Month: January 2005

Don’t shop at Waterstone’s Books

The Woolamaloo Gazette:

Over the course of the Woolamaloo Gazette I have posted on a wide variety of subjects; sometimes on books, movies or simply the city of Edinburgh; often on topical and troublesome ones. This however is one of the most difficult I have ever had to write. Shortly before Christmas, in the spirit of that season, my manager at Waterstone’s asked me to come into the office. Within a few, short moments I was told that for comments I had posted on this web site I was now subject to an enquiry to determine if I should face a disciplinary hearing for ‘gross misconduct’ because I had ‘brought the company into disrepute’. I was informed (more than once) that this could cause my dismissal. I was suspended on pay and escorted from the premises of the bookstore I had worked in for eleven years.

Yet another Fired for Blogging incident?

final(?) system/network tuning

Following up on earlier notes, I decided to make one more change: I doubled the sending buffer’s size.

[/usr/home/paul]:: sysctl net.inet.tcp.sendspace
net.inet.tcp.sendspace: 131070

I rebooted the system that’s been taking all the load and these tuning adjustments weren’t permanent at that point. It took a very short time before I saw the same problem cropping up. I reset the send and receive buffers to 64k and things improved. I don’t know if I need a send buffer that large, but I don’t think it will hurt anything. I do have some transaction in today’s log of more than 200k, one of more than 2 Mb.

Now playing: The National Anthem by Radiohead from the album “Kid A” | Get it

lazyweb: can you show Amazon sales reports via AWS?

I think with so many people offering to donate their Amazon Associates love, it might be a cool thing to display how much has been raised by a given site. This ain’t for bragging rights, I assure you: my take so far is US$.80. But if the trend toward web-enabled altruism continues, this could be an interesting feedback system.

what was I thinking?

I was thinking over this story of indeterminate length as I drove back from IKEA (a good stretch of road: had to return the tree we rent each Christmas and spend the $10 deposit) and it struck me: why on earth would I have a lawyer as the protagonist of the story? My experience with that breed doesn’t merit that. And I know too many good lawyer jokes to let that stand (below the fold).

So he now becomes a retired mining engineer which a. opens up a lot of possibilities and b. is a reference to the hero of the first and greatest adventure story of them all, “The 39 Steps,” a book which, to this day, I cannot pick up without reading through. (Just now, I started reading through the e-text while getting the link sorted out.)

Now playing: I Am Stretched On Your Grave by Sinéad O’Connor from the album “I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got” | Get it

Continue reading “what was I thinking?”

weblogs for project/knowledge management

Is Your Library Blogging Yet?:

Blogs aren’t just for marketing – there are many areas of the business where they can help improve information flow, reduce clutter and avoid the dreaded ‘but I didn’t know about that’ situation. Here’s ten ways that we’ve used blogs for managing projects – both internally and with our clients.

At my last fulltime gig, I tried to sell the idea of weblogs as a knowledge management solution and my peers as a way of breaking through the oral culture, the lack of easily accessible information (I didn’t know we even had time sheets for my first 6 weeks or so, that’s how bad it was: got paid anyway, so you get a sense of how rigorous the processes were).

This might be a good question to start asking on interviews: not “do you blog?” but something more general about self-publishing and decentralized knowledge management within a consistent architecture.

Now playing: The Playboy Mansion by U2 from the album “Pop” | Get it

recipe: yellow pea soup

I got this from a book, but once I can make it from memory, I call it my own. Herewith, a recipe for a hearty and substantial yellow pea soup.

Ingredients:

  • 2-3 tbsp olive oil
  • 1 onion
  • tbsp rosemary (if fresh), tsp if dried
  • 1 lb split yellow peas
  • 3 qts water
    1 tbsp salt

Assembly:

  • Heat up the oil in the biggest cauldron you have: be mindful of the three quarts of water.
  • Chop the onion, add to the warmed oil.
  • Add the rosemary, chopped or otherwise broken up if it’s fresh.
  • Cook it slowly, letting the onions soften and the flavors to come out.
  • Wash and sort the peas, looking for stones or other non-nutritious surprises.
  • Once the onions are soft and golden, add the peas, and turn the heat up.
  • Mix it all together and add the water.
  • Add the salt.
  • Bring to a boil, then turn down to a simmer, uncovered.
  • Takes about an hour to an hour and a half to cook down.
  • Check it at an hour and dish it when it’s how you like it.

Serve with a hearty artisan bread in rough chunks for dipping.

tuning under load

It’s been an exciting couple of days. When I passed along the news about CNN’s RSS feeds, I figured I might see an uptick in traffic, but it came in pretty hard. Turned out to be a good opportunity for tuning the server and kernel, but the addition of the santy worm didn’t help.

What seemed to happening was the webserver processes (Apache 1.3.33) were getting bound up: the mysql backend didn’t seem to be breathing all that hard. So after some Googling, I decided to tinker with some sysctl variables:

sysctl net.inet.tcp.always_keepalive=0
sysctl net.inet.tcp.sendspace=65535
sysctl net.inet.tcp.recvspace=65535

I turned off keepalives for connection unless they specifically request it. I also opened up the transfer buffers a bit and that seemed to help quite a bit. Load seemed to dissipate quite quickly, even though traffic was still coming in. It should be possible to have the send and recv buffers assymettrical: requests are smaller, much smaller, than replies (the graphic doesn’t make it so clear: the green is inbound requests, the blue replies), but I’ll leave it as it is for now. The max in was 267kBits, out was 213 kBits: pesky santy floods are those spikes you see. The peak hit rate was 17 hits/minute: errors peaked at 1,950, but are almost nonexistent when we’re not logging bogus requests.

Mrtg Red Red 2-Day

I seem to remember going through this in Solaris 2.5 in 1996 or so, trying to cope with everyone surfing at work. Ah, yes, Netscape server 2.0 and Solaris 2.5/2.6 on 170MHz single CPU Sparcs, clients like Navigator 2 and 3 . . . not quite stone knives and bear skins, but light years behind today.

Now playing: Locked Out by Crowded House from the album “Recurring Dream” | Get it

networked giving?

Lots of sites have hung out the “buy through me and I’ll send on the proceeds to tsunami relief.” Seems to me the kind of clever mind that can devise the lazyweb can come up with a giving web, where participating sites can be found for all kinds of charities. Let’s be realistic: even when the people affected by the tsunami are out of the worst of it, we can apply ourselves to other parts of our hurting world . . .

So where’s the giving web?

Now playing: Hollow Inside by The Buzzcocks from the album “A Different Kind of Tension” | Get it