mattgadient.com

I believed in you. I thought you had potential. But apparantly I was wrong. May whatever God you believe in… have mercy on your soul…. This court stands adjourned.

Q – “All Good Things…” – Star Trek: The Next Generation

DMOZ was arguably once a strong, vibrant, quality directory. But my, how things have changed. It’s about time that Google re-evaluated their usage of dmoz.org as a weighted directory.

Three years back, I submitted one of my sites to the DMOZ. The site in question is listed in the side-bar, and has been mentioned by USA Today, the New York Times, and WKYC (an NBC company), amongst many other places. I think it’s fair to say that it’s a fairly popular resource.

If you haven’t picked up on it already, the site is called EyeglassRetailerReviews.com . Whether it should or shouldn’t be listed isn’t the question, but I mention it to show that I have a good idea what I’m talking about below in regards to the problems I noticed with a certain category in the Open Directory Project (ODP) below… continue reading…

I’ve been hooked on Kaspersky for a while now. Periodically we’d have something that slipped by some of the free anti-virus programs, and since Kaspersky and NOD32 were the only strongly recommended ones out there that were low on bloat, I tried them both and settled on Kaspersky.

This year, we grabbed a 5 user license for Kaspersky Internet Security. Some of the family’s been switching to Mac’s, so we only needed 4 licenses for the remaining PC’s. It was a bit pricey for the license from the Kaspersky website (buying a couple 3-user packs from Future Shop, Best Buy, or London Drugs when they go on sale would have been cheaper). In any case, we still had 1 left over.

You might imagine my surprise when today I found this message on one of our machines though: continue reading…

I’m a huge casual Sim City fan. By that I mean I’ll play it for a few days at a time, then take a break for a few months, then come back to it. The Sim City franchise has been great – I could go into details about the joys of everything from Sim City for SNES all the way up to Sim City 4, but I’ll spare the details.

Unfortunately, Sim City 4 is effectively where the franchise died. It’s odd because usually a franchise dies after a horrible game, not after an amazing one. And SC4 was definitely an epic success. EA tried to play off of the name with Sim City Societies, but everyone knows that Societies was never a true Sim City successor.

Years went by, and rumors of “the next Sim City” came and went. Finally, a real competitor came about, and was finally released earlier this month: Cities XL.

So, without further ado, let’s compare Cities XL and  Sim City 4.

——

The short version first:

Sim City 4 has continue reading…

Recently, I switched most of my sites to another server.

After about a week of not receiving any messages through the contact form on one of them, I suddenly realized… “ya know… it’s been a while”. I tried sending myself a test message through the contact form, and never received it. Sending from another email account worked though. Strange…..

Before going any further it’s worth noting that I’m using Google Apps on the aforementioned site for mail (gmail for domains).

To narrow down continue reading…

If you’ve tried to clean up your Joomla template, something may have perplexed you at one point or another. There’s no mention of mootools or caption.js in the template file, yet these 2 things end up in the HEAD section of all your pages anyway.

If your site is pretty basic, you probably don’t need them, and having them load every time just makes it that much more painful for your dial-up viewers. Heck, mootools.js alone is 74 kb !

So how do you get rid of mootools? It’s pretty simple code that you throw in your template’s HTML fi continue reading…

While looking for a way to convert MP4 to FLV, I came across a couple free programs. Since I had problems finding free programs to convert videos to flash in the past, I’ll list them here. While both are free, neither are open-source (if anyone knows of an open source converter feel free to leave a comment).

That said, both of these do work well for the simple task of converting to flash video.

——

Any Video Converter continue reading…

So… Install Windows 7, hook up the Samsung ML-1210 printer, and…

…well not much happens. If you’ve gone to Samsung’s site, you may have found 2 possible files to download (technically more, but only 2 that have any hope of working), and you’ll find that neither seems to work well.

The Universal Print Driver will install, and you’ll probably get it to even find your ML-1210 eventually. If you get farther than that, congratulations! You’ll have gone farther than I was able to with that package.

The GDI driver on the other hand will refuse to install. Windows will pop up and ask if you want to try compatibility mode. Unfortunately, it’ll still refuse.

The solution?

No, it’s not a Lexmark E210 driver this time (I tried it… no such luck).

The solution is simple, but not elegant.

1) Download the GDI driver install package from Samsung’s site. If you’re lazy continue reading…

While reading through WHT, I came across a neat little tidbit.

It’s a bit of PHP code that can be used to get an idea as to how fast the processor is on the machine your websites are hosted on – or at least the speed you have available to you. A thanks to “webpan” of the WHT forums for putting up the code he used for his LiquidWeb test.

Basically, you create a php file that looks like this:

<?php
$startTime = microtime(true);
for ($i=0;$i<500;$i++) {
$j++;
for ($k=0;$k<10000;$k++) {
$j++;}
}
$endTime = microtime(true);
$delta = $endTime – $startTime;

echo “total time: $delta seconds.\n”;

//phpinfo();
?>

Call it “test.php” or something, and put it somewhere on your webserver – then browse and run it. You could modify it to do some more stressful math, but don’t go crazy.

I tried it on 3 hosts, and here were my results:

time in seconds - lower is better

Each test was run at 3 different time periods during the day. To make things a continue reading…

I recently started up an account at SimpleCDN to help offload a webserver a little bit by putting static images there.  After a couple days, I decided to give Amazon’s CloudFront a try as well.

I’ll start off by saying this was originally going to be primarily about the performance differences. However, after a few hours of testing, I found there’s not enough of a difference to be worth mentioning – neither was consistently better than the other. Performance-wise, for the most part it really boiled down to how close each test location was to the nearest respective edge server. This was relatively small-scale testing with a site that pulled about 12 images per page (and thus pulled 12 items from each CDN), but I concluded that neither’s going to make a lick of difference performance-wise… at least, not for the typical individual who’s looking at these two for solutions.

That said, time to take a look at the merits of each at a basic level: continue reading…

Background:

I used to use non-SEF url’s on a Joomla site, and recently turned on Joomla’s built-in SEF. Problem is that the old URL’s still “work”. Of course, this is great for people who visit – not so great when GoogleBot comes along.

GoogleBot comes happily along and for any given article sees the original archaic url with a bunch of parameters that have been there forever. Of course, there’s little incentive for it to use the “cleaner” versions. As far as it’s concerned, the archaic stuff is the original, and the new url’s are duplicate content. It could eventually change it’s mind as to the “preferred” page on it’s own, but there are a few fighting factors here. On one hand, the sitemap points to the “new” one, and it’s predominantly linked to through the current site. On the other hand, anyone who’s linked to the site in the past has linked to the “old” one, and let’s face it – it was there first.

To make the change and get Google looking at the right page, we’ll go over the things I tried that didn’t work, and then the thing I tried that did work: continue reading…