Time makes a dig against the Body Mass Index method of measuring how fat you are. I have to agree with him as it’s not a realistic scale IMO.
Anyway, I love the comment left by Aaron, it’s all gravity’s fault!
Author Archives: Donncha
Accelerating PHP Applications
This set of slides from a presentation earlier this month is well worth a read-over. I knew a lot of it, but there were a few surprises too. Hopefully I can report back in a few days time if it made much of an impact on the server!
Later… I’m impressed, but here’s a short summary of what I did first:
- Stripped the Apache modules (libphp4 went from 5.6MB down to 1.5MB!)
- Increased the default kernel buffer size as mentioned in the docs. I had already set the max higher, but didn’t know about the default value.
- Moved php accelerator object files into seperate virtual host directories. I did the same with PHP4 session files.
- Increased the StartServers, MinSpareServers and MaxSpareServers settings.
The result? Double the network traffic to our web server! I haven’t examined the logfiles yet but hopefully they’ll show an increase in page views!
Much Later… You’ll be happy to hear there was a corresponding increase in page view. If you run a Apache/PHP based website take heed of the tips above and in this presentation!
The Couch-to-5K Running Plan
To read later: This running plan may be useful in my exercise regime. Hmm, lovely day outside, I’m going for a walk!
First Post From Fedora Core 2
No, I don’t know yet if I’ve been hit by the WinXP/Kernel 2.6 bug but I do have the recovery commands written out in good old dead tree format just in case things go sideways when I reboot later.
First impressions? It’s buggy, a little. Nautilaus just crashed there and it’s not responding correctly yet (I’ll probably need to restart X), I had to enter the Oceanfree dns settings in /etc/resolv.conf as kppp didn’t pick them up from pppd for some reason (they appeared in /var/log/messages however), and when I first went online Mozilla and Moz FF both crashed when they received keyboard input. That seems to be solved now by restarting X (obviously, if you’re reading this!)
Later… Booting into XP seems to be OK!
Apart from that, it looks nice, the usual arial-type fonts are installed although they look bigger than FC1 but maybe that’s down to some tweaking I did previously in FC1.
The first thing to do of course is install apt, do an “update”, and install “xmms-mp3” as well as a few updates that are available.
Open Office works as well as can be expected, Gnucash is slightly updated but nothing new. I briefly played with the new spatial features of Nautilaus but it’s crashed now so that experimentation was short lived!
Is it worth upgrading from FC1? Probably not, especially if you have a Kernel 2.6 update for FC1 then you get all the speed improvements without the bugs. 🙂
Later Still… I’ve burned CDs, copied photos from my camera (it’s handy that a “camera” icon appears automagically now), and Nautilus seems to have settled down somewhat. It generates thumbnails of image folders really quickly, almost as quickly as WinXP, and certainly much faster than Gthumb (and Gthumb can use the same thumbnails AFAICS).
This is a handy tip for using the Gnome 2.6 GUI. Not obvious and terrible usability wise however:
You can type a file name into the new file selector.
Ctrl + L will open the filename box, with autocomplete and all.
C64 Game Fans?
Damn, when someone visited by searching for Godian Tomb on Google I just had to go look for it myself.. and I found lots more too, even Mr Robot although something tells me it won’t hold quite the same attraction as it did over 10 years ago.
If only I could play it on a decent portable device! The keyboard on my 7650 is fairly knackered from playing Stunt Car Racer, oops! Can anyone suggest a pda with a good C64 emulator? Not as if I have the money for it, mind, but one can always dream eh?
Much Later… I’m just after trying out Gordian Tomb and the version on that site is one I know very well… I coded the “crack” intro on it! Wow, that must have been some 14 or more years ago! I wonder how they got that copy?
Edit on 09/12/2008. Bah. c64unlimited.net is gone. All links removed.
Photographic Composition – a Tutorial and Guide
Andy WIlliams posted this excellent link to the STF. The American School of Paris has plenty of other tutorials, links and articles.
Digital Panoramas – Panotools and Photoshop
Here’s a good and lengthy article on Digital Panoramas. There are several good tips about taking the photo as well as a walk through using PTAssembler.
Me? I’m still stuck using the GIMP, CBA learning Panotools as I seem to get “good enough” results without them!
The author has a blog post about the article, with links to other stuff he’s written on the subject!
James Nachtwey – Photography Gallery
Not sure where I found this link, might have been del.icio.us. James Nachtwey has an online gallery and his images are well worth a look. Be warned that it’s not all roses and honey in his world…
Vivid Light Photograpy #36
The latest Vivid Light magazine is online and there’s certainly a few interesting articles. Mark quoted from two of the articles but I had a quick read of the Nude vs. Naked story. Judging by the comments left, it’s a hot issue among readers of the mag, although to be honest the nudes were very tasteful and hardly worthy of the negative attention they received.
Then again.. “ohmygod! is that Janet Jackson’s nipple?” *shock*
Bush in lala land?
Or in other words, he can’t see the reality he created.
In this review of a speech Bush made a few days ago William Saletan counters and analyzes the words and ideas of the American President.
It really looks like they won’t learn from the past, if they continue to delude themselves about what they’ve done in Iraq, but I’ll leave it to the above article to say it best.. (Was this the speech where Bush tripped over saying, “Abu Ghraib”? That was mentioned on the radio yesterday morning.)
Via Scott who mentions that The New York Times has reconsidered, “the WMD hysteria that marked some of its prewar coverage and marred its reputation.” Even Dave Winer picked up on this which makes me cringe about linking to it!
While we’re on the subject, I started on Mark Little’s Zulu Time – it’s turning out to be a good book, and I’ll post a slightly more detailed review when I finish it!