So I recently installed a syntax highlighter and by coincidence the author of that plugin also had a post about decreasing wordpress bandwidth usage. So I’ve read it and I thought let’s check how big the frontpage of my blog is when downloaded by a new visitor (The FireFox extension FireBug works great for this). A whopping 1.05MB! as my website is hosted on my server at home and my upload speed is at max 150KB total that would mean to load the pages take about 7 seconds to load.

So I went back to this persons blog post (You can find it here btw) and started reading through it again. First I tried wp-minify but as he stated this doesn’t work properly in Internet Explorer and your images wont load if your css contains relative urls, so this wasn’t going to work.

He also mentioned that his syntax highlighting plugin uses a lot of bandwidth to load all languages it supports so I made it only load the languages it needed. Dunno how did affect the bandwidth usage but it decreased page load times.

After that there was 1 last thing I had to test, enabling GZip compressed output. So after a little searching I found a WordPress plugin to enable it. I tested it, No changes at all. So I checked my apache installation and noticed mod_deflate wasn’t enabled (This is needed to enable the compression). So after enabling this I checked the size again, but it only decreased by 0.03 MB (That’s about 30kb).

So leaving that enabled I decided to check if the compression was indeed enabled(I used this page to test it). Firstly I checked the frontpage, It said compression enabled, and compressed to 23% of the original size, But this wouldn’t explain why the size still was 1.02MB. So I decided to check an image on my blog to see if that was being compressed, filled in the url hit check, and the results, not compressed. This meant that the compression was only enabled on WordPress pages.

So I decided to search on google how I could enable GZip compression for all files through a .htaccess file and found this. Though this person said don’t enable it on images and also not on flash as that might make flash stop working I ignored it and tried anyway by just adding the following code to my .htaccess file.

SetOutputFilter DEFLATE
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4.0[678] no-gzip
BrowserMatch bMSI[E] !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html

After adding this I hit ctrl+f5 in my firefox (Clears cache before loading page) and checked the size again, now it was down to 163KB! that means it would load in around a second instead of 7 seconds. I’m now trying to find out how to fix WP-Minify because that would bring it down even more, and I might also try to decrease the size of the images used in the sites layout/design. I’ll report how that went after I’ve done it.

Hope this was helpful, If you have any questions or feedback don’t hesitate to comment.

Regards, Xeross

I was working on my CMS (Just took a brake to write this), and I tried to figure out how to pass additional arguments to a javascript callback. After some searching I found what I was looking for, I told the people in the jQuery IRC channel and someone gave me shorter and cleaner code that does the same. So let me run you through the code (Note: This is jquery but the same method would also work with normal Javascript) .

In this example I will use an argument that defines where to load the data got from an AJAX request in.

//Custom function that's used instead of the long jQuery Syntax
function loadUrl(url, destination)
{
    // Use a get request to get the page at URL
    $.get(url, function(html, status) { loadedPage(html, status, destination) });
}

// The callback function
function loadedPage(html, status, destination)
{
    // If the AJAX call failed stop the function
    if(status != "success")
        return;

    // Set the html of destination (Which is in this case a jQuery Selector) to the jquery repsonse
    $(destination).html(html);
}

If you haven’t figured out how to pass the additional arguments from the above example I’ll explain in detail, Let’s take a closer look at line 5(Formatted for readability).

$.get(url,
    function(html, status)
    {
        loadedPage(html, status, destination)
    }
);

As you can see we are using a custom defined function for the callback, What we do is make a function that has the arguments that get passed to the callback.

function(html, status)
{

}

And in that function we call our real callback function but with the additional arguments we passed to loadUrl()

function(html, status)
{
    loadedPage(html, status, destination)
}

And that’s it, this can be done with as many additional parameters as you like just add them to the call of the real callback function.

Leave a comment if you have any questions or feedback.

Regards, Xeross

In my opinion the blog theme was a little too plain, Everything looked pretty much flat and just plain boring. So I’ve decided to make some changes to make it look better and less flat, These are the things I’ve changed.

• Added better looking and better readable comments (Example)
• Made blockquote borders rounded (Except in IE) (Example)
• Added shadows to bottom of blog posts and bottom of sidebar widgets
• Changed title bar look, Not much but it’s a slightly better looking style
• Added 3d look to navigation bar links and sidebar widget titles.
• Added submenus/dropdown menu’s to the navigation.

I still have more work to do to improve the blog, I think I’ll change the look of the post listings and single post view. I’ll update this posts when I’ve done that, For now leave some feedback on the changes.

Regards, Xeross

I’ve been trying to figure out a good Rupture fit for mission running for a while now, a corp mate send me something similiar to this and I edited it a little.

Equipment List

High Power
4x Dual 180mm AutoCannon I
2x Heavy Missile Launcher I

Medium Power
2x Medium Capacitor Battery II
1x Y-S8 Hydrocarbon I Afterburners

Low Power
1x Medium Armor Repairer I
2x Capacitor Power Relay II
1x Rat Specific Hardener
1x Rat Specific Membrane

Rigs
2x Medium Ancillary Router

And after testing it out it works great, most of the times I don’t need to warp out and back in because of low armor, and if I do it’s only once or twice.

Thank you for your time, Xeross

Updated on: 12 September 2009

Hey Folks,

I’ve made some changes to the blog, I’ve added a list of pages in the sidebar on the top right, I’ve added the possibility to add comments on pages, And i’ve fixed a few minor things in the layout of the comments.

