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Here’s a really cool 3D iPhone application that is coming soon. (You can sign up for the beta for now…)

The iPhone Earth lets you view satellite imagery of the globe in 3D, sorta like Google Earth, but customized for the iPhone so you can rotate it back and forth for control.

I was particularly impressed when I saw they had used the iPhone accelerometers to allow you to tilt and rotate your view by tilting the iPhone. They weren’t downloading the imagery data over the net, it was all running local with just imagery for the San Francisco area. But, it was still very cool! The application is under development using the Apple iPhone SDK. So, assuming they finish the product, it should run under iPhone 2.0. You would definitely only want to run a real app like this if you had a WiFI connection or 3G - imagery and 3D takes a lot of bandwidth.

[via techeblog gearthblog]

Well, this isn’t a very bad news for me although I use TWO EDVO sprint cards plus my blackberry which can be used as a broadband modem.  All I can say is wait until Sprint comes out with the WiMAX technology, which will save all of us from bandwidth and speed problems.

Well, we did a lot of server hacking before with some MySQL, eAccelerator, and httpd.

There’s a lot of major blogs out there I have checked using Web Page Compression Tool that are not using compression. (For one, I checked John Chow’s blog)

Try to check one of your posts instead of checking your main URL as the tool is funky with root domains. (e.g. Check http://zedomax.com/blog/2008/02/23/never-give-up-especially-your-blog-dude/ instead of http://zedomax.com)

Here’s a screenshow of compression test I did for one of John Chow’s posts:

As you can see, John Chow’s blog does not use compression. As a result, he’s losing out on almost 5 times of bandwidth!!!

With level 9 compression, his site could be loaded on your web browser at 21K instead of the whopping 100K.

Now the compression might not be for all of you with slow CPUs. Our Zedomax.com runs on Quad-CPU server which has a lot of CPU processing power.

Here’s a screenshow of my server under normal load:

As you can see, most of the time, my CPU is idling at 80.8%! That means my CPU is pretty much sitting on its ass instead of doing work for me.

Now, if you have a similar situation, compression will help your site load faster and also bring your load down so you can handle more traffic.

Here’s how to enable compression if you have a dedicated or access to root on your server:

(Most servers have zlib installed, if you don’t have zlib installed, you will have to install that first, you can check it by making a test file and putting <?php phpinfo() ?> and search for zlib)

Add the following lines to your /etc/php.ini:

zlib.output_compression = on
zlib.output_compression_level = 5

and then restart apache! (of course):

httpd -k restart

Now, go check one of your posts on the Compression Test Tool here.

As you can see above, I just compressed one of my blog posts by a whopping 76.1%!

If you are using Super Cache plugin for Wordpress, make sure to go to options and do this too:

Now, your server will run faster since there’s less data being transmitted to your visitors, meaning you save bandwith, time, and most importantly, the ability to handle more traffic.

At 70% increase in bandwidth, that could translate to that many more visitors too as bandwidth is directly proportional to amount of time a visitor stays on your site. (Yes, I did take Calculus in college, I failed miserably before passing.) The less time a visitor takes to load a page on your blog or your site, the more time and bandwidth you have for other visitors.)

I was searching through the web for many ways to use compression for server optimization but I couldn’t find any so I sort put everything together here.

Hopefully, it helps you.

And one more thing, you can also check out this great tutorial on your httpd.conf setup.

You can always check out HOWTO decrease load on your server by 5 times also.

After receiving DoS (Denial of Service) attacks from hackers and whatnot, we’ve decided to permanently place the Math Comments Plugin. Basically, robots won’t be able to waste any of our server’s precious time and bandwidth. I’ve seen almost zero SPAM comments on our other blogs such as Bedzine Mattress Store and Keetsa Mattress Store after this plugin was installed along with Trackback Verification plugin.

What does it do?

Well, you gotta be good in math or at least be able to add numbers. Until the spammers figure out how to do math, we should be okay and have less problems with our bandwidth.

Sorry for non-spammers out there, you will have to do a little math to comment but no big deal right?

For hackers, bring ‘em on! We love your challenge. We are ethical hackers and will spam, and hack you back 10 fold so… watch who u messin’ with, b**tch!  (We have a spam and DoS attacking machine here at Zedomax.com to counter-attack DoSers.)