FREE THOUGHT · FREE SOFTWARE · FREE WORLD

CSS Background Image Sprites

Using a CSS Background Image Sprite with the CSS background-position and background-image I can display all these icons: . I can even have them show up anywhere on the page!

CSS

Help the Free Software Foundation


Become a member of the Free Software Foundation today to help us reach our goal of $450,000 by January 31st.


Net

Faster Form Submission and Processing with fsockopen

Speedy Forms using background-requestsPart II: Example illustrating how to speed up GET/POST form submissions. Uses fsockopen to initiate a server-side background request to process the submitted data, so that the result page of the form is displayed to the client lightningly quick.

PHP

Make Windows XP Blazingly Fast

Here is the basic process that I use to speed up Windows. A lot of good tips and tricks I've picked up over the past 15+ years of crashing and burning Windows that can transform your PC to be much faster than its ever been. The process focuses on freeing up RAM/Memory, freeing up your CPU/Processor, and optimizing your Hard Drive for a permanent solution.

Make sure to check out the free software I recommend at the end, installing them after this optimization process will keep your machine fast for a long time.

Windows

Getting flash to show up in front of content

Adobe Flash PositioningI used to have a problem of controlling flash elements on my sites.. On one site we have 6 different flash flv movies that are all the same size and are in the same position on the page. But only 1 is displayed at a time based on what the user wants to watch. So the selected flash movie needs to have the highest stacking order/zIndex.

CSS

Advanced Windows Batch File Scripting

Windows Batch Programming ExampleIf for some reason you need to use windows .bat batch file scripting to do some task, or you just want to learn the most universal batch programming language on Windows machines, you lucked out and found the AskApache example. My expertise is the shell, in this article the shell is Windows cmd.exe. It has some pretty advanced windows shell usage, including pipes and redirection, but it's the modular linux-like coding approach that earns this script it's "advanced" title.

:SETPROMPT
set PROMPT=$_[%USERNAME%@%USERDOMAIN%]$S[$P]$_$M$G && EXIT /B

Create an AT job to run as system in Notepad++ IDEMy favorite tool (and I've tried sooo many) for editing most Windows files and especially .bat files is the free and open-source Notepad++. Set that up and you will have a color-syntax-highlighted editor for Batch Scripting that works very very well.

Windows

Come On and Sprite for your Website

CSS Sprite, candid shotLet me show you an example that works so well I am using it right now on my site. Every page in fact. If you are a young or up and coming web developer with skills to pay the bills, lets make the future Net fast, learn about optimization and refactoring while you still have the chance.

CSS

Questions I Ask Web Hosting Companies, Before Buying

The following is a transcript of a chat I had with a company called tektonic, and at that time I was looking for a cheap linux host to use for some redundancy/failover operations. I generally contact a new hosting company like this every few months.. I like to have options available in case of some kind of failure or network attack, so it's always a good idea to have a few ace linux servers in your back pocket.

If you've read any other articles on AskApache, you can see a certain obsession towards optimization, speed, and security -- so that is the purpose of the following questions.

Hosting

DNS Round Robin Configuration using Rsync over SSH

The goal is to add the HostGator server to be an exact mirror of the s.askapache.net domain, then to add that server as a 2nd A record to my DNS zone. That way half the visitors to the size will be taking up resources and bandwidth on the HostGator server instead of mine.

Round Robin A records in DNS are intended to evenly distribute queries between each host of the same name. Using some tricks straight out of a hackers toolbox we can verify if the distribution is taking place. (It is.)

Optimization

Optimizing Servers and Processes for Speed with ionice, nice, ulimit

To prepare for several upcoming articles on AskApache that are focused on optimizing Servers and Sites from a server admin level, here is an article to introduce the main tools that we will be using. These tools are used to optimize CPU time for each process using nice and renice, and other tools like ionice are used to optimize the Disk IO, or Disk speed / Disk traffic for each process. Then you can make sure your mysqld and httpd processes are always fast and prioritized.

Optimization

PullQuotes using CSS

CSS, no javascript pullquote not blockquoteI looked at a lot of different ways to display quotes and pullquotes and even though the javascript solutions are very nice, esp. the 456bereastreet.com solution, I decided to just use CSS (Keep It Simple Stupid).

CSS

Internet Census 2012 – Port scanning using insecure embedded devices – Carna Botnet

While playing around with the Nmap Scripting Engine (NSE) we discovered an amazing number of open embedded devices on the Internet. Many of them are based on Linux and allow login to standard BusyBox with empty or default credentials. We used these devices to build a distributed port scanner to scan all IPv4 addresses. These scans include service probes for the most common ports, ICMP ping, reverse DNS and SYN scans. We analyzed some of the data to get an estimation of the IP address usage.

