Mokka mit Schlag

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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I do most of my presentation slides in pure XML, but I also do a few more high-level/less-code talks in PowerPoint. Sometimes I need to give the same presentation to different audiences or at different lengths. In XML it’s easy to “comment out” individual slides or whole sections to reduce a presentation to size. Is there any plausible way to do this in PowerPoint?
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My search for a reliable, fast, correct, usable program to synchronize my G5 with my TiBook over Ethernet continues. It had been almost a year since I last evaluated and rejected Decimus Synk, but it had been through several minor versions since then. I figured it was time to give it another try, and see if Decimus had fixed the bug syncing large (> 2.1 GB) files that had led me to reject it last year.

I synced up the TiBook before I left for Norway and all went well, after I finally excluded enough data to allow the desktop content to fit on the laptop. However when I came home and ran the sync in the other direction, Synk hung on my Thunderbird Inbox. Seems I hadn’t cleaned it out enough in Norway and it had grown from just about 2.0GB to 2.4GB in the week I was away. Apparently that was enough to break Synk.

When are programmers going to learn that a signed four-byte int (or even an unsigned four-byte int) just isn’t big enough to hold a file size any more? It hasn’t been large enough for years. Heck, I’m not sure even a long would be large enough for some applications. It’s not just e-mail Inboxes that are big but any sort of data recorded from the outside world: sound, video, scientific imagery, DVD images, backup sets and more. Large files are proliferating. We’ve got to stop ignoring them.
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