Site maintenance

NOW HEAR THIS, all contributors and readers:

The site will be moving servers. This is expected to happen on Wednesday afternoon. During the move, we should remain reachable, but interactive features (that means Comments) will be turned off to avoid data loss. They’ll come back on as re-delegation to the new server reaches completion.

Contributors should avoid posting their brilliant and lengthy diatribes until it’s all over.

Wednesday 9:40pm. Well, that wasn’t entirely without its challenges. But we should be okay now.

Citylink goes down

CricketersA power outage resulted in a shutdown of Melbourne’s CityLink tollway tunnels today around 9am, for several hours. Apart from the obvious electronic signs that rely on power, I assume it affected lighting and exhaust pumps.

According to the Herald-Sun, Citylink spokeswoman Jean Ker Walsh said: “We have rebooted the systems that allow our operators to manage the tunnels safely.” So there you go. They rebooted the tunnel. Ms Ker Walsh also mentioned on the evening TV news that they’d be upgrading their UPS!

Interestingly on the Herald-Sun’s RSS feed, this story came through in the early afternoon. The feed claimed there was an attached picture, but it turned out not to be a picture of gridlocked cars or an empty motorway — rather it seemed to be a picture of cricket players.

The other effect of the shutdown was the Citylink web site also appeared to lose power… or perhaps it was just snowed under by the traffic. Like some other transport providers, they didn’t cope well under stress.

The Vicroads web site kept running under the load, though apart from showing slow traffic in the area, didn’t contain specific information relevant to motorists who might be caught there. I assume the information for radio reports and the like are gathered by phone, not off the web sites.

Scott Meyers’ five top fives – EVER

I’ve been waiting for the full set to be published, before dumping ’em here:

Headlines via PHP/RSS

This utterly rocks, and I can’t believe I didn’t go looking for something like it before: MagpieRSS lets you show RSS headlines on a PHP page. I’m using it on my old toxiccustard.com page to show the latest headlines from my diary and the site’s News and Guide to Australia pages (which all run WordPress). It includes caching so you won’t burn up your (or anybody else’s) bandwidth by grabbing the feed continually.

Geekbench

Now this is handy: Geekbench, a cross-platform (Mac OS-X, Windows and Linux, that is) benchmark system. It’s written in platform-neutral C++.

My aging cobbled-together PC (1.7 Ghz Celeron) returns an overall score of 73.6.

My newish cheap but cheerful PC (3 GHz P4) returns an overall score of: 137.4

Windows 2000 within Virtual PC on the above: 103.5 (I note it was only configured for 128Mb of “RAM”, even though Geekbench claims to need 256Mb.)

In all cases I shut down other applications, but obviously the figures would be subject to whatever background services were grabbing CPU time.

Throwing backwards compatibility away

If I had name the biggest difference between the attitudes at Microsoft vs Apple as to how they build their operating systems, it’s that one of Microsoft’s primary concerns is backwards compatibility, whereas Apple isn’t afraid to jump off the cliff to a better place, knowing it can’t go back.

A lot of what is going on underneath the hood of Windows involves shims, workarounds, and downright kludges to allow old apps and a gazillion third-party devices to work. From a purist’s point of view, it’s got to be ugly. — Ed Bott

You wouldn’t see Microsoft making a jump across processor lines like Apple did to Intel, saying a (prolonged but firm) bye-bye to anybody who bought a Mac before this year. Microsoft would get crucified for such behaviour.

But now that Microsoft has mature, stable (and free) virtualisation technology, maybe they can make a leap. What’s to stop them totally re-engineering Windows to remove all the messy stuff (some of which dates right back to the early versions of DOS) and telling anybody who wants to run an old application that they’ll have to do so on a virtual machine?

(From an idea out of a discussion with Matt.)

I like traffic lights

In case you’ve ever wondered…

Vertical slats are used to prevent people in the wrong spot seeing the light, eg for diagonal intersections like Camberwell Junction.

Horizontal slats are used to prevent people at a distance seeing the light, when they should be concentrating on a closer one.

Mesh can be used when both are a problem. Which is probably not very often.

Crocodile Hunter news hits the web (and what Scott Adams said about it)

The Age/SMH reports than the death of Crocodile Hunter Steve Irwin caused a mass of web traffic onto news sites, causing some such as CNN to switch off bandwidth-heavy elements, and the ABC Online site to crash. The BBC and others reported spikes in demand.

Irwin’s own Australia Zoo and Crocodile Hunter web sites certainly weren’t responding, obviously snowed-under at the news. Technorati, Newsgator, Digg and other aggregators highlighted the story. News Corp’s Australian sites, which only recently started accepting them, received unprecedented numbers of reader comments.

And one other interesting snippet: Scott Adams of Dilbert fame wrote a post on his blog about Irwin’s death. Within about 24 hours it had been pulled offline, without a trace. Did Irwin’s fans get angry with him for his wisecracks? Was it simply in poor taste? Some people saw it, and commented here.

You decide. Here it is, in full: Continue reading →

Cheap and cheerful disk benchmarking

Freebie disk benchmarking: Disk Bench. Does quick tests by reading/writing/copying files of your preferred size, and tells you the speed. The only downside is it requires the Dot Net Framework. (Explains why the Disk Bench download is so small.)

I found this while pondering why my secondary computer is running so slowly. Confirmed my suspicions: Windows is installed on the slowest of the old drives in the beast. Time for a quick re-install.