Puppy Mill bill

Puppy Mill bill could die without YOUR help!! PLEASE CALL NOW!Make
a short phone call to STEVE TROXLER (919) 733-7125.Leave this
message:......“Hello, my name is _________. I live in
________ county. I’m calling to ask that STEVE TROXLER do the right
thing for North Carolina dogs, consumers and tax payers. Support the
REGULATION OF COMMERCIAL BREEDERS. Thank you!

job hunt day 3

bought a new suit
applied for more jobs

job hunt

Day two: applied for unemployment
Took dog to the park, they love it...I realized how much I miss getting stuck in an office.
Applied for several jobs
Wished I was the old man on the park bench who was retired...

job hunt

Well I am back to the job hunt again.

Day one: updated my resume, talk to a few recruiters and setup an interview for tomorrow.

Bambi and Thumper Do exist

http://www.jokelibrary.net/animals/d_to_z/rabbit-bambi.html

Speeding Up Firefox

Speeding up Firefox seems to be a meme going around the blogsphere lately. Most of the tips I’ve seen, though, are only for broadband connections with the latest hardware and only include some of the settings that would affect performance.

The Firefox Tweak Guide has the full details on how to speed up Firefox regardless of your connection or hardware, reprinted in part below. Don’t forget that the easiest way to tweak user files is with chromEdit extension.

Common to all configurations

These are the settings that seem to be common to all configuration files regardless of connection speed or computer speed with a couple of additions - plugin paths can be found with about:plugins and the bookmark menu delay is turned off.

user_pref("network.http.pipelining", true);
user_pref("network.http.proxy.pipelining", true);
user_pref("network.http.pipelining.maxrequests", 8);
user_pref("content.notify.backoffcount", 5);
user_pref("plugin.expose_full_path", true);
user_pref("ui.submenuDelay", 0);

Fast Computer Fast Connection

user_pref("content.interrupt.parsing", true);
user_pref("content.max.tokenizing.time", 2250000);
user_pref("content.notify.interval", 750000);
user_pref("content.notify.ontimer", true);
user_pref("content.switch.threshold", 750000);
user_pref("nglayout.initialpaint.delay", 0);
user_pref("network.http.max-connections", 48);
user_pref("network.http.max-connections-per-server", 16);
user_pref("network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-proxy", 16);
user_pref("network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server", 8);
user_pref("browser.cache.memory.capacity", 65536);

A couple settings of note - Firefox is allocated 4096 KB of memory by default and in this configuration we give it roughly 65MB as denoted by the last line. This can be changed according to what is used.

Fast Computer, Slower Connection

This configuration is more suited to people without ultra fast connections. We are not talking about dial up connections but slower DSL / Cable connections.

user_pref("content.max.tokenizing.time", 2250000);
user_pref("content.notify.interval", 750000);
user_pref("content.notify.ontimer", true);
user_pref("content.switch.threshold", 750000);
user_pref("network.http.max-connections", 48);
user_pref("network.http.max-connections-per-server", 16);
user_pref("network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-proxy", 16);
user_pref("network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server", 8);
user_pref("nglayout.initialpaint.delay", 0);
user_pref("browser.cache.memory.capacity", 65536);

Fast Computer, Slow Connection

user_pref("browser.xul.error_pages.enabled", true);
user_pref("content.interrupt.parsing", true);
user_pref("content.max.tokenizing.time", 3000000);
user_pref("content.maxtextrun", 8191);
user_pref("content.notify.interval", 750000);
user_pref("content.notify.ontimer", true);
user_pref("content.switch.threshold", 750000);
user_pref("network.http.max-connections", 32);
user_pref("network.http.max-connections-per-server", 8);
user_pref("network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-proxy", 8);
user_pref("network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server", 4);
user_pref("nglayout.initialpaint.delay", 0);
user_pref("browser.cache.memory.capacity", 65536);

Slow Computer, Fast Connection

user_pref("content.max.tokenizing.time", 3000000);
user_pref("content.notify.backoffcount", 5);
user_pref("content.notify.interval", 1000000);
user_pref("content.notify.ontimer", true);
user_pref("content.switch.threshold", 1000000);
user_pref("content.maxtextrun", 4095);
user_pref("nglayout.initialpaint.delay", 1000);
user_pref("network.http.max-connections", 48);
user_pref("network.http.max-connections-per-server", 16);
user_pref("network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-proxy", 16);
user_pref("network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server", 8);
user_pref("dom.disable_window_status_change", true);

One of the changes made for this particular configuration is the final line where the status bar is disabled for changing web pages to save processor time.

Slow Computer, Slow Connection

We have entered the doldrums of the dial-up user

user_pref("content.max.tokenizing.time", 2250000);
user_pref("content.notify.interval", 750000);
user_pref("content.notify.ontimer", true);
user_pref("content.switch.threshold", 750000);
user_pref("nglayout.initialpaint.delay", 750);
user_pref("network.http.max-connections", 32);
user_pref("network.http.max-connections-per-server", 8);
user_pref("network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-proxy", 8);
user_pref("network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server", 4);
user_pref("dom.disable_window_status_change", true);

New species of tiger!

