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Stefan Didak

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Making WordPress Fly with APC, Varnish, Memcached and more!

October 20, 2013 by Stefan Didak 1 Comment
wordpress-logo

It appears that after my previous presentation on developer tools at the East Bay WordPress Meetup I’ve found myself doing another presentation, this time about how to make WordPress fly. Like a bat out of hell. That, of course is both a BatCache and a MeatLoaf reference. Pick whichever suits you based on your age category. ๐Ÿ™‚ This presentation does NOT cover the regular caching plugins but rather on how you can optimize your server (and your code) to make use of a much higher performant level of caching. I will be very quickly covering the levels of caching supported by WordPress itself (the run-time cache, transient cache, object cache, page cache and fragment cache).

Filed Under: Lengthy, Software, The Web Tagged With: Apache, APC, Caching, Digital Ocean, Droplet, Fast, Linode, Meetup, Memcached, Nginx, Opcode Caching, Performance, Speed, Varnish, WordPress, XCache

Resigned from the Oakley Chamber of Commerce

October 3, 2013 by Stefan Didak Leave a Comment
chamber_logo_1-198x150

On October 1st, 2013 I resigned, effective immediately, as a board member/director at the Oakley Chamber of Commerce.The date is actually irrelevant though. The question I will be repeatedly asked now, is โ€œwhyโ€. So hereโ€™s why. I expect the board of directors at a Chamber of Commerce, most of which are business owners, to act and make decisions in a business-like and professional manner for the organization as a whole, its members, its board, and of course for themselves. When important decisions need to be made you need to rely on everyone doing the right thing and bundle all that business experience into something that forms a solid and cohesive decision. At this, however, the board has unfortunately failed and in a way that is incomprehensible to me.

Filed Under: Lengthy, Personal Tagged With: Chamber of Commerce, Oakley

WordPress, Ignytion DDT and the Home Office (aka the Ignyter Network)

July 12, 2013 by Stefan Didak 2 Comments
Ignyter Network

I use WordPress. I use it a lot. I use it for most of my personal sites, business sites, I hack around with it and contort things to do what I need them to do. I’m not, however, one of those WordPress fanatics. In fact, you will hear me say a lot of nice things about Drupal, for example, even in public and even when talking to WordPress fans. I believe in using the right tool for the right job and in this case you can consider platforms of choice to be no different from any tool. One way I use WordPress is for something that nobody ever gets to really see (unless you visit my office and I happen to show you how I manage and control things): managing my vast number of systems, laptops, devices, and most of all the growing deployment of virtual machines. I used to keep track of network port diagrams via Microsoft Visio but since I am not using Windows as much these days and also don’t want to go back to keeping ASCII notes or document files I decided to put together a more proprietary and automated way to keep track of IP addresses, services provided systems and VM’s, passwords, installation and deployment notes, hardware notes, driver information, etc. And for that I decided to go with WordPress.

Filed Under: Home Office, Lengthy, Software, Software Development, The Web Tagged With: APC, Automation, Home Office, Ignyter, jQuery, Nagios, Nginx, PHP, Plugin, Puppet, Skematic, Theme, Twitter Bootstrap, Varnish, WordPress, XDebug

Dreamhost compromised by hackers AGAIN!

June 21, 2013 by Stefan Didak 1 Comment
dreamhost-problems, compromised by hackers once again

n other words, the people who configured the Dreamhost network were a bunch of incompetent fools that didn’t know what they were doing. And I believe most of Dreamhost is still in the same frame of expertise these days. Instead of resolving an external MX record they used local DNS (cached perhaps, I don’t know, but certainly fully internal in a way it should have NEVER BEEN IN THE FIRST PLACE) and mail would go to any domain that was perceived to be local whether it was TRUE OR NOT. I outlined everything in detail, my findings, my repeated tests, and the full proof in the e-mail to them (because they couldn’t be bothered to take a call for which I offered to pay myself) and the response I got was that they COULD NOT FIX IT. In fact, let me just dig this up for the record because Dreamhost deserves some public shaming for this. “Jeff” responded back to me on January 5th 2007 saying…

Filed Under: Personal, Rant, Very Lengthy Tagged With: Dreamhost, Email, Hackers, Hacking, Infection, Malware, Problems, WordPress

My “real developer” presentation at the East Bay WordPress Meetup

June 16, 2013 by Stefan Didak Leave a Comment
A real developer

I’m pleased to announced that I’ve recently acquired the domain for arealdeveloper.com. Details on its content and my future plans for that domain will be revealed later. Possibly quite a bit later. I’ve always thought it was a great domain name so you have no idea how happy I am that I’ve now got it. Most of you KNOW that I am NOT a “web developer”. I am, however, setting up a large scale SaaS project that happens to be web-based (what a surprise!). I frequently encounter people who say they are web developers and yet have never heard of basic things like XDebug, Profiling with XHProf, SASS, LESS, versioning, virtualization and local development servers, etc. So what happens when “arealdeveloper” enters the world of web development? You start looking for the right tools, buying the right hardware and software, invest some time in learning how to make best use of them, and before you know it you’re doing a presentation at the Easy Bay WordPress Meetup in Oakland, CA about developer tools. You can download the 69 slide presentation here.

