Developed by researchers in China and the United Kingdom, a new type of microchip has the ability to send out laser beams. These beams have the unusual property of Orbital Angular Momentum (OAM), or orbital angular momentum. The new chips have implications for the future of optical communications technology.

Optical Communications

Fiber-optic technology has been a fixture of digital communications for many years. The technology has been refined over time to allow larger volumes of data to be sent more rapidly. Networks currently utilize different frequencies of laser light to increase the bandwidth available in a single fiber optic cable. One data stream is sent using one frequency, the second using another and so on.

Researchers hope to improve on this still further by exploiting photons with angular momentum - photons that travel in a twisted or spiral path. It's theorized that data speeds could be increased, since the same frequency could be used for two or more data streams if the photons making up the stream had different angles of momentum.

Related Research

In a separate but related development, a conference in Los Angeles saw the unveiling of a new device: a means to twist two spiraling beams of laser light together and then untwist them (multiplexing and demultiplexing). The existence of a device for multiplexing twisted light beams indicates that the new OAM chip will have important real-world applications. Siyuan Yu, a researcher at the UK's University of Bristol, commented: "OAM appears to be the last parameter of light that we haven't explored so much."

Creating Twisted Light

According to Siyuan Yu, producing a corkscrew of light necessitates a means of shifting a laser's phase in a specific way. The device announced at the Los Angeles conference required multiple waveguides to direct the laser light in a spiral. The new microchip requires only a single waveguide, making it less complicated to produce.

Possible Applications

It may be possible for twisted OAM laser light to provide a means for microchips to 'talk' directly with computers. OAM light might also be used to detect the 'handedness'of molecules.

Conclusion

At present, the potential applications of OAM remain somewhat speculative. There is still plenty of room for improvement, especially in the area of energy efficiency. If the latest results are any indication, however, OAM laser light may well be the future of optical communications.

There is some fine print – first, we’ve capped the number of referrals at 5 for the month of May. Additionally, to prevent abuse, the credits will be applied 70 days after the signup date. Both accounts must remain active for the full 70-day period.

Not sure where to start? We’ve written a pre-written tweet for you, with your client ID in the control panel at http://control.vps.net/.

Our office has been buzzing with excitement about Star Trek Into the Darkness premiering this Thursday. I'm pretty certain that there are even a few employees who have already bought their tickets to make it to the premier showing. We wanted to have fun with our customers for the movie, so what better way than to make it part of our Social Media Monday contest? It's time to embrace your inner Spock, and take your favorite Star Trek quote and turn it into something VPS.NET or Cloud Related. Internally we've come up with, "Take me to the Cloud, Scotty!"

To enter the contest just direct a tweet to @vpsnet or respond to our Facebook status update with your quote, and we'll pick our 5 favorites. The contest will end Thursday May 16th at 11:59 PM EDT.

The first place winner will receive a Star Wars Enterprise Plush Toy & a Mini Star Trek Phaser gun. We'll be giving the runner ups a Mini Star Trek Phaser gun and a Star Trek Enterprise Mug. Cool, right?

Get those tweets and status updates in!

If you're a web developer and deal with any type of server side platform like PHP, you know the amount of overhead that goes into just getting your code to run, let alone develop.  In the past with PHP, you'd have to install a web server, set up some sort of virtual hosts, add a new DNS entry for each project and make sure the web server had some way to transfer and receive data from the PHP interpreter.  Only then would you be able to actually run your code in a browser.  Well, those days are over.

PHP 5.4 introduced a HTTP web server!  Seriously.  If you have PHP 5.4 or greater installed, you can start serving your content over the web with just one command.

php -S localhost:8000 -t foo/

Really, that's it.  Just run that and you'll instantly have foo/ being served over port 8000.  No giant configuration files, no virtualhosts, no CGI and no permission issues.

The beauty of this is that you can easily work on multiple projects and switch back and forth with ease.  If you want to stop working on foo/ from the above example and now want to work on bar/, just end that server and start it up again on bar/.

php -S localhost:8000 -t bar/

That's it!  Now, you're serving bar/!  Or, if you want to serve them both at the same time, just fire up another terminal or use screen and use a different port.

php -S localhost:8000 -t foo/
php -S localhost:8001 -t bar/

Now you can have foot/ on port 8000 and bar/ on port 8001.  The added benefit here is that each of your projects are identified and served over different ports, rather than different hostnames and virtualhosts.  This completely eliminates the need to deal with DNS in any way, which is great for development.

