VARNISH is valuable for a number of reasons, including security, privacy, and performance. I first used it around 2009 when another site of mine had repeatedly come under DDOS attacks. Using Varnish means that requests for pages usually come from the same IP address (the cache proxy), if at all. Much of the time visitors get served static (cached) pages transparently and quickly. The downside is, this interferes with statistics (the Apache server does not even see all requests) and it is not compatible with modules like polls, where each IP addressed is allowed just one vote.

During the server/site migration we tried to preserve as many of the features as we could. There was a transition from old Debian to new CentOS and the new architecture is quite different (still 2 CPU cores but with more RAM, a virtual container, and resilience owing to proxies/redundancy). Thanks to those who suggested workarounds. We have looked at some of them, but without losing on performance there is no way to keep meaningful statistics. These statistics have been disabled. Not even we, with direct access to the server and the CMS, have access to meaningful statistics.

We are going to try to focus on high quality selection of news, not on numbers. █

It is an alternative to Google Analytics and from my experience, better in many respects. The latest version, released just today June 1 2012, is Piwik 1.8, and it comes with its share of new and improved features and bugfixes.

This release is rated critical, so if you are running Piwik 1.7.1, the previous stable version, immediate upgrade is highly recommended.

Boxee was an early full screen playback system which suited Ubuntu well, and the community in the most part followed it creating their own set top boxes and starting the cut the cord revolution.

Well Boxee knows how to say thank you for that early desktop commitment...

Read more...

With Christmas just 10 days away how about putting a little extra something in tuxmachines stocking this year? I know times are tough but if you have an extra 5 or 10 or even 20 bucks it would be a really nice way to say thanks to Susan for bringing us our daily fix of news and information.

http://www.tuxmachines.org/node/15555

Merry Christmas to all!