Month: January 2007

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Hang on, I’m not done waiting yet

The server that hosts radinfo.musc.edu is hardly a speed demon (it’s a dual 450 MHz Pentium II), so for most things I’ve got running on this server, I’m used to waiting a little bit for things to get processed.

Lately I’ve been running the wheeljack dev build of Movable Type (I like to be on the bleeding edge of software) which has incorporated support for FastCGI (recently rolled out with MT 3.34). I finally got around to building FastCGI and incorporating it into the Apache config to see how it would help with the back end of MT. While it’s not much of an improvement on this pokey slow machine, it’s definitely faster than pre-FastCGI. MT’s user interface has become noticeably faster although I’ve had to give up an old hit counter CGI program that just didn’t want to run under FastCGI. It’s definitely enough of a speed improvement to make me happy.

Still need to test things to make sure everything works. If anybody happens to notice something got busted, let me know.

Update 1: Well, publishing an entry took a curiously long time. Normally once I hit the publish button I usually see the next screen that say things are getting published and sites are getting pinged. This time it stayed on the entry screen for several minutes before switching. I wonder if this is normal…

Update 2: Looks like commenting is really slow too. Seeing a lot of error messages in the Apache error log about the mt-comment.cgi and mt.cgi processes getting killed and restarted during comment processing. Seems like anything involving rebuilding takes a long long time. Might have to back out the FastCGI stuff.

Update 3: There were too many unexplained errors showing up in the Apache error log so I decided to back out the FastCGI stuff for now, at least until after the weekend when I might have some more time to investigate.

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Another dog-gone weekend

Coming up this weekend is the Charleston Kennel Club‘s annual dog show up at the Ladson fairgrounds. To go along with the dog show, the CSCLRC is hosting the supported entry for labs. I’m told there are 147 labs entered for showing Saturday and Sunday, so it should be a lot of good looking dogs to check out.
CSCLRC is also having a raffle along with hosting lunch (for a small donation) on Sunday, so if anybody is interested in a weekend of dogs, stop on by. I’ll only be there part of the day Saturday since Simba has a Real Life 101 class at 1, but I’m going to try to hang out most of the day Sunday.

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Lots of Canadians might not be Canadians anymore

With the new US passport rules coming into effect now, there’s been a surge of passport applications in both the US and Canada going. Fortunately mine doesn’t expire for a few more years yet so I’ve got a little time.
I was just reading on CBC that a bunch of people applying for their Canadian passports are finding out that they’re not Canadian citizens anymore. What a shocker that must be.

Many applying for a Canadian passport have been informed their chance to remain a citizen expired years ago because of an obscure provision in the Citizenship Act, a little-known law that applied between 1947 and 1977.
The law states that if you lived outside Canada on your 24th birthday and failed to sign the right form, you automatically lost your citizenship.

So there could potentially be 10’s of thousands of people living in Canada, thinking they’re Canadian citizens, but really have no citizenship at all. You can bet there’s going to be a lot of really stressed people out there.

According to Canadian census data, there are an estimated 10,000 to 20,000 people in Canada who could find out they’ve lost their citizenship if they apply for a passport.

I hope the Liberal government does the right thing and makes it easy for these people to re-establish their rightful citizenship status.

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It’s a long road trip back home

As the Google Maps crow flies, it’s a long 4200 km (2610 miles) drive back home which, according to Google Maps, would take less than two days (41 hours) of continuous driving to make. Mapquest puts the trip at 4160 km (2585 miles). Either way it’s a long drive through 8 states and 3 provinces. I bet it would be an interesting trip to take though. I may have to try it one of these days.

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Extreme overclocking

Probably not something that will make it to anybody’s desktop anytime soon, but it’s still pretty cool. A group of Italian overclocking enthusiasts have managed to get a P4 631 up to 8 GHz! Naturally there was a little bit of extreme cooling going on in the form of liquid nitrogen and some hardware modifications to the voltage regulators. There’s only a benchmark of some fractal calculations at 8 GHz, so I don’t know how much performance increase there was going up to that speed. Pretty moot anyway because I doubt anybody would want to rig up a machine that required continuous cryogenic coolling to run. Still a very impressive OC
Found at Slashdot.