Month: June 2006

poor man’s Apache tuning

After literally years of wrestling with Apache performance tuning, I may have stumbled onto something that works for low-volume and even lower-resourced sites like this one.

I read through the httpd.conf file and noticed that I had the resource settings for the server set pretty high: I was creating a lot of listener clients, more than I needed, and the master process wasn’t killing them off very aggressively. It occurred to me I was setting things up to fail by picking (or simply defaulting to) arbitrary values.

So I simply noted how large a single httpd process was in memory — about 12 Mb — and divided that into the amount of RAM I have to work with. 256 / 12 = 21.3, but I need to set aside some memory for little things like the kernel and connection queues. I went with 13 clients.

Where I used to see:
May 21 09:20:00 red root: Watchdog checkfile detected: exiting
May 21 09:20:01 red root: Watchdog running: load of 11.11,
May 21 09:25:01 red root: Watchdog checkfile detected: exiting
May 21 09:25:01 red root: Watchdog running: load of 10.65,
May 21 09:30:00 red root: Watchdog checkfile detected: exiting
May 21 10:40:25 red root: Watchdog running: load of 11.56,
May 21 10:45:01 red root: Watchdog checkfile detected: exiting
May 21 10:50:01 red root: Watchdog checkfile detected: exiting
May 21 16:15:54 red root: Watchdog running: load of 12.21,
May 21 16:20:01 red root: Watchdog checkfile detected: exiting

I no longer have to deal with that.

Likewise, this:

May 19 11:05:29 red /kernel: swap_pager_getswapspace: failed
May 19 11:10:26 red /kernel: swap_pager_getswapspace: failed
May 19 11:10:44 red /kernel: swap_pager_getswapspace: failed
May 21 02:52:25 red /kernel: swap_pager_getswapspace: failed
May 21 04:18:29 red /kernel: swap_pager_getswapspace: failed
May 21 17:41:10 red /kernel: swap_pager_getswapspace: failed

And coincidentally(?) traffic volumes are up: mostly attempted spam, of course, but servicing more requests without adding any additional resources sounds good to me.

say yes

Colbert Tells College Graduates: Get Your Own TV Show:

He closed his speech on an apparently semi-serious note, urging the grads to learn how to say “yes.” He noted that saying yes will sometimes get them in trouble or make them look like a fool. But he added: “Remember, you cannot be both young and wise. Young people who pretend to be wise to the ways of the world are mostly cynics. Cynicism masquerades as wisdom, but it is the farthest thing from it. Because cynics don’t learn anything. Because cynicism is a self-imposed blinder, a rejection of the world because we are afraid it will hurt us or disappoint us.

“Cynics always say no. But saying yes begins things. Saying yes is how things grow. Saying yes leads to knowledge. Yes is for young people. So for as long as you have the strength to, say yes.

“And that’s The Word.”

Reminds me of this. I can’t think of how many times I passed up opportunities that might have made a difference in my life, but I’m trying to rectify that mistake and make sure my kids take theirs as they come up.

sourdough waffles

Made these for breakfast and thought they were worth passing along.

The Sponge: make the night before, covered at room temperature.

  • 1 cup (8 ounces) unbleached all-purpose flour
  • 2 cups (16 ounces) buttermilk
  • 1 cup (8 ounces) sourdough starter

The Batter: make the following morning.

  • 2 large eggs
  • 2 tablespoons sugar (I used brown, since I was out of white: it was fine)
  • 1/4 cup (2 ounces) butter, melted (or vegetable oil)
  • 3/4 teaspoon salt
  • 1 teaspoon baking soda

For buttermilk, I just soured the milk with lemon juice, after warming it up.

The directions are simple: mix the sponge, let it rest overnight, mix the batter ingredients the following morning, mix both together, and cook. Some recipes call for adding the sugar to the sponge, but I am wary of accelerants like that.

The results are light and crisp, very nice. Makes a bunch, about 16 in one of large square waffle-irons (four at a time). Freeze and toast up for weekday morning specials.

camera hacking

Holga Mods Made Easy!:

One of the best things about the Holga is that it is the perfect camera from the novice camera hacker. There’s lots of room for improvement and it’s all held together with only five screws.

as easy as it sounds . . .

I didn’t do everything he recommends — I haven’t noticed any light leaks either through the frame counter or inside the body (does this mean my Holga is defective?) so I skipped the flocking step — but the disassembly and reassembly were easy enough.

Interesting that the fine craftsmen at the Holga works keep making incremental improvements to the little gem. Mine has foam inserts for better film tension and a tripod mount, two of the more popular after-market fixes. The meaningless aperture setting is a tough one to understand, but easy remedied. Now, of course, I may find myself needing faster film. C’est la vie.

The new aperture, if you use a 1/8 drill bit, works out to f/16 (fl/a where fl (focal length) = 2 and a (aperture = .125)). Sunny-16 exposures anyone? Looks like 100 speed film is the way to go, after all.

