Older blog entries for heschong (starting at number 4)

When the Blake Babies reunited recently, I was pretty excited. I even traveled to Atlanta to see them in concert! I was even more excited when they released their recent album, the aptly titled God Bless the Blake Babies.

When the Go-Go's reunited recently, I was pretty excited. I even traveled to Atlanta to see them in concert! I was even more excited when they released their recent album, the aptly titled God Bless the Go-Go's.

And to think that the only CD I have left in my old car is the Lemonheads album where there are songs with backup vocals by Juliana Hatfield (on several tracks) and Belinda Carlisle (on one track).

Naturally, this has nothing to do with software.

Stutter's first scalability test was Tuesday night, when Ipecac Records hosted a moderated chat with Greg Werckman. Over 200 people showed up, with over 150 online at the same time during one point in the chat. My blazingly-fast PII-400 Mhz handled the load reasonably well, once I upped the concurrent connection limit in MySQL from the default of 100 to a more comfortable 300. This was a mix of streaming and meta-refresh browsers (Macs are the only ones that require meta-refresh tags, because of weird connection handling).

P.S. If you live in the bay area, you can catch the Blake Babies tommorrow night at the GMA. You must be age 6 or older.

I finally got around to working on Stutter last night. I ended up spending about 8 hours straight converting it to work with PHP's shared memory functions.

For anyone who tries to use the shmop fu with PHP, be forewarned that if you shmop_write() a string called "foobar" and then shmop_write() to the same block another string called "bar" with a 0 offset, the resulting block will be "barbar" (which was not apparent from the documentation). In addition, when you shmop_read() from that shared memory block, the result will be a string padded to the size you have specified in the read operation. A liberal use of trim() and pad() are the apparent solution.

Of course, today I accidentally slept in until noon, almost making myself late for a meeting. Typical.

I added an incredible amount of flexibility to the template functions in Pecos today. Template designers can now set properties, call methods, etc, on objects. In fact, the new capabilities are such that templates could theoretically be thought of as a (very) primitive scripting language. If I get all excited and add control structures, I might have something useful. More useful than DTML anyway.

Christ, since I've returned from work today, I've apparently escalated to about 30 SPH (sneezes per hour). If my calculations are correct, I've drained approximately 12 gallons of mucous out of my head today, with no end in sight. I've taken various types of cold medicine over the last few days (Nyquil Cold and Tylenol Allergy, an armful of vitamins, etc.) just to see if any would help. None have.

If anyone is in the mood for a great pop album to listen to when your sunroof is open, pick up Tahiti 80's Puzzle.

So I have a choice. Speed, simplicity, or power. Why do they have to be exclusive? Maybe I should learn Python?

Since I have several work-related deadlines looming, I had decided to go to work today. Now that it's almost 6:00pm, and I still haven't made it into the office (which is, I am ashamed to say, directly across the street from my apartment), I'm considering taking the day off. Looks like I have another hour or so before my girlfriend gets home and I have to start looking like I've been doing something productive.

I've realized why I am marginally proficient at web application programming. It's because I can digest the small chunks that it doles out to me. <click>(program starts, program stops). <click> (program starts, program stops). My short attention span fits in nicely with this model. Perhaps one is the result of the other.

I love/hate OS X. It's so fast/slow, and all the apps are incredibly stable/flakey.

Last week, Nicole asked me to take two days off to go to a bed and breakfast in Butler. Butler is the town that the TVA bought in the 30s for the express purpose of turning it into a big lake. They picked up all the houses and moved them elsewhere, but the people who live there still point out into the lake at the place that their old homestead used to be. It's slightly spooky.

So I agreed to go, and I set about trying to figure out a way to work from my laptop with no Internet connectivity. I discovered that getting Apache, PHP and MySQL installed and working under OS X was fairly simple, and so I moved my entire development environment onto my laptop. Is this a good idea? Probably not.

Of course, I did all of this for no reason. Between the peace and quiet of the inn and a strange attack of allergy/cold symptoms, I never even cracked the lid of my notebook open. Instead, I took a few naps, finished reading the Rudy Rucker *ware books, and played with a swarm of domesticated carp.