AWS

Everybody heard about Amazon Cloud. It has been around for a good few years. Despite its popularity not everybody had a chance to try it. Amazon tries it best to get more people on board by offering “Micro” versions of their web service for free. If you are into technology or just want a quality hosting for your website, it’s worth getting familiar with AWS. After all.. can you beat free?
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Lorem Ipsum

From time to time we all have to work with data which doesn’t exist. The best example is web development. Front-end developers create HTML and CSS before any web content is created. The common practice is to use Lorem Impsum which proved to be effective strategy. It’s not much different with back-end programming. We need dummy data at least as often as front-end devs. The most popular cases are:
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Apache Solr

So why do you need a search engine, is database not enough? If you create a small website it might not matter. With medium or big size applications it’s often wiser to go for a search engine. Saying that, even a small websites can benefit from Solr if you desire a high level of relevance in search results.
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VarnishCache

Lets face it, WordPress is slow. With every request it has to go though thousands lines of code and multiple SQL queries to render a page. Very popular configuration for a WordPress site is Apache, mod_rewrite, mod_php, PHP and MySQL. It’s very good setup but can’t be consider the fastest (at least without any additional tweaking).
The good news is WordPress doesn’t have to be a speed demon. In most cases it’s just a CMS to produce static pages. If the content is static it doesn’t make any sense to waste CPU cycles on re-rendering the same HTML over and over again.
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Varnish

This is going to be the shortest post ever both might save hours to people who don’t know it yet.

The good old fashion \” won’t work. Suggestion from the manual to use %22 doesn’t work either. Solution to this problem is regex ASCII escape “\x22″.

Simple as that but took me some time to figure it out.

Test

Wait a minute! How can you possibly code faster when in fact you have to write more code? Test Driven Development requires additional (redundant?!) classes which only duplicates work. The “redundant” code has to be maintained and kept in sync with the main software. It might be good for some big companies (preferably at the other end of the world) but not for us. We all heard that.
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Arduino Uno

In my previous post I discussed basics of serial communication between Arduino and PHP. Theory behind it is very simple. It all comes down to writing to a file. Simplicity of the serial communication paradoxically might contribute to confusion and surprising results. Serial device is like a black hole when you think about it. You send data inside but there is no feedback. You don’t know has your message arrived or not. You don’t know is your transmission going to be divided into multiple chunks or will arrive at one peace. There is no guarantee no feedback. On top of that there are some differences between operating systems and Arduino peculiarities. All of that combined together can confuse for a few hours or even discourage from the project.
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