some third-party libraries that extend PHP's core functionality do NOT play nicely in a threaded environment
This has been the stock answer for a while (and I don't question it), but has anyone ever seen a list detailing each module and whether they are thread-safe under Apache 2? There are *tons* of modules and I only use a small subset so I would like to be able to check a list to see if I might be OK to try Apache 2.
The big one for me would be Postgres.
Anyone seen such a list? I've asked one of the developers and he sort of brushed it off. A list such as this might very well speed up adoption for people like me.
-h3
Re:Clusters are a bit overhyped
on
ClusterKnoppix
·
· Score: 1
I don't know about "overhyped"- "misunderstood" might be a better word. Using OpenMosix, jobs aren't automatically run in parallel across all your computers - that's a different kind of clustering and requires individual applications to be programmed for that capability. Rather, OpenMosix will "load balance" your jobs if you run a number of CPU-intensive processes simultaneously.
For typical home users, there's probably little benefit. Your web browsing won't benefit. Email, nope. Music playing, nope. Office suite-nope. The only thing I can think of that might benefit would be music/video related encoding.
But this is a big deal for environments such as mine, where you have to deal with lots of users running lots of CPU intensive jobs that take days/weeks/months and you want to efficiently use the CPU resources available.
I'm sure others can think of other scenarios where this can be actually useful.
OpenMosix takes about 30 minutes to set up and it then works with every application you run.
Well, not *every* application. Some don't migrate, depending on I/O, threading, etc. But a lot do, and it really is easy to setup.
We use it at work on a bioinformatics cluster and the best part is that it'll transparently balance user jobs without them having to do or learn anything new.
Ob topic: we happen to run MySQL on one of our cluster nodes, but it doesn't migrate;).
Wow, you must be my doppleganger - I never would've expected anyone else to have recently read Murakami and Lemony Snicket.
My favorite Murakami works were Norwegian Wood and Wind Up Bird Chronicles. Norwegian Wood is a beautiful love story, the likes of which I haven't enjoyed since Garcia-Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera. Wind Up Bird Chronicles - it just blew my mind. It affect my mood for days afterward.
I've also been somewhat disappointed to the Lemony Snicket series, they're quite repetitive.
A couple of works I rarely see mentioned but I would guess the Slashdot crowd would like: Stephenson's Diamond Age and John Barnes Mother of All Storms.
I like Diamond Age best of Stephenson's works, but Snowcrash and Cryptonomicon seem to get all the hype (they were OK, too).
Don't be put off by the dumb title - Mother of All Storms isn't quite what you'd expect. Sure, it's about storms, but it's set in a near-future as fully realized as I've read (on par, if not surpassing Snowcrash) and it makes the weather interesting to boot!
Another recent read is Ken Follet's Pillars of the Earth, quite entertaining as well.
Looking at the timeline, the 10 years refers to the commercial releases of BBEdit, which began in 1993 at v2.5x.
I recall using it for a programming class in college ca. '89-'90, so it's been already a bit longer than that. Probably longer than some slashdotters have been around:p.
I also remember reading the README that came with the original freeware BBEdit, where Rich proclaimed that BBEdit will always and forever be FREE (as in beer).
I've always admired the design of php.net. Maybe it's because I spend so much time there (the manual) and I've grown used to it, but I find it easy to navigate and read.
On top of the straight design stuff, they also have a lot of neat "features" that really add to the site design:
Smart URLs (http://www.php.net/echo will take you to the "echo" manual page)
Smart 404s - mistype a URL and it'll essentially perform a search instead and come up with suggestions
"view source", as in view the PHP source that generated the page, anywhere.
ACCESSKEYs used liberally in the HTML to ease keyboard navigation
Intelligent language accomodations - urls all have the language code so it's obvious and simple to switch languages. Plus, you can cookie your preferred language.
There's probably lots of stuff I've forgotten or don't know about, but to me it seems clear that the PHP folks take their website seriously and have spent considerable time improving usability.
What reason do you really have for insisting that Apple is all about DRM all of a sudden?
I don't know what reason the original poster had, but it was stated that Apple was implementing DRM in relation to the music service it was planning back when that was announced (related slashdot story). The music execs wouldn't go for it without that.
Netscape 4.7? It's only two years old, guys. It isn't like it's hard to code a page that will look correct in NS4
Well, while the specific dot version may only be two years old, I believe the NS4 series was released in the '97-'98 timeframe, making the codebase in the area of 5-6 years old! That's half the age of the web!
And no, it's not hard to code a page that will look correct in NS4. It is hard to code a page that will look correct and good, and do so in the most recent browsers, and use proper and conforming markup, and so on.
I've given up on NS4 as a developer. I make sure my pages are viewable and functional but I completely strip them of any layout- basically, they don't get styled at all, except for any tweaks required to make them viewable and functional- and provide a little notice of what to expect and urge them to upgrade. They work, but it looks like crap, but I think anyone using NS4 in this day and age probably understands the consequences of that decision (whether it's their own, or not).
