Cox Crow

Waiting

A waiter may be efficient, bringing your food quickly, removing it promptly, keeping your coffee full. But he's not a good waiter.

A waiter may be polite, charming, a witty conversationalist, but your food is cold; the coffee is slower to arrive than your check. He's not a good waiter.

A good waiter is first and foremost unobtrusive. The order is taken correctly and delivered before you are waiting. The coffee is always full. The check is on the table before you ask for it, but after you've finished your meal.

A well-run system is like a good waiter.

9:42:02 PM # Google It!
categories: System Administration

Boiling Off the Fat

Netcraft's September survey presents a breakdown of surveyed addresses, by IP address instead of by hostname.

This has the effect of boiling off all domain parking, HTTP/1.1 shared hosting, and eliminating duplicate counting of the same server when multiple domain names ... all point to the same site.

When counting by IP address, the supposed volatility of the past few months disappears, with Apache showing a three percentage point increase from 51% to 54% since the start of 2001, and Microsoft unchanged at 35%.

More than one IP address may be bound to a single NIC, and more than one NIC may be found within a host, so we can't extrapolate from this data and say that n number of hosts are serving web pages. What we can say is that of the publicly-accessible addresses that are serving web pages, at least 35% of them are running a version of Windows.

3:30:09 PM # Google It!
categories: Industry

But, Cap'n, she cannae give you more power!

Intel's Huge Bet Turns Iffy: "It turns out, Dr. Schmidt told the audience, that what matters most to the computer designers at Google is not speed but power — low power, because data centers can consume as much electricity as a city." [ The New York Times via Hack the Planet]

2:42:40 PM # Google It!
categories: Industry

Cruft

This weekend John Robb posted some sample code for including a Google search on a web page, which had the expected effects on Radio's aggregator. While cleaning this up on my end, I modified the default rendering of the aggregator page to remove the nested tables. I'm not completely satisfied with my changes yet. But I am finding something that disturbs me: stylistic changes could be simpler. And isn't that the entire point of a content management system?

Then I downloaded Mark Paschal's Kit.

I think I'll ignore Dave's aggregator from now on.

1:03:24 PM # Google It!
categories: Writing Online

Old Dog, New Tricks

Have you ever noticed how some people do things just one way, because they do not know there is another?

Or, finding there is another, they do not wish to learn?

8:46:13 AM # Google It!