and click properties)

4 - If you still have the problem, you will have to have the right shebang line in the beginning of your script, the most common one is:
#!/usr/bin/env python
If this doesn’t work try:
#!/usr/bin/python
Or:
#!/usr/local/bin/python
Note that, this must be the first line

5 - If none of these worked and you have root access to your server, try:
tail -f /usr/local/apache/logs/error_log (Note that, the path to Apache error log might be different on your server)
And look for the error message associated with your request.

6 - If you still can’t figure it out, write to your hosting company and ask them.

I hope this helps

There is another way to fix this issue and I didn’t write about it because I couldn’t make it work at first.
Apparently I was missing one line

First you will need to find out where libexpat is located on your server, it’s probably here:
/usr/lib

To find out for sure, open this folder (/usr/lib) and look for the file:
libexpat.so

If you can’t find it, log in as root via SSH and enter:
whereis libexpat.so

This should list the folder in which libexpat is located.

After all this you will need to compile PHP to use libexpat instead of libxml, so go to:
/var/cpanel/easy/apache/rawopts/

And create a file and name it “all_php5″ (no quotes), if there is a file with this name edit it and add these lines to the end of it:
–with-expat=builtin
–with-libexpat-dir=/usr/lib

(lines start with two dashes “-” that are not showing up here for some reason)
Remember that depending on where libexpat is located on your server you might need to edit the second line.

Now compile Apache and everything should work fine!

When you parse XML with PHP and libxml 2.7.0, all HTML entities were stripped out and this annoying bug messed up a lot of things and no one seems to care enough to fix this.

This bug is also reported here:
http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=45996
http://bugs.typo3.org/view.php?id=9359&nbn=2

From reading these few resources, I knew I had to downgrade to an older version of libxml but since I’m not very good at Linux I had no idea how to.

But I finally figured this out and here is how to do it with WHM/cPanel:

First you will have to install an older version of libxml, I installed libxml 2.6.30.
You will need an SSH client and you will have to login to your server with root, I use Putty:
http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/
Download it, run it, enter the IP address of your server, enter root and enter your password.
Then do:

cd /opt

mkdir libxml

cd libxml

wget http://xmlsoft.org/sources/libxml2-2.6.30.tar.gz

tar xvzf libxml2-2.6.30.tar.gz

cd libxml2-2.6.30

./configure –bindir=/opt/libxml/ –sbindir=/opt/libxml/ –libexecdir=/opt/libxml/ –datadir=/opt/libxml/ –sysconfdir=/opt/libxml/ –sharedstatedir=/opt/libxml/ –libdir=/opt/libxml/ –includedir=/opt/libxml/ –oldincludedir=/opt/libxml/

make && make install

Now you will need to update yum.conf to prevent it from updating libxml back, so edit:
/etc/yum.conf

And find the line that starts with:
exclude=

And add libxml* to the end of it so this line should look something like this:
exclude=apache* bind-chroot courier* dovecot* exim* httpd* mod_ssl* mysql* nsd* php* proftpd* pure-ftpd* spamassassin* squirrelmail* libxml*

Now we will have to let WHM know that we want to compile PHP with this new libxml path so go to:
/var/cpanel/easy/apache/rawopts/

There might be a file there named: “all_php5″ (no quotes) if there is edit it if there is not create it and add these lines to the end of it:
–with-libxml-dir=/opt/libxml
–with-libxml-dir=/opt/libxml/

Now go ahead and build Apache and PHP using:
Main >> Software >> Apache Update

You should be all set.

Please note:
1 - Do this on your own risk.
2 - I’m not very good at Linux so please let me know if there is an easier method.
3 - This worked great on my CentOS.
4 - If you have never used WHM’s Apache Update, go ahead and read about it first.

Here is how to fix it:
1 - Right click on Flash’s desktop (or whatever) icon and then click “Properties”
2 - Go to compatibility tab
3 - Check the box “Run this program in compatibility mode for:”
4 - From the drop down select “Windows XP (Service Pack 2)”
5 - Open Flash

And that’s it, it will run smoothly, or at least it did for me.

