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In: Computers|Cool Links|Ideas|OCD|Programming|Rants & Raves
10 Jun 2008This post christens my newest category, Thinking Aloud. It’s meant to house random thoughts that pop into my head, versus fully fleshed-out ideas. Thus it’s meant more as an invitation for comments than something factual or informative, and is likely full of errors… Aside from “time geeks,” those who deal with it professionally, and those [...]
In: Computers|Cool Links|Ideas|Interesting|Linux Tips|OCD|Performance|Programming|Rants & Raves|Uncategorized
10 Jun 2008From my “Random ideas I wish I had the resources to try out…” file… The way the “pretty big” sites work is that they have a cluster of servers… A few are database servers, many are webservers, and a few are front-end caches. The theory is that the webservers do the ‘heavy lifting’ to generate [...]
I made a bunch of changes all at once, and suddenly my system froze when I tried to log in, just saying “Loading your personal settings…” For a long time, I’ve wanted Windows to show me exactly what it was doing, since “Loading your personal settings…” means nothing. Is it choking on a config file? [...]
You know those times when you decide to let yourself surf aimlessly? And an hour later, you have absolutely no idea how you got to where you did? I found the K0S Strange Antenna Contest page from 2003, where some ham radio operators started using, well, strange things as antennas. Who’d think that a ladder [...]
In: Computers|Ideas|Insanity|Living|Programming|Rants & Raves
17 May 2008I frankly don’t use AIM that much these days, but will often sign on and think, “Wow, lots of people are on tonight!” or, “Wow, almost no one is on tonight!” So I just wanted to list my thought process after noticing this: I’d be interested in seeing a graph of my “buddies” online over [...]
I keep coming across things like this eBay listing. Sun Enterprise 4500, 12 SPARC processors (400 MHz, 4MB cache) and 12 GB of RAM. This one looks to have a couple Gigabit fiber NICs, too. (Although it’s fiber, so you’d need a pricier switch to use it on a “normal” copper home LAN.) Even if [...]
In: Computers|Cool Links|Ideas|OCD|Programming|Rants & Raves
9 May 2008The Web Developer toolbar, which is (1) the #1 hit on Google for “Web Developer,” and (2) now compatible with Firefox 3 beta, is totally awesome. You may recall that, in the past, if you had text after a bulleted list or similar on this page, the text would suddenly be mashed together. I never [...]
In: Computers|Cool Links|Ideas|Performance|Programming|Rants & Raves
8 May 2008I’ve alluded before to using gzip compression on webserver. HTML is very compressible, so servers moving tremendous amounts of text/HTML would see a major reduction in bandwidth. (Images and such would not see much of a benefit, as they’re already compressed.) As an example, I downloaded the main page of Wikipedia, retrieving only the HTML [...]
Periodically I come across deals for computers that are very tempting. I’m not necessarily in the market right away: I’m going to keep my laptop until I’ve been working long enough that I can afford something stellar. It’s silly to “upgrade” a little bit. But every time I see these deals, I think of the [...]
In: Cool Links|Ideas|Insanity|Living|OCD|Programming|Rants & Raves
28 Apr 2008Have you guys seen Google Charts? It’s a quirky little API I didn’t know existed until I saw a passing allusion to it. Essentially, you pass it a specially-crafted URL (essentially the definition of an API) and it will generate a PNG image. Here’s a fairly random line graph. My labeling of the axes makes [...]