I’m also planning on adding ajax based comments, This makes it so that the page wont reload when you post a comment but the comment just gets added without that. Other then that I still have to change the header on the list of links so that it reads “Other EVE Online Blogs” or something similiar but that’s proving more difficult then i initially though.

I’ll keep everyone updated.

Regards, Xeross

Well, A corp mate of mine offered me to team up and do some missions. Now I’m way weaker then him but he said it doesn’t matter and I could take out the weaker enemies. ATM I’m checking the items he salvaged for equipment and ammo, So far I found a few heavy missiles and a ‘Malkuth’ Heavy Launcher (Fires faster then a normal heavy launcher).

However today I probably won’t be able to complete some missions with him as I have to go in a few minutes, But it’ll provide a nice flow of standing with the Spacelane Patrol and a nice amount of ISK in the future.

I’m also planning on getting some Tech II Power Diagnostic Systems and a Tech II Co-Processors so my ship has higher powergrid and CPU capacity. After that I think I’ll train for Tech II shield extenders and a better Invulnerability Field.

Well that kind of wraps it up for today, Expect another update soon.

Regards, Xeross

Well I finally got a new ship after saving up and it works great, it’s not faster then my old ship but it’s a lot stronger, I can now do lvl2 missions instead of lvl1 and they barely damage me at all. The ship also uses medium instead of small turrets and heavy missile launchers instead of light missile launchers.

Screenshots

Well that’s all of em, After this I’m going to get a Battlecruiser and right now I’m getting some drones.

As always, I’ll keep you posted. And if you want a free 14-day trial for eve click here

Regards, Xeross

So I decided that my blog needs a proper logo, After browsing through some tutorials for an idea I found one that seemed cool to try out.

However after I finished the tutorial and added some twists for it to be unique it turned out it’s a bit too large to use as a logo So I decided to just post it on here as an image. So here it is (Click to enlarge):

Hope you’ll rate and comment on it.

Regards, Xeross

P.S: I just realized I could use it as the background for my twitter account, So I’m going to change it into a background.

Hey Folks,

I’ve created a twitter account for this blog and for general use (Already had one but in dutch), I’ll add it to the sidebar soon and I’ll keep everyone posted with it. To go to my twitter account click here

Regards, Xeross

My pc has been running at low latency for a while without a problem until suddenly it lagged the hell out of everything, when this started i had a latency/ping of around 300-400ms  on average, sometimes even 1000ms. Now I’m back down to 30-60ms and lowest I had was like 13ms. Here’s what I did.

Step 1.

Ok first thing I did was (This can be skipped btw) is I installed cFosSpeed (Click here for the Trial), This prioritizes gaming, normal browsing etc. and gives downloading etc. a lower priority. After installation it asks to reboot, Let it reboot.

Now the fastest way to get it to work optimally is to upload a big file somewhere or something similiar (Send yourself a big file through email.)  more info about that here. If you don’t do this it might take a few days before it’s calibrated. Once again this is optional, And I’m not going into detail how to work with this.

Step 2

Ok now we need to do some registry tweaking, and some command line stuff. However we don’t need to do it ourselves. There’s a website called speedguide.net that has a script called SG Vista TCP/IP Patch. If you don’t trust it you can find the manual instructions here (And a guide to how the registry works here) and if you do trust it the script is here (Right click->Save As) after downloading open/run the script and once it opens you have 4 choices:

• “Y” To optimize Vista TCP/IP settings
• “Q” To disable QoS reserved bandwidth
• “D” To revert to Vista default values
• “N” To cancel patch and exit

Now just hit Y and it will optimize the settings. Now after this run it again but this time press Q, After this is done again reboot.

Now if the problem got worse just run the thing again but press D, and if your lag isn’t high anymore or lower then it was, good, that was our goal.

Step 3

Now we need to uncheck some stuff on the network connection, It’s simple to do but it does have some impact (Well it did for me).

Ok let’s start first thing to do is launch the control panel, Open the start menu and click Control panel on the right. Now the control panel will appear. Now if your control panel is set at classic open Network and Sharing center. If it’s set at normal view click Network and Internet and then open Network and Sharing center. Now in the left bar click “Manage network connections”. Now a window will open with 1 or more network adapters (Icons) there should be one that sais Wireless Network Connection or something similiar, and it should have the name of your wireless network below the that.

Now right-click it and click properties. Now a new window comes up with in the middle a box with checkboxes on the left and some text next to them. What you now need to do is uncheck “QoS Packet Scheduler” and also uncheck “Internet Protocol Version 6 (TCP/IPv6)”, You can uncheck them by clicking on the checkboxes. See image below (It’s in dutch but well the names are pretty much the same):

Now after that just click OK and wait for the window to disappear.

Step 4

Now, First test out if the lag is gone, If so, Good we solved it, If you have lagspikes every 30-60 seconds and you have a wireless connection continue reading. And if you still have normal lag try asking at one of the windows help forums.

Now the reason this lag occurs is because windows vista scans for wireless networks every 60 seconds. We are going to use Vista Anti-Lag. You can download the setup here and the rarred version without installer here.

Now install or extract the program and launch it(If you’ve downloaded the rarred version open val.exe). A window similiar to the following will pop-up:

Now just hit the Activate VAL button and it will disable the automatic scan for as long as it’s running. Now for me this step wasn’t needed so I didn’t do it, But it might do the trick for you. Now go test if this fixed it if it did, Make sure you start Vista Anti-Lag every time you start your computer (Or when you play a game whatever you like), And the lag should be gone.

Now if you have any questions, comments don’t hesitate to leave a comment and I’ll reply as soon as possible.

Regards, Xeross