I worked 2 full days to get Red5 0.7.0 working with custom applications but I had no luck.

I couldn’t even get the tutorials written by Red5 developers working, it doesn’t have proper documentation either so it was a real nightmare.
So many other people have these problems too and there seem to be no answer to these problems.

So here is what I did, I installed Red5 0.6.2 and voila! it worked, all the tutorials worked and all the examples worked too!

I’m not a Java guru and I’m glad I’m not, it looks really huge and complicated, it doesn’t look fun to program in at all. I’m sure so many people like it very much but I really think even C is nicer than Java.
For example, to make an even “Hello World” Red5 application you have to make ~5 folders, 4 XML files, 1 Java class, compile your class, upload it to your server and restart Red5!!!

Update:
Funny, I kind of started liking Java

Read this post first:
http://blog.code-head.com/detecting-the-end-of-flv-stream-in-actionscript-3

Funny today, I get the events in reverse order:

NetStream.Buffer.Empty
NetStream.Buffer.Flush

Yesterday it was:

NetStream.Buffer.Flush
NetStream.Buffer.Empty

I will find the solution though

On this page:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/ie/default.mspx

It says “See how it helps to protect you from viruses, spyware, and other risks, plus more easily find the information you need.”.

Do you know how? It’s a virus itself!
Just kidding

It turns out that it’s Google toolbar, try uninstalling it and you will see the difference.
I tried installing the latest version of Google toolbar but it didn’t really make much difference.

It made some difference when I disabled some buttons on the toolbar though, such as bookmarks.
My buttons are now: news, pop up blocker, PageRank, spell checker and Autofill.

Probably some of these buttons try to contact some server for some reason when you open a new tab and it makes everything slow.

I thought it was great but we have so many problems now with big accounts and I don’t know why they offer this problematic feature.

I am sick and tired of Windows and Internet Explorer and all of their problems, some of you might think it’s just fine and you don’t have any issues with these products, but I do complicated stuff and some times lose all my work.

What are you doing every day at Microsoft? Apparently you are not doing your job properly, open source and free applications are more stable than your products.

I can’t believe a huge software company with that many employees releases these garbage pieces of software for people to use and charges a lot of money for them and I’m sure they know about it, but the question is why?
Why is it like this?
Don’t you have enough smart people to figure these issues out?
Don’t you have enough smart people to fix these bugs?
If you do have smart people then what are they doing every day going to work for Microsoft?

Your products are all buggy and you release new versions!!!!!!!!! How about you fix the old ones first? How about you test your products a lot and make them with good quality so they are not this buggy in the first place?

Do you care about your customers? They lose their work and it’s annoying to pay a lot of money for garbage products.

Microsoft, you lost me, I know I don’t matter at all but you lost me and I will buy a MAC and install Linux on this computer instead of this piece of crap “Windows Vista Home Premium” which is a copy of MAC OS 10 anyway. Windows is a copy of MAC in the first place anyway.
http://www.google.com/search?q=Windows+copies+MAC

Those of you who know about SEO know that one of the easy ways to promote your site and show to search engine that your site exists is to submit your site to directories.

I submit my sites to a few directories every once in a while and I used to use directorycritic.com’s free list of directories.

Lately, there are so many junk directories listed that you can not believe, they are death, paid or their submit form doesn’t work.

I don’t know why this happened but I’m guessing that the owner paid someone to take care of his site for him and that someone is either dishonest or very lazy to the point that the list is almost not usable and a waste of time.

If you know about directories, you know that 90% of them are lame to begin with, the owners setup those directories with free scripts, templates and no technical knowledge.

