Posts

Posted on

Apache v Spaghetti Monster

Some very interesting graphics posted in a ZDNet blog recently comparing the number of system calls made by Windows+IIS vs. Linux+Apache to serve a very simple web page. Short story: Everything you’ve ever heard about the fabulously complicated plate of accreted spaghetti code in Windows is true. Does all that added complexity increase the inherent vulnerability of Windows as a server OS? Probably. But getting to the real-world truth of that claim is nearly impossible without being a genius engineer intimately familiar with both code bases. I only know the images seem to confirm what I already believe. Computerworld aggregates blogged notes and observations on the frightening pics.

Posted on

Ch-infamous

Birdhouse Hosting welcomes Ch-infamous, the weblog of J-School student Joshua Chin. Some nice photos of his recent trip to India working with “Wildlife SOS, an Indian animal rights NGO that is trying to save sloth bears from rather painful and not terribly dignified lives as street performers.”

Josh Chin is a former apparatchik for the Chinese government. He also used to cook French food on a man-made floating island in San Francisco. He is from Utah and has spent a lot of time, probably too much, as a reporter in Asia. Now a student at the Graduate School of Journalism, he is aware of what a solipsistic thing it is to have a blog – and he’s fine with it.

Posted on

Win den Herder

23-year-old Dutch kid Wim den Herder playing an Oscar Peterson solo with seemingly impossible precision, ecstatic (love the whoop! at the end). Just a guy breathing music, playing his heart out for friends. Apparently he’s been shredding since age six, now teaching guitar (probably to students much older than himself).

Thanks baald

Posted on

Trading Up

A Montreal blogger is “living on magic,” trying to trade up from a red paper clip to a house. His trades thus far are almost surreal:

  • Paper clip for a fish-shaped pen
  • Fish-shaped pen for a clay doorknob with a funny face on it
  • Clay doorknob for a camping stove
  • Stove for a generator
  • Generator for an “instant party”
  • Instant party for a snowmobile
  • Snowmobile for an all-expenses-paid trip to Yahk, British Columbia
  • Yahk trip for a panel van
  • Van for a recording contract
  • Recording contract for the year of free rent in Phoenix

We should all live on such magic.

Music: The Roches :: Mr. Sellack
Posted on

Pet Food Healthier

It’s official, sort of: According to one study, pet food is healthier than many fast foods.

Nutrition experts who compared 30 human meals with 15 pet foods discovered that Gourmet Gold cat food, with 2.9 grams of fat per 100 grams, was eight times less fatty than pieces of Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) which had 23.2 grams of fat per 100 grams and 1.9 grams of salt.

Scientist John Searle, from the Global food-testing lab in Burton upon Trent, says ““It would not do a human any harm to eat this cat and dog food. It would be categorised in the green or amber levels. But some convenience foods would fall in the red or unhealthy category.”

Music: The Roches :: Damned Old Dog
Posted on

Chairs, Sculptures, and Brains

Reason #216 why having a three-yr-old around guarantees you’ll never be bored: Excellent Jokes.

Me: “Miles, will you tell me a joke?”

Miles: “I know an orangutan who likes to eat chairs, sculptures, and brains! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!”

Posted on

Akismet for MT

The collaborative comment spam filtering database has drastically improved the game for me over the past few months, but until recently, it worked only with WordPress. Just days after I switched from MovableType to WP, I was contacted to help with a secret beta test of a version of Akismet for MT. Since I could no longer run that test on this blog, I deployed it on John Battelle’s Searchblog and Mary Hodder’s Napsterization, two of Birdhouse’s hardest-hit installations. After identifying some bugs and an initial rocky start, the plugin started kicking some serious butt.

Today Akismet/MT went public — ironically at the same time some independent coders developed their own versions. So far, the only thing that seems to hang it up are scoring conflicts with other installed systems. For example, if you have MT set to score +1 for a comment containing less than three links, but Akismet flags a comment as spam and ranks it -1, the two scores cancel each other out. But those are minor bumps.

Unfortunately Akismet isn’t quite the true golden egg in terms of reducing server load, though it does help. My comments on that topic here.

Spammers listen up: There are a whole lot more of us than there are of you, and it’s really hard to imagine you figuring out how to game this system. You don’t stand a chance.

Technorati Tags: ,

Posted on

Google Mini Minus Link Love

First-hand report from an organization using the Google-mini appliance. Mostly run-of-the-mill observations, but it surfaces a limitation of Goog-in-the-enterprise that hadn’t occurred to me: Google’s secret sauce is PageRank, and PageRank depends on link love. But if what you’re indexing is a few thousand Word/Excel/PDF documents that don’t link to each other, there is no link love to be had, and you’re back to Alta Vista days and plain old keyword frequency.

If the interlinking metadata between documents is non-existent, and PageRank is zero on every one of your documents, you’re back to keyword frequency matching.

That’s not really a criticism of the Google appliances themselves, as I’m not sure what could be done about it, but it seems to me a bit like selling an invention known for one special feature… without that feature. Big Macs without the secret sauce.

Music: Captain Beefheart and His Magi :: Grown So Ugly