• Unlike a home web server, SSH is read/write, meaning you can get and put files on a server with it.
• Unlike a home FTP server, SSH is secure. All the transactions are encrypted and cannot be sniffed.
• Unlike a VNC server, SSH alone doesnt let you drive your computer remotely, and it is also secure and encrypted while VNC is not.

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The site provides an administrator username and password for every system which allows you to to add and delete content, change the way things look, basically be the admin of any system here without fear of breaking anything. Each system is deleted and re-installed every two hours.

At the upper left hand side of your screen you will see a clock that is counting down. What it shows is how much time is left in this two hour demo window. Once the clock hits 00:00:00, opensourceCMS.com will shut down and the demos are completely refreshed.

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Google gives an example of usage:
“For example, lets say you are in charge of your club soccer teams website, and you want to add a current weather forecast so your fans can plan for your games or you want to include a daily brainteaser on your site without having to come up with something new everyday. Google Gadgets lets you do this easily. Just visit the directory of “Google Gadgets for your webpage” to find gadgets that youd like to add to your own page and select your preferences for how the gadget will appear on your page. Then, copy and paste the HTML from the window into the HTML code for your own website. Its an easy way to get the content you need and want without spending hours writing code”

Previously, some gadgets could be included in Google Page Creator if you selected the experimental features.
Here’s an example (called babelfish):

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One issue I did come up against is that although you can put Template Tags and PHP code into a Page Template, you cannot put these into the content of a Page and expect them to run. This meant I had to use a PHP evaluating Plugin (example: RunPHP) to enable the < ?php randomFeedList() ?> feature of the Feed List plugin.

EDIT: October 10
I’ve completely revamped how I use this plugin.

• I have a WordPress Page with it’s own template (page_rss_parent), that is an exact replica of my standard Page template except it incldues the Dynamic Ajax Content from www.dynamicdrive.com. As you select a link to a particular RSS feed, this Page loads it dynamically.
• The RSS feeds are each in their own page, using the FeedList plugin . These pages have their own template ( page_rss) that has no call to sidebar or footer. This is because these pages will be loaded into a DIV on already already existing page, with the header, sidebar footer etc already present.
• I have another page that is the parent of the pages with the RSS feeds. This means I can exclude this page (and therefore the underlying RSS Feed pages) when using wp_list_pages in my header.
• I don’t need the runPHP plugin.

Next step is to write it up as a plugin. The big issue is where to store the RSS feeds:

• If I store them in WordPress as Pages, you’ll need to do the wp_list_pages hack described above.
• If I store them in another table, it raises issues of tidiness and compatibility with later versions
• If I store them as a text file in the plugin directory, there’s issues around the read/write permissions

from http://arstechnica.com – arstechnica.

1. AT&T, Feds neglect low-price mandate designed to help schools - Schools that uncover overcharging are often punished.
2. e-Books may take a page out of digital music's book - The International Digital Publishing Forum is considering a lightweight DRM.
3. Facial detection startup changes privacy policy after Friday launch - SceneTap's policy now states it will not store "facial mapping metrics."
4. Chinese authorities approve Google's acquisition of Motorola - The move looks like the last step as Google works to develop a smart phone.
5. Make mainframes, not war: how Mad Men sold computers in the 1960s and 1970s - Celebs, comics, and—at times—computing itself helped sell the young technology.
6. SpaceX launch aborted, next launch window on Tuesday - Countdown hits T-minus 0, but an engine issue keeps the rocket grounded.
7. Ryan Montbleau Band brings concerts to the fans through DIY livestream - Want higher quality live audio? If you want it done right...
8. Hands on with Glassboard 2.0 for iOS: simple, private group sharing - Introducing sharing and collaboration for the boardroom, or some friends.
9. The Listening Machine converts 500 people’s tweets into music - Composer Peter Gregson turns the words of hundreds into music.
10. Week in Apple: stalkers, antivirus, and MacBook Pros. Oh my! - Perian, Airplay speakers, and jailbreaks, too.

