Mokka mit Schlag

Used to be you could surf Amazon completely without cookies. They’d feed you a cookie if you were naive enough to take it, but you didn’t have to accept it. You could still browse, add items to and remove items from your shopping cart, checkout, pay, and do anything else you wanted to do without any cookies at all. That was a very important characteristic given Amazon’s penchant for tracking users and data mining.

The Amazon site wasn’t completely RESTful–without a lot of JavaScript I don’t think any consumer site could be given both the browser vendors’ and the W3C’s failure to implement simple features like HTTP logout and forms that PUT and DELETE–but it did better than most.

However about a week or two ago something changed, and it now seems impossible to do more than browse without accepting their nutrition-free cookies. They seem to be going through a site-wide redesign. This is a definite step backwards. Given that they were already maintaining sessions (without cookies) before, I’m not sure if this will have a negative impact on their scalability. Nonetheless, it’s disappointing.

Striped Lynx Spider, Oxyopes salticus
Fort Tilden, 2007-09-23

I used a macro lens to take the photo. This is much larger than life size. The actual spider could stand on a dime. I found this one in the men’s room. Bathrooms in public parks are often a good place to find interesting spiders. You just have to be ready to explain to the park ranger what you’re doing setting up tripods and video equipment in the toilet. :-)
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I’m still finding this site to be unmanageably slow at times. One other trick that’s been suggested is to install eAccelerator to cache the compiled PHP scripts. (WP-cache only caches the output pages.) I’ve now done that. At first glance it does feel like a dramatic speed-up, but we’ll have to see how it handles under load. Please holler if anything seems broken.

The install was shockingly easy for a Unix server program: took me about ten minutes total including time to write this entry. That’s less time than it took me to install PHP in the first place.

Things do seem to be faster, though I’m still seeing occasional timeouts requesting pages. I really wish there were some decent profiling and logging tools that could tell me exactly where the system is bottlenecking.

Sachem Skipper, Atalopedes campestris
Floyd Bennett Field, 2007-09-23

Monarch butterfly, Danaus plexippus
Floyd Bennett Field, 2007-09-23

As many monarchs as we see around here, we don’t see too many monarch caterpillars because there isn’t that much (or any) milkweed in most of the parks. I spotted this caterpillar grazing on milkweed on a Brooklyn Bird Club field trip this morning. It’s getting a little late in the season for caterpillars. I hope this fella can metamorphosize and head south before winter hits.
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Coccinella bipunctata
Oslo, Norway, 2007-09-08
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