Category: Uncategorized

Just a test! Ignore! Ignore!

Surely you remember John Mitchell! Well, he was Attorney-General.
And he went to jail.

© Gary Trudeau — 1973/1974

Michael Feldman reminds us all about this sorry state of affairs.[here]

Technorati: Karl Rove, KarlRove

Chuck Cadman, a man and a politician I highly respected, passed away Saturday. [here]
Chuck was a man who was moved into action by a single, life-changing event: the murder of his son in a random attack by a group of boys in 1992. Propelled onto the national stage, Chuck drove his agenda, and his passion, at everyone and anyone who would listen.
He beat the odds when his party tried to throw him out due to political expediency, winning his last election to the Canadian Parliament standing as an independent. In a previous life, I noted that due to the distribution of seats in the last parliament, Chuck held the deciding vote that could sink or save the Liberal Government.
He used that power on May 19, in the last act of his career, flying to Ottawa, full of chemotherapy poison, to cast his vote with the government, and allow the budget to pass.
I will miss you Chuck.

Technorati: Chuck Cadman, canadian politics, Canada

This picture holds many fond memories for me.

Did you forget that American Politics is a bloodsport?
Don’t enemies of the state get sent to Gitmo?

Technorati: Karl Rove, KarlRove, Gitmo

Just stare at the cross.
Now, if you don’t get seasick, what happens?

Isn’t the brain weird?
Via: OMdC::log

Technorati: optical illusion

Karl:
Dan Gillmor, a journalist (not one of your paid flacks), has come up with an alternative history which places you and your Republican allies in the light you like to paint the enemies of the state…errr, people who hold independent opinions on topics such as the War in Iraq, the Patriot Act, and balanced budgets. [here]
Ya know, Dan gets one thing wrong; I am not sure that the private sector is willing to deal with someone who is willing to leak some of this nation’s top secrets to satisfy the wishes of Dick Cheney…errrr, his political masters.
Hope today is a better day for you.
PS: CIA operatives tend to carry a grudge. Try to stay out of dark alleys for a little while.

Technorati: Karl Rove, KarlRove, Valerie Plame, ValeriePlame, Dick Cheney, White House, CIA

Karl:
I hear you’ve done a lot of good work for the Bush Cabal over the last eight years. I mean, you turned John McCain’s name to mud, you got the weasel…errr, President re-elected, you’ve controlled the media more effectively than Ron Ziegler.
However, when the White House decided to turn on Joseph Wilson, you volunteered to take point. Sure, you didn’t name Valerie Plame by name, but saying that the wife of Ambassador Joseph Wilson was a CIA analyst kind of made any reporter’s job a little easier.
Now, from what I have read, this is a Federal Offence. Not the kind that Martha Stewart went to Club Fed for, but one that gets your butt sent to a nice Maximum Security Prison for say…oh, 10 years.
Now, after 4.5 years of shrill, emotional baiting, negative economic growth, two wars that are descending below the surface of quagmire, and a nation reeling into the 21st Century as the only Western Theocracy, it might be time to re-evaluate how History (with a capital ‘H’) will remember you and the rest of the Cabal.
Frankly, Karl, I revel in the prospect that you did this. And I hope that you roll over and say that Cheney asked you to do it.
And you know what?
You just got John McCain elected president in 2008.
Bet the irony is just killing you right now.

Technorati: Karl Rove, KarlRove, Valerie Plame, ValeriePlame, Dick Cheney, White House, John McCain

Not many of you were likely reading this blog when I turned down the GrabPERF Web Performance Monitoring System a few months back (here). Well, today, I decided that I needed something to hold my interest and keep me busy, so I re-initialized the system.
It’s live here. Heck, I even fixed a couple of long-standing annoyances with the aggregation tables in the database.
I am trying to keep the targets limited to interesting, and likely performance-challenged, Web 2.0 companies. If you would like to see a (your?) site added to the system, drop me a comment.
Enjoy!
UPDATE: Found a bug in the PHP 5.1.0b2 release I was using that caused the dates extracted from the database to be mangled when they were passed to PHPlot. I returned to the release version PHP (5.04) and all charting is now working normally.

Technorati: web performance, GrabPERF System, Internet, Web 2.0

…and all she brought us was a basement full of water.
I love hurricane season on the East Cost.

You have noted that you are experiencing some performance issues related to high load (here). So I investigated and found that all the servers at the hostname www.technorati.com are responding with HTTP/1.0 headers and are explicitly closing the connections to the clients.
Why?
This will not relieve the performance problems. In fact, doing this may make the situation worse. The only way that this will not cause an issue is if you have tuned the kernel on these servers to go through an EXTREMELY fast TCP teardown process on the server side.
If you haven’t done this, go run a netstat -vanp on your www servers. See all the fin_wait, fin_wait2, closing and time_wait states? These are sockets that can’t be used again until the kernel releases them.
Now, Turning on keep-alives or persistent connections on the www servers will:

1. Reduce the total number of connections per client
2. Reduce the number of sockets “hung” in the teardown process
3. Improve performance by reducing the network overhead required by the client and the server

The only caveat is to reduce the keep-alive timeout to something like 4-5 seconds so that these connections don’t wait for traffic forever.
Improving performance through disabling persistent connections is a myth. HTTP/1.1 was adopted for a reason. Use it wisely and your will reap the rewards.

Technorati: web performance, HTTP, Technorati, Apache, PHP