Your description is very little to go about suggesting solutions...
You have to tell us many many specific things before we can suggest specific solutions. All we know is that the application runs on a 32 cPU system, and has 64 GB. This is all about the hardware. The application is a "large commercial application", and there is "contention within the application or the operating system". We do not even know what the hardware is, nor what operating system it is.
Anyways, here are some generic suggestions form past experience, most of it on UNIX systems, many with Oracle, and most with commerical non-web systems.
- Is the application CPU bound, memory bound, or I/O bound? If you do not know then you have to find out first, then attack the area of
- Is the application transactional in nature or batch? Is it an operational system, or a decision support type of application?
- Does the application use a database (probably does)? Is the database on the same box that runs the application? If so moving the database to a separate box with a fast connection (FDDI or Gigabit Ethernet) may help things.
- Does the application uses queues or message passing? Do these queues fill up at certain peak hours causing slow downs?
- Can you benchmark/load test the application on a similar box? If you have transaction generation/injection tools, then you can simulate the real load and then run tools for profiling, performance and the like in real time (e.g. sar, vmstat, top,....etc. if you are on a *NIX type of system).
Performance tuning is an iterative process that is more of an art than a science. Start with the 80/20 rule, and get the low hanging fruit (attack the easiest and most obvious area that would gain you some performance, then move to the next area,...etc until you hit the diminishing returns areas).
There are two cases where details of individual lives are very valuable historically:
1. Family genealogy.
It is valuable to know something about your distant ancestors. The lack of data that surrounds your ancestors (say in 1800s) leaves much to be desired. If you know which school they went to, who their friends are, what they did for a living, something about their temper, interests,...etc, that would shed some light on them. Chances are most people only know names, date of birth/marriage/death, a picture and that is about it.
Consider 50 or 100 or 200 years from now. Say your descendants search The-All-Encompassing-Knowledge-Repository (privacy issues aside), and find out that posted on Slashdot, then they research what Slashdot was, deduce that you are an Open Source fan,...etc. If they have interest to dig deeper, they can know what songs you listened to, who you chat with, which things you bought.
2. Archeology.
The lives of a single person in some remote past can be a gold mine of information. Think about Otzi the ice man for example. We know what he ate, we know the weapons and implements he carried, and know what he was dressed in. We speculate about the tatooes on his body, and whether he was involved in a skirmish/fight before he died. If we had a recording of the language he used we would know a lot. In any case, he himself is not important, not being a king, conqueror, or author, but the info gleaned from the life of that individual is priceless, and tells a lot about the age.
If Google (or any philanthropist) wants to really help a poor country, persuading them to depose their theocratic / despotic / fascist / socialist / puppet Governments and replace them with a constitutionally-bound Republic would be a good start.
I am not disputing that classical liberalism is a good thing (tm), and that getting rid of bad governments is, in general, a good thing.
However, having a republic and democracy in place is no cure in and of its own to poverty.
The proof is that there are democratic countries where the majority of the population is poor (Philippines, India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, some in Central and Latin America, others in Africa,...etc.)
These countries are mired by other ills, such as corruption, mismanagement,...etc.
Democracy is merely a nice thing to have. It is not enough on its own. It also has to come from within, not be imposed externally, otherwise it does not take root, and fails quickly.
As for republic or not, this is immaterial to economic well being in and of itself.
Have you seen any of this on TV or in your newspaper?
Call it media bias or "not newsworthy" or whatever... the end result is the same: the public always ask for "where are the moderate Muslims" or "do they every condemn terrorism"?
It suffers from several drawbacks, and SVN does address those.
For example, if you move or rename a file or directory in CVS, you lose its history.
Supposed you have a file called foo.c that you have been committing to for months, and then decide that instead of being in directory src/blah, it should be src/blat. Or if you want it to be simply bar.c. You do a cvs remove and then a cvs add, and bingo: you lost all the history of that file. It will go back to 1.1.
SVN handles that nicely.
The other thing in SVN is that commits are set at a time, not file at a time. Each commit has a unique number that spans all the files, and you can arbitrarity branch the entire project at any point back, without the need to have a tag.
Those are from my own experience. I have been using CVS for the past years, both professionally and in open source projects that I contribute to (have you done any Drupal lately?).
Since this is 2006, there is no point in starting with CVS.
