Alriyadh.com website is now served by Lighttpd (aka Lighty).

I moved all static content from Apache to Lighty, Lighty “select” based design makes it ideal for I/O bound operation, i.e. disk and network operations. For this reason Lighty move all CPU bound operations to external process and communicate with them using FastCGI protocol.

This is what delayed my migration to Lighty, because I used to compile PHP with mod_php only and with FastCGI support, so I have to recompile PHP to enable it. Of course I spent few days testing, and I am still having some areas not covered completely.

Few weeks ago I started using Google Reader, and so far it is amazing. Basically you subscribe all your RSS feeds you are interested in Google Reader, and instead of visiting 10 or 20 website, you visit Reader page to get the latest updates.

The integration with Firefox is amazing, just click on RSS icon and you can add it directly to Google Reader, very easy.

I used to use Thunderbird for a while for RSS, but after I set it up I forgot to use it. The subscription method is bit more complex than Google reader, and lack of a single folder for all of my RSS feeds make it useless.

Since we migrated Saudi Arabia international lines from ISU to us, we started to host the most unpopular web page in the kingdom, Internet Block Page.
We started hosting it on Apache web server, but we noticed timeout problems with the server, to discover that slow clients reserve many Apache process which lead to consuming all of Apache processes.
Lighttpd came to the rescue, I replaced Apache with Lighttpd and so far it is doing a great job. Lighttpd is a prefect fit since the website only serve one static page, and this where Lighttpd shines.
This doesn’t mean Lighttpd is better than Apache, each one has its own uses, this small comparison table for both:

FreeBSD my favorite operating system has new version 6.2. The new version has many features, the most intersting (for me at least):

• freebsd-update provides officially supported binary updates for security fixes and errata patches (I always thought applying the patches manually isn’t friendly enough for most people).
• csup, an integrated cvsup client (Now I don’t have to install it manually in new machines).

If you never used FreeBSD invest sometime on it, and I guarantee that you will fall in love with it 🙂

Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency (SAMA) lately is doing a horrible job with SPAN network, SPAN is Saudi Arabia system for paying using your bank card.

In the last 4 months, most transactions from local store fails, which force many business and customer to fall back to an older technology, Cash!!

I am not used to carrying a lot of cash with me, and rely on my bank card to buy goods.

Recently I have improved alriyadh.com voting system, many of them are in administration area, some of these changes will be visible in the near future.

One of the new additions is the previous votes page:
http://www.alriyadh.com/php/vote/

Check it out, and keep in mind the design is still under work.

Memo to self: replace the word “vote” with “poll”

UPDATE: If you see weird colors in IE (7?) it is fixed now.

According to this website:
http://linkdonkey.blogspot.com/2007/01/fattest-countries-on-earth.html
Saudi Arabia is the 8th fattest country on Earth. Other Arab countries are also included!

Does the government know about this?
What do you suggest to do about it.

10) Emirates – 25.9 men/39.9 women
9) Palestine – 23.9 men/42 women
8) Saudi Arabia – 26.4 men/44 women
7) French Polynesia – 36.3 men/ 44.3 women
6) Qatar – 34.6 men/45.3 women
5) Nieue – 15 men/46 women
4) Jordan – 32.7 men/59.8 women
3) Samoa – 32.9 men/63 women
2) Tonga – 46.6% men / 70.3% women
1) Nauru – 80.2% men / 78.6% women

XCache is relatively new PHP code optimizer, written by “Jan Kneschke” the same guy who wrote Lighttpd web server.

After migrating Alriyadh.com to the new dual CPU servers, I had problems with APC PHP optimizer and locking, so I disabled the optimizer altogether, after all the CPU was very fast and it handled the load without any problems.

But lately with my increasing interest on Lighttpd I noticed XCache, I never heard of it before but after reading the web site, and the problem APC have with multi processors I decided to give XCache a try, and the best of all it was ready in FreeBSD ports, so I installed it and so far it doing a good job.

since Saturday 3 am, but I just got recovered from the jet lag.
Hopefully I’ll post my trip highlight and photos soon.

I am currently on vacation in Thailand, so far I love it. Really beautiful and clean despite being crowded in some areas.

Hopefully I’ll post more about in the coming days. Meanwhile checkout out my photos on Flickr:
rayed @ Flickr