Under The Fridge

I’m currently playing around a lot with web caching and performance related work (my Masters Thesis in the area is due shortly), so I’m finding quite a few interesting articles on the subject.

Currently thinking through which parts of my OASIS-Akl application needs to be session tracked, and which parts don’t. It’s not just a case of session tracking for funky dynamic stuff, there are security issues too. So while some of the images don’t need to be tracked, I do need to make sure that they’re not served to users who aren’t logged in, for example.

I’m playing with using the Varnish http proxy to assemble pages from multiple page fragments (using esi:include). The neat bit is using Varnish’s VCL language to strip session (cookie) information from the page fragments that don’t need it, thus allowing them to be cached. So for example for a typical page with a fairly dynamic menu on the left that isn’t user specific, that menu can be cached, while the main page content is user specific and keeps session information (or could perhaps be cached per-user)

Interesting topic and I’m getting quite into it. Lots to learn though.

Wasted quite a few hours with failing to get ESI to work, but it looks like the problem was some sort of conflict between varnish and the cherrypy.wsgi web server I’m using - chunked encoding is killing varnish. Not sure where the fault is, but I can avoid tripping it by returning pages from cherrypy in one go rather than piecemeal.

Interesting Links

компютри втора употребаput-the-web-server-on-a-diet-and-increase-scalability??????

- Colin

Was happy enough with the features in 2.2, but need to keep on top of security.

Hopefully everything still works.

- Colin

Sitting at BarcampAuckland listening to an MS talk thinking I should probably revitalise this blog.

- Colin

So we’re finally moved into our new house!

I’ve uploaded a fairly random set of House Photos, although you’ll need a password to see them. (Just ask me for it, if I know you I’ll let you in )

- Colin

At over 400 spam comment attempts per day, it’s just too much work, especially given I post here
so infrequently that the number of legitimate comments is so low anyway. So I’m disabling comments
for now. If you really want to get in touch with me or comment on anything I’ve written, feel free to
send me an email, or go through all the hassle of registering an account.

Update: Ok, after thinking about it a bit more clearly, I’ve re-enabled comments, but
installed a couple of spam checkers. Lets hope Akismet and spamassassin can help sufficiently.

Part of the problem was that all comments get emailed to me for moderation, but because I was getting
>400 a day, they were just swamping me. And filtering those with my mail reader spam checker wasn’t
working because it kept learning that *any* moderation mail was spam.

- Colin

yeah yeah, so it’s not 1st January, but I spend summer hiding from the world so don’t do much thinking about this kind of thing.

These are mainly so I can look back in a year and see what I was thinking.

1. Programmers will finally realize that WS-* is a pile of stinking rubbish designed to kill interoperability, not support it. The Big Business Steamroller will continue to wonder why it keeps getting beaten by small startups developing in more lightweight styles, but won’t be able to understand how much SOAP Everywhere is costing them.
2. Vista will do well commercially. Windows has never been about customer choice. Vista won’t change that.
   People will still eat what they’re fed and think that computers have to be that unusable.
3. Firefox and Safari will continue to rock but no-one will care. Internet Explorer 8 will return to locking people into Windows. People won’t mind.
4. The masses will continue to deny that Richard Dawkins is right. Firebombs may be involved.
5. Apple will release a new application that people weren’t expecting. It will rock.
6. Using Transactional Memory to make parallel programming easier will turn out to not work very well. Scaling applications upwards requires a redesign, not behind the scenes hacks. It’ll show some promise for small numbers of cores (2-8) but will fail horribly above that.

- Colin

I just went to an interesting presentation by Chris DiBona (from Google). He was mainly talking about various things he does at Google, and some interesting projects and challenges they have.

An entertaining and interesting talk, and it’s good to be able to put a face on at least one small part of the huge entity that is taking over the world.

I often wish my job involved some actual technical challenge. Maybe I should apply for a job there

I also got a look at a prototype of the OLPC. Very interesting machine and I think if they can get the software even half way decent, it really will change at least some of the world for the better. I’ll be happy to buy one on their “and someone who needs one gets one free” proposed business model.
- Colin

So how long until someone uses a flaw in Apple’s new IPhone to get Linux running on the thing?
- Colin

The start of a new year.

Always a good time.

This year I intend to get comfortable with TurboGears.

My year of using Eclipse has also been interesting. I’m not sure if I’ll continue, it’s just been too slow and unreliable on my two main platforms (linux-amd64 and linux-ppc), but it was very good at some things. It’s certainly made me think about what I want from my development environment.
- Colin

If the spammers had their way, there’d be roughly twelve spam posts a day on this blog. I hate to think what it’d be like on the blogs that are actually read.
The couple I bothered to try tracking down appear to have come from compromised Windows XP machines.

This (dollar) cost of lax security in our desktop systems must vastly outweigh the cost of doing it right in the first place.

Unfortunately business isn’t about doing things right.

- Colin