Use SVN if you will be the only person committing stuff in to the repository. If you plan to share the code in an Open Source project with many people, and each will have their own distributed repository, then look into something like bzr from Canonical.
I meant all the current companies who are licensees of MySQL, who rely on a commerical license from MySQL AND redistribute MySQL in their solutions.
Those will be screwed big time, since Oracle owns the non-GPL license of MySQL, and they can kill it.
Going back to the scenario of MySQL/Inno/DBD developers leaving Oracle and being hired by some other company, I think this is the best outcome from all this. Some companies may suffer, but the community and the product as a whole would continue to thrive.
Alternative scenario: MySQL dies, and SQLite replaces it at the low end, and PostgreSQL at the high end. The middle (where you need a server, but not high end features) would still have a void in it.
Anyone who knows anything about marketing will tell you that you have two extremes:
1. Commodity products that you sell a lot of at rock bottom prices, and make your money on volume (think no name PCs, computer parts, GM and Ford cars,...etc.).
2. Expensive unique products that you sell a few of at high prices, and make your money on margin (think Rolex, Ferrari, Porsche, Apple Mac,...etc.).
Think if an inverted bell curve with price and quantity as the axes, and you get the idea. The former is on the far left, the latter is on the far right.
The best place to be is closer to the left as possible, or closer to the right as possible. Being in the middle is the toughest spot.
Apple is already differentiated and sought after. By going Windows, they will lose a lot:
1. Their hardware will be expensive, while the user interface will be the same as one from Dell or a no name PC.
2. They lose revenue by giving a piece of every sale of a PC to their arch-rival Microsoft.
3. They become undifferentiated, and compete with well established PC vendors (Dell,...etc.) as well cheap no namers.
4. Their user base will be pissed off and will defect to cheaper PCs, since they lose the most unique part of the deal: OS X.
There is nothing going for this line of thinking. Or rather lack of thinking...
First of all, there was a very small percentage of muslims who reacted violently.
Small percentage? There's thousands of Muslims rioting and attacking embassies. If it were a few small groups of extremists, that'd be one thing. But popularly-supported riots with thousands of people is another thing entirely. It's pretty obvious that the behavior of these violent Muslims is fairly representative of the feelings of the majority.
You can't call them "a few extremists" any more when there's thousands of them crowding the streets.
Let us do some math.
Assuming that there were demonstrations in 10 countries, and there were 2,000 people in each demonstration, this makes up for 20,000 Muslims involved.
I am in a generous mood, so let us say 5,000 in each demonstration, in 20 countries. Total is 100,000 Muslims then. Mind you not all of these were violent, nor involved property damage. The most notable torching of embassies was in Lebanon and Syria, perhaps a couple of others.
Now, how much is 100,000 in the total population of Muslims worldwide which is estimated at 1.2 billion or more? This is 0.008% of the total.
Even if we assume that there are 1,200,000 Muslims involved, this is still 0.01%.
Second, You are leaving out the political/cultural context. The muslims have been experienced a lot of suffering under colonial occupation.
Tough shit. Honestly, I really don't care any more. The Europeans haven't had control of the middle eastern countries for almost a century now; no one in those violent crowds was alive when there were any colonies. This is like the excuse that some black people in the US give for having atrocious behavior, that their distant ancestors were slaves. Sorry, it's not 1850 any more; it's time to join the rest of society and stop playing the oppression card. Even worse, the US has never had any colonies, so that argument really doesn't apply to the country they all hate the most.
You have a point here about the victimization complex, and I agree with it.
On the other hand, if it not have been for the two recent invasions of Muslim countries, this argument would have been stronger.
I've been rabidly anti-Republican since the Bush/Gore election, but any sympathy I ever had for Muslims is gone now.
Too bad that you sympathy is gone because of some choice footage in the media that leaves a lot of background and context.
By the same token, the rest of the world solely judges the USA from what they see from Hollywood and TV shows, as well as its actions (foreign policy and military). This is unfair, but it is the sore thumb sticking out. Judging should be based on a deeper multi-facted analysis.
We should pull out of these backwards, hellhole countries and leave them to their own devices.
Good idea. Intervention was wrong in the first place. But it is not going to happen, since there is so much at stake (oil, geo-politics,...etc.)
Nubian means from Nubia. Nubia is the land historically between Egypt, which was considered to end at the first cataract on the Nile (waterfall making the river not navigable south of it), and the North part of what is now Sudan.
