Clker.com - weblog

I love using Linux to do my work. My best usage of Linux is my web server, although I recall I read once that Linus never intended for the kernel to be used as a server. He was more focused on using the kernel in desktops. I’ve been running my own web server for almost a year now, which runs two websites mibrahim.net my real estate website, and clker.com a to be online clipart website - we’re halfway there.

The fun part is simply everything just works. You’ll have all the tools you need starting from database engines like postgres, mysql to scripting languages like php, ruby with different types of webservers apache, lighthttpd and others. All the tools you might think of are there and under your own hand. Building your own server is not expensive - around $100 will do it. You don’t need a super quad core machine to produce extremely fast websites, unless you are already getting more than 50 page requests per second and at that point you will need something faster.

The performance bottle neck is never the CPU, it’s the hard drives read or write speeds. You can improve on that using fake RAIDs. Almost all Linux distros offer fake RAIDs and that is the cheapest way to improve the read speed.

Setting up your server is not a hard process. The best distributions that I recommend are Debian and Ubuntu. The reason is the very large library of software that comes with each. I believe that now the full distribution has grown more than 11 CDs. I used to run Debian and switched to Ubuntu a year ago and the reason behind the switch is the faster updates I get from Ubuntu, which enables me to use more recent and updated versions of PHP and the database engines.

The easiest setup is using the Ubuntu server CD, which is not any different from the desktop CD in terms of binaries. The only difference is that it won’t install the X11-server (GUI) and the window managers (gnome or kde) and the install program itself runs over the console and not VGA graphics. I use the server installation, and connect to my server using ssh. I have another old machine that runs Ubutu as well, and is used to run freenx. By that way I keep the server’s memory for the services running, and I can add all the GUI programs I want on this old machine.

Since I greatly benefited from running my own web server, I will share my experiences every now and then when I’ve got time to write.

Technorati Tags: ubuntu, linux, server, apache, database, sql server, database server, web server

I previously wrote about hardware problems that were puzzling me, and I finally found the answer. I installed sensors on ubuntu and ran ksensors and just watched what’s going on. The old server that was shutting down suddenly had an opteron dual core processor, which ran at 50 degrees Celsius at no load. I had three websites running there, the most recent addition is clker.com . Due to the large number of people that were trying to access the website, the CPU was loaded and overheated, which inturn lead to it shutting down.

Of course the solution is to put the server in a very cold room, which I don’t have. I resorted to buying a new board and CPU, which does not heat as much as the old ones and transfered the database and pictures to it. Currently the no load temperature is 11 degrees, which I think is great. This new board is a special sale from microcenter, both the board and CPU were for $94 with $15 rebate Sempron 64! I added 1GB of RAM. It really worked much better than my expectations, as I had very very low performance expectations from that CPU

Currently this server is running clker.com only, and will run mibrahim.net today. The CPU load as shown in top does not pass 2% except in spikes. People are still digging as well as search engine robots. So that’s a good value if someone wants to run his/her own starter website.

Technorati Tags: ubuntu, shutting down, temperature, sempron, AMD, performance, linux, web server, server, php, postgresql

The web server has been shutting down by itself for the past week. I tried looking at the logs to figure out why I come to my office and I find it turned off. It looks like there’s a hardware problem causing the server to shutdown suddenly.

Luckily, I didn’t get any database corruptions - not until now. I changed the power supply and testing to see the results. In my experience almost 90% of the time it is a power supply problem especially that I’m loading the server with an extra useless PATA hard drive just to make GRUB happy.

Technorati Tags: grub, hardware, failures, clker, clker.com, power supply

Finally, there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. It’s 4:21 AM and I’m very happy to reach this stage with the openoffice addon.

You can download it Openoffice.org addon for clker.com integration . Installation is very easy, from the tools menu in openoffice, select Extension Manager. Click add, and point to the file. You will need to restart openoffice for it to work.

This extension will show you the contents of your basket stored on clker, and will allow you to place any clipart image in the clipboard, then you can paste it in the correct place in your document.

Still there are some minor issues:

1. The addon parent is currently null, so an extra window will appear in the task bar
2. The way we place the picture in the clipboard is by loading it in draw, select all and copy then closing draw. There are better ways for doing this. You will notice that the screen will flicker especially if your using the ODG or the SVG formats since draw takes some time to render the vectors.

In case you wanted to play with the source, the addon source is here.

