My website hosting provider GoDaddy.com has mailed me saying that this site is consuming a lot of server resources. As part of the remedy I have removed several plugins and cut down on few features in sidebars. I am not sure if these measures are going to cut down the CPU load on GoDaddy servers. I might end up moving the site to another server (although I would like to keep it where it is).
If you know a good hosting provider that can support PHD, please drop a comment or mail me at chandoo.d @ gmail.com. Thanks.
Clarification (added later): I have been using GoDaddy for the last 8 months and the site had seen crazy (ok, moderately crazy) traffic but hosting never failed. I am guessing the cause of this recent development is unnecessary (and probably dumb) plugin usage. Also, as most you might think the issue is not with traffic or storage capacity but with how much of server CPU is used by the blog. Initial research suggests usage of plugins and some non-optimized queries is to be blamed for this.
Anyways, here is a list of excel links that I found useful in the last week. Thanks to Tal for sending few links thru email.
There are only 14 different calendars, really!
Spreadsheet page explores the calendar generation logic and concludes that there are actually just 14 different calendar combinations (7 possible weekdays for Jan 1 and another 7 for leap years). They provided a compatibility table to see which year’s calendar same.
How cool would it be if you can use regular expressions in excel’s find formulas? Well, T Mehta has provided a simple VBA solution to achieve just this.
Number Spirals in Excel [xls file]
Number spirals is an interesting way to explore and understand numbers.
Number spirals are very simple. To make one, we just write the non-negative integers on a ribbon and roll it up with zero at the center.
So what the heck they got to do with Excel ? Well, they have provided an excel sheet using which you can generate number spirals. If you enjoy numbers like I do then you can download and play with this.
Huge Data for Simulations and Experimentation
Dick Kusleika from daily dose of excel points us to few sources of huge excel based sample data that you can use in your simulations or just to play around.
Another Excel Clone, this time with Python goodness
This one aims to be reliable and help programmers understand and build applications on this excel clone. For one it uses Python (unlike VBA) to extend the functionality. I have doubts if this will appeal to excel users (of which most are working in offices or running businesses). What do you think?
Want to share a link with PHD readers?
Drop a comment or send me an email (chandoo.d at gmail.com) and I will be very happy to publish the same.
9 Responses
yess….that would be great…plz go ahead….
my yess is for creating a forum……thanks…
Go Daddy = Bad. Find a better home. Just my .02
Have you given a thought to 1and1.com? I heard they are good.
Hi Chandoo,
A couple of points:-
Yes to a forum, great idea
I notice one or two images don’t work for me now – have you been too aggressive in your bandwidth restrictions?
Finally, the number spiral is a very interesting idea – I’m a keen photographer and like to explore alternative methods of producing images, such as pin-holes and photon sieves, instead of lenses (see here: http://ca.geocities.com/penate@rogers.com/sieve/photonsieve.html). I wonder if there is a way to modify the spreadsheet to generate a photon sieve pattern?
Keep up the good work 🙂
I’ve been using Bluehost.com for three years now and highly recommend them. While I have not had a moment of downtime, I have received great support when I’ve had questions about how to set things up on my site.
@All thanks for the suggestions. I have temporarily resolved the hosting issues. Btw, I am also on the lookout for a host so that I can move away from GoDaddy to a pure hosting company to ensure excellent uptime and speed for this site.
@John: I am sorry for the delayed reply to your query. A photon sieve is a new concept to me as well. But you can use Excel’s bubble chart to get this effect.
I absolutely think a forum with practical advice, from all levels of user proficiency, would be great. I have only recently come across the site and I really like the temperament and style of delivery of the information. I find it very beneficial, and I believe sharing the knowledge and experience of the user base with each other can only enhance every users’ knoweledge.
The only thing that I fear of forums is when users leech on to the site with nothing more than the objective to grate everyone else’s nerves and sanity with their “pi$$ and vinegar” personality and attitudes. As long as forum policing can be managed by both moderators and the users, to keep a civil environment, I would completely support forums.
@JT: Awesome, thanks for the inputs.
As You can probably guess, the host problems are still bothering me. Once I solve them I will go ahead and add a discussion forum to the blog. We will start small and see how it goes 🙂