The future is waiting for Linux

The rising generation of programmers isn't being fed .Net and Windows. It's growing strong on Linux and its associated LAMP stack, as Robert Guth of the Wall Street Journal notes. Microsoft thinks it has an answer to this trend toward Linux. It is very telling how far from reality Microsoft is by its response:

Microsoft hasn't been a player in the Net start-up world, in part because of the cost of its server product. Mr. Hilf tells [the WSJ] that Microsoft is trying to fix that with new licensing schemes that make Windows Server more affordable for start-ups....

The technology has also been a hindrance, which Mr. Hilf says Microsoft tried to overcome by making additions to Windows Server 2008 that might appeal to Linux programmers who want better access to the technical guts of the software. Such changes "will be a big impact to that next-generation Facebook," Mr. Hilf says.

Well, no, Bill. Such changes are largely irrelevant at this point. You've already lost the mindshare war, and tepid changes to Microsoft's server licensing policies won't change things, either. Your company's limp olive branch to the open-source community ("You can use our software royalty-free and without fear of legal retribution...so long as you never make a penny from your efforts") is worse than insulting.

Microsoft's model is perfect for the client/server model that it helped to pioneer. It is irrelevant for the web-enabled future that is being built even as I type. This new world looks more like Firefox: platform agnostic. It doesn't care if people run Windows. Neither should you.

Ref : http://www.cnet.com/8301-13505_1-9892174-16.html

Things You Don't Know but You Can Do With Google

Every time I turn around, Google's come up with something new, cool, or innovative. It's no wonder it has Microsoft on the run.

Nifty Google Features

Calculate This: You can use Google Calculator to crunch numbers and figure out conversions. Try entering 12*12 and see what happens; you can also run more complex equations, like G*(6e24 kg)/(4000 miles)^2). Google Calculator handles conversions of all types, such as 3 ounces in tablespoons, 16 dollars in euros, or 19999GB to MB.

Find That Number: You can track FedEx, UPS, and U.S. Postal Service shipments just by sticking the tracking number into Google's search field; do the same with zip and area codes, vehicle IDs, patent numbers, airplane registration numbers, and even UPC codes.

Make Me Special: Google has special search sites just for you. There's one for Firefox users, another for Linux users, and a spot for those of you who can't get enough of Microsoft.

Dig This: This is one flight I'm glad I missed.
The other video had me going until the passengers started jumping out of the plane.

Dig This, Too: So you need to move a palm tree? Watch this safety video first. Step one: Hire a professional.

Useful Google Services

Sights on Google: My buddy Leo F. sent a note asking if I wanted to create a quick Web page, or something fairly complex, with just novice skills. "Google Sites is fun to play with," Leo said, "and even makes a useful Web page, too. Of course, it's free."

Ongoing Experiments: If you like poking around with Web tools, you need to explore Google Labs. For instance, Experimental Search gives you five new ways to search, each aimed at tightening and focusing on specific results.

BTW, Goog411 is a Google Labs graduate and a great service. Read about how it's replaced traditional 411 in a blog I posted last year.

Alert Me! Google sends me an e-mail every time it sees a new occurrence of "steve bass PC World," "steve bass PC Annoyances," or keywords about my various hobbies and interests. If you haven't tried Google Alerts, you're missing out on a terrific service.

Hello, Google? If you're using Firefox and find something cool on the Web, you can use Google Send to Phone to pass the info along to a U.S.-based cell phone. It's a nifty service that's really useful for, say, sending a map to a lost buddy. Check the FAQ for details.

Dig This: You may not be old enough to remember Soap, the LOL TV spoof from the seventies. So here's a short video excerpt of "Chuck and Bob Mindreading."

Even More Fun With Google

You probably think there's not much more to say about Google. Nope, there's still lots.

Start by downloading the Google Cheat Sheet, a two-page PDF with lots of valuable Google shortcuts, search and query examples, and services.

Even better is 55 Ways to Have Fun with Google, a free e-book with Google trivia, games, and nonsense, enough to kill an afternoon (I did). The more I explored, the better I liked this 228-page book. For instance, I wasted time with The Image Quiz, which has you guess the Google search term for a bunch of images. I also picked up a nifty Google magic trick, learned how to find world records, read IRC chat logs people didn't know were public, and browsed to some very funny Google parody sites, such as UnderGoos, the underwear search site, and Cthuugle, the Lovecraft search engine.

Dig This: I always get a kick out of the way the folks at Google occasionally transform the logo to match up with the day. Here are some Google logo rejects.

Dig This, Too: What's more interesting than a hole in the ground? Not much, you'll think, after you take a gander at these amazing pictures.

40 Tips for optimizing your php code

1. If a method can be static, declare it static. Speed improvement is by a factor of 4.



2. echo is faster than print.


