Category: Uncategorized

One of the issues with not being a coder is that development tends to be kludegy. Add in SQL queries and the mess gets worse.
I have made some mods to the Index graphs (daily and hourly) that should only penalize the first person in one of my persistent database connections. After that, the queries are cached.
And while sitting here, I just realized I could improve the speed of this process even more.
I. Am. An. Idiot.
I will fix it….later.

I was having issues upgrading the site to PHP 5.1, mainly because it broke a number of the GrabPERF graphs.
Then I read the PHP docs. Turns out that there have been some internal changes to the strtotime() function. I had been using strtotime(date(Ymd H), time()) in the broken graphs; this now returns FALSE, not a numeric value.
A simple switch to strtotime(date(YmdH0000), time()) resolved the problem entirely.
If you see any weirdness, let me know!

This is enough. Do something.
Read this. Then come back to this forum and tell me how you can support this man.
He and his cronies claim to support the little people. So far, the poor and desperate have suffered the indignity of having their humanity stripped from them by their own government.
Yesterday, we saw a car from Louisiana pass us on the 495. Samantha and I both thought poor buggers. Yet now, I realize that they were driving a very expensive minivan. They weren’t suffering. And they were likely staying in hotels.
The United States should be ashamed of their President, their government, and what they have down to their own people.
What will you do to bring humanity back to the United States.

Tim Bray makes a comment on the new MSIE exhibit at the Royal Saskatchewan Museum.[here]
Yummy geek humour.

<RANT>
George Bush is lame, and a lame duck.
He is a stooge, only in place to ensure that the right-wing packs the Supreme Court for a generation (Think Pelican Brief).
Now, after playing politics with 9/11, Karl Rove is playing politics with Katrina.
WHY?
What does playing politics mean? How many lives does it save?
FEMA failed. DHS failed. Santorum wants to gut NOAA so it can fail during the next crisis.
Karl Rove committed treason. George Bush committed stupidity. Brown and Chertoff were shown to be useless in the face of a disaster.

SHUT UP.
Unless you are going to New Orleans to DO something, stay home. Stay off the TV. Stay out of the media.
The White House has NOTHING to add to the conversation. It has added nothing to the effort to save these people.
The president of the oil companies and conservative religious fanatics failed the United States. And Karl Rove is trying to make the chimp look good.
Karl, you have failed. You are the most reviled man in America. I think that Karl Rove should be made to clean the Superdome. By hand. Alone.
</RANT>

Despite my anti-tagging rant, all I can say is: Of course I’m here.

I am basically a lazy sod.
However, I have been dutifully tagging my posts, but being less and less enamoured of the process. For me, it is a manual process, involving visits to Technorati and copy and paste.
People would say, well, just write a widget to do it for you.
No.
It’s over. And Darren Barefoot finally pushed me over the edge. [here]
The search tools have to get smarter. It’s not 2004 anymore. The obsolesence cycle is getting shorter. The search tools should be able to classify the data without a nudge in the right direction.
Just goes to show that two malcontents from Canada who survived Tourism Victoria can start something.
My final tags.

Technorati: purple, monkey, dishwasher
IceRocket: purple, monkey, dishwasher
Google: purple monkey dishwasher

Ummm, this one floored me. If Weblogs.com wants to reduce their traffic, turn on mod_deflate in Apache 2.0.

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Fri, 02 Sep 2005 14:13:10 GMT
Server: Apache/2.0.46 (Red Hat)
Last-Modified: Fri, 02 Sep 2005 14:09:54 GMT
ETag: "ac0b3-3559d-840c3080"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 218525
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8

I know it won’t solve everything, but it’s a start.

Dave Sifry released a state of the search post yesterday. Between re-building my laptop and getting a client project out, I missed the original post.[here]
Thanks Dave! And continued success.

Technorati: Technorati, Web Performance, Capacity Planning, Web 2.0, SEO, traffic analysis
IceRocket: Technorati, Web Performance, Capacity Planning, Web 2.0, SEO, traffic analysis

Looks like today is the day I either swap out my laptop for a new one or re-build this one from scratch (or a disk image). MSIE does not retrieve pages anymore, and I have been using this machine for nearly 9 months and the registry is likely a complete mess.
Mmmmm…love that shiny, new install smell.