This week SAUDI NET customer care team left NCCI building and moved to one of the STC (out parent company) headquarter buildings.

The customer care works in shifts 24 hours a day, and today it is the first time since I came to SAUDI NET 5 years ago I come to my office and no one else in our floor except me.

I rarely chat with the guys in customer care, I am not very social person after all, but today I really missed them a lot, I really feel a huge void in my life, very sad moment indeed.

http://my.saudi.net.sa/webcam

GD is a graphic library that enable PHP to manipulate images, to install it from FreeBSD port us:

# cd /usr/ports/graphics/php4-gd
# make -DWITHOUT_X11 install

The tip is to use WITHOUT_X11 option this will save you from compiling X Windows which is needed for some of GD supported formats.

Whenever I install new machine or a new browser I download one HTML file and make it my home page.

This start page contains:

• Search form for many of my favourite search engines.
• Links to my favourite links.

The start page save me a lot of time typing, since it have links of frequently used websites.

Give it a try, My Start Page.

I tested different types of caching, here is my times:

Altought File caching is much faster that the other two methods, it can suffer from file locking problems, and can’t be shared between more than one server.

memcached client used is written in PHP which will slow it down a little bit.

So MySQL seems the ideal choice 😉

When I started building alriyadh.com website I decided to generate all pages as static HTML files, I relied heavily on Server Side Includes (SSI) to build complex pages.

The main reason for this decision was the fact that the server was very slow on processing PHP files, espcially with a site with high load.

Generating static HTML files has its advantages but it also had many problems:

• Regenerate everytime you want to test a change
• Changing the design will cause regenrating the whole website, which could take forever.
• Generating complex pages is very hard, I had to rely on SSI.
• What to do with pages that change frequently, e.g. pages with comments.
• When importing old data, you need to generate them as well.
• Static HTML files performance advantage for frequently used data, like todays issue, but for old issues it just take a lot of disk space.

Soon I’ll start testing dynamicly generated of pages with these points in mind:

Ruby on Rails is a web development framework written in Ruby computer language.
It is based on the Model-View-Controller (MVC) architecture.
Smarty does a good job in the areas of View-Controller in PHP language, but I always had a feeling that the model part can be improved, but no idea how. I raed a little about Object-Relational mapping but it seems very complicated and very restircting.
Ruby on Rails on the other hand does a good job in the these 3 areas, specially the Model part, they have something called ActiveRecord which maps database tables.
There are also PHP clone for Ruby on Rails, Cake PHP, it is still in its early phases, but could give a feeling of what Ruby on Rails can offer.

Osama Aldosary started a Saudi Ubuntu email group at Yahoo Groups, join us!

Click to join subuntu

We’ve just upgrade SAUDI NET main mail server 350GB, RAID-5, simply awesome.

Even fungus couldn’t eat McDonald’s Food