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Whether you’re looking to make a somewhat involved chronological timeline, or just a simple from Point A to Point B kind of deal, this tutorial’s got you covered. Create a Timeline in Excel [Microsoft Education Center]

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Blond and Danish or not, do be careful broadcasting your IP address with BT – Check out some info on anonymous BT so you can at least try to hide.

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More details about Anoushe Ansari

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Programs and services that start whenever Windows boots do so in various ways. The simplest way to install programs and services that start whenever Windows boots is to create a shortcut to the program within the Startup folder for the current user (or for each user on the machine). To open your Startup folder, click Start, then Run, and type the following:

%userprofile%\Start Menu\Programs\Startup

To open the Startup folder for all users, click Start, then Run, and type the following:

%allusersprofile%\Start Menu\Programs\Startup

In addition, Registry keys are another common way to launch programs or services at startup. You can also use tools like your System Configuration Utility (click Start, then Run, type msconfig.exe, click OK, and select the Startup tab) or a third-party tool like Autoruns from Sysinternals. Once you’ve found all this junk though, how do you get rid of it?

Removing items from your Startup folder (or the common Startup folder) is generally safe, but deleting values from your Registry should be done only as a last resort. In fact, sometimes deleting a registry value won’t even work–as soon as you run the application associated with the startup program, the deleted registry value may get automatically re-created!

The best way to proceed is to first try to see if the application itself lets you remove the feature or component that’s starting up every time Windows boots. You might need to rerun your application’s Setup program to do this. If this fails, then (and only then) should you consider deleting a registry value (but always back up your registry before making any changes to it).

Finally, here a few more sources of information on the topic of startup programs:

• How to Remove Startup Programs
• How To Manage Windows Startup
• Configure Auto-Starting Applications
• How to Modify the List of Programs that Run When You Start Windows XP
• Restore Your Computer’s Performance with Windows XP

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EverythingLinux’s excellent rsync tutorial discusses some of the reasons why rsync is better than ftp.

• Diffs – Only actual changed pieces of files are transferred, rather than the whole file. This makes updates faster, especially over slower links like modems. FTP would transfer the entire file, even if only one byte changed.
• Compression – The tiny pieces of diffs are then compressed on the fly, further saving you file transfer time and reducing the load on the network.
• Secure Shell – The security conscious of you out there would like this, and you should all be using it. The stream from rsync is passed through the ssh protocol to encrypt your session.

previous links:

Rsync on Windows
rsync – Windows, MAC, Unix, Linux, BSD

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It appears that there is no real hard and fast rule anymore. And setting it against a static value (like physical memory) is incredibly wasteful. It’s a much better idea to set it interactively. In other words, use the system without adjusting the Virtual Memory for a while, then take a look at your usage and set your virtual memory against that usage.

For instance:
If you’re in a Windows machine, let it run normally for a few days.
Run everything the way you normally use it.
– Multiple apps,
– Multiple instances,
– everything you normally run.

Then open up the Task Manager and look at the Performance tab.
Take a look at the Peak value under “Commit Charge”.
Set your virtual memory, min and max, at about 10% above that value to leave yourself a little headroom. Normally this will be enough to deal with your maximum swap requests.
If, somehow, you begin bumping against virtual memory limits again AFTER that, bump it another 10%.
If you still have problems, keep bumping it in 10% increments, and start looking for apps that are memory leaking.

You have to be aware of what your system is doing and what its based on. For example, the best *current* laptop drive is still slower than a fairly low-end *current* desktop drive. A current laptop drive however is much faster than a high-end desktop drive from just a couple years ago however.

The point here is that if a laptop hard drive powers down, then swapping gets REALLY slow. On the other hand, you really don’t want to be swapping on a laptop or your battery life disappears… (unless you’re using a laptop / notebook as a desktop replacement)

Some background
Swap has two purposes: To swap out uncommonly-used pages so you can load more of the current working set, and to extend the memory space available to programs. 10 years ago, when we had mere seconds of swap, this made more sense. You could load windows, and swap half of it out, and boy did you ever need that RAM. If you were going to load a Word document that didn’t quite fit, swap could save your bum, and if it got too loaded, it’d still run out of memory. You could afford to wait because you only had a few seconds of swap, and short of a really pathological swapping pattern you could expect your operation to terminate in a couple of minutes.

