TortoiseSVN: libapr_tsvn.dll missing

Don’t touch the running system.

Yesterday I’ve decided to spend some time to upgrade my “old school” TortoiseSVN to the latest release. I thought it should be a five-minute-problem or so.  Sure…

The result was a nice greeting from my ZoneAlarm who was missing one of the Tortoise dlls. Thanks to Google and the author of this post. It was 5 minutes to find the answer however the solution took another 15 minutes instead of the 5 initially planned.

First commit, then upgrade ;)

Apache Compression: Performance Magic

Recently I have revisited the performance issue on my largest project – Diorama.Ru.  4000 users with 60.000 page views hitting the server every day. I am proud to have such a “playground” for performance optimization.

We’ve started with the MySQL tuning several months ago, then I have introduced the application level caching using Smarty template engine and finally pushed the last button – Apache gzip compression via mod_deflate.

Continue reading

Design behind the design :)

Exploring Boxes and Arrows today I’ve found a broken link. The 404-page suggested me to “go back to where you come from”. Nice.

I had an intention to help by informing a webmaster but I didn’t find any single contact (or at least the way to contact the authors) on the whole website. Nothing. Closed like a Black Box.

May be this is a new step in UX evolution, who knows…

Top Microstocks on Google Trends

An interesting picture from the Google Trends covering the popularity of top microsotck brands in the Google search and news.

Microstock Brands on Google Trends

istockphoto: 1.00 shutterstock: 0.66 fotolia: 0.78
dreamstime:
0.20  stockxpert: 0.04

Dreamstime and Stockexpert are stagnating on the bottom but Fotolia competes with two other “micro-monsters” on the top. This is quite interesting because it doesn’t exactly reflects the situation with my sales. Also  according to the regular earnings reports posted by Lee Torrents on Microstock Diaries the picture looks a bit different. You never see the Fotolia in the leaders.  Very good promotion or am I missing something as a contributor?