You love your WordPress installation but you need that little extra something? These 3 WordPress Performance and WordPress Optimization plugins will make your day. You need to understand the basics of stuff like MySQL queries, be familiar with changing settings in my.cnf and make sure you have a backup of your DB (data base) before you run any of the following WordPress Performance and WordPress Optimization plugins.

The concept is simple. You need to find what is causing your blog and site to be slow. Looking for delays in old plugin queries or old theme files is a great way to improve WordPress Performance. Assuming your web server is properly configured and that you already use caching plugins like W3 Total Cache or WP Super Cache.

P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler)
See which plugins are slowing down your site. This plugin creates a performance report for your site.

This plugin creates a profile of your WordPress site’s plugins’ performance by measuring their impact on your site’s load time. Often times, WordPress sites load slowly because of poorly configured plugins or because there are so many of them. By using the P3 plugin, you can narrow down anything causing slowness on your site.

This plugin uses the canvas element for drawing charts and requires requires Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari, or IE9 or later. This plugin will not work in IE8 or lower.

Debug Objects
The Plugin Debug Objects provides a large number of information: query, cache, cron, constants, hooks, functions and many more.

The Plugin Debug Objects provides the user, which has the appropriate rights, normally the administrator, a large number of information: query, cache, cron, constants, hooks, functions and many many more. Values and content get displayed at the frontend and backend of the blog, to analyze errors but also to better understand and develop with/for WordPress.

WP-Optimize
This simple but effective plugin allows you to clean up your WordPress database and optimize it without phpMyAdmin.

WP-Optimize is a WordPress 2.9++ database cleanup and optimization tool. It doesn’t require PhpMyAdmin to optimize your database tables. It allows you to remove post revisions, comments in the spam queue, un-approved comments within few clicks.

Remove the WordPress post revisions, remove the WordPress auto draft posts, remove all the comments in the spam queue, remove all the un-approved comments, apply mysql optimize commands on your database tables without phpMyAdmin, display Database table statistics. Shows how much space can be optimzied and how much space has been cleared.

Remember, you need to backup your WordPress DB (data base) just in case you decide to use WP-Optimize. Debug Objects and P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler) just profile (monitor and report WordPress performance or lack of it) without altering your WordPress DB (data base).

Examples:

Deprecated variables -> new variables

thread_cache -> thread_cache_size
key_buffer -> key_buffer_size
table_cache -> table_open_cache
log-slow-queries -> slow_query_log

Puppet Enterprise is IT automation software that gives system administrators the power to easily automate repetitive tasks, quickly deploy critical applications, and proactively manage infrastructure changes, on-premise or in the cloud. Learn more about Puppet Enterprise below, or download now and manage up to 10 nodes free.

Google uses it. Zynga uses it. Nasa uses it. So does Rackspace and many many other companies. What for? Puppet Labs helps you manage your computers. Here’s what Puppet Labs does, and how it fits into the world. We talked with a couple of the execs at the Open Stack Design Summit (they announced support of OpenStack at that event). http://puppetlabs.com/ has more about puppet labs.

Follow Miss Reef through the beautiful beaches of Culebrita Island, Puerto Rico. This behind the scenes look will give you some insight into all the action that took place in the making of the January spread of the 2012 Miss Reef Calendar.

Enjoy this months sneak peak of what made the Calendar pages of February’s 2012 Miss Reef Calendar. This months video and images come form the beaches of Villa Montana, Puerto Rico.

Food Network Magazine asked top chefs across the country for their best advice and created the top 100 cooking tips of all time. Quick cooking tip for meat and steak lovers: start cooking a steak on the fat side first, so there’s flavorful fat for the rest of the cooking. Read all the 100 cooking tips of all time here.

Fiat money is money that derives its value from government regulation or law. The term derives from the Latin fiat, meaning “let it be done” or “it shall be [money]“, as such money is established by government decree. Where fiat money is used as currency, the term fiat currency is used.

By World War I most nations had a legalized government monopoly on bank notes and the legal tender status thereof. In theory, governments still promised to redeem notes in specie on demand. However, the costs of the war and the massive expansion afterward made governments suspend redemption in specie. Since there was no direct penalty for doing so, governments were not immediately responsible for the economic consequences of printing more money, which led to hyperinflation – for example in Weimar Germany.