The kingdom of Napata eventually took over Egypt, and their kings became pharoahs. Their center was at Meroe, where there are pyramids today. The most famous "black pharoah" was Taharqa.
Coptic is the wrong term. The correct term is "Canopic jars".
Intact tombs are indeed rare, and I have posted the other day on why King Tut became famous in the last century despite him being a minor figure in history, and why undisturbed tombs are a rarity. You can read it at this Slashdot comment.
Yes, Tut was a minor figure in Egyptian history, despite his modern fame.
This fame is due largely to the discovery of his tomb in the early 20th century by Howard Carter. What was unique is that it was about the only tomb of a pharoah to be found intact, i.e. unplundered.
Tut's era was the New Kingdom last 4 centuries of the second millenium BC), one of three "peaks" in Egypt's ancient history. This same era saw more famous kings such as Ahmose (uniter of Egypt, expelling the foreign Hyksos), Hatshepsut (the female pharoah, who sent ships in the Red Sea and beyond, recording the discoveries on her temple), Thutmosis (the ancient Napoleon, who conquered as far as Mesopotamia, hunting elephants on the Euphrates), Amenhotep (great builder and diplomat), Akhnaten (the Heretic monotheist pharoah), Thutmosis IV (dream stele by the sphinx), Ramses II (2nd longest reign in Egyptian history), Merenptah (his son), and Seti.
This was the golden age of Egypt, more than a millenium after the pyramids were build. Egypt expanded as never before.
This was followed by an age of decline when the priests took over, and could not keep the invaders out (Libyans, Nubians,...etc.).
During this age, the priests plundered the tombs of previous pharoahs, "confiscating" the tomb wealth to use for current pharoahs and priests. Most of the mummies of royals from the New Kingdom were re-wrapped, and moved to central "caches". Those caches were discovered in the Kings Valley (KV) near Luxor, and the pharoahs identified, unwrapped, and moved to museums. All the treasures in the tombs was long gone (circa 1000 BC).
This is why a relatively insignificant pharoah like Tut shot to fame. It seems that the priests lost track of where his tomb was, but some robbers have managed to cause minor damage to the external chamber in antiquity. Then Howard Carter came along and discovered the real treasure, and the rest is history.
One could imagine how the likes of Ramses or Amenhotep were buried...
Disclaimer: I am a Drupal community member and developer.
I think you have to hack it to get it to work multisite?
Nope.
Drupal has multi site out of the box, and has been like that for years. For some 18 months, I ran 4 different domain out of the same code base and the same database even (with database prefixes).
Also, the URLs are pretty horrible.
Drupal boasts "clean URLs" out of the box as well. This means that urls do not have to be www.example.com?q=node/123 but rather www.example.com/node/123 (this requires mod_rewrite).
Moreover, Drupal has out of the box the path module which allows you to alias any page to any URL you like. There is also a contributed module (pathauto) that makes this totally automated.
Check my web site for examples (all URLs are aliased).
Slashdot Mirror
Your description is very little to go about suggesting solutions ...
....etc. if you are on a *NIX type of system).
...etc until you hit the diminishing returns areas).
You have to tell us many many specific things before we can suggest specific solutions. All we know is that the application runs on a 32 cPU system, and has 64 GB. This is all about the hardware. The application is a "large commercial application", and there is "contention within the application or the operating system". We do not even know what the hardware is, nor what operating system it is.
Anyways, here are some generic suggestions form past experience, most of it on UNIX systems, many with Oracle, and most with commerical non-web systems.
- Is the application CPU bound, memory bound, or I/O bound? If you do not know then you have to find out first, then attack the area of
- Is the application transactional in nature or batch? Is it an operational system, or a decision support type of application?
- Does the application use a database (probably does)? Is the database on the same box that runs the application? If so moving the database to a separate box with a fast connection (FDDI or Gigabit Ethernet) may help things.
- Does the application uses queues or message passing? Do these queues fill up at certain peak hours causing slow downs?
- Can you benchmark/load test the application on a similar box? If you have transaction generation/injection tools, then you can simulate the real load and then run tools for profiling, performance and the like in real time (e.g. sar, vmstat, top,
Performance tuning is an iterative process that is more of an art than a science. Start with the 80/20 rule, and get the low hanging fruit (attack the easiest and most obvious area that would gain you some performance, then move to the next area,
Look at it from an alternate perspecitive ...