The only think I need to do is add a cable release fitting and make a pinhole insert, since the lens is now easily — too easily — removable.
Some more tips here. Not sure how he gets the aperture numbers he gets. But he offers some more thoughtful, less judgmental tips on fixing up the Best $20 Camera You’ll Ever Own.

Quote of the day

Senator Bill Frist demonstrates his ignorance of core American values:

[T]he Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection, should demean themselves as good citizens.

Spoken by George Washington, namesake of this state. This cuts through the immigration debate as well as the gay marriage amendment: the people who come here to work want to be good citizens, pay their taxes, and live their lives. That phrase — to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance — is golden.

Friday Random Ten: Now that’s how I spell random edition

“Adagio sostenuto” from Piano Sonata No. 14 in C-sharp Minor,No. 2 “Moonlight” / Béla Fleck / Perpetual Motion
Disturbance At The Heron House / R.E.M. / Document
Molto vivace / CSO-Fritz Reiner / Beethoven: Symphony No. 9, Op. 125, “Choral”
Jericho / k.d. lang / Hymns of the 49th Parallel
Waitin’ For A Superman (Remix) / The Flaming Lips / The Soft Bulletin
So Alive / Love and Rockets / Love and Rockets
4_I. Tempo molto moderato, quasi adagio / Sir Colin Davis & the Boston Symphony Orchestra / The Complete Symphonies 1 (Disc 1) / Colin Davis & the Boston Symphony Orchestra
Porrohman / Big Country / The Crossing
The Ugly Things / Elvis Costello / Spike Bonus Disc
Pursuance (Part 3)/Psalm (Part 4) / John Coltrane / A Love Supreme

5 ✭ &#x266b«: Saviour Machine from The Man Who Sold the World

(Idea blatantly ripped from Tim Bray: if the title looks funky, here’s why.)

This track has just been leaping out from my so-called random playlists: Bowie’s over-the-top theatricality, some tasteful crunchiness from Mick Ronson, and words that seem up-to-date, perhaps too much so.

Saviour Machine:

President Joe once had a dream
The world held his hand, gave their pledge
So he told them his scheme for a Saviour Machine

They called it the Prayer, its answer was law
Its logic stopped war, gave them food
How they adored till it cried in its boredom

‘Please don’t believe in me, please disagree with me
Life is too easy, a plague seems quite feasible now
or maybe a war, or I may kill you all

Don’t let me stay, don’t let me stay
My logic says burn so send me away
Your minds are too green, I despise all I’ve seen
You can’t stake your lives on a Saviour Machine

I need you flying, and I’ll show that dying
Is living beyond reason, sacred dimension of time
I perceive every sign, I can steal every mind

Don’t let me stay, don’t let me stay
My logic says burn so send me away
Your minds are too green, I despise all I’ve seen
You can’t stake your lives on a Saviour Machine

So much for faith-based whathaveyou . . .

I haven’t listened to the rest of the record as closely as this track or perhaps it hasn’t registered as strongly, but it’s early 70s Bowie, with the simpler mixes and intimate sound that is more widely associated with Ziggy Stardust. So it’s all very listenable, perhaps experimental at the time but now assimilated into the language. And hardly obscure, so you can find it wherever fine audio recordings are sold[iTMS | AMZN].

Now playing: Son’s Gonna Rise by Citizen Cope & Santana from the album “The Clarence Greenwood Recordings”

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If the iTunes store is so simple, why couldn’t Sony compete with it?

Obviously, it’s not technology (online commerce is by no means new). Perhaps it’s something else? Like vision?

[print version] How Sony failed to Connect, again | CNET News.com:

Early in 2005, more than a dozen Sony employees from the company’s consumer electronics divisions gathered for an unusual meeting in the tiny Palo Alto, Calif., headquarters of digital media start-up Kinoma.

Kinoma Chief Executive Peter Hoddie, an Apple Computer alumnus, had been put in charge of high-profile Sony software development, including the Connect digital music project. For a company historically averse to using outside technology, this was a significant step.

For more than two hours, the group met in the futon-lined public area of Kinoma’s offices. According to attendees, Hoddie gave a sales pitch, but not much more. When asked for details on the technology they’d be using for Connect, Hoddie declined to provide them, and the meeting turned contentious before breaking up, employees said.

Programmers went to work on the project, intended to be Sony’s answer to Apple’s iTunes. But the tone had been set for a dysfunctional mix of politics, programming and pique that would prove deeply destructive to Sony’s digital music ambitions. Fourteen months later, a disastrous product launch doomed Sony’s latest attempt to catch Apple.

Politics killing a software project? Strike me pink.

from Tim Bray’s ongoing:

Tantek Çelik writes, on the subject of work by Scott Reynen: “Companies take note – on the internet, there will always be smarter, more clever people building on each other’s work than your secret internal committees, your architecture councils, your internal discussion forums — no matter how many supergeniuses you think you may have hired away and locked up with golden shackles in your labs. Either play open or expect your proprietary formats and protocols to be obsolete before they’ve even seen the light of day.”

Worked at one place where we were told never to post in newsgroups or on mailing lists, lest someone learn anything about what we were doing. To this day, no one knows.