The second use in modern times is basically pointless; just let the program fail. You almost certainly do not want to let the program spend the next hour swapping. The first use might still be valid, but you might as well only use a couple of seconds of swap; call it 100MB. Beyond that, nothing is really useful. And in Windows, excessive swapping also tends to basically lock up the machine which is something to be avoided.

Huge swap partitions, unless you have another use for them (some implementations of Linux suspend are the only ones I know of) are basically a holdover from the past, religiously clung to by people who have been ‘doing it this way’ for over a decade. Skip the swap unless you know why you shouldn’t.

Why do I talk about ‘seconds of swap’ rather than gigabytes of swap ?
Processors have gotten faster, memory has gotten somewhat faster, hard drives have gotten monstrously larger, but hard drives have only gotten marginally faster since ten years ago.

So, instead of measuring swap in terms of absolute size, measure it in terms of time-to-fill, if your system were writing flat-out.Let’s say you have 1GB of memory and you use the old timey rule-of-thumb for 2.5GB of swap. Using an average hard drive transfer of 50GB/sec (which would be the read speed, not the write speed which is much slower), if you’re going to use that swap, it would take you nearly a minute to use that space, writing flat out.

Odds are you’re not actually going to use it that way, so whatever is using that swap is probably going to take a lot longer, orders of magnitude more. Do you really need a minute’s worth of swap? Is there anything that is so critical that you can’t afford to run out of memory, but you’re willing to wait hours upon hours while the swap is fully utilized?

Some more background
Most operating systems, desktop and server, will swap well ahead of not having free memory (for good reason). This isn’t a bad thing generally.

There are generally two strategies:
-The common-sense one
This where you swap when you run out of memory. This makes a lot of practical sense on systems with limited write cycles (flash based swap, though you really never ever should do that anyway), and systems that want to spin down drives to conserve power for battery conservation. Performance wise (this may surprise people who haven’t spent time thinking about it), this can often be bad. Avoiding swapping is generally only good on systems where resource utilization is carefully managed and you know it won’t swap ever (the unneeded IO operations can interfere with the productive activity of a constantly busy system). This is actually a vast minority of systems in the world (no matter how l33t one may think themselves, they most certainly don’t have a usage pattern that would be impacted by the extraneous IO operations of occasional write to swap.

-Pre-emptive swapping. When the IO subsystem is idle and the system can afford to copy memory to swap area, it does so (depending on criteria). Generally speaking it will select memory not accessed much and write it to disk, but leave the memory copy in place if the physical memory is not immediately needed. A fair amount of swap used in an apparently underutilized system is duplicated in physical memory and swap space. The benefit here is that if the process reads back that memory, it doesn’t incur any penalty in reading it back despite it being also in swap (the system may make certain decisions on what is the best swap candidate and write to disk different data). The benefit of writing this stuff to swap even when not needed is clear when an application comes along that allocs more memory than the system has free in physical space. In the first strategy, this means the malloc blocks while data is written to disk, and the new application starting or needing a lot of data is severely impacted. In the pre-emptive swap case, the system notices the condition, knows what memory it has a backup in swap of that hasn’t been used lately, and can free that memory and satisfy the malloc pretty much instantly.

To those who have, say, a desktop with 1GB of RAM or more, it becomes less likely that the system will have to flush memory from physical RAM, but there is a balance to be struck between memory used directly invoked by applications, what the application memory access pattern is, and what ram you can use to buffer filesystem access. If your total application memory allocation is 75%, it still may make sense performance wise to only keep 50% of your physical memory dedicated to the applications, (the other bit relegated to swap), and 50% of the memory to buffer disk I/O.

A couple of usefull links
This extensive and fantastically informative guide on tweaking virtual memory was a huge help and a fascinating read.

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