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.

The Thing with the Rows?

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After years of not knowing any better, I finally learned the answer to, “Are you good with Excel?”

It’s an emphatic, “No.”

Of course I actually know my way around it really well. But, every single time, I have soon realized that I’d have been better off lying. “Hey Matt, I have this list of numbers and I want to find the standard deviation” would be easy. So wouldn’t, “How can I get this formula to apply to these cells?”

But, “Why isn’t my data importing from Excel to PowerPoint properly?” I don’t have the foggiest clue. Why doesn’t some complex formula you wrote work? I don’t know, you wrote it! Why doesn’t the SQL in your query work? Wait, what? You asked me about Excel.

I’m warning you. When someone asks you, say no, play dumb (“Naw, I don’t get it at all… That’s the thing with them numbers and rows, right?”) And, if there’s any signs that they’re not taking no for an answer, simply turn and run.

MiniAjax — An Awesome Site

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Web developers, check it out. My one complaint is that this is an awkward assortment of things ranging from little JavaScript snippets to free (GPL) apps to proprietary, expensive applications. But there are some very cool ones in there. (Psst! Heatmap is running on this site! It’s going to take a while to build up enough data worth sharing, but I’ll let you know when the time comes.) Some of the other ones are going to make their way into some projects I’m working on.

Police Logs

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Last night I was in the police station getting data for the police logs. As I sat there in the lobby perusing the logs, some girl came in and approached the dispatch desk.

“Hi, I don’t know what to do… This has never happened before. I think my car was towed.”

A few minutes go by, and the dispatcher concludes, “Ma’am, we didn’t tow your car.”

She told him exactly where she’d parked, so he pulled it up on the camera and zoomed in. (The zoom on those cameras is ridiculous!) “I was right next to that Jeep,” she said. Sure enough, her car wasn’t there.

She called to get information on activating Lo-jack in her car.  The dispatcher called local tow yards to confirm that no one had towed the car without telling him. One  by one, they came back negative.

I was sitting there, intrigued. Part of me didn’t believe that a car had just been stolen on campus. But the other part of me was irritated that the dispatcher was was lallygagging around instead of putting out a BOLO for the recently-stolen car.

Finally, he radioed to one of the officers who was patrolling the parking lot, and asked him to look for the car. About ten seconds later, he radioed back. “I’m sitting right in front of it.” He turned on his lights so they could see where he was on camera.

He was maybe four cars down from where she said she’d parked.

I tried to refrain from cracking up. And as I soon realized that it’s exactly what everyone else in the station was trying to do.

(As an added bonus, she freely admitted that she was illegally parked in a handicapped spot and had no parking permit, although they seemed to distracted with the hunt for her lost car to issue her a citation.)