Filed Under: Apple Software, Rant, Software Development, The Web, Windows Software Tagged With: Development, Easy Bay, PHP, Presentation, Slides, Tools, Web, WordPress

The DEATH of the Hollywood Special Effects Industry

March 2, 2013 by Stefan Didak Leave a Comment
The Death of the VFX industry

Over the past many years, going back at least as far as the past decade, I have been hearing and seeing the hurt and imminent death throes of the VFX (visual effects) industry and its many great artists that made it the industry that it has become over the past several decades. Even thought I have not been an actual “artist” (if I ever was one, since I considered myself always more of a “crazy scientist developer annex artist”, which most of us were back in the founding days before there even WAS a VFX “industry” to speak of) in this field since the very late 80’s, or early 90’s at best, I have most certainly not failed to noticed the direction things have been heading in for a very long time. And I am sad to say that many of the things I saw coming have been coming to a pass in a very rapid pace the past 2 to 3 years. It does appear, however, things are in an even more hyper-accelerated way the past year.

Filed Under: Lengthy, Rant Tagged With: 3D Animation, Computer Graphics, Hollywood, Visual Effects

Home Office Security and Update

February 19, 2013 by Stefan Didak 34 Comments
Tactical Assault Rifle

I know, I know, you had hoped for a major update with pictures of the new final completed Home Office 7.0 and instead you’re getting something completely different! In the meantime, people often ask me what I do about security and protection at home, especially with the office being a possible target of ill-willed criminals and other likeminded varmint. I normally don’t go into details about that and answer in rather broad terms that we have an excellent alarm system that is being monitored 24-7 by a professional security company. However, recently we extended the “home office defense system” (ha ha) with a new firewall and a thing that can fire very nicely at any kind of wall. And not just walls. Meet the home office protection device! You might wonder what on earth I’d need a tactical assault rifle for, amongst other things. The answer to that might be a long story.

Filed Under: Hardware, Home Office, Lengthy Tagged With: Assault Rifle, Gun, Red Dot, Tactical

The Home Office Tattoo?

February 9, 2013 by Stefan Didak 4 Comments
Steven Dray Home Office Tattoo

This morning I woke up and checked my e-mail and found a message from one of the big fans of my office and website, Steven Dray. Attached were two images that certainly surprised me, to make an understatement. Steven has posted the images to his Facebook page and on Twitter but considering the content of the images I’m also posting it here with a little bit more information. It is, I suppose, flattering, but at the same time it brings up a few questions. I asked Steven Dray how he made the image because I couldn’t see any artifacts that are usually present when photoshopping or compositing an image. With my background in 3D computer graphics, rendering, and pixels in general, I would be able to tell and I couldn’t. So either this was a really amazing photoshop skill or not. I asked Steven about it and he told me it wasn’t a composite, it was real.

Filed Under: Home Office, Personal Tagged With: Home Office, Ink, Steven Dray, Tattoo

Mitch Haile and Stefan Didak in the New Office

January 21, 2013 by Stefan Didak Leave a Comment
Mitch Haile and Stefan Didak in the New Office

I have a quick update on the current status of the new (7.0 final) home office for you all. Pictures are being delayed by several factors. One factor being that it’s real busy here. The other factor being that two machines arrived with some serious problems after transport. They’re being looked at now but this is going to be an insurance claim situation. Of course, if you are a fellow crazy home office aficionado, you get “first dibbs” on seeing the current new home office “live and in the flesh” or is that “live and in the metal?” ๐Ÿ™‚ So for those few crazy people out there who blog about how Mitch Haile and myself are adversaries in some kind of home office contest, we’re not. We get along just fine! And yes, Mitch is the first fellow tech guy who’s actually seen the office as it is right now.

Filed Under: Home Office, Personal Tagged With: Home Office, Mitch Haile

Getting ready to build the new home office

December 2, 2012 by Stefan Didak 15 Comments
The new USB LED lights

However, I have most of my camera gear here and the other half is being shipped along with the majority of Home Office 6.0, my books, and tons of boxes with other stuff that still needed to be shipped from Rotterdam to California. With a bit of luck everything should arrive in perfect order sometime near the end of the year. This of course means that starting 2013 I’ll be (finally) constructing the final office 7.0, the combination of the current California office and the previous office.

Filed Under: Home Office, Personal Tagged With: Batteries, Charger, Office 7.0 Beta, Person Of Interest, Velcro, Whiskey
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