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Speeding Up Flash in Linux

Written by Jason Kendall Monday, 21 February 2011 20:10

My wife was pissed. Enough Said.

She couldn't play her damn facebook games - you know what that means, that means I better fix it. Good excuse for a new computer (See other post), I still plan on getting a new one, but there had to be a way to speed up what I already had.

I wanted to expand on what I found here: http://ulyssesonline.com/2010/10/15/adobe-flash-in-linux-is-slow/ and of course ensure it stays available on the web.

Here is the recommended steps from there, and anything else I can find on the net on this subject.

FlashBlock:

"Never be annoyed by a Flash animation again! Blocks Flash so it won't get in your way, but if you want to see it, just click on..."

Wow, what an idea - stop those stupid flash ads from playing and wasting my CPU time, even when I leave the pages open for reference.
Link: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/flashblock/

Webpage Cache in Ram:

One other thing that was suggested is to put browser cache into ram. I did this first to see what the improvements were - I have to admit, I love it ;)
Short how to for firefox on Ubuntu

1. Stop Firefox
2. Add the following line to /etc/fstab:
   none    /home/[USER]/Cache    tmpfs    size=1G,nr_inodes=10k,mode=0700   0     0
3. Link the Firefox Cache to this folder:
   Under /home/[USER]/.mozilla/firefox you will find "default" profile, in that folder, mv Cache to a backup, just in case, then ln Cache /home/[USER]/Cache

Flashblock Whitelists:

It turns out, some apps don't like it when you block flash games - In flashblock options, you can add sites white lists. The problem with facebook is, the apps run inside an iframe, so just white listing apps.facebook.com isn't going to work. I'm going to catalog some URLs of games I come across that require whitelisting.

• Facebook
  
  • Farmville: http://*.farmville.com/*
  • Zynga Games: http://*.zynga.com/*

New computer

Written by Jason Kendall Saturday, 12 February 2011 16:34

So, some of you know that recently I found out my desktop is running around 5-6 Years old. It kinda explained why things ran so slow. I haven't BUILT a desktop in years, mostly because the last time I tried, you had to watch CPU/Motherboard matching.

I started to look at bundles, and a site I look at sometimes has a nice build guide: http://www.mmo-champion.com/content/2151-Guides-Contest-Guild-Reputation-Setup-of-the-Month-Recruitment-Comics (Scroll down)

In their build suggestion, I was looking at Narwhal and when I looked at the price here locally, I could do it about the same, not including Case, CDRom, HDD and other things I don't really need.

My current vendor of choice is Canada Computers, I find they are reasonable, and not as pushy as TigerDirect has be come. So I started looking at the site to see what they had, pre-built. I settled on http://canadacomputers.com/product_info.php?cPath=7_121&item_id=035681 and asked for comments via Twitter.  @marshray pointed out the following:

@coolacid another $100 might make a big difference on the video card. The 'Home' OS? Oh and that chipset is defective http://bit.ly/g4BpzI

Sigh - I didn't care for the M$ Tax, I use Linux on my desktop. And a defective chipset. Back to the drawing board.  Fortunatly, he suggested I look at the Gigabyte GA-880GM-UD2H and AMD Phenom II 1055T. I have been a fan of AMD for a long time, but getting tired of their lack of quality linux video drivers. But what the hell, lets price it out:

Motherboard:

Gigabyte GA-880GM-UD2H Socket AM3 (Six-Core Support) AMD 880G + SB710 Chipset ATI Radeon HD 4250 Graphics with HDMI/DVI/VGA Dual-Channel DDR3 1800+/1333/1066 MHz 8-Channel HD Audio Gigabit LAN 5x SATA 3Gb/s + 1x eSATA3Gb/s 12x USB 2.0 Micro ATX

http://canadacomputers.com/product_info.php?cPath=26_340&item_id=030753

CPU:

