The title is a play on an old Royal Canadian Air Farce skit.
I have been having an adverse reaction to a new medication, which the doctor asked me to stop taking today. This reaction involves am itchy rash slowly spreading all over my skin.
Tonight I took 1.5 teaspoons of Benadryl to see if that would help.
Well, that’s 3 hours of my life I won’t get back from the sleep goddess.
Author: spierzchala
Blogger Upgrade: Dude! You forgot the compression switch!
Ok, the Blogger blogs all use GZIP compression.
BUT! The Blogger.com homepage does not.
Ummm…attention to detail? Anyone?
Technorati Tags: Blogger, Upgrade, HTTP+Compression, Web+compression, QA, GrabPERF, Web+Performance
Black and Worn: Weathering a storm of the mind
I wandered around the net today, linking random connections together. Richard Thompson, John Martyn, Nick Drake.
When I visited Nick Drake’s official site (sadly out of date) I found this lovely image dominating the front page.
A lovely, weathered, black leather notebook.
Nick Drake strikes me as a person that is a lot like I could have been. Painfully shy, suffering from depression, trying to get the ideas out in a world that was not his. When he died in 1974, he was ignored and forgotten.
Now that he is all the rage again, it important to go back and consider his life. Consider what he made in a few short years. The stories he tore out of himself, willing to share this one aspect of his life with us.
The rest, well, they are hidden in the little black book.
AOL and Movie Studios: This is your life takes on a whole new meaning…
I wonder if the AOL/Movie Studio deal will lead to a whole bunch of new genre pics…you know AOL has some pretty compelling information to share with the producers…
Technorati Tags: AOL, Movie+studios, Fox, Sony, Universal, Warner+Bros, Privacy
GrabPERF: Main Page Performance Improvement
One of the performance hits that the GrabPERF system has is the dynamic generation of the main page. The nature of the SQL calls and the underlying PHP makes it scale exponentially past a certain number of measurements.
Last night, Kevin Burton made a grand suggestion: generate a static page on a regular schedule.
Duh!
Today, I wrote the script that does this. The performance of the main page has adjusted accordingly.
Yikes!
UPDATE: Ian Holsman reminded that if I use cURL, I can use the exiting PHP to build the pages without a PERL script.
I. AM. AN. IDIOT.
Now, bedtime.
Technorati Tags: GrabPERF, Web+performance, PHP, MySQL, Dynamic+pages, Static+pages, HTML
"Slow walkin’ Walter, the fire-engine guy"
If you know this joke, you also know which band I have been listening to this morning….
Technorati Tags: Music, Deep+Purple
Caching for Performance Article Posted
A few years ago, I wrote an article ablout how to best set up Web server cache-control messages to take advantage of this free form of content distribution. Until now, it has only existed as a PDF file.
Last night, I sent a copy to Kevin Burton of TailRank in response to some of his recent musings around making TailRank faster by sending explicit caching messages in his server responses. His response to the PDF was “make it an HTML file”.
You can now find the Caching for Performance at the link – just click it.
Use it. Live it.
GrabPERF: GZIP Performance Experiment Revisited
A few years ago, I wrote an article on how GZIP compression improved Web performance. Don Marti at the Linux Journal was a great editor, and eventually, the article ended up in the online version of the Magazine.
At the time, I used Ian Holsman’s webperf.org (now renamed ITScales) to capture the data. Now that I have built my own Web performance monitoring network, I thought I would repeat the experiment.
You can see the comparative results at these locations:
- Wikipedia
- Google News
- Technorati
- Juniper Networks — they own the Redline hardware acceleration device
- F5 Networks — they sell the F5 hardware acceleration device
After I have collected a lot more data, I will be re-visiting the article and commenting on the state of compression technology on the Internet.
If you would like to suggest a site to measure, please leave a comment.
Technorati Tags: HTTP, Web+Compression, Web+performance, GrabPERF, study, HTTP+compression
Number One, Almost Done
After more than a year, my first Moleskine notebook is nearly done.
A year!?!
Yes, a year. All that I have been using it for is work notes, jotting down the facts that make my customers and colleagues get up every morning.
Its replacement is in my bag, still wrapped in its cellophane, calling me; tempting me.
Bridging the Gap
The last 4 weeks have been extremely traumatic for me. It has culminated in an extended period of renewal, reflection and rejuvenation, where I have looked back over the last 15 years of my life and asked, “What next?”.
An interesting note on the word rejuvenation: it means to reclaim your childlike state (ok, I’m playing fast and loose with the definition).
Why now? Why 15 years?
In the Fall of 1991, I bought my first computer. Until then, I had avoided using them like the plague. I had managed to get through my undergraduate years with a pen, paper, and an electronic typewriter with rudimentary spell-checking. I felt that I had achieved something; I felt bonded to the works I created.
I was also an avid and active journal-keeper. In the months after my father died, the writing in my journal was what let me empty my naive mind, letting me vent the chaos that rushed through my head on a constant basis.
Then I went to grad school. And I realized then that I would need to step up in order to generate the massive amount of paper that is required in a graduate history program.
It turns out that I found the technology more enticing than the program. To this day, my failure to complete my Masters degree haunts me. Someday, I will return to that, and complete it. Knot the loose ends of my life together.
Ok, this really is going somewhere; thanks for hanging on this far.
After 15 years of intense immersion in technology, the Web, networking, and all that comes along with that, I have realized that something has been missing from my work, my writing, my life. I have missed the rushing sound of pen on a clean sheet of blank paper. No lines to slow you down; nothing besides the edges of the page to define what you put in the book.
Technology has lost its lustre. The rushing stream of this new laptop, that new technology, another over-inflated boom have left me feeling empty, asking “So what?”. In a hundred years, we can be so far down the path to post-humanism that computers as we know them are a vague and distant antique amusement.
Or we could be living in caves, scratching by a subsistence existence.
In either case, the only thing that will remain, that will linger, that will connect us to the past will be the written word. Not the electronic bits and bytes we are now so addicted to, but the ink on paper, graphite on wood pulp.
The smooth, quiet, seductive transition of ideas from mind to physical reality.
I have been trimming back my blog-reading. Gone are the political blogs. I fear that the gadget blogs are next.
What you have left are those people who celebrate life outside the electronic realm. Those who step back, and look back on the knowledge that preceded us. Who pick up a book that was published before they were born.
A book that left the mind of the author and flowed gracefully from the pen, to the paper, to another mind.
15 years is a long time to try and live without paper. Those 15 years have seen the niceties of a bygone age evaporate, get swallowed by an endless sea, a raging torrent of information.
The cursive hand; the thoughtful response; the flowing of ideas from person to person.
To calm the storm of my mind, I have returned to my first love: ideas of the mind, of the soul. Ideas that were worthy of the preparation of the parchment, the sharpening of the quill, the grinding of the pigment to create the ink.
We have walked away from those ideas, grasping at the brass ring in front of us, to the disdain of the treasure chest we leave behind.
To focus on the ideas, that is to live again.
To heal my mind, I must write my mind. Not type it; not IM it or e-mail it or blog it.
That familiar scratch of pen on paper. The rush that comes from committing something to paper; something that you can share with others.
Something that you can set adrift, watch as it floats, the glow from its candle on the gentle rippled flow of all the ideas that have come before.
I am setting my ideas free again.
Picture: girlzone41
Technorati Tags: ideas, quill, ink, pigment, death, life, resurrection, rebirth, technology, paper, pen, rejuvenation, myths, legends, chaos, healing, mind