I haven’t messed around with my Google search history all that much but I saw a cool feature today that creates a heat map on a monthly calendar that tracked my search usage. If anything I still use Google way to much. These searches are also only from home desktop.

I think 150+ searches per day is a lot. I’m hoping I don’t hit 250+ any time soon. It would be nice if Google could provide this data in XML or some other downloadable format so I could play with it without having to drag it screaming out of their website.

And this is an embarrassing graph of my insomnia.

APC or Alternative PHP Cache is an awesome add-on for any apache web server. On my own server I was able to to handle about I was able to serve well over 1 million page views on a single server more traffic just by enabling the software. Facebook recently gave a presentation on how they use APC to serve over a billion php pages per month. My server does about 3% of that and its been running since 2004 so naturally Facebook doing the same thing as me is good reinforcement that I know what I’m doing.

Installing APC

First you have to download the latest APC and then uncompress it. To compile it use these 4 lines.

/usr/bin/phpize

./configure –enable-apc –enable-apc-mmap –with-apxs=/usr/local/apache/bin/apxs –with-php-config=/usr/bin/php-config –enable-apc-pthreadmutex

make

make install

To finish installing APC you need to edit php.ini and point it at the apc.so directory.

extension_dir = /usr/lib/php/extensions/
extension = apc.so

Configuring APC

My Server

apc.shm_segments = 1
apc.shm_size = 64
apc.stat = 1

Facebook

apc.shm_segments = 1
apc.shm_size = 648
apc.stat = 0

Other Improvements

Naturally setting up APC isn’t the only thing you can do to improve your server and your users experience. Enabling MySQL query cache is one thing you should do as it will vastly improve the number of pages your server can serve.

my.cnf with 64mb cache

query_cache_type = 1
query_cache_size = 67108864

Another thing you can do is use the Firefox plugin YSlow from Yahoo and it will show what parts of your site are slow and it will also make suggestions on what you can do to improve load times. They have a user guide thats better than anything I can write.

Beyond simple server setups you can use squid as a reverse transparent proxy to serve static content and you can learn about distributed cluster computing from Google.

I played around with Google Presentation today. The collaboration feature is amazing. No more having to meet with your group members to finish a Powerpoint presentation. I really think it can take out Powerpoint in its current state if they can reduce the CPU usage a little. The update feature is a beast and was using 20-40% of my cpu on a blank slide with one other person connected.

Presentations is lacking video and sound support which is a good thing IMO. I haven’t seen a Powerpoint yet where sound/video adds to the presentation. Each presentation has a 10 megabyte limit so movies are pretty much out of the question anyway.

Google could improve by adding the chat feature to the editor thats present in the presentation mode. Presentations also needs a way to lock down changes on slides and add commentary/notes that doesn’t show up in the presentation. The right click feature is also broken when you are clicking on selected text objects.

The good news is that its very simple to use. Sure it lacks some of the more powerful things that power users want but its probably easier to use for a beginner compared to Powerpoint.

Google has finally added search to the Reader product. I woke up and got this surprise.

Gotta love it. Now all they need to do is add better tasks to Google Calendar so that I can see whats due soon as well as set reminders. I wouldn’t mind better color coding too.

So I check out the trends feature a realized something, I can’t maintain a normal sleep schedule.

So at 3-4am is the drop due to no one else publishing or me sleeping.

GMail is the gold standard in file sharing for college students. Every group project I’ve ever worked on since GMail was how everyone shared files between one another. Recently while using Google Reader I thought about my GMail usage and wondered why it doesn’t have any keyboard shortcuts. Well it does and I needed to turn them on.

Settings -> Keyboard Shortcuts on

Granted now you have to learn how to use them. I’ve included a list of GMail keyboard shortcuts that I’ve found. You can read the official list but I think mine is easier to use.

c - compose
/ - search
k - move to newer conversation
j - move to older conversation
n - next message
p - previous message
o or enter - open a conversation
u - return to conversation list
y - archive a conversation
m - mute user, all email from user is automatically archived
x - select conversation
s - star a message or conversation
! - report spam
r - reply to a mail
a - reply to all recepients
f - forward message
esc - escape from input field
ctrl+s - save draft
tab -> enter - send message
y -> o - archive your conversation and move to the next one.
g -> a - show all mail
g -> s - show starred conversations
g -> c - show contacts list.
g -> d - show drafts
g -> i - show inbox

If you like to stay current you have to read a lot of websites. RSS Feeds are like a gift from heaven because they make it so much easier to browse and ignore content. Using a RSS reader like Google is like reading 100s of printer friendly websites at one time. No outrageous ads and quick, easy browsing. I’d thought I’d share some of the feeds that I subscribe to currently.

• TechCrunch - Just like Mashable but more focused. I’ll read a story here before I go to Mashable.
• Engadget - Who doesn’t like gadgets? I wish they would shut up about the iPhone though.
• Official Google Blog - Keep an eye on what Google is doing.
• Slashdot - News for nerds. Now that JonKatz is gone the site is pretty decent. They could use a spell checker though.
• Digg / Technology - most of Digg is now filled with spam, repeats and bad spelling. Occasionally they have some links that I haven’t seen somewhere else. I do enjoy watching diggnation every once and a while.
• How to Change the World - Guy Kawasaki’s blog. I like to read his insights as an entrepreneur.
• Mashable - I like to see whats new in the web.
• Penny Arcade - Because their comics aren’t daily its nice to see when they put out new comics.

The only complaint I have about Google Reader right now is that you can’t use search. The lack of search makes no sense to me. Where is the text search Google? Isn’t your whole business model ads and search.