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Category: Programming

XAMPP Slow on Windows 10

Is XAMPP slow?

I’ve used XAMPP for pretty much as long as I’ve been doing web development. It makes it trivial to get Apache, MySQL, and PHP set up.Since upgrading from Windows 7 to Windows 10 though I’ve noticed it was running much slower. I just assumed that XAMPP is slow. There was also an upgrade to XAMPP as part of that, although I don’t remember what versions.

The slowness was especially noticeable working on Moodle plugins. It was almost unusable, although that’s not too surprising with the 250-300 database tables that Moodle uses.

Googling brought a bunch of potential solutions

  • Disable IPv6
  • Edit hosts file to point 127.0.0.1 to localhost
  • Exclude Apache, MySQL, and PHP from firewall

And all of these seemed to help just a little bit, but so little that it could have just been psychological.

Importing into Moodle from Examview – With Images

Edit on 8/7/2014

Well, this script is pretty much worthless now. Not sure when it happened, but Moodle now lets you upload the entire Blackboard zip file, images included, and everything gets imported. No more messing around with the res00000 files.

Going to leave the original post though. Might be handy for someone stuck using an older version of Moodle.

Original Post

I’m a big fan of Moodle, but really don’t like the way you have to add questions to banks. There’s just too much on that page.

So I normally build question banks in Examview and then import to Moodle. Only catch is that importing that way doesn’t allow for images.

So what I’ve done is create a simple Python script that takes the exported file and replaces the image links with a data scheme URI. Wasn’t expecting it to work, but it works without a hitch.

Hiding the “Welcome to your new WordPress site” message

Sitting here working on setting up a WordPress network and hit a snag. New sites have a giant “Welcome to your new WordPress site” message when someone logs in for the first time.

Now, I’m not against the message; and WordPress should definitely market where ever they can. But I’d like to be able to customize the layout a bit. Still plan on keeping links to WP and all of that, just want to add in some of my own welcome message.

Googling didn’t turn up anything except editing the core WordPress code which is a terrible idea. I don’t want to have to redo it every time WP upgrades. And it looks like there isn’t a hook or filter that can make it easy. So I had to make it ugly.