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DMI News |
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September 12, 2002 11:35 The hits continue. I've fallen off the front page of bluesnews.com, so most of the hits from that site have fallen off, but the residual sites still remain, and I expect a huge swarm of hits tonight when TechTV does a feature on this site. On the 10th, I had over 8500 hits total, and that was right about the point of saturation. However, it wasn't a bandwidth issue so much as an internal issue. I have ineffiency in my controlling structure. Problems that don't show up when I get only 1000 hits a day are major issues when I get 8K/day. The primary problem rests with the doorbell server, which does all the appliance controlling. That program is a simple tcp/ip server loop that accepts a connection, processes it, and closes the connection. This works well for light loads, but when its getting hammered 10-20 times per second, especially when some of the commands take over a second to process, problems develop, mostly when it segfaults on a connect. I'm therefore taking a number of precautions to prevent this problem. First off, about 90% of the requests to the server aren't for an appliance action, but to update or obtain the current insanity level, or to obtain the current lamp status. The insanity level is requested on every page load. I've fixed this so it gets requested once per minute, then updates a local file on the webserver for the page to display. In addition, lamp requests can determine the current state before they do any hardware activity, and simply ignore the request if the lamp is already in the desired state. X10 commands take 1 second to process. The server also needs to be multithreaded. Allow the main thread to handle the connection, and spawn a thread to handle the request. This way, 1 second actions will not hold up the server from handling other requests. In addition, any incoming requests could be compared to the current request queue and simply ignore any duplicate requests. Placing requests in a queue and having a thread handle the requests one at a time is also an option, for those requests that don't require a return value. However, right now, turning on lamp requires two connections, one to turn the lamp on, and another to get the new state. This could easily be handled in the same connection.
September 10, 2002 12:32 I woke up this morning to a more than typical lightflashing experience. When I check the server, I've noticed that Bluesnews has linked my site. Traffic from that site is at the point of saturation. Then a few moments ago, I noticed that Majorgeeks has ALSO linked me, and hits from THAT site are just as heavy. Not to mentoin, I'm still getting plenty of hits from k10k and Ace & TJ. Its going to be QUITE the busy day. I'm definitely going to need to update the controlling software to use a threaded model to prevet the occasional lockups I'm getting. Once every 6 months wasn't a problem, but with the traffic I'm getting these days, its happening every 30 minutes or so.
September 09, 2002 22:44 Leslie and X10n together worked hard for a couple hours (they were bored me thinks) and managed to get the insanity level up to 100%. So... congrats... or whatever.
September 09, 2002 19:38 Thanks to a couple more big sites linking me, my hits have increased rapidly AGAIN. If only I could maintain this hit rate, I might be able to do something. Of course, its very likely I might start retaining a significant number of visitors. Of course, to my dismay, Verizon had to cut the dsl connection for 6 hours today for some silly reason that for once WASN'T my fault, so who knows how many thousands of people thought the site was gone. Oh well.
September 07, 2002 10:11 My normal posting on slashdot brings the normal sized crowd every day that I post an insightful enough comment to get anyone looking at it. Anyway, Yesterday was no different, but someone grabbed the link from there and posted it on madville.com. While the hits from there weren't terribly significant, those who looked must have been. In the hours following, I have been linked from linkfilter.net, bbspot.com, acetj.com, and the normal collection of forum posts that typically follow any heavy linking activity. Someone even submitted me to fark.com, but thankfully they seem to have chosen NOT to post me again, despite the fact that they tend to post duplicates quite frequently. :) Ahh. The glory of absent bandwidth. But that's what its there for. :)
September 05, 2002 16:59 Added to the events for the Pointless Olympics (sugguestions for a better name are welcome), which currently includes only Hacing, is the grand sport of Telemarking. No, I don't know what that is, but that's not really the important thing. We're talking high intensity brutal sports here, who CARES if nobody knows what the game is, or what the rules are. We can always figure that out when we're trying to pick a winner. Despite my efforts to maintain a Dr Pepper free diet, I WILL be cheating tomorrow night. Most likely anyway. However, I will continue the plan from Saturday on. In completely unrelated news, It might be in your best interest to sell your shares in Dr Pepper and invest in companies that sell OJ. No, I don't have a specific brand, just diversify. It'll be ok.