Just set up a single development server for yourself accessible via an easy to remember hostname like dev.mydomain.com.  Then, each of your projects will simply be on different ports as you fire them up with a single command line.  It's an absolute dream come true.

dev.mydomain.com:8000 would serve foo/.  While dev.mydomain.com:8001 would serve bar/.

While this has been available for about a year now, I've yet to see anybody use the built in PHP HTTP server for production.  However, I don't see any real drawbacks to using it on projects and applications that don't require a full fledged HTTP server.  The biggest examples that come to mind are API gateways, which don't need fancy features like rewrites.

Do you get adrenaline rush by just being on the bleeding edge of programming or computing? Is your dream computer experience filled with images of you customizing every aspect of your operating system? If so, Gentoo Linux operating system is the ideal distribution for you.

Gentoo Linux is a free and open source operating system that allows the user to compile the source code depending on the selected configurations. This feature greatly improves overall system efficiency since the computer is not overburdened with unnecessary programs, and executable programs are optimized to suit the user's exact needs. However, because of the long hours needed to compile the source codes, this operating system is not suited for programming greenhorns.

All in all, Gentoo Linux is a versatile operating system that offers numerous benefits.

1. System Optimization

Despite Gentoo being developed from source distribution, it allows the user to specify compiler flags during the source code compilation process. In particular, the user is allowed to specify the model and features of the CPU that the code will run on. By specifying certain CPU components like type of processor, the compiler is able to generate tailored processor codes that result in better and faster machine performance.

2. Ultimate Programming Experience

The OS offers numerous documentation pages that are bound to appeal to the Linux programmer in you. Various compiler flags sprucing up the whole programming experience moderate the compilation process. In addition, building/compiler packages in Gentoo are easy to compile, as they are essentially shell scripts.

3. Customized Solutions

Modern operating systems have certain disadvantages especially when it comes to developing toolkits or apps that are not featured in the distribution. The user is forced to develop the codes of the toolkit from scratch, which can be a very challenging task. Another challenge arises when a new version or updated toolkit is available but it was not included in the prepackaged OS. On the other hand, Gentoo is a versatile distribution since installing new toolkits and packages only involves downloading source codes and then compiling them. In addition, the toolkit or app is optimized to meet your system requirements.

4. Ease of Administering Multiple Machines

Gentoo is arguably the best operating system for complex IT infrastructure management. Gentoo is a dynamic and versatile OS that comes with various source codes that enable system administrators to compile codes for any network problem that may arise. The OS allows user to create their customized packages or tweak existing ones to suit their operating environment.

5. Enhanced Security

Firewalls are an excellent way to secure your system. Gentoo allows the user to create dynamic scripts that are essential when improving network security and rate of system responsiveness. The scripts can also be generated when making rapid and complex modifications in your firewall protocols.

An advanced use case for this would be large applications that need to scale horizontally for short periods of time depending on traffic and usage patterns. A developer can create a custom template with their software already installing and running in a way that once a new cloud server is created, it can instantly start processing requests without the need for additional customization. Using the VPS.NET API can even allow you to automate this for an awesome way to scale both up and down, serving your application efficiently while still keeping costs to a minimum.

Custom templates can be useful for the common folk as well though, ideally saving you time from doing repetitive tasks over and over again on every server you create. Here's a few examples on how you can use a custom template to make you deployments easier.

For these examples, let's assume you're a web developer who offers hosting to your clients. You like to use a different server for each client, here's a few ways you can use a custom template.

1. Install Your Software

Chances are you're going to be doing something with your server, you're not just booting it up and leaving it there all lonely. The bulk of the time that goes into deployment is installing and configuring the various software components needed for your server.

Let's take a website for example. After you clean out the bloatware, set up a basic firewall, and lock down authentication, you'll need to install a few things to get your website up and running. Let's say you need Apache, PHP, and MySQL. Fairly common, right?

Well, you could go through the installation process of each of those every time you launch a new server for a client. Or you could do it once, and save it as a template. This means you have everything ready to go instantly as you create a new cloud server.

Beyond just installing your software, go ahead and make all your little tweaks as well. Maybe you need to disable some PHP functions so your client doesn't screw things up. Perhaps you need to increase the amount of memory you allow MySQL. You might also want to make configuration tweaks to Apache to get the maximum performance out of it.  The beauty is, all the work you put into configuring everything will pay off time and time again every time you launch a new cloud server with this OS template.

