The hard drive on which my Windows operating system sits crashed! I was preparing a blog entry about the steps I took last year to quiet my PCs. I regret that I bought my hard drives from a dishonest Internet merchant. Lesson learned! I’ll try to complete the story and post more once I restore my Windows installation.

gazpacho.net made its web debut seven years ago. It has seen many changes over the years. But it has always given information about me and my projects. As mentioned previously I plan on upgrading the blog software. At the same time I plan a bit of a redesign to emphasize the blog and make the site look better.

I am unable to boot the Linux operating system on my primary home PC. I am pointing my finger at the utility I use to update my Linux installation, a Python script.

When I booted from a rescue disk last night, I discovered that the /dev filesystem had been zapped. My best guess is that the updater script fell down when installing devfs.

My remedy is to re-install Fedora Core 3 tonight. I plan to download and burn CDs of the latest test release.

To the improve the performance of Web applications I have five ideas that will help.

1) Determine your metric. In order to improve performance you have to be able to measure your changes. Pick your metric, or unit of measure, whether it is packet throughput, perceived response time or number of visits by cannibal pygmies.

2) Synchronize the clocks. This may seem obvious. But it is often overlooked. If the web server, proxy server, database server and client PCs have the same time, it is easier to establish a timeline of events. Spikes of activity in a timeline can help identify performance hot spots. Your task will be complicated if you need to compensate for late clocks. Pity that, White Rabbit!

3) Log it. Most web servers have log files. Write your application to log information, too. Log files with timestamps not only aide with debugging, but help measure performance.

4) Establish a baseline. Run an unmodified version of your application. Take a measurement. This is the baseline you can use for future comparisons. Scientists call this a control experiment.

5) Change one item at a time. If you do not limit your changes to a single item and your changes actually hurt performance, it is difficult to determine which item is the problem. Ambitious mega-patches can cost you hours of changes and re-tests.

The topic of improving software performance has and will continue to fill volumes of books. I hope these ideas will help you as you tackle your performance challenge.

I was unproductive this afternoon. The weather conspired against me. It has been raining since Sunday. Today the power went out for three hours. I left for a friend’s house where we watched one of his DVDs and chatted.

I have been struggling to get dual monitors to work with the proprietary ATI video driver and Linux kernel 2.6.6. ATI released a new driver just today. I thought they may fix my problems.. but so far no joy. Well, at least I figured out how to make the fglrx driver load without crashing (pre-load intel-agp), got the cordless Logitech mouse to work (use Explorer as the mouse name) and *finally* got OpenOffice to work (fixed with install of Fedora Core 2 test 3). I’m counting my blessings. Oh yeah, oowriter is praise-worthy.

I made a pledge to myself not rant in this weblog. I decided to be positive and post entries when stuff does not suck. I have reserved my rants for private email to my brother and friends. In my opinion it is poor taste to publicly criticize an open source project unless you make an effort to contribute to it.

This week I received an answer to a bug report I submitted on Fedora Core 2 test 3. I had been unable to get the calendar to work in Evolution, an email client that rocks. The email author suggested that I was seeing the task list pane and the calendar pane had been reduced to a sliver by the splitter bar. I moused around and found the splitter bar. Once I moved the splitter bar, the calendar appeared. Yes! Thanks for the support, Red Hat.

According to this Yahoo news article trials for the $1 Million DARPA Grand Challenge have begun. The contest is a race that pits autonomous ground vehicles on a 200 mile trek from Los Angeles to Las Vegas.

Race Day is March 13th.