Technorati Tags: addon, uno, openoffice, gallery, clipart, online, clker

Many things happened over the thanksgiving weekend. First there’s a lot of work done in reading the svg metadata, parsing and using it. Now, all the tags inside the svg files are used as tags for the images. Also, the title of the clipart page first is obtained from the svg metadata. If the svg metadata did not have a title, then we make up a title from the original svg filename.

Over the search bar a bread crumb is now visible that shows where the user is, and how he is opening the tags and relative tags. Under the search bar, the most prominent tags are shown. This helps the user to fine tune his search.

Technorati Tags: clipart, clip, art, images, files, tags, tagging, svg, meta, data, metadata, title, keywords, search

I’ve been working since yesterday on an addon to openoffice.org , which will directly insert images from clker.com . The way it works is by searching for the images you want, adding them to my basket , then going to openoffice.org and hitting the addon button.

Just from few minutes I got the basic idea to work, and the addon is accessing the contents of the basket. I would now give the openoffice.org team a super thumbs up on the UNO implementation and the way it is designed - also to the netbeans team.

I’ve been out all day today, eating almost at every stop turkey, stuffing plus driving for more than three hours from Germantown to Ocean City - yet I’m so excited about this addon and still working on it. I’ll see how much longer I will last before collapsing :)…..

Watch the website after thanksgiving for the release of the addon - I’ll do my best to get it out by Monday if not before.

Technorati Tags: openoffice, open, office, org, addon, clipart, clker, turkey, thanksgiving, stuffing, ocean city, germantown

One of the SVG pictures that had troubles is the powered by Ubuntu logo. In an earlier post I described that I’m doing some SVG cleanup, and still to expect more cleanup in the future. One of the images that I was looking forward to is the powered by Ubuntu logo. So I’m up to some coloring for this night ! I will try to make a unified theme for both the website part, and the wordpress weblog part, and of course will incorporate the powered by Ubuntu logo, since this server is actually powered by Ubuntu.

Technorati Tags: ubuntu, powered, powered by ubuntu, server, webserver, apache, wordpress, theme, css, style

More cleanup since yesterday. I found that some SVGs have bogus linked images, which makes inkscape show a big red cross saying “linked image not found”. I added a pre-filtering stage before the thumbnails are created in which the SVG is cleaned up. In that process, bogus image insertions are deleted, and non-ASCII characters are replaced by spaces. This is another issue that appeared with non us-english files. I found that there are characters over 127, but the XML file is assumed to be ascii, which again makes inkscape and other programs I’m using throw errors.

I ran the thumbnail regeneration script and lots of images are getting cleaned up. There are still some problems with ODG export, and little by little I’ll get all of the problems taken care of.

Technorati Tags: inkscape, odg, clipart, openoffice, openoffice.org, openclipart, openclipart.org, svg, png, export, cleanup, clean, up

Human beings are visual creatures. Pictures and eye sight is the second important way by which humans learn after hearing. Adding pictures related to your post will help visitors get your point. Exactly like adding pictures in a presentation, which help people understand the description made by the presenter.

Adding pictures to your weblog post will also help attract attention to your article, and increase the time your visitors stay. Pictures breaks the boring lengthy text of an article and gives the reader a break in the middle.

An important factor is then how easy is it to a) find a picture ad b) add it to your weblog?

Clker.com offers a huge collection of high quality cliparts. All cliparts are tagged with relevant words making it very easy to search and find the exact picture you’re looking for. You can directly copy the HTML code and paste it in your weblog’s page. All pictures can be easily embedded in any HTML source.

By default, all pictures are floated to the left making the text wrap around it without wasting your weblog space. You can manually remove the float and allow the picture to occupy a full horizontal area as shown above.

Technorati Tags: blog, clipart, cliparts, clker, Embed, find, HTML, pictures, search, weblog, wordpress

I’ve been searching for public domain clip arts for the previous week or so more for research purposes, just to see what are going on and who’s doing what. I stumbled across this article pointing to a library called wpclipart and it looks like the best raster public domain library I’ve found thus far. There’s lots of other sources of public domain images like the NOAA photo library , which actually is one of the libraries that I like to browse through some times. The problem with NOAA library is categorization. It was not meant to be a clip art library and that’s why it is hard to find what you’re looking for there, unless you really know where it is or the search is very obvious. Some images do not have descriptions or comments.

However, the NOAA photo library is a great source for those who want to trace image and create vector cliparts, or combine parts of those different images together as there is no copyrights for any of the images.

Technorati Tags: clipart, domain, library, noaa, photo, public, raster, wpclipart