September 03, 2002 22:15 The headache settled in yesterday. Last night it was difficult to concentrate on anything. Even Subspace was a challenge. Today it continued for a while, but it seems to have toned itself down to a mild little annoying thing that if I don't think about it, I don't realize its there. Took a few more whacks at the tree in my backyard. Stubborn tree. Damn thing won't fall. I just want one light push and down it goes. That's the way GOOD trees do it. But Nooooooo... not MY tree.. it wants to struggle with me. I hear it cracking.. I know its going to fall.. but I don't want it falling in the wrong direction. Oh well. Project for tomorrow. And some google snacks:
where the name jessica comes from
September 01, 2002 20:54 So far I've managed to survive an entire day without my beloved Dr Pepper. Uncertain I am how I've managed, but I've managed it well, and so far no unfortunate side effects. I even managed to get up at a decent hour this morning, but that was because I was having dreams about copying files, since I spent so much time doing that yesterday I guess. So anyway, I was dreaming that among the files I copied were pictures of one of the girls I know in a thong. So I woke up this morning still thinking that, and I simply couldn't stay in bed any longer. I HAD to confirm if the dream had any anchor in reality. Sadly, I must inform the world that my dreams deceived me, but it DID get me up at 8 am on a weekend morning, which like.... NEVER happens. Take that for what you will. I've removed most of the dead flora from my back yard. The garbage man now has a very large pile of dead tree branches as a present, just to let them know how much I really do care about their continued employment in the sanitation engineering department. Which is fine with me so long as *I* don't have to haul them to the transfer station. :) And some googlesnacks:
little ninja
September 01, 2002 19:01 Note: If this is about you, read at your own peril. Tomorrow will be exactly one year from an extremely happy day. Starting the day after, life for me got.... rather complex. A month earlier I met someone. Within 48 hours I went from feeling resigned to spending the rest of my life single, to never wanting to be single again. Sure I jumped to conclusions. Sure I assumed there was more there than there actually was. Of course, I don't think my feelings were terribly unjustified, but that's how it goes sometimes. A month later, a year ago from tomorrow, was the final date. Everything that day was perfect. Well, at least to me it was. Perhaps there was writing on the wall telling me to take a step back, but I never saw it. The next day I heard in her voice that everything between us was over. The next day it was confirmed, and I became the right thing at the wrong time. So then I slipped into denial. I mean, this was only a setback, not a stop sign. A couple weeks could change anything, but I knew it was all over. And friday night, THAT was confirmed, thus began 20 days of emotional torment. Its funny when you're in a state of temporary depression, how music lyrics suddenly change. I mean, they're the same lyrics as before, but you hear them now in a new way. All the sad songs made me feel sad, and all the happy songs made me feel even worse. "Johnny B" by The Hooters was probably the most appropriate song I heard during that time. It STILL jerks at me a little sometimes. Then 20 days later, I met her again for the first time since the painful talk. And I suddenly realized something. There was nothing there anymore. Whatever torment I had been causing myself for the prior three weeks seemed to be in vain. In a matter of minutes I had completely gotten over her. So now I'm no longer emotionally attached to her, but I'm still...... needy. I'm not comfortable facing the single life again. So I continue my hunt for potential rebound relationships. And when I'm just about ready to go back to the single life, I find one. Of course, I didn't really plan for it to be a relationship. I wasn't planning anything at all. She came to visit. Visit me and visit others from the area that she'd met online. But when she leaves three days later, we're an item. An ironic twist of fate indeed, since were it not for the prior parting of ways, I never would have met her. Yet a month later, she comes for a return visit, only to open old wounds by exhibiting a desire to do to me once again what I just suffered through just a few months previously. I was not eagar to face the situation again. But while last time I just stood back and let things happen as they would, this time I fought. This time I wasn't about to let it happen. And I won, I suppose. But perhaps in the long run (and we ALL plan ahead, don't we :) I would have been better off if I just let her go too. I learned many years ago that if someone gives you an escape from the relationship early on, its sometimes a good idea to take it. But I did my best to keep it together, despite the fact that her family wasn't too keen on the idea. Despite the fact that there are good reasons why huge age differences aren't a good thing in relationships. Despite the fact that she did countless things to annoy me. Calling me WAY too many times a day, only to have to leave a minute later. Picking up bad habits, and showing no resilliance in quitting others. Eventually I recommended we break up. We went through a lot of heated debate over that issue until we resolved it, only to have her present a new challenge a week late, which in turn needed to be resolved. And after that, she spent a good amount of time hanging out with the WRONG people doing all the wrong things. I finally ended it. But at least now, I'm no longer needy. I didn't leave that relationship yearning for another. Its been 3 months now and I'm still happily single, and after hearing what she's been up to, quite glad that I ended it when I did. I don't even DESIRE a relationship right now. I occasionally browse personal ads for the heck of it, but nobody even strikes my interest. And a LOT of the girls in there are quite attractive, and some might even be of interest to me.. assuming I was even remotely interested. For now, my computers work for me. I'm getting back into projects that I had all but postponed for the last year. Silly social life getting in the way of what's REALLY important. :) So things are going rather well, and I'm once again happily single and not looking. So of course, this has to be the time when some cute young thing will once again fall into my life and screw things up again. Looking forward to it. :)
August 31, 2002 20:09 Got a new HD. Its a 120 gig drive at 7200 RPM. Its taking a LONG time to format. No.. I mean it... a LONG time. :) Anyway, as soon as the smaller of the two partitions is done formatting I plan to copy the contents of the old drive onto it, and at some point start formatting the rest of the drive. Once that is completed, everything that once was, will be again. In other news, I have completed my last can of Dr Pepper. I am now chugging down a 1 gallon jug of Hawaiian punch, which as it turns out is almost as bad for me as the Dr Pepper, and doesn't even contain that blessed hyper drug. I'm probably going to have to seek out alternative beverages, although it wasn't really my health that I was doing this for anyway. :) The lawn's been mowed, and I'm looking forward to a nice quiet evening, unless someone comes over of course.
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