Category Archives: Software

The NeoSmart DevNet Initiative

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NeoSmart Technologies is pleased to announce the logical next-step in our contributions to the tech community by the establishment of the NeoSmart DevNet project.

NeoSmart DevNet is a new effort on behalf of NST to reach out and lend a helping hand to other software developers by providing a number of tools, libraries, and frameworks that we’ve developed over the last several years to address certain commonly-encountered issues in a generic-yet-customizable manner.

Basically, DevNet is an attempt at getting software developers to spend more time on developing their applications verses worrying about the stuff that they need to get there. Unlike other developer resources on the internet, the goal of DevNet is to provide complete working subsystems and frameworks to developers, almost entirely doing away with the need for supplemental coding and code-monkey work.

For instance, the first of our DevNet projects to be released is a scriptable graphical HTTP/FTP downloader. The NeoSmart Downloader (NST Downloader) is intended to be drop-in solution for anyone looking to add the ability to download and run components from the internet to their software projects. All interfacing with the NST Downloader is done via command-line arguments, making it language-agnostic and dead-simple to use.

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File-Based Extension to the WordPress Object Cache

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WordPress 2.5 has just been released, and has users are quickly finding out, file-based object caching has been removed from this release.

We’ve just released another extension to the WordPress object cache mechanism, supplementing our existing plugins for adding eAccelerator and XCache support to WordPress’s object caching features.

NeoSmart Technologies’ File-Based object caching extension for WordPress re-implements the cache-to-disk object caching feature of WordPress 2.0 through to 2.2. NeoSmart Technologies is also committed to the maintenance and support of the file-based caching mechanism.

Please be careful with the use of this plugin. It’s been disabled in the default WordPress codebase since WordPress 2.1 as a result of certain shared webhosts complaining of increased disk I/O access and thrashing when WordPress is subjected to extreme load times (as in the event of a Digg or Slashdot attack); so make sure your disk is fast enough to make it worth using this extension.

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Preying on the Handicapped and Giving Geeks a Bad Name

Posted on by Mahmoud Al-Qudsi
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When you’ve practically lived online day-in, day-out for the past decade or so you tend to develop a thick skin to the malevolent things that tend to happen every once in a while. But there are some things that you’d never expect, not once in a million years; they strike a nerve and they really do hurt.

This morning I came across such an event that penetrated that virtual suite of armor when I read this Wired.com article about a recent script-kiddy attack on a web forum run by The Epilepsy Foundation – the news is so bad it makes one’s blood boil. A group of crackers launched a bone-chillingly cold-blooded and thoughtless attack on the members of the epilepsy forum. They weren’t looking for money, private info, fame, or acknowledgement — they were merely searching for a way to cause as much physical and mental harm as possible.

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WordPress, PerformancePress, and GSoC 2008

Posted on by Mahmoud Al-Qudsi
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For those of you that haven’t yet heard, WordPress is once-more taking part in the Google Summer of Code. Google Summer of Code 2008 is a Google-sponsored program where college students are encouraged to contribute to their favorite open-source projects for a summer, and in exchange both they and their mentors receive some monetary compensation/motivation for their efforts.

I really don’t need to go into details about this much, since Lloyd Budd has done such a good job explaining what it is and what WordPress hopes to achieve in this program. This year, WordPress has an even-larger and more-exciting list of possible projects than before, along with a list of the mentors available for each idea. This Google Summer of Code, I’ll be mentoring for the WordPress projects in the one area that is closest to my heart: improving performance.

It would be unfair to say that WordPress is slow or an inadequately-performing blogging engine, because that’s not really true. "Performance," more than any other software characteristic or trait, is a very relative and subjective index. It depends on thousands of different factors, it has dozens of different baselines, and most confusingly of all, sometimes the perception of performance matters more than the performance itself.