AMD Phenom II X6 1055T (125W) Six Core Socket AM3, 2.8GHz, 9Mb Cache, 2000MHz HT, 45nm (HDT55TFBGRBOX)

http://canadacomputers.com/product_info.php?cPath=4_64&item_id=030520

RAM:

Mushkin Silverline 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3 1333MHz CL9 DIMMs (996770)

http://canadacomputers.com/product_info.php?cPath=24_311_312_611&item_id=035006

Video:

Asus ENGTX470/2DI/1280MD5 nVidia GeForce GTX 470 Chipset (607Mhz) 1280MB (3348Mhz) GDDR5 Dual Dual-Link DVI-I/HDMI Display PCI-Express 2.0 Graphics Card

http://canadacomputers.com/product_info.php?cPath=43_557_559&item_id=030349

Power:

Antec TP-750 Blue Truepower New 750W Continuous Power Supply

http://canadacomputers.com/product_info.php?cPath=33_443&item_id=021535

Motherboard: 87.99
CPU: 174.99
RAM: 76.99
Video: 267.99
Power: 125.99

Total: 732.95

I don't include mail in rebates - I don't ever expect them to work ;) Comments and suggestions welcomed!

Update: (Mail In Rebates)
Just to Kinda keep all this together MIRs come out to about $65. So IF the MIR actually go though, total cost before tax would be: $667.96

Forcing a cpanel reinstall

Written by Jason Kendall Wednesday, 20 October 2010 15:46

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There comes a time in everyone's security life you need to rebuild a cpanel server.. i'm talking about the OS, whm/cpanel and it's modules.. not websites. I wanted to document the process I use to rebuild it:

1. Force an CentOS/Redhat Reinstall by:
   1. Create an empty directory: mkdir /tempreinstall
   2. CD into the new empty directory: cd /tempreinstall
   3. Force a Yum update: yum reinstall *
   4. delete the temp empty directory
2. Force cpanel to update with:
   

   /scripts/upcp --force

3. Force the webmail systems to update with:
   

   Roundcube:

   /usr/local/cpanel/bin/update-roundcube –-force

   Horde:

   /usr/local/cpanel/bin/update-horde –-force

   Squirrelmail

   /usr/local/cpanel/bin/update-squirrelmail –-force

4. Reinstall MySQL:
   

   /scripts/mysqlup --force

Your mileage may very, and you may run into issues on the OS reinstall.. so backup first.

Rick Rolled the Bots!

Written by Jason Kendall Tuesday, 10 August 2010 11:52

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I do twitter, i post links to twitter. I wanted more details into my links I post into twitter, so I setup my own link shortener - shurls.ca. I notice, I get anywhere between 10 and 30 clicks to my links with in about 5 seconds after I post my tweet.. Light Bulb.. Breakage, Carnage Follows.

Yes, that is how I think. Sad, I know.

Anyway.. I start asking, what happens if I send a link, in a tweet, that just 301 redirects to it self? Yeah, evil.. So I send out this tweet:

I want to see what happens to bots when you put a self referring link in twitter - so don't click this: http://www.shurl.ca/roll - http://twitter.com/coolacid/status/20803314903

And the gory details followed.

With in about 30 seconds, I had about 300 hits, in under a minute, I decided to turn off the redirect, and redirect to something else before I got into trouble with my host :)

Final count: From 11:29:22 to 11:32:11 I had over a thousand hits.

Top 5 Bad IPs that just kept following:

538 - 64.74.98.14 - LinkedIn Corporation - LinkedInBot/1.0
109 - 68.40.195.13 - Comcast Cable Communications - PycURL/7.19.4
101 - 38.113.234.181 - PSINet - Voyager/1.0 - Possibly http://www.kosmix.com/
100 - 38.113.234.180 - PSINet - Voyager/1.0 - Possibly http://www.kosmix.com/
88 -  87.230.55.42 - Hosteurope GmbH - Blank -- Possibly http://popurls.com/

I'm sure more will be looked at at this topic..