...
For most of North America, where high speed is fairly common and unmetered, this is not a good idea.
For some other parts of the world, the internet is only available in dialup, and is metered. Spending hours surfing can be very cost prohibitive.
So, if large parts of the net is available offline, I can see a market for those geographical areas, provided the cost is not prohibitive
I have been on Mandrake/Mandriva since the 8.x days (maybe 4-5 years). Had it on 4 out of the 5 machines at home.
The last release of Mandriva that I used (LE 2005) was really slow to boot, and my kids complained.
I am now half moved to kubuntu, with only the server left to migrate.
I find kubuntu is nice to use and more lightweight than the latest incarnations of Mandriva.
These circular structures in the Libyan desert are not craters, and seem to be man made.
Are they the circular irrigation things. A bit north there are more of them.
Anyone has an idea on what they are?
This is not for everyone, but the Dilbert Ultimate House has some good ideas in some areas that apply for non-geeks.
I agree the summary should have more context ...
...
OSU OSL is Oregon State University Open Source Labs.
This is a project that manages infrastructure (machines, bandwidth) for many open source projects.
Their list of projects include Debian, Drupal, Gentoo, Mozilla and others
So, it is really good news, since the longevity of these projects are better (not that they were in danger or anything).
Disclaimer: I contribute to Drupal.
I disagree.
...etc, that would shed some light on them. Chances are most people only know names, date of birth/marriage/death, a picture and that is about it.
...etc. If they have interest to dig deeper, they can know what songs you listened to, who you chat with, which things you bought.
There are two cases where details of individual lives are very valuable historically:
1. Family genealogy.
It is valuable to know something about your distant ancestors. The lack of data that surrounds your ancestors (say in 1800s) leaves much to be desired. If you know which school they went to, who their friends are, what they did for a living, something about their temper, interests,
Consider 50 or 100 or 200 years from now. Say your descendants search The-All-Encompassing-Knowledge-Repository (privacy issues aside), and find out that posted on Slashdot, then they research what Slashdot was, deduce that you are an Open Source fan,
2. Archeology.
The lives of a single person in some remote past can be a gold mine of information. Think about Otzi the ice man for example. We know what he ate, we know the weapons and implements he carried, and know what he was dressed in. We speculate about the tatooes on his body, and whether he was involved in a skirmish/fight before he died. If we had a recording of the language he used we would know a lot. In any case, he himself is not important, not being a king, conqueror, or author, but the info gleaned from the life of that individual is priceless, and tells a lot about the age.
This is why "Digital Archeology" is so important for the future.
If Google (or any philanthropist) wants to really help a poor country, persuading them to depose their theocratic / despotic / fascist / socialist / puppet Governments and replace them with a constitutionally-bound Republic would be a good start.
...etc.)
...etc.
I am not disputing that classical liberalism is a good thing (tm), and that getting rid of bad governments is, in general, a good thing.
However, having a republic and democracy in place is no cure in and of its own to poverty.
The proof is that there are democratic countries where the majority of the population is poor (Philippines, India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, some in Central and Latin America, others in Africa,
These countries are mired by other ills, such as corruption, mismanagement,
Democracy is merely a nice thing to have. It is not enough on its own. It also has to come from within, not be imposed externally, otherwise it does not take root, and fails quickly.
As for republic or not, this is immaterial to economic well being in and of itself.
One of the big reasons is where the media puts the spotlight.
... the end result is the same: the public always ask for "where are the moderate Muslims" or "do they every condemn terrorism"?
For example, here is a list of Muslims and Muslim organizations who condemned terrorism and terrorist acts.
Have you seen any of this on TV or in your newspaper?
Call it media bias or "not newsworthy" or whatever
You, and others interested, can read some thoughts on the prophet Muhammad cartoon controversey.
Here is a previous discussion on the topic, as well as an attempt to quantify how many Muslims are involved, and what percentage they are.
CVS is antiquated by today's standards.
It suffers from several drawbacks, and SVN does address those.
For example, if you move or rename a file or directory in CVS, you lose its history.
Supposed you have a file called foo.c that you have been committing to for months, and then decide that instead of being in directory src/blah, it should be src/blat. Or if you want it to be simply bar.c. You do a cvs remove and then a cvs add, and bingo: you lost all the history of that file. It will go back to 1.1.