Here are some of the stupid things about many of these directories:
1 - They have funny and irrelevant domain names.
2 - They have funny and irrelevant names.
3 - Their submit forms don’t work.
4 - Their submit form does work but it doesn’t tell you that if your submission was successful.
5 - Their Captcha image doesn’t work.
6 - They use bad English. (worst than mine :))
7 - They never approve any link, some of them have 1,000s of links waiting for review.

1-
One of them which is posted on: (Until now at least 9/4/2008)
http://highscalability.com/digg-architecture

In the “Lessons Learned” section says:
Tune MySQL through your database engine selection. Use InnoDB when you need transactions and MyISAM when you don’t. For example, transactional tables on the master can use MyISAM for read-only slaves.

InnoDB tables are mostly faster than MyISAM. The only thing MyISAM supports is full-text search which is crappy and slow on large datasets anyway.

2-
On the same page:
They moved nearly all work out of the database and into applications, including joins, an operation we normally think of as the job of the database.

a) If you want to join tables from your PHP scripts, that means putting a query in a loop and that means sending a query 10, 15 or 20 times to MySQL and get the results and put the results together some how.
This is slow your application down dramatically…
On the other hand, you can let MySQL handle; MySQL is written in C which is a lot (I mean a lot) faster than PHP; it is also designed to do joins and things like that and knows how to optimize your joins; it is made to be fast!
(This also applies to most database servers)

b) If you want to move sorts to PHP, then you are in so much trouble, say you have 1,000,000 users in a table and you want to get your latest 10 users sorted by username, do you know what you have to do?
You have to load all 1,000,000 users to an array in PHP and then use a usort with a custom function that compares the usernames and the problem with this is that PHP will probably run out of memory in the first place and if not, it will take a long time.

If you follow these 2 “lessons” you will make web applications that suck so bad that you either have to rewrite them or add 1 server per 10 extra users per second…

I agree, PHP, is easy to learn, use and abuse and makes many people who don’t know anything about server and web development feel like experts, but that doesn’t mean PHP sucks, those developers suck.

Recently I read on SEOmoz:

There is no mileage in buying vBulletin for $160. It can’t be any good at that price - and is probably written in PHP. You are looking for a cool project to write in Ruby and here’s your chance.

Just in case the author doesn’t know, here is a list of sites that are powered by PHP:
1 - Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/index.php)
2 - Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index.php)
3 - Yahoo! bookmarks (You have to login)
4 - Stumbleupon (http://www.stumbleupon.com/index.php but redirects to http://www.stumbleupon.com/)
5 - SEOmoz itself! (http://www.seomoz.org/index.php)
6 - Flickr (http://www.niallkennedy.com/blog/uploads/flickr_php.pdf Flickr even uses Smarty template engine!)
There are more but I think this is enough.

Now vBulletin which is also written in PHP, is a state of the art forum software that is running some of the biggest communities on the web such as:
1 - Digital Point
2 - Site Point
3 - RC Groups
etc. ect.

That’s all.

Last night I was doing some stuff and had all kinds of open apps.
I went away for like 15 minutes and apparently Windows Vista updated itself and restarted my computer!!!
It probably told me that it’s going to do it but the fact that it just goes ahead and does it is really stupid.

I don’t know who in Microsoft makes these design decisions but it makes me angry that they don’t respect the user.

The reason behind it might be that the updates are important for security or all the other problems Vista has but it’s stupid and it shouldn’t restart my computer without my permission.

It also tries to remember what you where doing but in a retarded way and I lost stuff.

I’m really considering moving to Linux and trowing this piece of crap operating system into trash.

Yes, many people did and they are complaining.
It’s a beta product and it’s not meant to be for users. You can safely (well…) upgrade to Internet Explorer 8 when it’s not beta anymore.

It has so many issues, Internet Explorer 7 has so many problems already and I can’t imagine what sort of issues Internet Explorer 8 “Beta” has…

Here are some stories:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-10805_3-10028458-75.html

The definition of beta software:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_release_life_cycle#Beta

Beta software is for users who want to participate in testing an unfinished product.