Category: Uncategorized

Ouch.
Technorati accelerator.
This one has to hurt. They are getting better…
Via: The Blog Herald

Oracle Agrees to Buy Siebel for $10.66 a Share
Vaults Oracle to Number 1 in Customer Relationship Management
Nice to be number one…unfortunately, the well is deep and it will be a while before this shotgun wedding finds any love.

The weekly GrabPERF Search Index Results are in.
Week of September 4-11, 2005

TEST                     RESULT  SUCCESS  ATTEMPTS
--------------------  ---------  -------  --------
PubSub - Search       0.5421396    99.72      5680
Google - Search       0.5741554   100.00      5681
Yahoo - Search        0.8028792    99.95      5678
eBay - Search         0.9255761   100.00      5681
Feedster - Search     1.2524916    99.86      5679
MSN - Search          1.2737601    98.40      5681
BestBuy.com - Search  1.3964269    99.91      5680
Technorati - Search   1.4128937    99.98      5681
BlogLines - Search    1.6020669    99.16      5681
Amazon - Search       1.9909649    99.74      3108
BENCHMARK RESULTS     2.0313721    99.50     76849
Blogdigger - Search   2.3336642    98.53      5577
Newsgator - Search    2.5181818    99.68      5681
IceRocket - Search    4.3043685    99.77      5680
Blogpulse - Search    7.4959768    98.40      5681

These results are based on data gathered from three remote measurement locations in North America. Each location takes a measurement approximately once every five minutes.
The measurements are for the base HTML document only. No images or referenced files are included.

---

Technorati: GrabPERF, Web Performance, Web Performance Measurement, Web Performance Monitoring, search index, SEO
IceRocket: GrabPERF, Web Performance, Web Performance Measurement, Web Performance Monitoring, search index, SEO

Don’t you love this country?
Bush lifts wage rules for Katrina

President Bush issued an executive order Thursday allowing federal contractors rebuilding in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to pay below the prevailing wage.

Oh, and in the arrogant, rich, white people category, the award goes to Jefferson Parish near New Orleans. It seems that the righteous folks there have decided to re-water parts of New Orleans so that their area can get up and running faster. [here]
Remind me again why the United States continues to think that they are the moral leaders of the world community.

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. ZenWife 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.