SVN handles that nicely.
The other thing in SVN is that commits are set at a time, not file at a time. Each commit has a unique number that spans all the files, and you can arbitrarity branch the entire project at any point back, without the need to have a tag.
Those are from my own experience. I have been using CVS for the past years, both professionally and in open source projects that I contribute to (have you done any Drupal lately?).
CVS is showing its age. SVN is much better.
Since this is 2006, there is no point in starting with CVS.
Use SVN if you will be the only person committing stuff in to the repository. If you plan to share the code in an Open Source project with many people, and each will have their own distributed repository, then look into something like bzr from Canonical.
Not Red Hat.
I meant all the current companies who are licensees of MySQL, who rely on a commerical license from MySQL AND redistribute MySQL in their solutions.
Those will be screwed big time, since Oracle owns the non-GPL license of MySQL, and they can kill it.
Going back to the scenario of MySQL/Inno/DBD developers leaving Oracle and being hired by some other company, I think this is the best outcome from all this. Some companies may suffer, but the community and the product as a whole would continue to thrive.
Alternative scenario: MySQL dies, and SQLite replaces it at the low end, and PostgreSQL at the high end. The middle (where you need a server, but not high end features) would still have a void in it.
Anyone who knows anything about marketing will tell you that you have two extremes:
...etc.).
...etc.).
...etc.) as well cheap no namers.
...
1. Commodity products that you sell a lot of at rock bottom prices, and make your money on volume (think no name PCs, computer parts, GM and Ford cars,
2. Expensive unique products that you sell a few of at high prices, and make your money on margin (think Rolex, Ferrari, Porsche, Apple Mac,
Think if an inverted bell curve with price and quantity as the axes, and you get the idea. The former is on the far left, the latter is on the far right.
The best place to be is closer to the left as possible, or closer to the right as possible. Being in the middle is the toughest spot.
Apple is already differentiated and sought after. By going Windows, they will lose a lot:
1. Their hardware will be expensive, while the user interface will be the same as one from Dell or a no name PC.
2. They lose revenue by giving a piece of every sale of a PC to their arch-rival Microsoft.
3. They become undifferentiated, and compete with well established PC vendors (Dell,
4. Their user base will be pissed off and will defect to cheaper PCs, since they lose the most unique part of the deal: OS X.
There is nothing going for this line of thinking. Or rather lack of thinking
That is the best outcome.
However, what the ex-MySQL/DBD/InnoBase/Oracle people cannot do is sell non-GPL licenses of the MySQL/InnoDB/DBD and make that a business model.
They can still do private modifications for customers on the GPL base code, but those customers cannot relicense those under a proprietary license.
That is the different of having MySQL own the code (which is today's scenario) vs. Oracle owning it and the developers leaving.
In both cases there is an impact, but less so on the open source community than on private licensees.
The other day, I wrote about Oracle becoming too powerful and that now MySQL AB is totally screwed up.
...
MySQL AB should have first seen that Inno is crucial to them, and bought them out.
Having failed to do that, BDB was the engine left after Oracle gobbled up Inno, and MySQL AB should have bought them out.
Now MySQL AB will get choked
Let us do some math.
Assuming that there were demonstrations in 10 countries, and there were 2,000 people in each demonstration, this makes up for 20,000 Muslims involved.
I am in a generous mood, so let us say 5,000 in each demonstration, in 20 countries. Total is 100,000 Muslims then. Mind you not all of these were violent, nor involved property damage. The most notable torching of embassies was in Lebanon and Syria, perhaps a couple of others.
Now, how much is 100,000 in the total population of Muslims worldwide which is estimated at 1.2 billion or more? This is 0.008% of the total.
Even if we assume that there are 1,200,000 Muslims involved, this is still 0.01%.
Negligible for sure.
You can read an alternative view in some thoughts on the prophet Muhammad cartoons controversy.
You have a point here about the victimization complex, and I agree with it.
On the other hand, if it not have been for the two recent invasions of Muslim countries, this argument would have been stronger.
Too bad that you sympathy is gone because of some choice footage in the media that leaves a lot of background and context.
By the same token, the rest of the world solely judges the USA from what they see from Hollywood and TV shows, as well as its actions (foreign policy and military). This is unfair, but it is the sore thumb sticking out. Judging should be based on a deeper multi-facted analysis.
