Alex Le’s Blog

Yep, when I logged into my google analytics site, I saw 10 as the new maximum additional profiles! Yay. Good job Google!

Well, to get nph-proxy.cgi to work on 1and1, you have to do these following

1. Upload nph-proxy.cgi as ASCII
2. Chmod the script to 755 using any FTP client (e.g. FileZilla)
3. The default #! usr/bin/perl line of the script works just fine with 1and1 so you don’t have to worry about it.
4. To actually get the script working, change the extension from .cgi to .nph
5. Point your browser to the script, bam, things just work!

For some servers, they use the prefix nph- to signify the PERL engine to not parse the header (nph stands for non-parse-header). My guess is that 1and1 server configs to use the extension .nph to notify the PERL engine instead.

I hope that this saves you some hassles getting nph-proxy.cgi to work. Last of all, check out my proxy page at http://www.lastproxy.com

After surfing around sitepoint.com for a few days, I decided to put up my own proxy site. If Intel have Core Duo 2 (shouldn’t it be Core Quadro or something?), then my site should have dual-proxy — both PHP and CGI flavor.

Besides the regular features of the proxy, I’m thinking about adding countries IP-filtering, which should not be too hard to implement becase the documentations at Maxmind have the code exerpt. So it’s a matter of tweaking the script to work with my site. In light of a site-auction at sitepoint.com forum, .htaccess will also be added to avoid hot-linking. I think there are tons tutorials on how to do this.

Below is a screencast (gif!) of the template is below … I’m pretty happy with the result so far. The design process went really well and I have to admit that I LOVE my stripedesigner.com site. It’s awesome! Can you tell what stripes did I use for this particular design?

Comments are welcome as usual.

I’d like to republish my answer to a question on Sitepoint.com’s forum at http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.php?t=404876 about taking GIF animated screencast instead of outputting as the commonly used Flash. The GIF files have been scaled to fit to normal resolution (its original size is a whopping +900px!) so the image is quite grainy and doesn’t look as good. Click on them for a better view.

I’ve been using Camtasia for a while to produce flash videos and always know that Camtasia can do more than just outputting to Flash. After reading your question, I played with Techsmith Camtasia (I’m using 3.1.1) and found the Export to GIF option in the “Produce Video As” dialog. The rest is just playing with the settings to get to the right color option and file size. The output size is pretty good: I orignially recorded a 50sec long clip of 900 x 464, using the default settings, the file size output is 340Kb! Just a little bit bigger than the 256Kb upload limit of SitePoint. The produced color is slightly off because there is a wide spectrum of color in the screencast.

I chopped the clip down to about 16 secs and the fiesize is 124KB. And here is an attachment of the screencast in GIF. I used [url]http://www.stripedesigner.com[/url] as the test sample because there are small details (the stripes and small patterns) and some animations to see how good the output compression is.

Here is another sample of the clip with Dither On, 256 Color with Fixed palete. The size is a whopping 470Kb but notice how there are more colors. The stripes are quite grainy but it’s understandable because of the dithering and limited color palete. The clip is also a bit longer, close to the orignial 50 sec screen recording.

The result is quite satisfactory, however, I wouldn’t advice to use GIF output for movie or screencast of high color bitrates as we all know that GIF only support 256 colors. I wonder what would happen if we have PNG24-animation (with alpha-channel fullyloaded) ??

So what is my take on this? Probably producing Flash video is a good choice for long, graphics-heavy screencasts as the output SWF will have much better interaction (thanks to the navigational control bar) and higher quality (no pallete-color restriction). But for short clips of screencast, I’d say animated GIF if perfect for the job. Why? GIF is a lot more portable than Flash. Secondly, GIF can be used on mobile phones if you need it to while FlashLite player hasn’t done too well in the mobile phone sector. Thirdly, some people hate Flash and they get FlashBlock to block Flash clips. I do this all the time when go reading news. Newssite now have tons of annoying flash ads that I’m more than to be happy to get rid of them by switching FlashBlock to ON. This leaves animated GIF to be a universal solution to solve the screencast question.

By the way, go for Techsmite Camtasion if you want to do serious screencasts — it’s a much superior application than any other similar products out there!

First of all, thanks to all who have supported my blog by subscribing to the RSS feed. I’m very surprised to find out today on FeedBurner page . Yeah, I finally bit the bullet and signup for feedburner a fey days ago, even though I was quite skeptical about its effectiviess. It turns out that the 10 minutes I spent the other day with FeedBurner helps me see who’s supporting my little blog.

When I put up this blog, I didn’t think it would be of anything useful. YARB - yet another random blog. I gradually wrote more and more on topics that I enjoy and at the same time sharing stuff like Joomla component, JS with other people. The result is that for the past few weeks, Alexle.net constantly get 50 to 100 unique visitors a day, or even close to 200 if I announced something new. To tell you the truth, this is quite a heart-warming experience.

The fact that my blog has 7 subscribers according to FeedBurner is another surprise. 7 is not a large numer, but it’s a start. And I know I have to start somewhere.

Now if you can help me know what topic I should spend more time writing or experimenting on then let me know, from Ajax to CSS to PHP Scripting.

With all the love to you guys!