Category: books

More on top 20 IT mistakes and software engineering

More on top 20 IT mistakes and software engineering:

More on top 20 IT mistakes and software engineering

Malcolm Davis over at the java.net weblog community commented on the Top 20 IT mistakes feature I wrote a few weeks ago and picked the following “favorites”: mismanaging software development, developing web apps for IE only, and clinging to prior solutions.

I didn’t see this until I got home tonight, but I encountered an example of one of these today. I am helping with my school yearbook (elementary schools have yearbooks now?!) and we are going to do it all digital this year. But the web application requires IE. It won’t let you use anything else. I’m underwhelmed. I plan to grouse to the contact at the yearbook company about it and forward on some stuff about how organizations are rejecting IE or barring its use altogether.

Crypto-Gram: May 15, 2001:

If at all possible, don’t use Microsoft Internet Explorer.

[ . . . ]

If possible, don’t use Microsoft Windows.

will work for music . . .

PayPal – Use PayPal on iTunes—Get Five Free Songs!:

With a catalog of over one million tracks, iTunes lets you buy, download, share, and enjoy the music you love, both online and on the go. And PayPal makes it easy and secure for you to make and receive payments online.

Now, when you sign up for a new, free iTunes account and pay with PayPal in the iTunes Music Store, you’ll make your online music experience better than ever. And if you’re one of the first half million members to do it before March 31st, you’ll get five free songs.*

But I already have a Paypal account and I’ve spend a coupla hundred bucks at the iTunes Music Store . . . . gah.

I set up payments through PayPal, rather than a credit card: makes sense since I get paid through my PayPal account. But it would have been nice to get comped the 5 free tracks.

wringing some performance out of old hardware

Bart’s Soapbox – A Geeklog server on FreeBSD:

To get more performance out of PHP, there are a few ways to go.


Install pear and pear-APC

Install Turck-mmcache

Install a Zend cache

I get by far the best results by installing the somewhat experimental Turck-mmcache package instead of the commercial Zend-cache, and it seems to do its job very well.

Pear and APC caused some trouble for Apache and it wouldn’t shutdown properly, instead going in an infinite loop somewhere.

To install it on FreeBSD:

cd /usr/ports/www/turck-mmcache

make install

And follow the instructions at the end of the installation to update your php.ini file.

This seems to a quick and easy fix: this machine got swamped by a comment spam attack last night and even with 128 Mb of RAM dedicated to php, it still had issues. While I shop for more RAM, this seems to speed things up a bit.

graphing http traffic

I decided to plot my http server’s hits and errors in my mrtg graphing pages.

Hitrate

Given the trivial traffic I do (2500 – 4000 hits a day, even excluding all css files, images, and various MSFT exploit attempts), it’s not too difficult. It was simple enough for me to refactor it so I could track error rates as well. All I do is grab the 100 most recent lines of log file, pull out the date of the first and last, work out the seconds between, and calculate how many hits per minute that represents. Pulling the date from the logfile lines took more time than anything, but I am a bear of very little brain when it comes to regular expressions.

I’m sure some smarter person can come up with a Better Way . . . I’ll look for it in the comments.

If that’s too hard to read, you can get a copy here.

and the mrtg config looks like this:

Target[red-httpd]: `/usr/home/paul/bin/hitrate.pl`
MaxBytes[red-httpd]: 1000
AbsMax[red-httpd]: 1000000
Title[red-httpd]: httpd hits and errors
PageTop[red-httpd]: <h1>httpd hits and errors</h1>

Unscaled[red-httpd]: ymw
ShortLegend[red-httpd]: hits/minute
#kMG[red-httpd]:k
YLegend[red-httpd]: hits and errors
Legend1[red-httpd]: hits
Legend2[red-httpd]: errors
Legend3[red-httpd]: hits
Legend4[red-httpd]: errors
LegendI[red-httpd]: hits
LegendO[red-httpd]: errors
Options[red-httpd]: growright,gauge,nopercent

iPod doesn’t write files contiguously? drains battery life as a result?

iPod – restore and maximize battery life:

If you erase and add files in a normal manner you will get fragmentation. The iPod hard disk will have to work more to read your music and your battery will suffer.

This needs to be tested, I think: since the update process is initiated by the desktop system, it should be trivial, or even obvious, to ensure that files are written to contiguous blocks.

iPodlounge | All Things iPod:

Apple does not recommend running disk utilities like Norton Speed Disk, Disk Scan and Disk Defragmenter. It’s not really needed as the drive is not written to and erased nearly as much as a typical hard drive. If you’re emphatic about cleaning up your drive it’s best just to do a full Restore with the Apple Software Updater. This reformats the drive (defragmenting it in the process) and has the added benefit of creating a new clean iPod database which over extended periods of use can get corrupted.

I can see how seeking and scanning could run down battery life, but I’m not convinced it’s needed.

morning after thoughts on Delicious Library

So it occured to me that there’s an opportunity to hook your Deliciously organized library with Amazon’s filtering system. You’ll have noticed that Amazon wants to know what you own and how you like it: since Delicious Library (hereinafter DL) can make requests of Amazon to populate the metadata for various items, what if it could also populate your profile with stuff you own and your ratings to help you locate new things?

(Of course, it may already do this, but I sure didn’t see it in the review.)

Considering the cost of DL is close to $200 — unless you want to key in all the details and you don’t already have a camera — it’s not quite an impulse buy. Still cool, though.

Now playing:Morphine – Take Me With You