July 31, 2004
Homebrewblog.com
Chad Dickerson, a fellow home brewer, and InfoWorld's CTO, has started a new weblog all about home brewing.
I'm going to be contributing as well, so check it out: http://www.homebrewblog.com or grab the RSS feed: 
.
July 29, 2004
Wow... way cool iPod amp
Tubesville is a custom amp shop in NYC that builds whimsical bespoke amplifiers like this Victrola-oid iPod amp.
(via Gizmodo)
July 28, 2004
Scientists finger surprise culprit in spinal cord injury
Cool finding, from Science Blog:
ATP, the vital energy source that keeps our body's cells alive, runs amok at the site of a spinal cord injury, pouring into the area around the wound and killing the cells that normally allow us to move, scientists report in the cover story of the August issue of Nature Medicine. The finding that ATP... [Science Blog]
This Land... fair use goodness from JibJab
I'm a fan of Arlo Guthrie (much to the dismay of my wife) and his dad, Woody, created many well-known folk songs. Parody is one of the most widely recognized fair-use rights under Copyright law, but the group that now owns the copyrights to Woody Guthrie's music is attacking JibJab for this parody they did.
Anyhow, this is hilarious no matter which side of the political fence you sit on.
July 27, 2004
Ancient brewery discovered on mountaintop in Peru
Cool!
Archaeologists working in southern Peru found an ancient brewery more than 1,000 years old. Remains of the brewing facility were uncovered on Cerro Baúl, a mountaintop city over 8,000 feet above sea level, which was home to elite members of the Wari Empire from AD 600-1000. Predating the Inca Empire... [Science Blog]
July 23, 2004
More on InfoWorld's RSS/Apache optimization
More excellent suggestions from Sam Ruby:
Finer points of serving feeds
redirecting using HTTP 301 instead of HTTP 302. Infoworld is currently redirecting from news.rdf to news.xml with a HTTP 302 which is a temporary redirect. Consumers will follow the redirect, but will continue to issue requests against the original URL, resulting in double the number of requests.
Done. Not sure why the rdf/xml redirect wasn't R=permanent....
supporting either gzip or deflate encoding
Adding a encoding declaration in the XML prolog or http headers. Omitting this information is typically is an indication that encoding issues haven't been thought through. Infoworld feeds will likely will have problems with «Iñtërnâtiônàlizætiøn» and with characters like «‘’“”–—».
Will take a look at these two on Monday. =)
Using a content-type of application/xml instead of text/xml. This is related to the encoding/charset discussion above.
Done as well. Thanks for the excellent suggestions. I'll run things through the Validator and see what I come up with.
July 22, 2004
Recently Played in iTunes
Delving deeper into the innards of Movable Type this evening, I found a link to a cool AppleScript on AWholeLottaNothing. It uses MT's TrackBack Pings to update your main index page with the tracks you've listened to recently in iTunes. Just set up a category for it (NowPlaying for example), set up that category to accept TrackBack Pings, and drop this into your Main Index template:
<MTPings category="NowPlaying" lastn="5">
<$MTPingExcerpt$><br />
</MTPings>
For details on setup, see here and here.
Cool stuff....
Fixing InfoWorld's RSS growing pains
As InfoWorld's CTO, Chad Dickerson, posted here, InfoWorld has been noticing a lot of congestion at the top of the hour when thousands of RSS clients all hit our servers simultaneously to check for updated feeds. We've done a number of things to alleviate this, but thanks to excellent feedback from the RSS community we've done a lot more today that will hopefully resolve some of these issues.
Some of the links from Chad's blog that helped in our debugging:
Slashdot discussion about Chad's column and RSS traffic patterns in general, as well as comments from Brooks Talley and John Allspaw (both former InfoWorlders) and myself
Dare Obasanjo suggests gzip encoding and conditional GET, but notes: "The one thing that HTTP doesn't provide is a way for clients to deal with numerous connections being made to the site at once." There are methods to deal with that, of course (more servers, CDN services like Akamai and Speedera, etc.) but those solutions smack of mindlessly adding more lanes to the freeway instead of doing the hard work of analyzing the traffic problem and working on the fundamental issues.
Sam Ruby points back to Dare Obasanjo's suggestions and notes: The functionality is clearly there in HTTP. The word is clearly not getting out to everywhere it should be.
Nick Bradbury of FeedDemon fame add his voice to the chorus, and also notes that FeedDemon only checks feeds every three hours by default
Phil Windley: None of these problems are unsolvable and frankly, its nice to have scalability problems. It's a sign of success. (Agreed!)
The solutions we implemented today:
It's definitely been a productive day. We'll see over the next few weeks how this impacts our requests load at the top of the hour. =)
July 21, 2004
Cases are for wimps....
I've been wrestling with my one remaining Windows XP system (3GHz P4, GeForce Ti4900, SATA, etc gaming PC) for the past few days due to a looping reboot problem. Basically, it tries to start Windows then flashes a bluescreen for half a second and reboots. Over and over again.
Doing a Safe Mode with Command Prompt leads one to believe it's a problem with AGP440.SYS but that's just the last thing that loads during bootup. The actual problem ended up being hardware, not software. Specifically, a failing power supply in an old ATX case.
Anyhoo, after much wrestling with it I found a temporary solution:
As you can see from the temperature monitor / fan controller sitting on top of the hard drive, it's running at about 82 degrees. The temperature probe is stuck inside the heatsink, so that's a good temp for a p4. Being in the open air helps a lot of course... this system normally ran about 100-105 in the case.
Found a nice (quiet) case to replace this with, the Antec Sonata. It's designed as a very quiet enclosure, while still being able to handle the heat output of a 3GHz P4. Not too bad looking either, but not sexy like the G5 or PowerBook. =) Antec are well known for their solid designs, and especially for their high quality power supplies, so hopefully this will fix my issues.
July 20, 2004
Free iPods for all incoming Duke freshmen
Aren't there already enough distractions for freshmen?
Duke University has entered into an agreement with Apple to distribute iPods to all of the incoming freshmen this year - that's 1650 iPods! This agreement is part of an initiative to "encourage creative uses of technology in education and campus life" The iPods will have audio and text on them including special university content such as "faculty-provided course content, including language lessons, music, recorded lectures and audio books." Faculty will be assisted in creating new content for these devices by Duke's Center for Instructional Technology And here you thought iPods were just for music! [Slashdot]
July 06, 2004
Mac must-have: Tigger
Tigger (http://www.furrysoft.de/?page=tigger) is a shareware app that scrolls info in your unused menu bar space. I use it to scroll iTunes info so its there at a glance, but it's expandable with other plugins to show other info. Cool stuff.
I also still use Synergy (http://synergy.wincent.com/), an awesome iTunes controller app that also runs in the menubar. Synergy will pop up a semi-transparent window showing the song info and cover art each time the track changes in iTunes in addition to the play/pause, next, last track buttons it puts on the menu bar.