As another performance experiment (not content with just PHP 5.2.0) I’ve now got Apache (and hence mod-fcgid and PHP) using tcmalloc from Google’s PerfTools through the simple expedient of adding:
export LD_PRELOAD=/usr/local/google-perftools/lib/libtcmalloc.so
to /etc/default/apache2. Again, any problems, let me know!
Thanks to Mikal for the, ahem, pointer. 🙂
I’ve upgraded this server to PHP 5.2.0 using the Debian Backports repository, please post a comment or email me (send it to chris at this domain) if you spot any problems!
First impressions are very good, I’ve not been bitten by these WordPress problems (yet) and memory usage seems a hell of a lot better than 5.1. The only wrinkle is that I had to increase memory_limit to 128M to get posting articles to work, but whereas before that would have killed the system completely it seems OK for now..
Category: News article
Topic: Politics
Author: Michael Ellerman
Year created: 2006
You absolutely have to read Michael Ellerman’s satirical news article “John Howard to be deported after failing citizenship test“.
I hereby lend it any Google foo that I have..
Tags: citizenship deported failing howard john+howard citizenship+test australian+citizenship michael+ellerman satirical satire liberal+party
Apparently there are 1.3 million of us here in Australia, according to the Institute for Public Policy Research.
As the bushfires rage today the BBC is reporting that it was the hottest December day in more than 50 years, at 41.1C.
I went looking around the Bureau of Met website but could only find the spring records for 2006, and something caught my eye. Now I knew that this spring was very dry, with the north east having their driest spring recorded and most places getting less than half of the usual, but the new record for Wilsons Promontory shocked me. The previous record was in 1911 with 112.6 mm of rain, but now the new all-time (134 year) record is just 58.2 mm, barely half the previous record.
Not good records to see broken.
Back in January 2006 some clueful person came up with the idea of creating a Google Earth overlay to monitor bushfires in Victoria.
It pulls in the latest image from the Department of Sustainability and Environment (DSE) from their current incidents page about fires and overlays it on the satellite imagery.
Red circles are controlled fires, red stars are contained fires and red fires are “going” (i.e. not controlled or contained).
Congratulations to Shane Jacobsen for winning the AFI 2006 Best Actor award for Kenny!
This wonderful email was sent to me by a great friend of mine, Graham, telling the tale of unexpected happenings on a late night drive home.
For overseas readers : ute = utility = pickup truck.
The ABC is reporting that a section of the Great Wall in Inner Mongolia was blasted to make way for a highway.
The company responsible, Hongji Landbridge, was warned not to go ahead with construction. According to government officials, it not only ignored the warnings but went on to demolish three nearby ancient villages.
The free software world, as in any other field of human endeavour, has people and their interests come and go over time. This can leave projects unmaintained, but it is not necessarily the end of the world. Because of the licenses that are used others are quite free to take up the reins and resurrect a project (as myself and Brian have done with the Vacation program).
The real issue is people knowing about the projects in the first place, and so the Unmaintained Free Software Wiki was born.
Few people seem to know about the site though; Jon Corbett at LWN puts it like this:
Unfortunately, this project itself looks like it could benefit from a bit of maintenance. Only seven projects have been added since the beginning of the year, and only two (Gnome Commander and khtml2png) are listed as having been adopted. Perhaps the problem is simply one of awareness; If relatively few people even know that this site exists, few are unlikely to make use of it. If that is the case, then, hopefully, this article will help a bit.
So I’m hoping that this will help spread the word as well. If you like the idea of this then I encourage you to blog about it too and, if you have the skills, enthusiasm and Copious Free Time, take on a project yourself!