Category: Geekery

Today’s interesting discovery

I’ve just discovered  lighttpd, a small memory footprint web server that supports all the stuff I currently use on my Linode – it’s got server side includes, fast cgi, simple virtual hosting, and mod_rewrite type redirection.  And Ruby on Rails supports it.  Ruby on Rails also supports SQLite, a small memory footprint SQL RDBMS.

Considering the small memory on my linode, I’m thinking that a transition from Apache and MySQL to lighttpd and SQLite might be just the ticket to improve the performance.  Which will be important if I start playing around with Ruby on Rails, because these “do everything including the kitchen sink” things tend to be memory and CPU hogs.

Now I’m trying to figure out how to test a transition.  I could install both of them on my home server and run it on another port.  I could install both of them on my linode and run it on another port.  Both of those options have the problem that it’s not a 100% accurate test, because I’d have to change the code to support a different port, and then change it back if/when I make it the true thing.  Another possibility is to buy another Linode for a few months and try it out there.

Stupid tooth

One of my teeth exploded this morning.  I went to the dentist and they poked around, took a ton of x-rays, and scheduled me for about a bazillion appointments.  They haven’t put anything on the hole, but it isn’t hurting much.

In other news, somebody from my pimp agency came by to see me, because the INS was asking for proof that I have a legal right to work in the US, so I had to show him my green card.  Not sure why it didn’t take the last time I showed it to them.  I was asking him about the current job market.  Not that I expect anything – my contract has been extended to the end of the year, but it never hurts to keep your eyes and ears open.  He said that right now, the hot technology is J2EE.  I’m not entirely sure how J2EE differs from all the Java Swing and RDBMS stuff I’ve been doing is, but I suppose I should do some research and become buzzword compliant.

Which is too bad, because in aid of my desire to get some more experience with AJAX I was planning to teach myself more Javascript and maybe Ruby on Rails.  There just isn’t enough time, nor enough room in my head.

What crack is Adobe smoking?

Last night I wanted to install Acrobat Reader 7 on my laptop.  Normally installing a program in Mac OS X is just a matter of downloading a .dmg (Disk Image) file, opening it, and dragging the application out of there to the Applications folder.  Sometimes the .dmg has a package installer in it.  So I wasn’t too surprised when I found that the .dmg file I’d downloaded from Adobe had a package installer in it.  But when I ran the package installer, it didn’t just copy some files from within itself to places on the destination drive.  Oh no, that would be too normal.  Instead, the package installer fired up a Adobe download tool that downloaded another freaking .dmg file!  And that .dmg file had a package installer that actually installed the Acrobat Reader.

Can somebody please explain why they wouldn’t just let you download the Acrobat Reader installer package, instead of making you download an installer installer?

Rone, you want to comment?

Phew!

The problem described in Rants and Revelations : Oh, buggeration! has been fixed.  It was a simple matter of some bad DOM programming – the way I was turning on and off the divs to show various parts of the refresh screen, specifically to show the “You’re done” part, was incorrect.  It’s unfortunate that the way I was doing it before worked on Firefox and Safari, otherwise I wouldn’t have assumed it was correct.

In case anybody cares, I had

div.setAttribute(“style”, “display:none”);

where I should have had

div.style.display = “none”;

which of course makes a lot more sense and is a lot cleaner if I ever put a style sheet on these things.

Oh, buggeration!

In my entry Rants and Revelations : Baby’s first AJAX I crowed about my lovely new AJAX Javascript refresh thing.  It is a thing of beauty and I thought a joy forever.  Until I got an email today from a guy who was generating a database and it suddenly stopped refreshing.  He said it did work until he added another state to the ones he’d done before.  And he also revealed that he was using IE, and was unable to change to Firefox becaused the computer was provided by work.

So I checked it out, and did a really big database generate.  It refreshed a bunch of times, and then suddenly it stopped.  And when I hit shift-refresh, the count reset to 0 as if it didn’t make contact to the XML producer at all, or couldn’t parse it or something.  “View Source” wouldn’t even bring up a window.  But when I posted the same URL into Firefox, it showed the correct results.  I tried backing off the security settings to the loosest, to no avail.  Can’t see anything useful in the various settings pages.
I wish IE had a Javascript console.  I’d really like to know what’s going on.