All of this can potentially take 30 minutes up to a few hours depending on what you're doing. You can save yourself this time on every new cloud server by having a custom template, built by you, for you, with all your custom software and configuration.

2. Set Up Your Authentication

Hopefully you're using SSH keys to log in to your server. In your template, you can load up your public SSH key and even disable SSH password authentication for security altogether. Hell, go ahead and change the port while you're at it as well. Meaning, next time you spin up a server using this custom template, you'll have immediate access to the server using your private SSH key and custom port without having to fumble around importing it or dealing with root passwords.

I should note, that this doesn't mean you can completely disregard root passwords.  Choose a super strong one and stash it somewhere safe, just in case you need to use the console.

3. Set Up Your Firewall

As a developer, you probably want to drop all traffic to ports you don't want open to the public. Even if there's no service listening on your server. Or perhaps you want to block all traffic to your SSH daemon, white listing only your IP address. Well, rather than having to relearn IPTABLES or go through what's surely an overwhelming firewall config every single time, just do it once and stick it in a template. The next time you spin up a new server using this template, your base firewall rules will be right there and running, leaving you to only make the configuration tweaks specific to this server or client.

Let's be honest, IPTABLES is what the almighty Penguin put on this earth to torment all sysadmins.

4. Configure Startup Applications

Nobody likes bloatware. While most Linux distributions are pretty good about bloatware, and most of the basic templates are already running under 20MB RAM out of the box, there's probably that one thing you always have to remind yourself to diable to save that extra 1MB of RAM. For me, on CentOS and Ubuntu distributions, I have a habit of disabling the saslauthd daemon. Why? I don't need it, and you should never be running services you don't need, and you should especially make sure you're disabling them at startup.

5. Set Up Server Monitoring, Alerts, Bash Scripts, and Crons

Okay, I'm cheating a bit to get this list to 5. However, the power of custom templates is endless and allows you to save an enormous amount of time by doing various base tasks just once, then loading up that OS template for your future cloud servers.

The key is to keep your template up to date. Coming back to it every once in a while and making sure things are how you like them and then saving it again for future use. You also want to make sure the software and configuration in your template is flexible, and something you can add to. You don't want to create a template that you have to remove from, nor do you want one that has configuration to specific to a particular instance that you can''t easily use it on a new server.

Bloggers, both novice and advanced, usually use one blogging platform or another to make their website work efficiently. Among the many blogging platforms is WordPress, an impressive blogging platform with over 40 million posts a month, one that is used around the world, with support in over 120 languages. Just a few of the major players using WordPress as their preferred blogging platform are: UPS, CNN, CBS Radio, TechCrunch, NBC Sports and TED.

However, because of this widespread use, WordPress has recently become a target of brute force attacks. These are criminal activities are aimed at getting access to WordPress websites at the administrator level.

Signs of your WP site being signaled for attack, even when not fully infiltrated, are extreme slowdowns, significantly large web page downloads, and in an extreme case, your being blocked from website access.
This does not mean, however, that slow website load times are a definite indication of a brute force attack. These slowdowns can also be affected by other issues, such as high traffic, inefficient files, too much media or too many images and the WordPress handler you use.

1 - Update
Though updates may seem challenging, especially for inexperienced WordPress users, they are important. Developers constantly update the platform and create security patches so it’s important you keep your WordPress installation up to date. It is a simple process, just log into the cPanel of your hosting account and upgrade there, or if you created a manual installation, download the latest version of WordPress and follow the installation instructions offered on WordPress.org.

2 - Plugins

Although plugins are very useful, too much of a good thing can hurt. You want to update plugins, and make sure you install a login limiter to prevent brute force attacks from taking up your bandwidth or worse, from gaining entrance to the website. Other than that, you want to watch the number of plugins you do install. Although there are thousands of plugins out there, and many of them very useful, the more you install the slower your site will load, so you should remove those that you aren’t actively using. You especially want to be careful with the following plugins as they do require a large amount of bandwidth: wp-forum, geo-mashup, wassup and wp-digg.

