Category: observations

Before I started keeping this scintillating weblog, I had an encounter with one of my neighbors over a tree, or more specifically the leaves of the tree. Seems he was miffed that the tree was dropping leaves on his property, and he came to my door one day and blustered on about how he had talked to the Authorities and was within his rights to Take Steps. I thought not more of it: his reputation preceded him, and I wasn’t all that interested in hearing his complaints, especially about something as ephemeral as birch leaves.

Imagine my surprise when I returned from taking my kids to school and found a ladder leaning across my fence and two freshly-painted (!?) stumps where there used to be large limbs. Now, realize this tree is 50-60 feet tall, and the limbs that were removed are at about 8-10 feet. Is it likely the offending leaves came from the now-removed branches? Or perhaps from the higher ones that actually cross into his airspace?

He got a sternly-worded certified letter making him aware that in this timber loving state, damaging a tree not your own carries a treble damages penalty.

Now I have another neighbor who wants to have some branches removed from our towering cedrus deodara that is threatening to turn her yard into a moss garden. She called me on the phone a week or so ago to let me know what she wanted to do and that she would pay for it, and tonight stopped by to drop off a written note, listing all the agreed-upon details for my approval.

Gee, they couldn’t be more different in their approaches, could they?

Now playing: Helter Skelter by The Beatles from the album “The Beatles [White Album] (Disc 2)” | Get it

So would it be too much for OS X to check to see if any print jobs were running before shutting down? I just tried printing a job that got about 2/3 complete when poof — the connected computer shut down at its usual 9 PM time.

To its credit, the job was still in the spool and resumed printing, after a fashion: I’m not sure I have all the pages, but that’s easily remedied. Seems like there should be some general once-over that happens at shut down to make sure nothing is dropped.

Now playing: Green Song by Anne Sofie von Otter and Elvis Costello from the album “For The Stars” | Get it

Such a small thing, and yet so very annoying:

As an aside, and reading John’s piece, it suddenly pops into my head that the day a major hole is found in MT, it will be the presence of nav-commenters.gif that gives people a nice list of vulnerable sites to exploit.

What day would he like? With MT banned by hosting providers due to its bad manners — why would anyone design a product that runs as a CGI and perpetuate that in their third release? — that seems enough of a “hole” to me.
Now playing: You Just Haven’t Earned It Yet, Baby by The Smiths from the album “Louder Than Bombs” | Get it

I had occasion to use the virtual credit card service that PayPal offers today: I wanted to do some shopping but didn’t want to tap the family budget, nor did the merchant accept PayPal. So I simply had PayPal gin up a virtual MasterCard, backed by the cash in my account, and used that. So it’s really a debit card that works like a credit card. All the same, smooth as silk.

Once you get a “card” created for you, PayPal pops up a little mini-window with your account information — the account holder name, card number, expiration date, etc. — and you can just refer to the details there as you make your purchases.

Since my takings from my little part-time gig go to PayPal — I use their invoicing tool to collect — I have funds available. And this opens up possibilities with other merchants who don’t do PayPal (some eBay sellers don’t accept it, but would they care about a debit purchase? I doubt it.).

Now playing: Erase-Rewind by The Cardigans from the album “Gran Turismo” | Get it

5,000 cyclists huff and puff the Chilly Hilly:

Sunshine, lack of skiing may have boosted numbers

So that handwritten bib with “5001” on it was not a fluke . . .

Now playing: Pipeline by Dick Dale & Stevie Ray Vaughan from the album “Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble: The Real Deal – Greatest Hits 2”

Help Wanted to Expand Free Speech Globally:

A group that wants to assist free speech in authoritarian nations is looking for a technically savvy person — a CTO or lead engineer type — who can do a short term study, possibly leading to a longer-term job. This is a paying gig for the right person.

The project is intended, in its intitial form, to make possible blogging that is impossible (or at least extremely difficult) to trace. One of the people involved calls it an “anonymous, anti-tyranny blogging service.”

If you’re interested, please send e-mail to Jim Hake at jim@spiritofamerica.net —

Note to other bloggers: Please post your own notice about this. It’s a good cause.

NOTE: If you tried sending Jim mail earlier today and it bounced, that’s because the address was listed incorrectly for a while. Please try again.

An idea worth pursuing.

The default value of 8M was too small. In fact, to import my MovableType content, I ended up setting it to 128M, I think.

memory_limit = 16M ; Maximum amount of memory a script may consume (8MB)

and I diddled these values a bit, though I suspect the change to php.ini is where the battle was won.


StartServers 25
MinSpareServers 5
MaxSpareServers 10
MaxClients 75
MaxRequestsPerChild 0


With almost 4400 page views by 20:30 today — a Saturday — and no load-related weirdness, things are looking better.

Well, this is becoming a pattern. Wake up, take a look at the systems here at Thistle Dew World HQ, and find the server hammered with loads north of 36 (taking as a rule, load average should equal the number of CPUs, that would be bad in a single CPU system), I think it’s time I made some hardware improvements. The graph tells an ugly tale: from 4 AM until 6:30 or so, it was thrashing so hard it couldn’t even graph it’s own vital signs.

So I did a little research on tuning, and the consensus is that this system is starved for resources. I could add faster disks (some configuration of RAID, at various levels of expenditure), break the database server off by itself, or simply add RAM. Option 3 looks to offer the most bang for the buck: the box is capable of holding three times as much RAM as it has now, so that looks like a pretty quick improvement.

I’m seeing a lot of httpd in free(): warning: recursive call errors and all signs point to some issues with PHP and Apache under load, though to be fair, most of the Googling I have done mentions Apache 1.3, not 2.

High Performance MySQL Chapter 6: Server Performance Tuning:

To bridge the gap between blazingly fast CPUs and comparatively slow disks, we have memory. With respect to performance, it’s in the middle—significantly faster than disks but still much slower than the CPU. The underlying operating system generally uses free memory to cache data read from and written to disk. That means if you frequently query the same small MyISAM table over and over, there’s a very good chance you’ll never touch the disk. Even though MySQL doesn’t cache row data for MyISAM tables (only the index blocks), the entire MyISAM table is likely in the operating system’s disk cache.

Modern CPUs are even substantially faster than main memory. To combat this mismatch, chip makers have designed multilevel caching systems. It’s common for a CPU to contain level 1, level 2, and even level 3 caches. The caches use significantly faster and more expensive memory, so they’re generally a fraction of the size of main memory; a 512-KB L2 cache is generous.

With that in mind, simply adding memory to your server will improve MySQL performance only if the operating system can make good use of it by caching even more disk blocks. If your database is 512 MB, and you already have 1 GB of memory, adding more memory probably won’t help.

On the other hand, if you run more than just MySQL on the server, adding memory may help. Maybe that Java application server you’ve been running is eating up a lot of the memory that could otherwise cache disk access. Keep in mind that Linux, like most modern operating systems, considers caching disk I/O an optional feature. It doesn’t reserve any memory for it. So when free memory is low, MySQL can really suffer because MyISAM tables expect the OS to do some read caching.

And of course, FreeBSD 4.x is not the best choice for MySQL anyway.

According to the script here, the database I am most concerned with is only 5 Mb in size. Perhaps there are some other steps I can take in the meantime.

I tried rescuing this image using iPhoto’s editing tools (converting to monochrome and monkeying with the levels).

Not a big improvement, but not too bad.