If you are looking for an easy way of using an up to date version of Chromium (the free open-source version of Goole's Chrome browser) on Debian Squeeze you should try one of the Ubuntu Chromium Projects PPA Repositories, they have a beta based on the version used for the current Chrome Linux-Builds and and a daily-trunk based one.

Important thing is that you use the karmic-repository, lucid didn't work for me.

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/chromium-daily/ppa/ubuntu karmic main 
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/chromium-daily/ppa/ubuntu karmic main

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/chromium-daily/beta/ubuntu karmic main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/chromium-daily/beta/ubuntu karmic main

The package is named chromium-browser

A benchmarks showing how awesome fast dmcrypt is with AES-NI.

New notebooks are sometimes a little pain in the ass to get working with Linux. After more than 4 weeks, my new notebook finally arrived last monday. Monday this week I tried installing Debian Squeeze (still is testing) on my new Latitude and after 2 hours formatting the drive with dmcrypt, failed with a not starting X, not finding a screen. I didn't have the time to check it out because I needed a running System with OpenGL and Virtualbox to run my old Windows XP-Image using VisualStudio with the setup OpenGL-Stuff for university, so I went with Windows 7 for the first 3 days.

My Latitude E6510 specs:

• Intel i7-620M 2.66 GHZ Dualcore with AES-NI and Turbo Mode (biggest dualcore with AES-NI offered with the new Latitude-series)
• 4GB RAM (2 * 2GB) (8GB would have been 250€(+taxes) more)
• 250GB @7200RPM HDD (had 120GB in my old one, but never used it, since all big data normally goes on to external drive or the raid in my server)
• 15.6" @ 1920x1080 (After working over 4 1/2 year with 1024*768 it was time to get big)
• Nvidia Quadro NVS 3100M (well no player-card, but at least it seems some old games run on it)
• Intel Centrino Advanced-N 6200 Wifi

Today I helped somebody buy a cheap notebook as a replacement for a really old PC.
In the end we went home with a Samsung R530 and I immediately started configuring it.

After the installation I was looking on a lot of crap on the desktop and the startmenu.
I knew most notebooks today come with a lot of preinstalled crap like MS Office, ISP-software (AOL, T-Online, ... ) , virus-scanner, firewalls and more stuff (the same here, 60-day-trial for the new office, a McAfee Security-Solution (virus-scanner, anti-spam and more), ...) but I didnt see THAT coming.
Lots of games and programs from a company I already forgot the name, which which where usable for some hours but then you would have pay for them. I uninstalled them, even though they were from the same company and only some mb in size, each had it's own uninstaller. But I figured the low price for the notebook is partly due to those programs.
Then I discovered a popup for the most awesome program ever Phoenix FailSafe ... a product which helps you when your notebook gets stolen. It tracks it, deletes/downloads your data, makes a photo/video of the thief and stuff like that if he goes online or is in reach of any accessable gps-device the notebook can connect to (bluetooth or whatever) . It was a trial too and you would have to pay for it on a monthly base.

The first thing I did was searching for an uninstaller in the starmenu: nothing.
Then in Windows software-control: nothing.
Then I searched on google and found a thread about it. No real solution.

You can set it up, register, then login on their page, deactivate it and then download an "uninstaller"! Register to uninstall it ? WTF!!!

According to an entry in the forum, the support said, you can "uninstall" it manually by deleting the directory, the files and the start-menu entry by hand ...

What kind of crap is that ? A silly way to protect it from beeing deleted by a potential thief ? I would accept it if it would remove it's entry in start-menu and uninstaller after you have choosen to use it. But not even providing one ?
I will give the manual way a try next week and look if there is more data from this tool in the registry, autostart, services or anywhere else.

The HTML Validator-Extension for Firefox doesn't run on Debian Squeeze out of the box, the problem is the missing libstdc++5, but only libstdc++6 is installable from debians default-repositoy.

Well today I wasted about 12+ hours trying to compile firefox + html validator-extension from scratch, made many mistakes, first I used ff3.5-sources, then I found out that the instructions where not meant for firefox 3.5, but for firefox 2, then some typos on patching source-files that I only foundout about ... 40 minutes later, because building it took between 30 and 60minutes each time ... That's why 12 hours past so fast.

But finally I found a way to get it running. libstdc++5 wasn't the only problem :)

Using the solutions provided for other linux distributions, mixing them a bit and doing some testing myself I finally got a solution:

Having worked and refactored a of lot ugly code in my life and seen a lot more (often on helping people on php.de) I was wondering how big the impact of NOTICES thrown by php really is.
Since php allows a lot of really bad code and it is easy to turn off showing them (in most cases it is turned off by default and not logged either) I wanted to test some of those things you see almost every day, usage of uninitialized variables and accessing array keys without setting them into quotes.

Since this kind of bad code in most cases are only a small part of the complete applications code, it won't have a huge impact on the total performance of a script, but I wanted to know how much the difference for those code-parts would be.

Steps are simple:

Download the sources ~ 14 MB
extract it
install ~ 30mb of packages via apt-get
run autogen
make && make install
start it

But it may some time, at least on my slow notebook (p4 mobile 1,73 ghz) autogen took 10 minutes, make took about 60 minutes and make install another 4 minutes, but if you ever compiled mysql-server yourself you now ... mysql may take some time :)

So here in Detail, almost copy & paste-ready:
 

Caching data is an important part in todays Web-Application, it can boost the performance, save time and resources or can be necessary because of limited or slow calls to external apis and services.

Things you can cache are for example database-querys, api-calls, generated data (html, images, .... ), return-values of methods and a lot more things.

Here is an overview of classes you can use to cache all kinds of data. From PEAR over the Symfony Framework to the Zend Framework. With slow file or database-based backends and fast memory-based backends like APC, Memcached, eAccelerator or Redis. After the caching-classes is a list with opcode-caches, because some of them offer memory-based cache-backends.
 

PHP offers a lot of ways for requesting (GET) content via http(s) (and other protocols) and sending POST-Requests, if you need it for accessing an API, downloading files, unittests for a webservice, login-requests or whatever.

The extensions behind all those variantes are sockets (fsockopen()), streams (stream_socket_client()), curl or the PECL Extension Pecl_Http. Not all are usable on every host because of the php-configuration and the compiled/loaded extensions.

Here is a list of extensions and php-classes which can help you with those topics.

Noticed it some time ago that like in ubuntu (since 9.04), debian doesn't restart the x-server if you hit ctrl + alt + backspace anymore.

It was deactivated in the X-Server some time ago because people thought it was pushed to often accidently, especially by former windows users. I think I never pushed it accidently, but well, as long as it is easy reactivateable it is no problem.