Shot through the windshield while driving under the Mercer Island Lid.
Month: August 2008
learning
Owing to the generosity of Jack Shedd, I bought my own copy of this:
“The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain” (Betty Edwards)
which means the procrastination that allows me to avoid doing the exercises in the library copies no longer works. It’s not going anywhere. So I assembled the materials it calls for last weekend and worked through the pre-education exercise:
- a self-portrait
- a drawing from memory
- a drawing of whichever hand you don’t use to draw with.
Came out better than I expected (and no, I’m not sharing them — yet).
serendipity
good ideas, poorly summed up
This just rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it?
As counterintuitive as it may seem, this inexorably leads us to Kontra’s law:
A commercial company’s ability to innovate is inversely proportional to its proclivity to publicly release conceptual products.
[From Why Apple doesn’t do “Concept Products” « counternotions]
Actually, as the essay makes clear, it’s not counterintutive at all. How’s this?
A company’s willingness to invest in concepts that not designed for a real market underscores its inability to lead.
down for the third time, or brother can you spare a dime?
Looks like my venerable (Oct of 2003) iBook G4 is casters up for good and all. Some unusual freezing up yesterday, then a refusal to boot which continues, whether it be from a CD, from it’s own disk, whatever. It works fine in Target Disk mode, so that subset of features is still good. But as a full-fledged laptop? Not so much.
Oh, well. It’s on its third hard drive, second logic board, second case. I think everything has been replaced but the display and keyboard, including the batteries.
For about the same as I spent on that one, I could buy one of these:
If I had it.
another clumsy hack
Seeing a lot of junk that looks spammy, so this is a first cut at denying them whatever they are looking for.
#!/usr/local/bin/bash
cat /usr/local/www/data-dist/.htaccess.base > /usr/local/www/data-dist/.htaccess.tmp
grep "Successfully fetched" /var/log/httpd/httpd-error.log | awk '{ print $8 }' | cut -d"." -f1,2,3 | >> /usr/local/www/data-dist/.htaccess.dyn
sort -n /usr/local/www/data-dist/.htaccess.dyn | uniq | awk '{ print "Deny from "$1"." }' >> /usr/local/www/data-dist/.htaccess.tmp
cp /usr/local/www/data-dist/.htaccess.tmp /usr/local/www/data-dist/.htaccess
clumsy hacks, if that’s what it takes
I haven’t yet figured out what makes my system here get so sluggish under load: I realize it’s memory-starved, but I don’t yet know why. In the meantime, I am running this script out of cron.
I haven’t yet figured out what makes my system here get so sluggish under load: I realize it’s memory-starved, but I don’t yet know why. In the meantime, I am running this script out of cron.
#!/usr/local/bin/bash
export FREEMEM=`vmstat 1 2 | tail -1 | cut -d" " -f7`
if [ ${FREEMEM} -lt 10240 ];
then logger "free memory @ ${FREEMEM}; restarting apache"
/usr/local/sbin/apachectl stop
sleep 10
killall -1 httpd
/usr/local/sbin/apachectl start
fi
feh. This somehow doesn’t always work if you use “-f7.” Overnight, it seemed to want to use the 8th field. Whatever . . .
Flickr: Flickr 888
Given the success of last year’s event, we hope that you’ll join us in celebration of another 24 Hours of Flickr – Flickr 888 on Friday, August 8th, 2008 (8-8-8!), a most auspicious day!
How can you participate? Take a photo any time during the twenty-four hour period that’s August 8th where you are and then share it with the group. We’ll accept one (1) contribution per Flickr member into the group from noon PST Friday, August 8th until Tuesday, September 2nd, noon PST, 2008.
We’ve partnered with the cool folks at MOO to create unique Flickr 888 Postcard Packs. Those images with sufficient resolution (1795×1287 pixels) that feature “safe” content (as defined in our Community Guidelines), will be printed and sold in postcards packs this coming fall at MOO. We’re still working out the final details of how many, how much, etc., and we’ll share the full details here in the group when we’ve got our ducks in a row.
So, mark your calendars, and get ready to capture August 8th in all its glory.
tale of the tape
So here’s yesterday in hits (yikes!). 
Once you strain out the multiple hits per page, it’s still quite a bit of new traffic .
So here’s yesterday in hits (yikes!).
Once you strain out the multiple hits per page, it’s still quite a bit of new traffic . . . .
And today is looking similar, and it’s only 11AM:
42143 /var/log/httpd/httpd-access.log
rock, meet hard place
Aug 6 23:46:39 shuttle pid 1260 (mysqld), uid 88, was killed: out of swap space So I added some (slow) disk-based swap, and you all now face the interminable delays as the kernel tries to work with that…. I’m sure some people will claim that WordPress is TeH Suxxor and that’s where the blame lies, but I have lived through my MT days, with remaking of pages that didn’t change when you make a new post, with endless comment delays (how many MT site comment forms have “please submit once only” to assuage their users’ impatience?).
So I am currently weathering a wave of traffic from the popularity of this link and discovering where my hardware limits are. Last night, the MySQL server was terminated when the machine ran out of swap space.
Aug 6 23:46:39 shuttle pid 1260 (mysqld), uid 88, was killed: out of swap space
So I added some (slow) disk-based swap, and you all now face the interminable delays as the kernel tries to work with that.
shuttle swap_pager: indefinite wait buffer: bufobj: 0, blkno: 778064, size: 8192
This too shall pass.
I’m sure some people will claim that WordPress is TeH Suxxor and that’s where the blame lies, but I have lived through my MT days, with the rebuilding of pages that didn’t change each time you make a new post, with endless comment delays (how many MT site comment forms have “please submit once only” to assuage their users’ impatience?), with comment spam, and more stuff I have happily forgotten.
Looks like some tuning tips I found here helped.