Posts by: Vito Chin

  • Understanding APC October 7, 2010

    APC is a performance-enhancing extension. It should not be confused with a magic pill, although having it around does provide a positive impact on performance! If configured incorrectly, APC can cause unexpected behaviour, however when implemented optimally APC can be a useful weapon in your arsenal. In this post we will examine APC's capabilities and it's application both as an opcode cache and in its less common usage as a data cache.
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  • Precision color searching with Gmagick and Amazon Elastic MapReduce November 2, 2009

    There are many insights that we can gain by considering colors. For example, a search for Manchester football teams will yield more meaningful results if colors close to either primary red or blue is specified, and that certainly makes all the difference.

    Searching for colors

    We can also use information implicit in colors to fulfill our search requirements without additional search support structure. If we want to search for the Victoria line on London's useful tube map for example, we could search for the light blue color RGB(24, 132, 188) instead of having to set up the vector structures or other means to enable highlighting of the line. With Gmagick, we can highlight search results as we shall see further on in this section.

    More specificity in terms of colors and positions certainly helps too. Consider a situation where we are looking for a red roof in a collection of paintings. Knowing the opacity and location of red occurrences helps in narrowing down the scope of search.

    The necessary challenge with enhancing specificity is that ultimately latent in all human endeavors, that of resource constrain. A typical image usually contains millions of pixels. Storing and indexing a large amount of images is resource intensive depending on the quantization level. While computing resources in the domain of individual servers had and will continue to increase dramatically, the cloud has presented itself as a practical and available solution for us to do such resource intensive tasks.
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  • Keyboard Enabling Web Applications July 2, 2009

    Introduction

    It's time to bring the keyboard back! When we first started doing things on the web, there wasn't much to do. There were documents with hyperlinks that we can click on but that's about it; that was 15 years ago. Thanks to the growth of sophisticated server-side tools such as PHP and client-side tools such as jQuery, we are now able to do so much more. Today, many traditional desktop applications have migrated to the web. During this migration, we seem to have neglected the keyboard and I think we're missing out on a a great time-saving route to interact with the application. So, that is what this tutorial is about, getting the keyboard more exposure in user interaction for web applications.

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  • PHP and the Cloud March 31, 2009

    Introduction

    Cloud computing refers to the utilization of shared, elastic resources and processing power accessed via the Internet. In some ways, it hails the reversion to the golden age of time-sharing but with significant improvements to the distribution philosophies underlying the delivery infrastructure. So, analogously, we now have the shared wonders of Hyde Park, where everyone and anyone can chill on the bench, throw some Frisbee, instead of having to financially pool money to buy a private park to shoot rabbits.
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