How to get an exact version of phpBB

For whatever reason the authors of phpBB are not showing the exact version. At least I can’t find it in two seconds even inside the administration panel.

If there is no easy way to do it,  let’s do this simple trick:

SELECT * FROM `phpbb_config` WHERE `config_name` LIKE ‘%version%’

And here is how to do it in case you need an official support.

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.

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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…

Red Giant

Oracle buys Sun Microsystems. It seems this company simply cann’t stop shopping… Peoplesoft, Siebel, InnoDB and now Java and MySQL.

If we call IBM a blue giant should we name Oracle a red one? Or may be a Red Devil?…

Not carrying about Java at all, I’m worried about the MySQL future a bit. I don’t want to see this great project dying. The market sees it different, however.