dsandler.org

Is dsandler.org faster for you? Let me know.

I spent about an hour and implemented a pagecache for the front page. The first visitor to see fresh content will incur the usual page load time, including loading all 1600 entry files off disk, stat() and sorting them, and generating the output HTML.

Every subsequent visitor will see the same page, loaded from MySQL as a complete chunk. Every subsequent visitor, that is, until I add a new entry, in which case the cache is flushed and we start all over again. It should be a lot faster for most readers, and much less punishing to my server’s filesystem.

Variations on the front page (such as the previous N entries) should not be cached, and will be slow as usual. (If you see caching breakage—that is, stale content where you expect something else—please report the bug.)

Cory Doctorow has posted a 2 kiloword excerpt from his current book-in-progress, /usr/bin/god.

“I’ve got a fever, and the only prescription … is more COWBELL!” [snarfed from k5]

I hate to admit it, but I may need to investigate long-range wireless networking. Scary. [More articles: an old Cringely article; O’ReillyNet on Pringles solutions; a recent Yagi page; a respectable Yagi definition.]

Wow. I think this is something. Peter Arnett: “The first war plan has failed because of Iraqi resistance.” [Update: NBC to Arnett: That’ll teach you.]

How funny! The song playing in the Russian cowboy bar (the first song) was used on last night’s Da Ali G Show! Hee, hee!

My local corporate rock station just played a cut from The Ataris—unabashedly sappy punk-lite. And I loved it! Does that make me lame?

Top story on Slashdot is the debate in the Texas legislature about whether the term “engineer” can be used for computer scientists or programmers. I ran into this while at school; in fact, one of my courses had to be called “Program Construction” because “Program Engineering” would have been forbidden. (Oh, well, it looks like now it’s “Program Engineering” again. Whatever.)

Adam came up with this list of San Mateo restauraunts just a little too late for those of us leaving the area!

Mark Pilgrim continues his quest to fix bugs in the Web with a primer on HTTP error code 410: “Gone, not to return”.

Much of the supply of Tomahawk cruise missiles has been expended, aircraft carriers were going to run out of precision guided bombs and there were serious maintenance problems with tanks, armored vehicles and other equipment, the article said.

Reuters: Rumsfeld Ignored Pentagon Advice on Iraq, and the war is now a “stalemate”.

I’ve had a redesign sort of on the books for a little while. It’s about 70% complete, graphically, and 35% complete, code-wise.

But there’s just so much else going on now. I have two more weeks in this apartment, in this state. There’s so much going on.

Hence the minimalist re-design. It’s really an un-design—I’ve stripped out almost all the layout, leaving the structure largely intact. You might think of this as the web version of my apartment at the moment: half-lived in, with all the pretty stuff sealed in boxes, waiting to be unpacked on the other side.

dsandler.org isn’t going dormant or anything. I’ll still be here if you will. But I think it’ll be a few weeks before I can unpack and spread out again.

(Should I have used carboard-box tan instead of white?)

Another haircut I’m not totally thrilled about. I managed to bargain my way to straight bangs, but now it’s all way too short. I mean, I think so. I guess I’ve got a couple weeks for it to grow out before I see Erin again (which is pretty sad in itself).

Another Poster for Peace: royalty-free, well-designed anti-war posters and sundries.

Heh. Ali G interviews James A. Baker III.

Run Lola Run just came on Bravo. And I was planning on going to bed early …

An Afternoon With Mega Man and Protoman

Why do people keep asking me why I dislike ClearChannel?

Well, now Halliburton is out of the running.

Adam Cadre, interactive fiction author and all-around creative guy, on why Buffy is outstanding.

For this, after all, is the payoff! It’s these sorts of arcs that make all the dues-paying worthwhile, where you can have the Chosen One and the recovering black-eyed uberwitch and the repentant vampire and the sentient ball of energy and the dweeby wannabe evil genius and the teleporting vengeance demon wandering around without needing a scorecard to keep track of the players. Where you can cut to a doorframe and get a “wow” by showing any of twenty different returnees standing in it.

oh. my. god.

A rather oddly prosaic AP wire report about the Biblical sandstorm now enveloping coalition troops outside Baghdad.

Delivered/SAN MATEO CA         03/26/2003 11:33

The Wind Waker is here.

Microsoft Word’s “highlight changes” feature mystifies me. Why would I want to hide the change history of my document on-screen, but then print reams and reams of struck text dating back to the first version of the document? Don’t people only print things nowadays for filing and comfortable reading, neither of which is a task that benefits in any way from copious versioning, illegibly spliced in situ in the original document?

Sorry, my automatic blog system has been on the fritz for a couple of days. The previous five or six posts were written over the last couple of days, but are just showing up now.

Al-Jazeera now in English.

Why are the antiwar protests in San Francisco so much more obnoxious (and less effective) than those in New York City? “San Francisco is still lying around the house in its bathrobe, bitching about its lost dot-com job and demanding rent control while neglecting to take out the garbage,” says Paul Boutin. Right on.

The payola starts rolling in.

Full Metal Jacket. I’ve heard rumors that Apple is considering going to an all-metal look for future versions of OS X. Can anyone confirm or deny this?

Hey, we celebrate both St. Patrick’s Day and Purim chez Sandler!

Small boats with heavily armed soldiers searched among the reeds. From the banks, people took pot shots at objects in the river. Under the impression that the airman had been captured, thousands of cheering Iraqis chanted and clapped, shooting AK-47s in the air for joy. People in both uniform and civilian clothes eyed us with hostility during this celebration.

Things are going downhill in Iraq, writes a non-embedded reporter for Slate.

When Democracy Failed.

Within the first months after that terrorist attack, at the suggestion of a political advisor, he brought a formerly obscure word into common usage. He wanted to stir a “racial pride” among his countrymen, so, instead of referring to the nation by its name, he began to refer to it as “The Homeland,” a phrase publicly promoted in the introduction to a 1934 speech recorded in Leni Riefenstahl’s famous propaganda movie “Triumph Of The Will.” As hoped, people’s hearts swelled with pride, and the beginning of an us-versus-them mentality was sewn.

So EB put Wind Waker in a FedEx carton on Friday, but FedEx hasn’t heard about it yet. So hopefully it’ll actually ship out sometime this morning.

The official Wind Waker site is live these days. I mean, in case you didn’t know already.

Non-embedded journalists in Iraq paint less-rosy picture.

Starting to learn about H.323, the VoIP and videoconf standard that NetMeeting uses. Specifically interested in OpenH323 and the Linux NETMEETING HOWTO (not so much because I’m running Linux, but because I want to understand how the software works). Also: GnuGk (the GNU H323 Gatekeeper).