I came across a neat trick to improve the speed of Firefox with some changes in configuration, I hopeyou enjoy it.

In the URL bar, type “about:config” and press enter. This will bring up the configuration “menu” where you can change the parameters of Firefox.

Note that these are what I’ve found to really speed up my Firefox significantly - and these settings seem to be common among everybody else as well. But these settings are optimized for broadband connections - I mean with as much concurrent requests we’re going to open up with pipelining, you’d better have a big connection.

Double Click on the following settins and put in the numbers below - for the true / false booleans - they’ll change when you double click.

browser.tabs.showSingleWindowModePrefs – true
network.http.max-connections – 48
network.http.max-connections-per-server – 16
network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-proxy – 8
network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server – 4
network.http.pipelining – true
network.http.pipelining.maxrequests – 100
network.http.proxy.pipelining – true
network.http.request.timeout – 300

One more thing… Right-click somewhere on that screen and add a NEW -> Integer. Name it “nglayout.initialpaint.delay” and set its value to “0”.

That’s it!

Google have finally released the source code for Android, it’s open source mobile platform that it has been drumming up for support from mobile manufacturers since late last year.  You can visit the site here and download the source code.

Google has already has the backing of HTC, Motorola, LG Electronics, and Samsung who have confirmed devices that will be powered by Android.  The search giant has also dedicated a full team of programmers to help mold and direct the strategic efforts of the project. With over almost 11 million lines of code, it certainly will not be lightweight. Considering mobile devices will play a massive role in ubiqious computing and where significant efforts will be placed upon by web hosters and content producers, it’s important the community can help make it a successful.

Already the Open Alliance Handset partners have already offered speech-recognition engine from Nuance and audio and video decoder software from Packet Video.  With several more products in the pipleline, by this time next year Android should have a wide suite of applications.

The good people over at Fat Cow have decided to support a worthy cause for the month of October.  In support of the fight against breast cancer, the company has decided to donate $1 for each new sign up this month. The donations will benefit breast cancer research, education and advocacy.

In 2005, there were over half a million victims of breast cancer world wide and in the US alone there is a 1 in 8 chance that someone in her/his lifetime will develop some form of invasive cancer and 1 in 35 chance of breast cancer causing their death. Breast cancer can also affect men as well.

Fat Cow is a proud participant of the Pink for October Program and is the second year in a row that it has participated. I really think this is a worthy cause and I believe many people will of known someone who has fought this disease. Personally, I have close family members who have successfully overcome this and I hope that anyone considering a web hosting company to look at Fat Cow and support the fight against breast cancer in the process.

So jump aboard and change some stats today! You can support them by visiting them here.

I have finally taken the time to finalize my press release regarding HBM’s new look and have forwarded it to quite a few press release distribution centers.  if you want to have a look what was released, I have taken the liberty of adding it to our industry press news here.

I would also like to share some of the plans I have in the pipeline for HBM that includes adding more interviews and product reviews for our readers.  I should be a week or two away from publishing some new intervews - this is probably one of my more favourite jobs hearing from industry vetereans on their opinions on a range of web hosting industry related topics. In regards to product reviews, I think you will find them relevant to any webhost who puts in great efforts into server and client automation.  Hopefully, I will have it completed in about two/three weeks as well.

I also have a soft spot for anything related at the enterprize level that scales well having worked in critical IT environments, so I have recently signed up for some storage/cloud services that I’ll hopefully write about in the coming weeks as well.

Despite all these changes, I have launched a new forum called MS Forum Online that discusses a whole rage of Microsoft Consumer and Enterprise products.  Please drop by to have a look as well.

So, as you can see, I will be busy so I hope you drop me a line as any feedback would be much appreciated.

According to the Netcraft’s September 2008 web server survey which managed the responses of over 180 million websites and takes the sample of 44.5 million, it shows three quarters of web server software was powered by Apache and 2.6 million sites was hosted via The Planet’s network.  However, these are mostly polish (.pl) link farms that can artificially inflate figures. A link’s a link I assume!

Resin, a lesser known open source web server, is found to be the choice of 343 thousands websites.  The software is owned by Caucho Technology and pitches the product be a high performance application server product based on JAVA and PHP technology.  This makes it the 12th most popular web server on the Internet.

Another interesting statistic was SmugSmug, a photo sharing and sales web service, that has now over 18 thousand (subdomain) websites.  The company uses F5 BIG-IP devices to handle the traffic and uses over half a petabyte of storage space using Amazon’s Simple Storage Server (S3). That is impressive but not surprising as it provides photo storage facilities including watermark protection for artists and photographer’s works.

I am very happy for SmugSmug’s success particularly as I read through its about us section and see it as a very family oriented business.