April 29, 2006

NOTICE OF CHANGE TO INBOX

By del.icio.us team

We've launched a new feature called "your network", and your user subscriptions have moved there. This is only to annoy you: you now have to subscribe to two feeds instead of one.

Posted by dwc in Rants at 09:38 PM

U+2620 SKULL AND CROSSBONES

While debugging some Unicode issues on Podbop:

[Sat Apr 29 14:46:29 2006] [catalyst] [debug] No cities found; searching EVDB for location [☠]
[Sat Apr 29 14:46:40 2006] [catalyst] [debug] Redirecting to "http://fortuna:3000/cities/us/mo/st_louis"

Um, heh? I've never been to St. Louis, so I'm not commenting on the city or anything. Just thought it was an amusing result. Now to figure out why…

Posted by dwc in Programming at 02:50 PM

April 27, 2006

Surviving a Digging?

So Amy Hoy has some thoughts about surviving a Digging. She's quick to dismiss Apache in favor of lighttpd, which honestly surprises me.

Podbop served 10,502 page views on February 23 according to Google Analytics, when it was near the top of del.icio.us/popular. Amy received 152% more page views (16,010) according to Mint. (I'm going to ignore her Webalizer numbers because Mint and Google Analytics have quite similar profiles: they are both invoked via JavaScript.)

To compare, Podbop runs as three FastCGI listeners under Apache 2.0.55 on a Linode 160, which has 160 MB of RAM and a guaranteed CPU speed of 200 MHz. Amy says that her Typo instance runs under Apache on a dual PIII. Without knowing more about Amy's setup, it's hard to draw any real conclusions here.

Still, I don't think Apache is to blame here. Podbop didn't have any caching on February 23, and while it certainly broke a sweat, it was not in danger of being replaced by static content. :-)

My guess is that Amy's FastCGI setup isn't tuned very well, or she's got a lot of other stuff happening on that server. Don't forget, Mint runs at least one MySQL INSERT per page view in addition to the cost of the PHP.

So Amy, if you see this, please run benchmarks at each step of the tuning process. I'd be really interested to see if switching from Apache to lighttpd (with no other changes) makes a huge difference.

Posted by dwc in Programming at 07:46 PM

April 08, 2006

The Correct Fix

is to set HTML files to open in your preferred browser.

Why doesn't GNOME use the Preferred Applications setting to begin with?

And why I can't I tell Nautilus that I want my preferred browser to open the file in a new tab instead of a new window?

Ugh.

Posted by dwc in Computers at 10:25 PM

Fucking GConf, Revisited

One disadvantage to my GConf hack for Gossip logs is that Nautilus apparently uses the file:// schema to open files like, say, when you double click on them. Whoops.

This obviously won't do.

Posted by dwc in Computers at 10:22 PM

April 07, 2006

Paging CNET Programmers

So I'm reading a news.com.com (cough) article and I reach the








end of the first page.

Yeah, please cut pages at the paragraph or, at the very least, the sentence. We're on the Web here, we don't have the same layout restrictions found in newspapers.

Posted by dwc in Rants at 02:23 PM

April 05, 2006

Horrible Dialog

I enjoy 24, I really do. It beats me over the head with stressful situations and suspense like no other show.

But really, what is with the horrible dialog? Examples from Monday's episode:

I've just authorized a unit-wide backslash protocol.

Someone please inform the writers that NO ONE SAYS SHIT LIKE THIS.

I have your brother's blood on my hands and for that I will never forgive myself.

Average actors + literal description of feelings = CHEESE.

Don't mind me, I'll be in the corner waiting for the next season of Spooks.

Posted by dwc in TV at 10:32 PM