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WordPress 2.5 and the Object Cache…

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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Caching and Why We Need It

Ever since the creation of interpreted languages and the birth of dynamic web content, developers have been on the lookout for tools, workarounds, and extensions in search of a solution for a solution to bring maximum performance to the world of dynamically-generated web pages.

Perhaps the simplest, most straight-forward, and most effective of these solutions is the caching technique. In most caching implementations, the dynamic content generated by user requests to a particular URI on a server trigger the caching mechanism which then stores the generated content in a "storage facility" somewhere. Future requests to the same URI retrieve the stored content rather than spend time and effort re-creating the response.

The most-popular method of caching involves the archiving of the complete HTML response generated by the webserver and then stored as a static content on the hard drive for retrieval at a later date (usually with some mechanism responsible for expiring the content upon certain actions or after a set amount of time).

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Windows 7 FactsCentral

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As a first-step in our coverage of Windows 7, we’ve created the Windows 7 FactsCentral site, accessible either via our wiki or through the following direct link:
http://win7.neosmart.net/

The Windows 7 FactsCentral site is intended to be a one-stop information center, where info about available builds, verified facts regarding Windows 7, etc. are available in encyclopedia format (verses the chronological article-nature of posts here on The NeoSmart Files).

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Introducing NeoSmart Coverage of Windows 7

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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Press Notice: NeoSmart Technologies will by providing blow-by-blow reports regarding the next version of Windows, as the facts come in.

As always, NeoSmart Technologies remains committed to providing accurate and verifiable information from trustworthy sources. We’re also dedicated to providing reports/articles regarding content that our readers deem important and newsworthy; so you’ll always be able to find the latest accurate information regarding the Microsoft’s next OS at The NeoSmart Files.

Celebrating Pi Day (and other magical numbers)

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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Today is Pi-Day 2008. A day in honor of Pi, one of the oldest and most mysterious mathematical constants known to man. A day in celebration of the works of dozens of great mathematicians and scholars. A day to revel in the glory and power of Pi. For those of you that live in the USA and use the MM/DD date representation format, the reason should be clear enough: March 14th, 2008 == 3.14.

Pi isn’t just a number that you can use to calculate circle-related mathematics, it’s a symbol of something by far greater. Pi is one of many “magic” numbers that are found everywhere – if you know where to look. These magic numbers can’t be explained, they just are. And if you use them right, they make it a lot easier to do a lot of really complicated things… In a way, they’re a testimony to technology and computers (or vice-versa, depending on how you look at it).

Pi, i, e, and Phi are just some of the numbers that have an almost-magical role in furthering scientific and mathematical studies and observations in our daily lives. It doesn’t matter where they came from or what they actually mean; the one thing that truly counts is what you can make them do for you.

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Gigabyte’s Solid-Core Capacitors: A Gimmick?

Posted on by Mahmoud Al-Qudsi
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All the hardware manufacturers currently on the market boast and brag about not using anything other than the latest solid-core capacitors on their high-end motherboards. Perhaps the most notable of these is Gigabyte, which has been touting its “Ultra-Durable” brand of capacitors more than any other manufacturer. According to Gigabyte, their capacitors will last up to 18 times longer than standard electrolytic capacitors, and 3 times longer than the solid-core capacitors used in other high-end motherboards:

Gigabyte Capacitor Ultra-Durable 2

The problem is, these capacitors are also susceptible to internal damage and malfunctions, even if not as often. And when these capacitors do fail, it’s not as easy to tell nor as easy to fix.

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Internet Explorer 8 Screenshots

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As promised in our last post, we have some screenshots of Windows Internet Explorer 8 for those of you anxious to see where the latest iteration of Microsoft’s browser. While there are a couple of changes that stand out, most of the visual improvements are subtle and take some keen observation to notice.

The screenshots: http://neosmart.net/gallery/album/view/apps/Internet+Explorer/IE8/

We’re still working on an in-depth review and analysis of what IE8 brings to the proverbial web browser table.