Cox Crow

The Little Sister is fascinated by the antenna. She calls the radio, “phone.” The Big Sister wants to know if it has Disney music, which it does, but I think she might have had one of her albums in mind.

I got my Grundig radio. Thanks, David, for mentioning that there was such a beast as a $29 shortwave radio. Of course, I had to call my Dad to tell him. He sounded just as excited as I am! Time to tune in the BBC World Service.

Media State . . . . . . . . . . . : Cable Disconnected
Description . . . . . . . . . . . : Intel(R) PRO/Wireless 2200BG Network Connection

You need more memory. Really, you do.

I had 256MB of RAM on my laptop; now I have 512MB. This is not enough. This is not enough because I will swap.

Performance optimization, whether on a server or a desktop, is a matter of reducing I/O bottlenecks so that threads are not waiting to execute. In English, so that things can happen as quickly as they can. There are four basic subsystems which can be optimized, ranked in order of their speed.

• Processor
• Memory
• Disk
• Network

Most processors now are more than sufficient for most user activity. If you see excessive processor usage, it can generally be attributed to a bottleneck elsewhere.

The first place to look is memory. Are the programs which you use frequently entirely resident in memory? No? In that case, you’ll be using a virtual memory swap file on disk. You need more memory.

It may be that while the programs reside in memory, they will read data from the disk into memory, and then exceed the amount of real memory available. This is fine temporarily, but if it is persistent can be a problem. If you are working with large data sets, or with many not-so-recently-used files, you can find yourself in a situation where processing slows while the system waits for files to be read from disk to memory. This is hard to avoid, but the operating system tries. One common method for avoiding slow disk performance is to cache data in memory. You need more memory.

Data transfers over the network are often slower than reading them from disk. One common method for avoiding slow network performance is to cache data on local storage. This way you don’t have to transfer the files again if they haven’t changed. Once they are on disk, the former paragraph applies. You need more memory.

One common method for avoiding slow network performance is to cache data on local storage. One common method for avoiding slow disk performance is to cache data in memory. And one common method for addressing a memory shortage is to swap data to disk. So you need more memory.

Everything goes into memory. When we swap memory pages out to disk, the applications need to wait for the disk subsystem to complete input/output operations before they can execute. This is slow. Slow execution takes more time. Time is money. QED.

We initially thought, oh, let’s build up, and add a second story onto the house. That’s not going to work due to the cost of construction, so our current plan is to go out back, and bring the space defined by the three-season porch and deck into the house. While I thought we might be able to get a new old house in a Colonial pattern, the new plan may tend toward the Craftsman style. That’s not bad, just different. I don’t think it will be too out of place in this region.

It helps to like more than one style.

Microsoft ended support for Windows NT 4.0 on January 1, 2005. Novell has taken advantage of this sales opportunity by releasing a public service announcement. This is the risk that Microsoft took when they ended support. Whenever you force someone to choose, they might not choose you.

In the March web server survey, NetCraft notes,

Apache continued to take market share from Microsoft servers, gaining nearly 0.7 percent last month after gains the previous two months. After little or no change in server market share during 2004, Apache has widened its margin by 2.0 percent thus far in 2005.

Without underlying operating system numbers to back me up, what we’re seeing are Microsoft’s price-sensitive NT customers leaving in droves.

Instead of building yet another authentication source for your web application, you should strive to make use of existing sources. Depending on your environment, and your security requirements, an easily used source is your company’s ActiveDirectory domain. This can be used rather easily on Internet Information Services hosts in a trusting domain. ActiveDirectory may be used to authenticate Kerberos logins, or as an LDAP backend.

Here’s how to use ActiveDirectory with Apache‘s mod_auth_ldap.

Continue reading →

I think Technorati is pretty neat, but I haven’t gushed over it. It attempts to answer the question, “who’s talking about me?” But, unless your ears are burning, nobody is.

It’s nice to know that I’m in a bunch of sidebars, but without new links (Hi, Rick. Hi, David.), there’s really no point to daily ego-surfing, and almost none in linking particular items to a Technorati search. Don’t want to send my three readers on a wild goose chase for more commentary.

On the other hand, I really like what Ben Hammersley is doing with sparklines on The Observer‘s diary.

They like riding in strollers.

As I put on my boots this morning, on my way out to shovel the snow, I was accosted by the Little Sister.

Daddy, don’t go. Stay here with me. And Mommy. And Emmy.

Aww.

This dialog, how one developer explained REST to his wife, is funny, and close to home. Toward the end, he mentions the motivation behind SOAP.

We’re using HTTP but only because it helps us talk to our network and security people less.

What gnik has done with Google Maps is just fantastic. Unfortunately, it looks like Google’s broken it.

Jason Kottke pointed to the Bacontarian, a site devoted to one of my favorite foods: bacon! Our cafeteria’s delivery guy somehow managed to forget bacon yesterday, and it won’t be available until Wednesday. How will we survive breakfast?!

Oh, well, at least we have sausage.

I just used the movies search trick on Google to see what’s playing in our area. I have one word of advice for every other movie listings site out there: speed. It took me all of 30 seconds to find the times and information about the film. This on a 56k link. There’s no reason for me to use any other movie search.

Hint for Yahoo! Movies and other such slow sites: ditch the advertisements, dumbass, they’re slowing you down.

Meryl pointed out In2Books, a program to pair young readers with adult pen pals which began in the Washington, D. C., schools. The adult reads the same book the children do, and they correspond about it. Perhaps they will find that, as Thomas Jefferson did, I cannot live without books.

Deena and the girls have been reading the Little House series, by Laura Ingalls Wilder. Turns out we have a gap in our collection; so while we wait for their delivery, we finished Stuart Little. The girls, the Little Sister in particular, love singing along with Oliver!, so I tried Oliver Twist, but that didn’t work. Mr. Charles Dickens never found a word he couldn’t squeeze into a sentence somewhere, eventually finding his point somewhere between the beginning of his artful construction and its punctuation, on a course more meandering than not, but placing the antecedent somewhere towards the end of the sentence, with the prepositions scattered before it, renders his meaning hard for little ears to capture.

So they’re reading Alice in Wonderland.

Country Walkers sells walking tours that for some reason remind me of the picnic scene outside Florence in A Room with a View.

From her feet the ground sloped sharply into view, and violets ran down in rivulets and streams and cataracts, irrigating the hillside with blue, eddying round the tree stems, collecting into pools in the hollows, covering the grass with spots of azure foam. But never again were they in such profusion; this terrace was the well-head, the primal source whence beauty gushed out to water the earth.

One of these summers we’d like to visit Prince Edward Island, for the obvious reason. I wonder how the girls would do on this kind of trip. They’ve certainly held up to a lot of walking.

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E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View and L. M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables are in the public domain. You can read them at the libraries of Gutenberg Project or the University of Michigan, among others.

The Big Sister made this doll yesterday.

Maybe the question to ask is not did a four-year-old paint these, but why do people pay so much for abstract works? I’m quite confident that those paintings could be by a child, but I’m not so confident that abstract works deserve any of the attention lavished on them.

Little Miss Marla Olmstead‘s been well-promoted.

Besides, who lets their kids play with oil paints? Do you know how hard that is to get out of the carpet?

The Sisters were discussing theology the other day. The Church sent us an offering envelope for Easter, along with the mass schedule for Holy Week. I’ve been using it as a bookmark, in lieu of any other scrap of paper. It must have fallen out of my book, for I overheard the Sisters talking about where God is.

Jim McGee points to a nice set of lists of passwords not to use. Another set is available at dictionary.com, though Answers.com‘s might be easier to reference.

Me, I keep mine on the refrigerator.