3. Use echo's multiple parameters instead of string concatenation.


4. Set the maxvalue for your for-loops before and not in the loop.


5. Unset your variables to free memory, especially large arrays.


6. Avoid magic like __get, __set, __autoload


7. require_once() is expensive


8. Use full paths in includes and requires, less time spent on resolving the OS paths.


9. If you need to find out the time when the script started executing, $_SERVER[’REQUEST_TIME’] is preferred to time()



10. See if you can use strncasecmp, strpbrk and stripos instead of regex


11. str_replace is faster than preg_replace, but strtr is faster than str_replace by a factor of 4


12. If the function, such as string replacement function, accepts both arrays and single characters as arguments, and if your argument list is not too long, consider writing a few redundant replacement statements, passing one character at a time, instead of one line of code that accepts arrays as search and replace arguments.


13. It's better to use select statements than multi if, else if, statements.


14. Error suppression with @ is very slow.


15. Turn on apache's mod_deflate


16. Close your database connections when you're done with them


17. $row[’id’] is 7 times faster than $row[id]


18. Error messages are expensive


19. Do not use functions inside of for loop, such as for ($x=0; $x <>
    
20. Incrementing a local variable in a method is the fastest. Nearly the same as calling a local variable in a function.



21. Incrementing a global variable is 2 times slow than a local var.


22. Incrementing an object property (eg. $this->prop++) is 3 times slower than a local variable.


23. Incrementing an undefined local variable is 9-10 times slower than a pre-initialized one.


24. Just declaring a global variable without using it in a function also slows things down (by about the same amount as incrementing a local var). PHP probably does a check to see if the global exists.


25. Method invocation appears to be independent of the number of methods defined in the class because I added 10 more methods to the test class (before and after the test method) with no change in performance.


26. Methods in derived classes run faster than ones defined in the base class.


27. A function call with one parameter and an empty function body takes about the same time as doing 7-8 $localvar++ operations. A similar method call is of course about 15 $localvar++ operations.


28. Surrounding your string by ' instead of " will make things interpret a little faster since php looks for variables inside "..." but not inside '...'. Of course you can only do this when you don't need to have variables in the string.



29. When echoing strings it's faster to separate them by comma instead of dot. Note: This only works with echo, which is a function that can take several strings as arguments.


30. A PHP script will be served at least 2-10 times slower than a static HTML page by Apache. Try to use more static HTML pages and fewer scripts.


31. Your PHP scripts are recompiled every time unless the scripts are cached. Install a PHP caching product to typically increase performance by 25-100% by removing compile times.


32. Cache as much as possible. Use memcached - memcached is a high-performance memory object caching system intended to speed up dynamic web applications by alleviating database load. OP code caches are useful so that your script does not have to be compiled on every request


33. When working with strings and you need to check that the string is either of a certain length you'd understandably would want to use the strlen() function. This function is pretty quick since it's operation does not perform any calculation but merely return the already known length of a string available in the zval structure (internal C struct used to store variables in PHP). However because strlen() is a function it is still somewhat slow because the function call requires several operations such as lowercase & hashtable lookup followed by the execution of said function. In some instance you can improve the speed of your code by using an isset() trick.
    
    
    
    
    Ex.
    
    if (strlen($foo) < 5) { echo "Foo is too short"; }
    
    vs.
    
    if (!isset($foo{5})) { echo "Foo is too short"; }
    
    
    
    Calling isset() happens to be faster then strlen() because unlike strlen(), isset() is a language construct and not a function meaning that it's execution does not require function lookups and lowercase. This means you have virtually no overhead on top of the actual code that determines the string's length.



34. When incrementing or decrementing the value of the variable $i++ happens to be a tad slower then ++$i. This is something PHP specific and does not apply to other languages, so don't go modifying your C or Java code thinking it'll suddenly become faster, it won't. ++$i happens to be faster in PHP because instead of 4 opcodes used for $i++ you only need 3. Post incrementation actually causes in the creation of a temporary var that is then incremented. While pre-incrementation increases the original value directly. This is one of the optimization that opcode optimized like Zend's PHP optimizer. It is a still a good idea to keep in mind since not all opcode optimizers perform this optimization and there are plenty of ISPs and servers running without an opcode optimizer.


35. Not everything has to be OOP, often it is too much overhead, each method and object call consumes a lot of memory.


36. Do not implement every data structure as a class, arrays are useful, too


37. Don't split methods too much, think, which code you will really re-use


38. You can always split the code of a method later, when needed


39. Make use of the countless predefined functions


40. If you have very time consuming functions in your code, consider writing them as C extensions


41. Profile your code. A profiler shows you, which parts of your code consumes how many time. The Xdebug debugger already contains a profiler. Profiling shows you the bottlenecks in overview


42. mod_gzip which is available as an Apache module compresses your data on the fly and can reduce the data to transfer up to 80%


43. Excellent Article about optimizing php by John Lim