A Leslie Wong Blog

In an endless quest for brighter LEDs for my flashlight modding, I received some LEDs today that I ordered from DealExtreme.com. DealExtreme is a Hong Kong based vendor that sells DIY flashlight parts, among a lot of other (some interesting, some not) – junk.

Seoul Semiconductors Z-Power LED P4 (U bin)
Cree XLamp® XR-E LED (Q5 bin)
Seoul Semiconductors Z-Power LED P7 (C Bin)

Seoul Semiconductors says, “(the) Z-Power LED P7 series is single LED package providing the world highest brightness of 900 lumens and the efficacy of 90 lumens per watt to replace the conventional bulbs.”

These are all my posts about flashlights.

In the past couple of weeks, my WordPress 2.5.1 blog has seemed to slow. Loading the blog pages and the administrative pages would sometimes take 30-50 seconds and even timeout.

I have a cheap Linux shared hosting account at Godaddy.com and I wrote to their support several times. They asked me for trace routes. There were many timeouts between the Godaddy servers, ip-xxx-xxx-xxx-xxx.ip.secureserver.net. Godaddy support suggested that it was a problem with my ISP, then said the timeouts were from hitting their firewalls.

Godaddy support responses were, “Currently your hosting account is working properly and with in all perimeters” (sic). They also suggested, “However, as your site is hosted within a shared environment, you may experience periods of reduced performance. If you wish to have further resources devoted to your individual site including access to logs and specific services, you may wish to investigate the purchase of our Virtual or Dedicated Servers.”

The site YouGetSignal.com has a reverse IP check enabling you to… “Find other sites hosted on a web server by entering a domain or IP address…” According to YouGetSignal.com, my site has over 1171 domains hosted on the same web server (as lesliewong.us – 64.202.163.77). I guess that’s what $3.65/month hosting gets. But a random check of the listed web sites showed that they loaded very quickly, even WordPress blogs.

I run a LAMP development server on my Macintosh Powerbook G4 on my local network and disregarding the fact that it is one hop away from any client on the network, it loads the blog very quickly.

I tried several things to try speeding up WordPress. Several times a day, I would optimize the MySQL database, though it is less than 2MB. Most of the overhead was due to comment spam (I use Spam Karma 2). I was already using the WP-Cache plug-in. I also tried disabling all plug-ins, downgrading to to WordPress 2.3.3 and using the default WordPress theme. I disabled Google Adsense and the web cam in my sidebar. None seemed to offer much improvement.

I searched for tips on optimizing the speed of WordPress and found Jeff Atwood’s post on Behold WordPress, Destroyer of CPUs. I was already using a caching plug-in but there was a response from WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg and his recommended MySQL configuration optimizations. Unfortunately, I don’t think I can edit the my.cnf preference file on my shared host.

I found this site, WebsiteOptimization.com and running the analyzer on my blog home page made me hope that people on dial-up aren’t reading my blog.

Today I created a new MySQL 5.0 database, imported the MySQL 4.0 database that was my blog and now it’s running on that. It seems a little better, but it’s Saturday afternoon at 2:00 PM PST, so who’s on the internets then?

Automat, 977 Eighth Avenue, Manhattan.

I found this photograph by Bernice Abbott (1898-1991) at the New York Public Library Digital Gallery, whose image database was “developed to provide free and open online access to thousands of images from the original and rare holdings of The Library”. You can even order prints.

In the late 80’s, I ate at the last Automat in Manhattan at 42nd and Third and by then it was tired. I like the more advanced technology of Kaiten-zushi (conveyor belt sushi) anyway. You don’t have to get up to retrieve your food – kinda like dim sum without people.

Mark Seal, over at Wired, wrote a nice piece from a general interest point of view, Inside the Scandal That Rocked the Formula One Racing World.

He gives a brief overview of the sport and details the industrial espionage, dubbed Stepnygate (after the name of the Ferrari mechanic that passed the information), that took place last year between two Formula One teams, Ferrari and McLaren.

David Remnick, at The New Yorker, compiled a list of 100 Essential Jazz Albums after doing a profile of jazz broadcaster Phil Schaap.

I used to listen to Phil Schaap and Bird Flight on WKCR, when I was up that early. I also always used to play Charlie Parker’s rendition of Just Friends on the juke box at Bradley’s, which closed in 1998, about the same time my life started going downhill.

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krystalo over at digg.com writes, “Ubuntu 8.04 was released last month with highly-anticipated features like PulseAudio, GNOME 2.22, and Wubi. Although this release is a strong incremental improvement over its predecessor, we found some serious bugs that detract from the overall user experience. Ars takes a close look to find out if Hardy Heron raises the bar.”

I booted the live version on my Macbook, installed it on my VIA pc2500 and shrugged my shoulders.

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spuncoke over at digg.com writes, “Sometimes you don’t need to know everything about wireless to secure a home or home-office network; you only need to know what’s important.”

This is a great guide for securing your wireless network.

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