Mokka mit Schlag

I stumbled across the first issue of Season 8 by Joss Whedon at the Forbidden Planet this afternoon. <span style="voice-family: comic book guy, male;}">Best Comic Book Adaptation Ever!</span>.

Read the rest of this entry »

I know this site is more than a little slow on occasion. I also know that the static site www.xom.nu which is hosted on the exact same server runs like a bat out of hell, so it’s likely not the server hardware (Mac Mini) or network connection (Speakeasy DSL) that’s at fault. The remaining candidates are:

• PHP (Very likely)
• WordPress (Maybe, but unlikely except in so far as it’s written in PHP)
• Traffic volume (especially comment spammers)
• MySQL (Possible, but I tend to doubt it.)

I’ve got a lot of suggestions for improving performance, and I plan to start trying some of them. I don’t, however, have any good measurements of where this server is spending its time. I’d appreciate it if anyone could share knowledge and experience as to how to determine where the server is taking it’s time, and how to find out what’s making it so slow. Thanks.
Read the rest of this entry »

So far this year I’ve had little time to bird anywhere other than Prospect Park, which, while pretty, gets a little repetitive. (I did get a life bird there a couple of weeks ago though.) Thus I’m really looking forward to getting out and doing some California birding in the upcoming week while I’m in Santa Clara for Software Development 2007 West. Looking at my schedule I have three full days open, and maybe a little extra time here and there.

Here are my tentative plans. Schedule will be adjusted to fit the weather, tides, wind conditions, and such. If any locals would like to guide/escort/tag along please drop me e-mail. It’s always nice to have company. Also if anyone has suggestions for sites I’m missing, or information about tides, best viewing spots, local mailing lists and rare bird alerts, etc. please leave a comment.

Also it would be helpful to know which of my target species are hopeless at this time of year. I will be back in May so I can try for some of these later.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’m now working on the accessibility chapter of Refactoring HTML. I’d like to mention some automated tools for checking accessibility. The W3C lists a couple of dozen. Which are the best? If you had to pick just two or three, which would you choose?
Read the rest of this entry »

Personally I listen to hardly any Internet radio, or much radio at all for that matter except when I’m driving; and being a New Yorker that’s almost never. However people who do listen to the radio seem incensed over a recent decision by the Copyright Royalty Board to dramatically increase fees Internet radio station pay for broadcasting music. Some are even calling it a death sentence. I’m not so pessimistic, and here’s why.
Read the rest of this entry »

Paul S. R. Chisholm points out a new reason virtual machine based languages such as Java may sometimes outperform statically optimized languages such as C:

Portability depends on architecture (for example, x86 vs. PowerPC), but high performance depends on microarchitecture (for example, Pentium M vs. Athlon 64 X2). Today’s Core 2 chips have many high performance features missing from the 1993 original Pentiums. A good compiler like gcc can take advantage of those additional features. This is bad news if you’re using a binary Linux distribution, compiled to a lowest common denominator. It’s good news if you’re building and installing Linux from source, with something like Linux From Scratch or Gentoo/Portage. It’s also good news for just-in-time compilers (think Java, .NET, and Mono); they’re compiling on the “target” machine, so they can generate code tailored for the machine’s exact microarchitecture.

This sounds plausible in theory. What I don’t know is whether Java takes advantage of this in practice. Has anyone looked at the JIT source code lately? Can anyone say whether it makes any microarchitecture-specific optimizations?