Good idea. Intervention was wrong in the first place. But it is not going to happen, since there is so much at stake (oil, geo-politics,
Nubian means from Nubia. Nubia is the land historically between Egypt, which was considered to end at the first cataract on the Nile (waterfall making the river not navigable south of it), and the North part of what is now Sudan.
_ of_Egypt.
...
The kingdom of Napata eventually took over Egypt, and their kings became pharoahs. Their center was at Meroe, where there are pyramids today. The most famous "black pharoah" was Taharqa.
Read more here http://touregypt.net/historicalessays/nubia.htm, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nubia, and here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-fifth_dynasty
Outside of the Star Wars mythos of course
Ignoring the other stereotypes and sound bites that you posted, would the following answer the above question?
Thoughts on Prophet Muhammad Cartoon Controversy.
Do Muslims ever condemn terrorist attacks?
It is not the fault of the speaker if the audience choose to pretend they are deaf.
Coptic is the wrong term. The correct term is "Canopic jars".
Intact tombs are indeed rare, and I have posted the other day on why King Tut became famous in the last century despite him being a minor figure in history, and why undisturbed tombs are a rarity. You can read it at this Slashdot comment.
Yes, Tut was a minor figure in Egyptian history, despite his modern fame.
...etc.).
...
...)
This fame is due largely to the discovery of his tomb in the early 20th century by Howard Carter. What was unique is that it was about the only tomb of a pharoah to be found intact, i.e. unplundered.
Tut's era was the New Kingdom last 4 centuries of the second millenium BC), one of three "peaks" in Egypt's ancient history. This same era saw more famous kings such as Ahmose (uniter of Egypt, expelling the foreign Hyksos), Hatshepsut (the female pharoah, who sent ships in the Red Sea and beyond, recording the discoveries on her temple), Thutmosis (the ancient Napoleon, who conquered as far as Mesopotamia, hunting elephants on the Euphrates), Amenhotep (great builder and diplomat), Akhnaten (the Heretic monotheist pharoah), Thutmosis IV (dream stele by the sphinx), Ramses II (2nd longest reign in Egyptian history), Merenptah (his son), and Seti.
This was the golden age of Egypt, more than a millenium after the pyramids were build. Egypt expanded as never before.
This was followed by an age of decline when the priests took over, and could not keep the invaders out (Libyans, Nubians,
During this age, the priests plundered the tombs of previous pharoahs, "confiscating" the tomb wealth to use for current pharoahs and priests. Most of the mummies of royals from the New Kingdom were re-wrapped, and moved to central "caches". Those caches were discovered in the Kings Valley (KV) near Luxor, and the pharoahs identified, unwrapped, and moved to museums. All the treasures in the tombs was long gone (circa 1000 BC).
This is why a relatively insignificant pharoah like Tut shot to fame. It seems that the priests lost track of where his tomb was, but some robbers have managed to cause minor damage to the external chamber in antiquity. Then Howard Carter came along and discovered the real treasure, and the rest is history.
One could imagine how the likes of Ramses or Amenhotep were buried
Read more here:
- New Kingdom on wikipedia
(Oh, yes, I am Egyptian, that is why
Exactly who Tut's father was is uncertain. It is unlikely that Akhnaten (the Heretic pharoah) was his father.
Nope.
Drupal has multi site out of the box, and has been like that for years. For some 18 months, I ran 4 different domain out of the same code base and the same database even (with database prefixes).
Drupal boasts "clean URLs" out of the box as well. This means that urls do not have to be www.example.com?q=node/123 but rather www.example.com/node/123 (this requires mod_rewrite).
Moreover, Drupal has out of the box the path module which allows you to alias any page to any URL you like. There is also a contributed module (pathauto) that makes this totally automated.
Check my web site for examples (all URLs are aliased).
You probably saw scans for the old versions of xmlrpc.
...etc.)
This was a third party library that we incorporated in Drupal a while back to do some remote stuff (e.g. remote blogging,
If you do not use third party client apps to post, you can delete the file xmplrpc.php altogether if you wish.
When it was discovered that it has security flaws, we replaced it completely.
Newer versions are as secure as they can be.
Which Windows is he using?
If he does not have XP, then install ZoneAlarm for him from ZoneLabs. There is a free version.