WebandBlog.COM

AT&T Expands Wireless Capacity for 3G Mobile Broadband Network in Manhattan

...but i am still getting dropped calls in downtown.

However dataspeeds indeed improved. Here are a few screenshots with a test taken on a Saturday night (4 am): › Continue reading

Tags: 3g, AT&T, coverage, speedtest

If your iPhone developed a crack on the bottom of the plastic back

Last week i got my shiny new iPhone 4 and since i no longer needed my old iPhone 3GS i was about to put it for sale on eBay. The only little problem i had was a crack it developed in the bottom part of the back, right where the USB cable gets connected.

It appears, that in cases like this one Apple can replace your phone, yes not the back cover of it. For free and within 15 minutes. All you need - is a visit to the Genuis bar and a few things from the checklist below:

• check if your phone is still under warranty with Apple. Go to Apple warranty check website and type in your iPhone's serial number. If it says you are covered - you are in luck
• next, locate a nearest Apple store and make a reservation to the Genius Bar in the iPhone / iPod category
• arrive to the Genius Bar and just show your phone to the Apple Genius, he will make you sign some papers and will give you totally new sealed iPhone

Cool, isn't it? Now you can sell your old iPhone 3G or 3GS on eBay for a mere $300 - $350 and totally cover the purchase of your new toy - iPhone 4.

Tags: apple iphone, iphone crack, iphone replacement

Jewish Yellow Pages – New York style failed marketing

When it comes to signing up new clients jewish people can sometimes go far. Further, than you can imagine. Like creating fake success stories and repeatedly call you promising referrals of the "respective clients" just for you. I'm talking now about Jewish Yellow Pages.

I got a call from a very annoying Russian woman Rita about a year ago. She was trying to meet me in person at the Jewish Yellow Pages offices and  sign me up for the listing in the directory. Sounds like a "jewish style boiler room" isn't it? › Continue reading

Tags: Brooklyn, fail, Jewish Referral Service, Jewish Yellow Pages

From Las Vegas to San Francisco via Death Valley and Yosemite

Just want to dedicate this post to anyone who will ever choose this route for a gateway to Las Vegas and Northern California. Here is my story about trip taken from Las Vegas to San Francisco via Death Valley, Yosemite, SF Bay Area with maps, guidance and of course photos and links to more photos.

› Continue reading

Tags: Death Valley, San Francisco, Yosemite

Apache vs. Nginx – testing performance under heavy load

It has come to my attention, when a client of mine recently experienced unexpected traffic spike, that some industry standard solutions not always work or should i say not 100% reliable all the time. My client's server setup was an-old-school Apache 2.2/mod_php WordPress blog installation. One day they posted some "hot-buzz" celebrity photos and server had become non-responsive under the traffic flow. Of course, at that time i was unaware about high-availability setups and never imagined scenarios like this one, when you get monthly volume of visitors during the 24 hour period.

Since then i have researched a lot of places online and found, that Apache web server is not the only solution to the hosting setup problem. Many others exist and those others, event quite "beta", allow for the great tolerance for the high volume traffic.

Today i'd like to share with you my test results for my current server setup - LEMP or Linux, nginx (Engine-x), MySQL, PHP-FPM versus my old setup for this blog: LAMP - Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP. Both of those are on the Linode VPS (Linode 360). Before getting rid of the old server configuration i booted it one more time and ran tests using guys from LoadImpact to determine how will each of these survive under the load of 10-20-30-40-50 simulations requests.

› Continue reading

Tags: Apache, Hosting, Linode, nginx, performance