Mark, Darcie, Skylar, and Sammie came up from Alabama today. Before the Christmas festivities start we needed to settle all of the belated birthdays we missed this year (mine, Dena’s, Larry’s, and Darcie’s). Mark and Darcie got me this wonderful gift:
Thanks a ton, guys! I love Batman, particularly the comics, but I lack the conviction to buy them regularly. Getting them in one bound volume is an awesome gift for me.
A handy dandy regular expression to parse out fields from Apache’s combined log format:
/^(\S+)\s # requestor
(\S+)\s # ?
(\S+)\s # ?
\[([^\]]*)\]\s # time
"([^"]*)"\s # URL
(\d*)\s # result
(\d*)\s # bytes
"([^"]*)"\s # referrer
"([^"]*)"$/x # user agent
Barney came into our lives on Mothers day when I was in High School. He was my best friend, even posting in my senior pictures with me. After my parents divorced, he went to live with my Dad in Wisconson. I tried visited at least once a year, and he was always excited to see me.
He was hands-down the best dog I’ve ever had. He got along with everyone, including our cats. They used to sleep with him, and clean his face. In his later years he was my dad’s only constant companion.
The last few years were getting hard on him. It grew difficult for him to move around, especially during the winter. This past summer we decided that it would not be fair to him to make him suffer through another cold Wisconsin winter. His mind was still sharp but his body was not holding up. At the end, old age and cancer attacked him but he still kept his good spirits.
Yesterday at 8:30am, after more than 15 years of steadfast companionship, my dad took him to the vet where they put him to sleep. He’s now buried in the backyard of my dad’s lot, in his favorite spot under a tree, along with the pillow he slept with.
Farewell, faithful friend. I’ll miss you always.
We had a great time during our trip to New York City earlier this month.
The night we arrived, Adam & Matt from #linux on irc.arstechnica.com, took the train into down to meet us.
Together we braved the subway to Brooklyn where we feasted on some of the best pizza in the world:
The line was long but well-worth the wait:
Adam & Matt are, respectively, two of the smartest and funniest people I know. It was nice having a chance to split some pie and talk to them in person.
The next day Dena and I set out early. We knew we wanted to see the Statue of Liberty but neither of us thought we’d get so close. A ferry took u to Liberty Island where we spent a couple hours taking pictures and sampling food from street island vendors.
Afterwards, we took a short stop at Ellis Island. It was getting late in the day and our feet were killing us so we only stayed for about 45 minutes.
We strolled around Times Square, where we visited the “Toys R Us” store, where they charged us three times for our :
We made sure to take a stop at the remains of the World Trade Center. We saw Ladder Company 10, directly across from ground zero, roll out for a call:
and some interesting memories left behind:
On our last day, we had lunch at Tavern on the Green:
and took a stroll through Central Park:
Probably the strangest sight of all:
All in all we had a great, if tiring, time. You’ll have to excuse the strange blur visible in some of the pictures. It was only part-way through the weekend that I noticed the piece of lint on the inner glass of my good lense. I’m still sorting through pictures so stay tuned to my Flickr for updates.
I had breakfast with Jon Trowbridge (of Beagle fame) last weekend. One of the things we talked about was contributing to open source. It was a refreshing and eye-opening conversation. People want to contribute but don’t know where to start. There is this vast amount of software, plenty of bugs or missing features, but where do you begin?
We don’t have enough time in the day to do all of the things we’d like but we tend to waste a minute here or there reading Penny Arcade or Google News or whatever. By themselves they don’t seem like much but add them up and you might be surprised how much time you’ve wasted.
So, I issue a challenge to everyone on Planet, one that doesn’t require the ability to code (but if you possess such ability, use it). Pick an application you commonly use and find it’s bugzilla. Bookmark it if necessary. Once a day pull it up while you’re surfing and skim through it. See one that looks familiar or interesting? Confirm it, reproduce it, and add details to it. It helps confirm that there is a problem and helps to track down the bug. Developers appreciate this, trust me.
If you can write code and you see one that you think you can fix, give it a try. No patch is too small. If you fix it, attach the patch and add yourself to the CC list. You’ll get a nice notification when someone responds to your patch and you can feel good about yourself for contributing and maybe fixing something that’s been annoying a user for months.
For as little as five minutes a day (okay, so I sound like Sally Struthers) you too can be a part of what makes open-source great. See your name in lights (or just plain text).
Changelog:
2005-10-25 Larry Ewing* src/FlickrRemote.cs: Integrate patch from Adam Israel it quote
tag names with spaces in them.
Ordinary users to complain when something doesn’t work, rightly so. Be an extra-ordinary user and do something about it.
I’m so backed up on things I wanted to say (again) I’ll just do another set of bullets.
I’ve been spending a lot of time porting over some code from ASP.NET to mod_perl2. Along with that rewrite, I’ve been migrating a side business away from managed hosting running Windows 2003 to Linux. Between the porting and migrating, managing the clients and working to grow the business, I’ve had time for little else.
I’ve discovered some pretty cool things along the way, though.
Apache2’s prefork model seems to work much better than its worker model, specifically when interacting with mod_perl2. Gathering specific statistics is difficult so this is strictly empirical data. The worker model worked just fine during testing and initial testing. Once I started pushing some real traffic through the system (on the order of 1M requests/day) I began noticing some odd behavior. Internal to my application, I track how much time it took to complete each request, from start to finish. Those times remained consistent throughout the process, but when I tried going through Apache it took a minimum of 20 seconds.
Something was obviously wrong so I started eliminating possible bottlenecks, like network, processor, and memory. All of those checked out fine. I ran ngrep (one damn fine tool, btw) and watched the request. It was hitting Apache, hanging for a while, and then spitting back a response. So I tested against a static file — it was fast. I wrote a small mod_perl2 handler that did nothing but return OK. It hung. So, I figure that something with the request being handed off from Apache2 to mod_perl2 wasn’t working right.
I ran Apache2 through strace but I didn’t see anything enlightening. I googled, read, and googled some more. I tweaked all of the worker mpm settings with no success. There were plenty of processes waiting for connection but no apparent reason for the requests to be delayed. Then I remembered someone on IRC asked me about prefork vs. worker. I had thought, because it was the default when I apt-get installed mod_perl & Apache2, that the worker model was the one mod_perl2 preferred.
So on a hunch I removed the worker mpm in favor of the prefork one. I had to tune the prefork settings a bit from the default. Suddenly everything became responsive. No processes sitting in “sending reply” and lightning fast response times from Apache. Memory usage seems to be lower and almost nil processor usage. It’s working so well, in fact, that I’m afraid to go to bed for fear it’s just my imagination.
I was chatting on irc and organizing my wallpaper when I realized that there was no way to set my background image directly through Nautilus. I cracked open Anjuta and got to work.
Here is the result: nautilus-wallpaper
I still need to wrap my brain around autoconf, automake, etc. I did manage to hack the Makefiles so that the extension is installed to prefix/lib/nautilus/extensions-1.0. Hopefully there aren’t any other quirks with that.
Just a little bit of code I’ve been working on. Call this a proof-of-concept to test the geo-targetting library that I’m using. Taking that (a commercial product) and combining it with the Google Maps API, I’ve come up with something kind of fun:
It’s not 100% accurate and it only goes to the city level but it’s close enough for most purposes I need it for. It’s some pretty interesting technology, too. My next step is extending it to not only target the city you (or your ISP) is in, but other cities around you in a certain mile radius.