3 - Caching

Though a slow loading WordPress page can certainly be an indication of a brute force attack, it isn’t necessarily the reason for a load-page slowdown. Your page can load slowly because of a large amount of traffic, a large number of posts and heavy images. To prevent slowdowns, you should install a W3 total cache solution. High-traffic and numerous hits cause WordPress to degrade and slow down. A W3 cache stores your WordPress pages as static HTML files, allowing them to be accessed quickly when pulled up by viewers. It also reduces the amount of work for MySQL and manages the PHP recompilation more efficiently. A W3 total cache, or even the WP-Super-Cache reduces memory and CPU usage for a WordPress website by as much as 70 percent, thereby increasing the load time by as much as 50 percent.

4 - Don’t Overload Your Homepage

Naturally, the homepage of your site is likely to get the highest amount of traffic, so you need to compensate for this by not overloading your homepage with too many posts. WordPress, thinking of this issue, allows you to select the number of posts you want to display here, or allows you to select a few of your latest posts to populate the homepage. To prevent slowdowns, don’t use more than 8 to 10 posts on the front page.

5 - Beware of Images and Media

Note that the sizes of your images and media will also significantly slow your website load time, even to a point of your assuming you being victimized by a brute force attack. When your posts contain streaming media, large images and heavy advertisements, your site will take longer to load. So you want to downsize and limit the images on your WP website.

6 - SUPHP vs DSO

There are two basic handler types for WordPress: SUPHP and DSO. SUPHP makes the PHP files run under the specific user account, and although secure, this user account verification can cause the website to slow down. By contrast Dynamic Shared Object (DSO) runs faster but it runs under a ‘nobody’ user, which means you will need to make permission amendments to the files and directories need to be changed. Users who experience large amounts of traffic often find it beneficial to switch to DSO. But because of the complex directory changes, a DSO transfer needs to be handled by an experienced WordPress developer.

It’s Social Media Monday! Each Monday we do some type of contest/giveaway/special event on our Twitter and Facebook profiles (follow now if you haven’t) and this week we’re quite excited!

Without further ado… This week’s Social Media Monday is the EPIC DESK CONTEST. We’re giving away three incredibly awesome and sexy camera lens mugs to the top three people who have the coolest desk setup.

HOW TO ENTER

All you need to do to enter is take a picture of your desk and upload it here, in our Facebook app. Pretty easy? Yes; but if you want to win the mug it’s not so easy… unless your desk is so unbelievably amazing that anyone sitting there writes code that flows like wine and beautiful women instinctively flock like the salmon of Capistrano (you should click that link, it’s hilarious).

The best way to ensure you win is to get everyone you know to vote for your desk.

Anyone is invited to participate including people who are not our customers although the mug is pretty awesome so not sure how many awesome people are out there and not a VPS.NET customer.

The contest has already started and will stop tomorrow (Tuesday, April. 23 at 12pm) so get going!

Go to the Contest App

PHP frameworks are so robust today, that mastering them can take as much time as learning PHP itself.  However, getting to know a particular framework is incredibly rewarding and will save you heaps of time.  Let's take a look at some of the benefits that a framework brings to the table.

MVC Pattern

All PHP frameworks that I've encountered use the MVC pattern, except for Zend (kinda).  MVC stands for Model-View-Controller and is a completely different way of thinking about your application and it's components.  Traditionally, your PHP code in your head is viewed through files and individual pages..  Each file represents something, perhaps a page, or a class, or some other component.

With the MVC pattern, your code is broken up into three categories.  A model will hold the meat of your application.  For example, a blog-type application may have a post mode, a user model, and a comment, model.

Models are more or less what actually create, store, modify, retrieve, or manipulate data.

Views are just that.  Different views of your application.  In this blog-type application, we might have a view for the main blog page, single posts, comments, the administrator dashboard, a page to add or edit posts.

Views essentially are the frontend of your application, things like HTML, CSS, JS.

Immediately, you can see a benefit a framework provides here.  Traditionally, your PHP files might have a mixed, ugly monstrosity all in one file.  The one file might have code to call the database and retrieve posts at the top, then all the HTML at the bottom.  This is a very messy way of doing this.  The MVC pattern allows you to completely separate the business logic of your application from what the user actually sees.  Bringing a nice zen to how you visualize and think about your code.

Finally we have the controller.  The controller is what takes in user input such as, the URL that was requests, GET variables in the URL, and post fields.  With this information, the controller will decide what model to use, send it data, get data back from the model, then decide what view to use and send it out to the user's browser.