Wow! a new species of tiger has been found.

The Mud Hole

A motorist, after getting his car stuck in a big mud hole, paid a passing farmer five dollars to pull him out with his tractor. After he was back on dry ground, he said to the farmer, 'At those prices, I should think you would be pulling people out of the mud night and day.'

'Can't,' replied the farmer. 'At night I haul water for the mud hole.'

The Australian and the Texan

A Texas farmer on vacation in Australia met an Aussie farmer and they started talking. The Aussie showed off his biggest wheat field and the Texan says, 'Oh! We have wheat fields that are at least twice as large.'

Then they walk over to the pasture and the Aussie shows off his herd of cattle. The Texan immediately says, 'We have longhorns that are at least twice as large as your cows.'

The conversation has, meanwhile, almost died when the Texan sees a herd of kangaroos hopping through the field. Astonished, he asked, 'What are those?!?'

The Aussie replied with an incredulous look, 'Don't you have any grasshoppers in Texas?'

Site design

Everyone once in awhile you just run across a site that makes you go "WTF!". This is one of those sites. This has got to be the best website ever made.

http://yvettesbridalformal.com/index.htm

I am rather disappointed in the lack of blink tags though.

Oil Spill

BP Oil Spill: Daily Dead Wildlife Tally

Days since spill: 60

dead birds 885	dead sea turtles 363	dead mammals 44
oiled but alive 665	oiled but alive 75	oiled but alive 1
cleaned and released 42	cleaned and released 3	cleaned and released 1

World Cup Crap Call Costs U.S. Win Over Slovenia

What was up with that crappy call during the US vs Slovenia today? Come on seriously? From every angle that was clearly a bum call. Now we shouldn't have fallen so far behind in the first place. But clearly the ref made a bad call. We got robbed of that win.

Animal Abuse

Yesterday I saw a new commercial for animal cruelty on T.V. There was this one part where they showed a cage filled to the top with dogs. It was so horrible that it made me cry. How can people do that to poor innocent animals. They should be shot. I think that whatever someone does to an animal gets done to them in return. What have these poor creatures ever done to the humans that abuse them. What kind of person would do that. I think their punishment should be more severe. I mean some people just drop dogs off on the side of the road to fend for themselves. That is how my brother-in-law found his little dog. She was just a puppy. Someone just dumped her off. She would not have survived if by brother-in-law have not found her. People can be so mean and cruel.

Cat issue

Ok so my cat has been urinating on the carpet. I don't know why she does this. I keep her litter box clean which she will defecate in but not urinate. It is always by or near the same spot. By the back door. I can't seem to get the stains and odor out of the carpet. Anyone have any ideas? I have tried resolve powder, nature's miracle, and many others. My entire living room smells like cat urine. I need to find a way to get rid of it. The thing is, it is very hard to get rid of the smell. If anyone has any ideas then please let me know for I will try anything.

3ware Hardware RAID vs. Linux Software RAID

As part of a project we are building a iSCSI storage server. It has 16 500GB SATA disks and to provide redundancy we needed some sort of RAID controller. So we went with the well known 3ware controllers. More specifically a 9550SXU 16ML. The server itself is running CentOS 5 with 2 Dual-Core Intel Xeon processors. This post is just to share my experiences with this controller.

First, everybody that uses a ext3 filesystem on top of this controller should upgrade to firmware 9.4.2. It improves the write performance. In our case we went from around 55MB/s to around 75 MB/s for sequential I/O. That is not bad for a simple firmware upgrade.

But we were having one issue. On initial tests with a iSCSI exported logical volume we did a copy of a directory tree (on the same volume) with a total size of 1GB. And this test took around 6 minutes, that is even less then 3MB/s. To be fair, this structure contains a lot of smaller files, different directories. So a copy also involves a lot of metadata activity. So we did the same test on the storage server itself and we got around 3 minutes there. Mmm, and this should be a top end RAID controller, but we are only getting 6MB/s in this test.

So, just for fun I decided to let the RAID controller export each disk individually and use the Linux software RAID and see what performance that would give. Well, for this specific test the time was 2'50". And for all the other tests I did software RAID outperformed the hardware RAID.

So what did we learn here. First, do not let the numbers of all the different hardware RAID controller vendors foul you. They are sequential I/O test. But most day-to-day I/O patterns are different.
Second, always test yourself. Benchmarks found online can be indicators, but always test everything yourself for your specific case. Third, when using RAID always give software RAID a change. It may save you some money.

As a final note. If we mounted the filesytems as ext2 in this specific test the copy would only take 1 minute (in both HW and SW RAID). So do not forget about ext2, it still has it's advantages.