Monthly Archives: December 2007

The Problem with Wikipedia

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No, not that one.

I consider myself a talented writer. And I’m obsessive-compulsive about things being well-written. So giving me access to edit things is a recipe for awesome.

So I was doing some research for class. My research into Lynch v. Donnelly made me realize that the page was pitiful. So I cleaned it up to get it to its current state. (Which still needs a lot of work.) The Nautilus, Inc. page also got some updates after another class project on the subject.

You should get extra credit in class when you become the top contributor to the Wikipedia page on the subject.

When Life Gives You Lemons

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There’s a pile of snow outside.

In other news, Georgia is still having a drought.

Business idea of the day? Charge New Englanders for snow disposal. For about the cost of plowing, I’ll take the snow for you. You don’t have to worry about snowbanks.

I’ll then fill trains with it and ship it to Georgia and others in need of water, who will buy it from me.

Performance++

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I guess I’ve become somewhat of a performance nut. Truthfully a lot of the time is spent doing things for nominal improvements: changing MySQL’s tmp directory to be in RAM has had no noticeable impact on performance, for example. Defragging log files doesn’t speed much up either.

I was reading a bit about LiteSpeed, though. It’s got a web GUI to control it, and is supposedly much faster than Apache. I’ve got it installed, but I’m having some permission issues right now. (The problem is that changing them will break Apache, so I’m going to have to try it with some insignificant pages first.) It’ll automatically build APC or eAccelerator in. It apparently has some improved security features, too, which is spiffy. And it’s compatible with Apache, so I don’t have to start from scratch.

The base version is free, too. (But not GPL.) The “Enterprise” edition is $349/year or $499 outright purchase. To me, it’s not worth it. But if I were a hosting company with many clients, I might be viewing it differently, especially if the performance is as good as they say.

The Spare Box

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I don’t blame the OS directly, but life in Windows-land always involves me sitting around twiddling my thumbs.

So I brought back an ancient laptop with me. 512MB RAM (I think–it might be 256), a slow processor, a tiny hard drive, and a battery that doesn’t hold a charge. It’s running Ubuntu, and its two duties are as a web browsing machine and an IM machine.

So now while the system is unusable, I can get stuff done over here.

(Psst: Steam, when your game is so hard to start that I lose interest before it’s launched, you’ve failed miserably. Go get stuck in a lift. A burning lift.)

Terrible Software

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Two different things that boggled my mind today:

  • CCleaner offered clean up Symantec’s log files. All 5 gig of them. (?!?!)
  • Team Fortress 2 just crashed after spending about ten minutes “loading.” It complained that there wasn’t enough memory and that I probably had the paging file disabled. The latter is true: I never recreated it after disabling it since it was in 600 pieces. But RAM? I’ve got 2 GB of it. If you can’t write code to fit in that, you deserve to be stuck in a lift. A burning lift. With a corpse.

Seriously, 2 GB RAM isn’t enough to load the game? And you need 5 GB of log files?

Mailing Lists

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Mailing lists are dangerous things. Especially when you’re the admin of them.

I run one for a list of about 100 members in one of my clubs. The other is a list of board members for a second club, which has about 10 members. To start, I set Kyle’s Blackberry address up as a “moderator,” intending to whitelist him for sending to the list. In actuality, moderator status means that he receives an e-mail every time a member is added or removed from the list. And I proceeded to do a bulk-addition of all 100 addresses, which resulted in the server simultaneously sending him 100 electronic missives, which apparently caused the phone to “buzz like an angry hornet” before crashing.

Just now, I got the two lists confused. Fortunately, I did it the less dangerous way: sending an announcement meant for the 100 people to the 10-member board of the other club, all of which are good friends of mine who expect me to do dumb things like that. It would have been much worse had I instead sent some sort of sensitive material to a list of 100 people I hardly know, expecting to send it to the list of 10.