Hacking

Optimized Vimrc with 256 Colorscheme

askapachecode 256color colorscheme and vimrc screenshotThis is not your everyday vimrc. This is my personalized vimrc.. works especially great on remote servers, in tmux, screen, etc.

This doesn't require a git checkout, a vim update, a bash update, an OS update, a plugin. No. 1 vimrc, 1 colorscheme, just use curl to download and it's on. I use this on Arch Linux, NetBSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Debian, Ubuntu, Cent OS, Red Hat, and that's mostly it so far.
If you aren't already using vim as your primary editor in a powerful way, you are gonna owe me for this.

Linux

TMUX

penguin-tmuxarchlinux-on-macStop wasting your lives with Mac Terminals.. or Macs. Get a real machine and then get a real shell multiplexer! For many years we all loved GNU Screen, but tmux is by far a better option today. The only time I am in the shell and not using a multiplexer, is when I'm not on one of my machines. My Arch Linux machines all run URxvt and my .bash_profiles all start tmux automataically, whether in X or single-user mode, tmux is where it's at.

Hacking, Linux

Caching WordPress with Batcache and Memcache

join-meUsing memcache for me personally and the client sites I work on, has improved performance by over 1000%, in some cases even higher than that. It is a truly revolutionary way to optimize the performance of MySQL queries, remote requests such as to twitter or other apis, and this article is step 1. Plan is to go all the way to step 10 in future articles, it it grossly underused and misused in the WP world.

Optimization, WordPress

Google Web Fonts for Programming and Code

Ok, so on a site like this one, there is a tremendous amount of 'code' styled with CSS fonts in a pre, code, var, tt, samp, or kbd html tag. When using an programming tool like VIM to write code it is shown beautifully using your OS fonts. So then, how can we get that same font beauty to be there on the web? And, of course the solution must use best-practices (and preferably only use CSS and (X)HTML).

Also, text effects! --> View Solution

CSS

Crazy POWERFUL Bash Prompt

bash power prompt PS1This amazing bash linux prompt does more than meets the eye. If you want to know how to become really good with technology, linux is the secret sauce behind the AskApache articles. Open Source is elixir of the web. Thanks to everyone who helped me for the past 20 years. I use linux/bsd because homey don't play, so this is geared to be as productive a prompt as I can make it.

Don't have much time.. or just don't care? Not a problem, here are the 3 lines to copy and paste - you can just paste them right in your shell to test it, or add to a startup script.

export AA_P="export PVE=\"\\033[m\\033[38;5;2m\"\$(( \`sed -n \"s/MemFree:[\\t ]\\+\\([0-9]\\+\\) kB/\\1/p\" /proc/meminfo\` / 1024 ))\"\\033[38;5;22m/\"\$((\`sed -n \"s/MemTotal:[\\t ]\\+\\([0-9]\\+\\) kB/\\1/p\" /proc/meminfo\`/ 1024 ))MB\"\\t\\033[m\\033[38;5;55m\$(< /proc/loadavg)\\033[m\";echo -en \"\""
export PROMPT_COMMAND="history -a;((\$SECONDS % 10==0 ))&&eval \"\$AA_P\";echo -en \"\$PVE\";"
export PS1="\\[\\e[m\\n\\e[1;30m\\][\$\$:\$PPID \\j:\\!\\[\\e[1;30m\\]]\\[\\e[0;36m\\] \\T \\d \\[\\e[1;30m\\][\\[\\e[1;34m\\]\\u@\\H\\[\\e[1;30m\\]:\\[\\e[0;37m\\]\${SSH_TTY} \\[\\e[0;32m\\]+\${SHLVL}\\[\\e[1;30m\\]] \\[\\e[1;37m\\]\\w\\[\\e[0;37m\\] \\n(\$SHLVL:\\!)\\\$ " && eval $AA_P

Linux

Hacking VLAN switched networks

Bypassing VLAN security on networked switchesThere isn't much vlan info on the net in terms of specifics and I had to learn all about it because I needed to log in to a switch that was on a different vlan. With the help of the Ettercap developers NaGA and ALoR I figured it out.

Originally Posted: 3/30/2004

Hacking

Security with Apache htaccess Tutorial

Apache Security tips and tricks for securing Apache Web Servers using htaccess, httpd.conf, and other built-in techniques to thwart attackers. This really should be required reading for any Apache admin or user because these little tricks are so easy to do.

Htaccess