The MVC pattern alone is a great reason to start using a framework.  It allows you to completely compartmentalize different aspects of your application into different models, views, and controllers.  Now, each developer and each framework may have it's own conventions about what exactly goes where, but MVC is MVC nonetheless.

It's a framework, not a guide!

Using a PHP framework can save you incredible amounts of time as a framework is just that.  It's essentially a ready to go application out of the box.  It may not do anything useful, but a framework out of the box is actually a complete application that you can run in a web browser.

Why is this important?  Realizing that the framework is a full application will give you the right mentality and see that you are adding your features and what you see as your application on top of the framework.  This means there are tons of tools the framework already makes available to you.  Things like connecting to and accessing database information easily without you having to create or use a separate database class or function, some frameworks will have features allowing you to easily secure and sanitize input data.  Most will even have features allow you to create incredibly robust forms.

These are just minor examples, the point is that so much time and work is already done for you.  In a traditional application, you might have to spend time and write out functions and classes to get rich database connectivity.  With a framework, you just use what's already there!

Faster Development

Once you pick a framework, learn it, and use it more and more, you'll realize that you get things done much quicker because you're changing how you think about your application application.  You go from seeing it as a PHP application to seeing it as a [INSERT FRAMEWORK NAME HERE] application.  Most likely the framework you're using is designed to allow for much more rapid development than using PHP directly.

Here's a simple example of how easy it is to get information out of a database using the Laravel framework.  Let's say I have a table in my database called users, here's all it takes for me to get information from that table.

First I create a User model.

class User extends Eloquent {}

Then in my views or controller, and I can do cool stuff like this!

$users = User::all();

# The $user variable will hold an array of objects with all the users.

$sajan = User::find(4);

# The $sajan variable will hold an object of the entire row where the id = 4.
# Similar to the following SQL query: SELECT * FROM users WHERE id = 4

$user = User::where('email', '=', 'email@sajanp.com')->first();

# This is similar to a SQL query like: SELECT * FROM users WHERE email = "email@sajanp.com" LIMIT 1

Of course you can get much more fancier than that and do some really dynamic things.  However, you see how expressive that was?  I didn't have to off looking for some old code snippet or type ugly code to do that.

How Do I Get Started?

First thing I'd like to point out is that since most PHP frameworks are such a thick layer on top of PHP, it's a good idea to be very familiar with PHP itself before diving into a framework.  Many believe that using a framework might be a shortcut to mastering PHP.  Wrong.  You will only find yourself lost as the use of frameworks do assume a strong grasp of the underlying concepts.

Obviously the first thing you want to do is pick a PHP framework to use.  As mentioned before, learning a framework will require the same effort as learning PHP itself.  So it's best that you be ready to invest some time in things and look around before you choose one you really want to go with.

While there are tons of really solid PHP frameworks out there, here's a list of some of the bigger names that you can check out for yourself.  Most are catered to a very specific type of developer and have different featuresets.  So make sure you shop around and find the one you like to work with the best.

• CakePHP
• CodeIgniter
• Symphony
• Yii
• Zend Framework
• Laravel

I personally love Laravel.  It's one of the most beautiful and fastest frameworks I've used.

It is highly recommended that you ensure your WordPress login password is a secure password comprising of at least 8 characters and includes special characters (@#$%^&*), a variation of upper and lower case letters, and numbers.

Common Password Example:

secretword123

Secure Password Example:

Z4Tn@V^oes

Beginning on Tuesday, a large scale and very organized distributed attack on WordPress websites initiated worldwide affecting almost all web hosts and anyone who hosts a WordPress installation.

These attacks are brute force in nature and specifically target the wp-login.php file, which is the script handling WordPress logins. The attackers have been, are, and will be focusing on common passwords to gain entry and compromise your WordPress website.

You should be safe if you are currently using a secure password as outlined above; however, the attack itself is very resource intensive and, depending on the severity of the attack at any given time, may cause your website to become sluggish or non-responsive for short periods of time. In some cases it has become necessary to completely block access to wp-login.php to prevent the servers from being overwhelmed.

This is the most widely distributed and far-reaching global distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack that has been seen in quite some time. Due to the extremely distributed nature and the scale of the attacks, we have implemented checks and measures to mitigate these attacks and minimize their effects.

Typically attacks of this nature do not last more than a few days. However we will continue to work to improve performance throughout the attack and provide you the best service possible.

Please share this post with your network to ensure the words gets out and everyone is kept safe.