Jun 29, 2011

Google+ Design

The Google+ project: real life sharing, rethought for the web.

This looks very promising. Sadly I don't have any access to it at the moment. The only thing that I notice is the nice design that's slowly coming out. The Google Search page looks very very nice now. I like the new Top Bar a lot more than the old one.

I just wish Google would integrate things more into Blogger. This would have been nice with Buzz but didn't really happen there. It should be made easy to create a new Blogger post from something in your Feed. Also I would love to see a way to post a daily/weekly/monthly summary on Blogger from Buzz/Twitter/.. At least Chrome has a nice extension to create a post from what ever website you are on. I would rather like this to be more like on Facebook when you post a link into the stream. It would make this look so much nicer. I'm still hoping that this will happen one day.

Jun 28, 2011

Boost Team's Intelligence? Recruit Women

Want to Boost Your Team's Intelligence? Recruit More Women (and More Diversely)

I've been saying this for years now. I always like to have some women on a team. The end result just is much better. They just have such a different view on things. Sadly they are so rare in my work field.

Jun 23, 2011

Everything is a Remix

Everything is a Remix

Cool short videos, inspiring ...

MeeGo and Nokia

Editorial: Dear Nokia, you cannot be serious!

sad to see that this would have turned out as a good OS after all.

Did Nokia jump ship too early? After spending some quality time with the N9, I'd say so.

Jun 21, 2011

Nokia N9 UI hands-on demo



Nice MeeGo device. Would love to have one of those :). Such a shame that Nokia discontinued these devices.

Jun 13, 2011

Using Free Alternatives to Microsoft Office

Am I Missing Out by Using Free Alternatives to Microsoft Office? - Lifehacker

basically what I would say as well. Wasn't missing something for years now on OpenOffice/LibreOffice.

Jun 12, 2011

Drupal 7 admin pages slow

So for some time I've been running Drupal 7 for my private webpage. It has been slow as hell on the admin pages. The "frontend" side works fast and without any slowdown. There are others experiencing the same trouble. A lot of others it seems.

For years I've been running Drupal now and it's only since I switched to version 7 that it started to have speed problems. It has a major slowdown on all admin pages. They take sometimes 30+ seconds to load and almost every admin page uses 10+ seconds. The high times cause PHP to throw an error (Maximum execution time of 30 seconds exceeded) that some function was running too long. I constantly got these errors on admin pages. It was barely usable. I had to reload pages multiple times (often 5+ times) to finally get them to show. Each time I had to wait till the timeout came.

Furthermore the update.php page had the same problem. I couldn't update more than 2 modules for some time. Now I updated to version 7.2 and with that updated all modules to the newest versions. I wasn't able to update two of the modules. They run into this timeout even when they where the only modules which needed an update. So I desperately needed a solution for this problem as one was the views module which I need.

After a long time of seaching the net, this is what I found out and did so far:
  • It helps to disable all modules that aren't needed (of course). Especially the special modules for the admin pages like the Overlay module or the Update Manager module. These help minimally to increase page loading speeds. I did disable all non needed modules.
  • I installed the devel module to check where the problem is. This showed me that its on the PHP side and not the database.
  • There are some optimizations that can be done on the database side. I didn't do these as the database seems fast enough.
  • Someone wrote that it may be due to not finished installs of some module that messed up Drupal. This could be the case for me. I had a few "failed" upgrades of modules in the past. Uninstalling the module and reinstalling it is supposed to help. Didn't try this so far and it's hard to find the problematic modules. I'm considering a fresh install of Drupal with a new DB. Just need to have time for it and backup all the current data.
  • Another obvious solution is to increase the PHP timeout. This is what I did as the other solutions are too time consuming or don't feel "right". Edit the .htaccess file located within the drupal root directory and add a "php_value max_execution_time 90" at the end. 90 stands for 90 seconds, use what you think fits. You just need to remember that you did this the next time you update Drupal.