- Just reinstalled my Mac Pro and my dreaded video problem persists. I’m worried this is hardware related. Ugh.
- Slowly rebuilding my Mac Pro. Tedious, but not terribly unpleasant.
- Worth noting, my Mac Pro video problems persist although it isn’t freezing at least as much. I’m almost positive a repair visit is needed.
Very annoyed that I cannot just download a Google Earth installer anymore. You are forced to download the Google Updater and use it!?
Reading about directed acyclic graphs.
Question: is there ever a case where “utilize” is more appropriate than “use”?
Related: See word lists.
Matinee movie! Leatherheads.
Watching 60 Minutes on TiVo. Nice to see Al Gore has upgraded to Leopard.
How Software Is Built Interview
A few weeks ago I got the opportunity to do a phone interview with Scott Swigart and Sean Campbell who are doing a series of interviews regarding How Software Is Built. The interview was a lot of fun and really hit around the general theme of how open source is changing the way software is created. It is long, but I think it came out pretty well.
(Update 2024): The original site for this interview no longer exists but you can still read it via Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.
- Feeling fairly stupid having trouble migrating to WP 2.5 built-in avatar support and ditching Gravatar plugin. Ugh.
- Avatar success! Magic is:
<?php echo get_avatar($comment, '50'); ?>and it does everything, entire IMG tag. - I cannot even begin to express how much I love the Search Regex WP plugin. It has saved me hours!
- A little overwhelmed by how much cleanup work I need to do on my blog. Not WP 2.5 related, just years of messy junk.
- Changed my whole permalink structure and have done everything I can to make it right. Wondering how much of a hit I’ll take from Google.
One of the tweets highlighted in my MarketWatch Farewell Video.
Getting tired of the more and more elaborate April Fools things from various Internet sites. Perhaps I’m being lame.
Heading to The Bulldog for early ruby.mn fun.
Seems the USB hub in one of my Dell monitors is dead. 1 hour of my life wasted.
Watching Clifford Stoll’s TED video. Dude seems totally insane.
Enabling Time Machine via network drive for all Macs.
Updating three Apple TV’s to 2.0.1.
Watching Frontline “Bush’s War” in the background. Hard to even watch. Watching a disaster in slow-motion.
Summer of Love Preview
This summer is going to be filled with a lot of travel. I’m taking the summer off after leaving my current role, before I get going on a new thing. Tammy has given it a name, the Summer of Love. We’ve even got a wiki setup to build out our itinerary.
I’ve been asked by a number of people where we are going on our West Coast tour. The cities are listed on the wiki, and you could do a Google Earth Preview of the Summer of Love, but how about a video tour!
Find and attach video that was [vimeo.com/835067.](http://vimeo.com/835067.)
The music in the video is Windfall by Son Volt. One of my favorite songs, by one of my favorite bands. Notably, it is also the traditional first song to begin a road trip with.
Flashback: BigCharts on CNBC
Flashback to February 4, 1998! Here are a couple of videos that I stumbled upon on my machine recently. These are an extraordinary walk down memory lane for me, back to the early days of starting BigCharts.com.
We were still very early in the development BigCharts. There were only a dozen or so people in the company. I was sitting at my desk talking to our ISP about getting some more bandwidth. At the time we had a single T1 with a now trivial 1.5 Mbps of bandwidth, about what my cable modem at home does, and only used about a quarter of that. In those days I always had a TV with CNBC on in my office and this came on the screen with no warning.
I sat in my chair stunned in silence, and then hung up on the person I was talking to. At the time we served BigCharts off of a single Sparc 20 clone. The site ran with a clunky combination of Perl and CGI work sitting behind a very early version of Apache. With that clip on CNBC an avalanche of people started to come to the site. To be fair, back then that probably meant a couple of thousand. I really don’t know how many it was since we didn’t even have log analytics back then. Small numbers in 1998. I tried to get onto the server via console and it wouldn’t respond. The load average had spiked so high that I couldn’t get enough CPU to even get a prompt. We ended up pulling the ethernet cable to kill the traffic just to get onto the machine.
February 4th was a Wednesday. This was the first week that my friend Chris had joined BigCharts. We immediately got everyone together and I sat on the Sparc and figured out what, if anything, we could do. We realized our load average was up over 100 because we were forking Perl processes everywhere. Remember, this was old CGI stuff, no mod_perl here. So on his third day at work I started handing Chris Perl programs that he translated into C and gave me an executable for. As we replaced each piece the next one fell down, and we repeated the translation process.
After a couple of hours traffic subsided and we had converted enough things to native executables that we were okay. So the next day this video segment aired.
I love this bit. It is so quaint. I love how Bill Griffeth gives us a total pass on the site going down. It’s just taken as a given, when a lot of people go to a website, the server goes down. Few things highlight so starkly for me how the web has matured over the last decade.
Anyway, obviously with a mere 24 hour gap and being a startup with no real money we had the same issue. A ton of people pointed their browsers at us, the server got overloaded and we had a challenging couple of hours. If I remember right we just let the system ride through it on the second day since we’d already optimized as much as we could in that window.
Shortly after this we started a total revamp of our code. The final stage was a migration to Windows and distributing on multiple servers. But right away we started to push a lot of things that we were doing in CGI/Perl down into Javascript functions on the browser. If only the concept of a CDN existed back then that would have helped us a lot too.
Ahh… good times.
PS - Final comment. The “viewer” that sent the note into CNBC was our CEO and Founder, Philip Hotchkiss!
Wish I had an Xserve running Leopard server at home. Starting to feel the need for something like iCal server.