development

So, if you're one of the five readers here you may have noticed the site gets EXTREMELY slow from time to time. I've been very busy with work, but trying to track down why this is the case. Doing lots of googling about drupal and performance and things like that, which link to all sorts of things like mysql,php,httpd tweaking, optimizing drupal blocks, etc. Well, through much of this I never bothered to look at my.cnf. Yes. I know. Stoooopid. The only memory and performance settings were these:

myisam_sort_buffer_size = 16k

key_buffer_size = 16k

Well fucking duh it's slow. So, per this thread I added the following:

#you really don't need more than 200 connections
max_connections = 200

#this can be safely reduced to 32 or even 16M if you have few (0-20) or small (<1gb total) databases
key_buffer = 128M

myisam_sort_buffer_size = 32M
join_buffer_size = 2M

Not being the computerly-adept one, I thought I'd post this still-fascinating picture about usability and optics and where viewers look when they open a google search page
But since the photo came from google itself, I question whether the right bar actually receives that many hits, since the purpose of the image is to sell right bar ad space. Just sayin'

This isn't anything new, but as I was installing yet another app for which I will have to ask our employees, vendors, and customers to create another login, I was reminded of how often growing businesses don't prioritize universal enterprise logins. I'm not talking about "Single Sign-On" which is slightly different. SSO involves only having to login once, usually a Windows networking login in corporate environments. I'm talking about universal login, where you might have to enter your username and password more than once, but it's always the same username and password. And if you change the password, it changes for all the logins.

Update The activation servers are definitely down, as confirmed to Engadget by Apple. After having the lines not moving at the stores for awhile they're now selling unactivated 3G phones. So for the moment Emily is one of the only people with a 2.0 iPhone, now that's some serious irony considering that I'm the geek of the house.

Got one phone updated and the second is getting a network timeout on the iTunes store :( WAAAAAAAAA.

It's weird, I can open the store proper in iTunes so it's just the activation that's timing out. Unless the error message is spurious.

Got firmware this morning. It's great. Apps are amazing. I can't rave about how impressive this is and how much information and power is literally being put in one's hands. I'll let Steve Jobs put it in perspective:

"The reaction has been so strong," he says. "So many developers responded."

With 500 programs launching internationally today, "This is the biggest launch of my career," says Jobs.

I finally had a chance to peek at the iPhone app store. WOW. This stuff is crazy. There's CityTransit, a GPS for subway stations, an entire line of foreign language phrase books that speak the correct pronunciation when you tap the phrase, Lonely Planet and Frommers guides; Birth Buddy, which tracks contractions and automatically notifies family members; iAstronomica, which is a sky charting program that works anywhere on the Earth; Saleforce Mobile... This is just amazing. OMG WANT NOW. WANT FIRMWARE NOW :(

This script would have been gi-normous a few years ago and is a testament to the value of Javascript frameworks. Basically, all you have to do is add a class to your images and name the "on" states consistently and jquery does all the introspection and adding events. And it's not very much code and appears to be pretty quick.

Easy Image Rollover Script With jQuery

So I've been fiddling quite a bit with neo4j for an idea I had. I can say I definitely like how fast and intuitive it is to use. I'm a bit worried about storage. I created 1000 nodes with 100 relationships each and my database folder ballooned to 250 megs. That isn't huge, but it is quite a bit larger than I expected. I'm new to the framework, so I may have done something wrong in that test.

Qi4j is a new framework I've been looking at. As my friend Nick put it, "it's mixins for Java!" which is, well, true; but here's the description from the site:

Qi4j is a framework for domain centric application development, including evolved concepts from AOP, DI and DDD.

Qi4j is an implementation of Composite Oriented Programming, using the standard Java 5 platform, without the use of any pre-processors or new language elements. Everything you know from Java 5 still applies and you can leverage both your experience and toolkits to become more productive with Composite Oriented Programming today.

Next question is "what is composite oriented programming" right?

Many objects has life cycles that are more extensive than the simple model that Object Oriented Programming model wants us to believe. A few simple examples;

• An egg becomes a chicken which in turn becomes food.