TechniTip.Net

FTP with Resume

You often transfer huge files over FTP and are annoyed because the connection is sometimes interrupted and file transfer starts from zero? Especially when transferring over a mobile connection with UMTS/HSDPA this might get really really annoying.

To avoid this resume/restart should be enabled in your FTP server, in my case this is proftpd running on Debian Etch. To do this add the following two lines in /etc/proftpd/modules.conf:

AllowStoreRestart on
AllowRetrieveRestart on

And restart proftpd “/etc/init.d/proftpd restart”.

Next we need a FTP client which supports resume/restart. I found CoreFTP for Windows is doing a good job here. It remembers every file transfer in a queue so no downloads are lost after a disconnect of your connection. Also it resumes the transfer.

And: The Core FTP Lite version is free for personal, educational and evaluation use.

Nice Free Photo Organizer “Google Picasa”

Digital photo cameras are nowadays every where. Photographing got easy and cheap for everyone. So there is a need to organize your photos easily. A cute nice tool for doing this is Google Picasa. And it’s free. It’s also available in German language.

I like it because it’s really easy to use and it offers many features:

• Organize photos
• Edit photos
• Create slideshows and more
• Share photos using Picasa Web Albums

Or you can generate collages, slideshow movies with one click like the following (pictures are taken at Port of Hamburg):

Useful WordPress Plugins

This is my collection of useful wordpress plugins.

• Social bookmarking plugin
  Add links on your posts to popular social bookmarking sites.
• Google sitemap generator plugin
  This plugin generates a XML-Sitemap compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog. This format is supported by Ask.com, Google, YAHOO and MSN Search.
• All in One SEO pack plugin
  Automatic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) out of the box for your wordpress blog.
• NextGEN Gallery plugin
  Really nice and easy to use gallery script for wordpress.
• Askmet plugin
  Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not and lets you review the spam it catches under your blog’s “Comments” admin screen.
• Google Analytics plugin
  The Google Analytics for WordPress plugin automatically tracks and segments all outbound links from within posts, comment author links, links within comments, blogroll links and downloads. It also allows you to track AdSense clicks, add extra search engines, track image search queries and it will even work together with Urchin.
• Cross-references plugin
  Useful plugin for manually setting a reference to another post or page. It will generate backward references automatically.
• WP Super Cache
  This plugin generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After a html file is generated your webserver will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts.
• WPtouch: Mobile Plugin&Theme for WordPress
  It automatically generates pages for perfect display on mobile devices from your WordPress blog.
• MaxBlogPress Favicon
  Adds a favicon icon to your WordPress blog with 100 pre installed icons.
• Yet Another Related Posts plugin
  Gives you a list of posts and/or pages related to the current entry.
• WP-PageNavi plugin
  Adds a more advanced paging navigation to your WordPress site.
• Vimeo  QuickTags plugin
  Allows Vimeo video embed to be viewed in iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch. This plugin interprets its vimeo shortcode to produce the latest vimeo iframe embed code.

Hot Babe for Windows

Hot-babe is a small graphical utility which displays the system activity in a very special way. When the CPU is idle, it displays a dressed girl, and when the activity goes up, as the temperature increases, the girl begins to undress, to finish totally naked when the system activity reaches 100%. Of course, if you can be shocked by nudity, don’t use it!

Download Windows version.

Download Linux version.

PHP Accelerator

If you have running a webserver with many PHP pages I recommend to use a PHP accelerator like eaccelerator. Installation is really easy:

• Download the source
• Unpack the source and change to the unpacked directory
• run “phpize”
• run “./configure”
• run “make”
• run “make install”
• run ‘”mkdir /tmp/eaccelerator”
• run “chmod 0777 /tmp/eaccelerator”
• edit “/etc/php5/apache2/php.ini” (e.g. on Debian Etch)

[eAccelerator]
extension="eaccelerator.so"
eaccelerator.shm_size="128"
eaccelerator.cache_dir="/tmp/eaccelerator/"
eaccelerator.enable="1"
eaccelerator.optimizer="1"
eaccelerator.check_mtime="1"
eaccelerator.debug="0"
eaccelerator.filter=""
eaccelerator.shm_max="0"
eaccelerator.shm_ttl="0"
eaccelerator.shm_prune_period="0"
eaccelerator.shm_only="0"
eaccelerator.compress="1"
eaccelerator.compress_level="9"

• restart apache “/etc/init.d/apache2 restart”

In my example the shm_size has been set to 128 MByte because the server hosts serveral domains with PHP pages.