The business of Angsuman's Translator Plugin Pro and Angsuman's Translator Plugin Gold has been transferred over to Wordpress Translator. All future news and updates on Translator Plugin Pro & Translator Plugin Gold will be available from the new site.
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I mean every word of it. I found this simple configuration tip after days of continuously looking at MySQL logs (mytop), top, slow log queries, debugging the hell out of applications, reading tons of MySQL optimization tips (and pulling my remaining hairs in frustration) on the web. Even MySQL optimization tips from MySQL doesn't mention it. And yet this single tip solved all my MySQL headaches and performance problems. Here are some of the problems I faced:

My powerful dedicated server was frequently consuming 100% of the CPU even with moderate load.
Even with tons of optimization and indexes, I found my server idle CPU going to 0%. The key resource consumer was MySQL. The worst part was that MySQL refused to serve new request as all threads were exhausted waiting (for some miracle to happen?).

Does any of that sound familiar? Then read on for the gory technical explanations and the tip.

BTW: My initial reaction to such problems was the standard one. I looked at MySQL master-master replication (this is better than the master-slave replication which WordPress.com does for its sites) to take care of the increased load. Fortunately this single configuration change made my server take at least 10 times more load than before.

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David Remick is New Yorker's editor since 1998. He lead to a near-miraculous revival of the magazine, taking it to profitability and surpassing one million reader threshold. Unlike many magazines of the internet era, New Yorker features probing, lengthy (at times 10,000 words) articles, fine literature, selected poetry, reviews of art exhibitions or of historical biographies, clever columns and sophisticated, refined illustrations. There are barely any articles about celebrities. There are very few photographs. The format is rather rigid. The style is at times highbrow and always superbly intelligent. It doesn't try to attract young and impatient readers, or to appease the advertisers. The humble man behind all these gives some sound advice for budding journalists. Read more (181 words) »

WordPress wins the dubious distinction of Mass 0wnage Pwnie Award for an unbelievable number of WordPress vulnerabilities, over 140 as of today.

It seems like hardly a week goes by without a new vulnerability in WordPress or one of its many plugins. Many of them are actively being exploited to own popular WordPress blogs and use them to serve spam or client-side exploits to unsuspecting visitors. The popularity of WordPress combined with the abysmal security practices of WordPress plugin developers places the entire Internet at risk and is worthy of a nomination.

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Have you noticed the somewhat obscure in this blog?

It is in the menu. It is designed to take you to a random article on this blog. If you are feeling bored then give it a shot. You don't know what you will land up on. Simple Thoughts currently has 2,328 articles and 9,388 comments for you to enjoy mostly on Java, PHP and various other Web technologies.

Let me know if you like our new feature.

Zemanta is a nice little WordPress plugin which allows you to discover tags and linkable items within your content as well as images to include. In short it could have a nice little blogger's elf, helping you to create richer content. However it fails in several ways, the most prominent of which is its aggresive backlinking policy.

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We have started providing free upgrades for (WordPress) Translator Plugin Pro (Version 5.2) & (WordPress) Translator Plugin Gold (Version 1.2) to all our existing customers.

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I am continually amazed at how relevant ads (context sensitive advertisement) AdSense serves on certain articles. Here is a recent example on my post about future WordPress plugins.

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Translator Plugin Gold (for WordPress blogs) provides automatic machine translation of blogs in 32 languages (more will be added soon) - German, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional, Arabic, Dutch, Greek, Russian, Norwegian, Brazilian Portuguese, Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Finnish, Hungarian, Icelandic, Latin American Spanish, Filipino, Polish, Romanian, Serbian, Slovenian, Swedish, Welsh, Turkish and Latin. We provide unlimited free updates and upgrades and 6 months of free support.
Translator Plugin Gold has a lucrative affiliate program too. You can make a cool 30% from each sale!

The new features and fixes in version 1.2 (free upgrade for existing customers) are:

New Features

1. Directory browsing of translator plugin directory has been disabled for better security.
2. The ability to switch off translation statistics (from translator option page under Basic->Statistics->Disable Statistics section). You may gain some performance by switching off the statistics simply because it uses a database query to store the data. You can still use the Statistics widget to display your existing statistics. However it will not be updated if you decide to switch off stats. You can again switch it on any time.
3. In Translator Plugin Gold 1.2 we added a new hook / callback facility to enable you to view and process the translated page before it is served to the end user. Please refer to developer guide to know how to use it. The importance of this hook cannot be understated.
   You can use the tgTranslatorPostFilterHook to edit / modify the content of the translated pages before it is served to the user. You can also take action based on the content or engine used to translate the page.
   This hook can be used to handle errors in translation or even catch and process new types of errors. The actions include 1. ability to send custom error pages, 2. re-direct to original pages (for example in case of error), 3. displaying custom error messages and more. Few use cases for this hook are:
   • Provide customized title, meta tags & descriptions for translated pages to eliminate concerns about duplicate content. Check out the translated pages in simple thoughts for some usage examples (hint: look at the meta tags and title).
   • Provide custom error pages or re-direct to original page when translator is unable to translate a page (due to overload or temporary unavailability of engines).
   • Filter translated pages
   • Add your own content to translated pages like advertisements etc. You can also do it using existing translator API. However this provides full control over processing translated pages before it is served to the end-user.

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Translator Plugin Pro (for WordPress blogs) provides automatic machine translation of blogs in 13+1 languages (many more will be added soon) - German, Spanish, Russian, Arabic, Dutch, Greek, French, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional and optionally Norwegian (note: we provide 32 languages with Translator Plugin Gold). We provide unlimited free updates and upgrades and 6 months of free support. The new features and fixes in version 5.2 (free upgrade for existing customers) are:

New Features

1. Directory browsing of translator plugin directory has been disabled for better security.
2. The ability to switch off translation statistics (from translator option page under Basic->Statistics->Disable Statistics section). You may gain some performance by switching off the statistics simply because it uses a database query to store the data. You can still use the Statistics widget to display your existing statistics. However it will not be updated if you decide to switch off stats. You can again switch it on any time.
3. In Translator Plugin Pro 5.2 we added a new hook / callback facility to enable you to view and process the translated page before it is served to the end user. Please refer to developer guide to know how to use it. The importance of this hook cannot be understated.
   You can use the tgTranslatorPostFilterHook to edit / modify the content of the translated pages before it is served to the user. You can also take action based on the content or engine used to translate the page.
   This hook can be used to handle errors in translation or even catch and process new types of errors. The actions include 1. ability to send custom error pages, 2. re-direct to original pages (for example in case of error), 3. displaying custom error messages and more. Few use cases for this hook are:
   • Provide customized title, meta tags & descriptions for translated pages. Check out the translated pages in simple thoughts for some usage examples (hint: look at the meta tags).
   • Provide custom error pages or re-direct to original page when translator is unable to translate a page (due to overload or temporary unavailability of engines).
   • Filter translated pages
   • Add your own content to translated pages like advertisements etc. You can also do it using existing translator API. However this provides full control over processing translated pages before it is served to the end-user.

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