Attempts were made to reassert currency stability by anchoring it to wholesale gold bullion rather than making it payable in specie. This money combined pure fiat currency, in that the currency was limited to central bank notes and token coins that were current only by government fiat, with a form of convertibility, via gold bullion exchange, or via exchange into US dollars which were convertible into gold bullion, under the 1945 Bretton Woods system.

There’s more to the cosmos than meets the eye. About 80 percent of the matter in the universe is invisible to telescopes, yet its gravitational influence is manifest in the orbital speeds of stars around galaxies and in the motions of clusters of galaxies. Yet, despite decades of effort, no one knows what this “dark matter” really is. Many scientists think it’s likely that the mystery will be solved with the discovery of new kinds of subatomic particles, types necessarily different from those composing atoms of the ordinary matter all around us. The search to detect and identify these particles is underway in experiments both around the globe and above it.

Scientists working with data from NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope have looked for signals from some of these hypothetical particles by zeroing in on 10 small, faint galaxies that orbit our own. Although no signals have been detected, a novel analysis technique applied to two years of data from the observatory’s Large Area Telescope (LAT) has essentially eliminated these particle candidates for the first time.

WIMPs, or Weakly Interacting Massive Particles, represent a favored class of dark matter candidates. Some WIMPs may mutually annihilate when pairs of them interact, a process expected to produce gamma rays — the most energetic form of light — that the LAT is designed to detect.

The team examined two years of LAT-detected gamma rays with energies in the range from 200 million to 100 billion electron volts (GeV) from 10 of the roughly two dozen dwarf galaxies known to orbit the Milky Way. Instead of analyzing the results for each galaxy separately, the scientists developed a statistical technique — they call it a “joint likelihood analysis” — that evaluates all of the galaxies at once without merging the data together. No gamma-ray signal consistent with the annihilations expected from four different types of commonly considered WIMP particles was found.

For the first time, the results show that WIMP candidates within a specific range of masses and interaction rates cannot be dark matter. A paper detailing these results appeared in the Dec. 9, 2011, issue of Physical Review Letters.

Learn more at: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/GLAST/news/dark-matter-insights.html

PC Magazine claims

A new store isn’t going to solve the major problem with Android tablets, which is that they lack compelling tablet-focused apps from major, popular brands. But it’s a good move, and it’s very different from Google’s first attempt at selling hardware online, the doomed Nexus One store. The reason: this time, wireless carriers aren’t involved.

While this is true and carriers aren’t involved this time, Google has a bad record when it comes to selling hardware:

1. Nexus One – doomed
2. Chromebook – doomed
3. Google tablet – ?

PC Magazine assumes that telcos will give up subsidizing and selling 3G and 4G tablets and surrender to Google’s try to promote the WiFi Google tablet only. With a fail record like that, chances are Google will fail again because Google is still the old Google. This is not a bad thing though. It just means that Google has no retail experience and it still is an engineer driven company.

Even if Google “subsidize these tablets itself” it won’t make much of a difference for the “lack compelling tablet-focused apps” and lack of successful marketing and successful sales of Google hardware using Google online stores.

Google has to make it with its Google tablet store but chances are it won’t, not this time, not this way.

In memory of Whitney Houston and all the great artists who left us too soon. Whitney Houston meets Michael Jackson in heaven along with John Lennon, Jim Morisson, Freddie Mercury, Elvis, Jimi Hendrix, Amy Winehouse and Kurt Cobain.

Even mere mortals can recognize the 10 early signs of the financial crisis, right before the big economy crash. It takes 5 to 3 years from blooming to dooming and the financial meltdown. In the beginning everything is beautiful, smooth and shiny. As time flies pretty much everything turns out to be the clusterfuck we call financial crisis and economy crash.

These are 10 signs to watch pre financial crisis in no particular order.

1. New banks appear out of nowhere
2. Existing banks open new stores like crazy
3. Banks literally beg you to get their money
4. New strip clubs are all over the place
5. Betting, lottery, monitor and number games in the wild
6. Retail stores literally give away their stuff with first payment due to 12 months
7. Retail stores offer almost unlimited opportunities to pay back the bill due to 100 years
8. Telcos create way too many mind boggling products, offer unlimited choices
9. Car companies and leasing companies literally give away cars even super expensive SUVs
10. All of a sudden, “amateur” porn becomes mainstream

Bonus: TV stations rely heavily on reality shows, repetition of older shows, gossip shows