Daniel Sokolowski's Blog

Beta server a power beast with shortcomings OVH is a hosting company out of Europe making it's entry into the American market. As part of their (brilliant) buzz marketing strategy they are giving away 10,000 free servers. They do limit the number they give away per day so do hurry and visit http://www.ovh.com/ca/en/ to get yours; a twitter account is required Once I entered a code Twitted to me the server was up an running within half hour; at first glance it is a power horse: CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i3-2130 CPU @ 3.40GHz Memory: 16 GB DDR3 Hard disk 2x 1 TB - SATA2 However my basic benchmarking for IO resulted in 1.9 MB/s copy speed, now that is very sub part performance compared 60+MB/s I am getting out of my Linode VPS and is border line unusable. Network speed test with wget downloading a Debian ISO wasn't too impressive either, it averaged 1.75M/s (it did have nice high speed spikes), whereas my Linode VPS averaged 4.52M/s for the same file at the same...

Migrated to new cluster no questions asked; got performance boost! I have been using Linode as a hosting provider since July, 2010 after I outgrew WebFaction's shared plans. Overall I have been extremely happy with the service, reliability and support, so happy in fact I have prepaid for over a year. Lately however I have been reaching my memory limit and hitting the swap space; running for fun a Minecraft server will do that. It quickly became apparent that any disk IO would bring the sites served from that VPS to a crawl. Doing some IO benchmarking tests revealed a worrisome statistic: root@)root@shared-hosting-1~>$ dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=64k count=3k oflag=dsync && rm test 3072+0 records in 3072+0 records out 201326592 bytes (201 MB) copied, 26.3025 s, 7.7 MB/s rm: remove regular file `test'? y That is correct, lously 7.7MB/s copy test. Having access to Linode and burst.net servers I run the same VPS benchmark on them with following results: L...

How to disable the the "Go Home" keyboard shortcut in Opera This is the most anoying Opera browser shortcut as whenever typing I have more then once accidently lost my work due to this "Go Home" shortcut. The previous button will only work if the form is initialy empty but if you are updating a post, or a comment it restores that and so you loose your work, hence most counter productive keyboard shortcut. Disable this productivy killer by doing the following steps: Click 'Opera button' on goto to 'Settings' > 'Preferences' Go the 'Advanced' tab Select 'Shortcuts' at the bottom of list on the left Select 'Edit' next to the 'Keyboard setup' list In the search window type 'space ctrl' Press 'Delete' Press 'Ok' Add me to your G+ "Cool" Circle Disable "Back" - backspace keyboard shortcut Don't even get me started on this one - symptom Opera ...

How to fix rel="author" tag image that is no longer appearing. Today I noticed that Google stopped showing my head shot next to the Kingston Web Design search result; having this is crucial as it does increase click through rate for obvious reasons we do not need to go into. My authorship has been working and headshot was appearing in search results since mid April of this year. After lengthy debugging with Google’s Rich Snippets Testing Tool I was able to determine that rel="publisher" and rel="me" now seem to conflict with each other when on the same page; a verified rel="publisher" link makes the rel="author" link fail verification. Surprisingly and unexpectedly having a plain link to your Google+ brand page prevents your head shot from appearing - the author profile is being reported as verified yet the profile image is no longer displayed. One must completely remove any links to a Google+ Brand Page for the he...