Making Wordpress Fast

I read a detailed account on Ewan's blog on how to set up Worpress to handle 10M hits a day for minimal cost. Part of the instructions are installing software you need for any Wordpress setup: Ubuntu, MySQL, PHP, and Wordpress itself. What is the meat behind the speedup trick? Well it appears to be a combination of some products to accelerate Wordpress usage.

You want to have Nginx for high performance HTTP to start with. Then you add in Varnish, which is an HTTP accelerator. Varnish puts stuff in virtual memory and uses threads to speed things up. Then you add the W3 Total Cache plugin to Wordpress. It uses compression, and as the name implies, caching to really speed things up. It claims to increase the Wordpress throughput a massive 10 times.

One fact I found interesting was the use of Blitz to measure the speed gains. Blitz simulates a lot of users downloading pages from you web site. This all seems the domain of a skilled system adminstrator working on a shoestring budget.

Keygen Details

A rogue virus made it so that I needed to restore my computer to factory settings. I am still reinstalling all my apps. One of the apps kept complaining about a registration key. I ignored it for a while, but it was annoying. So I broke out a key generator.

The main thing of interest with the keygen is that it required me to put in my name. It appears the key is somehow tied to the name. Go figure. The authors of the key generator were able to detect this dependency and add it to their programs.

Can anyone decipher the foreign characters in the image I posted? I am assuming it means cool key generator.

No Laughs for LulzSec

Fox News has reported that five members of LulzSec have been arrested. They have been charged with conspiracy. The arrests include members who go by the code names Kayla, Topiary, Pwnsauce, Palladium, and Anarchaos. Not sure if these are the top dogs in LulzSec, or if this is the entire crew.

The breakthrough happened last year when LulzSec leader Sabu was arrested. His real name is Hector Mansegur. Apparently he has been cooperating with the FBI to arrange the sting on the rest of the members in the group. Now that these peeps are all behind bars, I wonder if the resources will turn toward capturing the greater Anonymous members.

404 Not Found Nginx

My laptop was seriously hijacked recently. Every time I did a Google search, clicking on search results sent me to some other random search site. I could not actually view the search results. When I tried to open the search result items in another tab, I got a page with a "404 Not Found Nginx" page.

I started to do some investigating. Another laptop using the same router as me was fine. This must have been local to my laptop. Then I checked out the hosts file. The thing is usually hidden. But I found some commands to make the file viewable and editable. Nope. That was not how they were intercepting the links.

I ran a bunch of antivirus and antispyware programs. None of them helped. Then I started to run other more agreesive removal programs. The last one made my computer unusable. I could not even restore back to a savepoint. Had to reset the thing to the factory defaults.

Not sure how these spammers took control of my browser. The same thing happened when I used the Chrome browser. I could not directly go to some other Google sites as well. I know these spam pages I was directed to would make some money for the perpatrators.