I *really* wanted to keep my sounds and fonts separate (before 7.1, they were both mixed inside the System "file"). I don't know why I really wanted this, but I did.
Cuz it freed us from having to use Font-DA Mover- arrghh!!
I forget where I learned this tip, but it's useful and doesn't seem widely known: many routers provide NTP service. So you can do a traceroute from your server out to anywhere (say google.com) and get a list of upstream routers. Don't forget to try the "-I" option (or whatever the equiv is in your version of traceroute) to use ICMP instead of the default UDP datagrams if your firewall is blocking those.
If/once you have a list of routers, try time syncing against them. It's worth a shot.
It appears that the "don't send referrer" behavior is something that Galeon, my primary browser, does. I just tried in Mozilla proper and I was blocked.
It never occurred to me that this particular behavior would be Galeon-specific. My apologies.
* Middle-click (on *nix): defaults to opening link in a new window I believe, so no referrer sent, no bugzilla block. Non-*nix: right-click, open link in new window
* Since presumably people most people reading Mozilla stories will be using Mozilla - open the link in a new tab. Again, no referrer, no block.
For the longest time, I didn't understand what people were talking about with this blocking business, until I realized I had been circumventing via one of the two methods above as part of my usual browsing behavior.
Both ways also have the advantage of not losing your place in the Slashdot discussion- just close the window/tab and you're back to where you were without reload/re-renders, etc.
FWIW, it bugs me when people *don't* link. Copy-paste is slightly more work, and sucks when Slashdot injects spaces into links.
Something I've been hoping for for years is that bus systems would utilize something like this to deliver real-time position information for their buses.
I would love to be able to load up a page and see where my bus currently is so that I can better gauge when I have to leave to catch it.
Even better, something that delivers to portable devices as well (cell phones/pdas) so that when I do arrive at the bus stop, I can check to see if I just missed it and I should hop on an alternate or if it's a couple blocks away.
Seems like all the technology is in place - anyone seen a bus system doing something like this?
Brian Burton's spamprobe, written in C++, tries to remember already-seen messages, so that you can dump your spams/good mails on separate folders, have spamprobe learn from them, and delete them afterwards. Spamprobe remembers which ones it already processed, and won't reprocess a message if it's already seen it.
I've been using spamprobe for a little while now and have been happy so far. One interesting bit about spamprobe is that it self-adjusts: after classifying each incoming email, it adds that email's data to its database, so as the content of spam (or your "good" mail) shifts, it's filtering criteria will shift with it.
Perhaps this is why I like it more than I did SpamAssassin (that and the messy perl-ness of SpamAssassin) - I don't have to worry about updating rule sets.
One caveat: the database can get pretty big. I seeded mine with about 600,000 lines total of spam and good mail and the database clocks in at about 83 MB.
I just tried it out on a freshly installed Moz 1.1 under Windows. It didn't work until I killed all instances of Mozilla and the quick launch as well.
Then, adding the line mentioned above "took" and when I went to access the dup app I was presented with an alert about security before it went and loaded it (it takes a few seconds).
FWIW, it works fine under Galeon 1.2.5 and Moz 1.0 under Linux as well - which is why the quick launch bit didn't occur to me at first.
I spent a lot of time grappling with this very issue. Ultimately, I gave up on getting it to work the way I felt it should and tacked on an ugly kludge. Luckily for me, it was a personal project and was only a reference/proof-of-concept implementation.
The only *working* example I could find online is the bugzilla duplicates app. I just didn't have the time to work out how exactly that was working while my app wasn't. I'm hoping come a few more revisions' time, things will work better and be better documented. It's very cool technology, and I can think of many uses for it.
Nevermind the last paragraph - I miss understood the process. I thought the article was novel technically, but it appears that they just created a DNA clone, ripped RNA off it, and use that to generate virus. While not novel technically, it is novel conceptually.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, cool, thanks for the link. Turns out Postgres *is* on there, listed under "libpq" and marked as thread-safe with a couple of exceptions.
-h3
some third-party libraries that extend PHP's core functionality do NOT play nicely in a threaded environment
This has been the stock answer for a while (and I don't question it), but has anyone ever seen a list detailing each module and whether they are thread-safe under Apache 2? There are *tons* of modules and I only use a small subset so I would like to be able to check a list to see if I might be OK to try Apache 2.
The big one for me would be Postgres.
Anyone seen such a list? I've asked one of the developers and he sort of brushed it off. A list such as this might very well speed up adoption for people like me.
-h3
I don't know about "overhyped"- "misunderstood" might be a better word. Using OpenMosix, jobs aren't automatically run in parallel across all your computers - that's a different kind of clustering and requires individual applications to be programmed for that capability. Rather, OpenMosix will "load balance" your jobs if you run a number of CPU-intensive processes simultaneously.
For typical home users, there's probably little benefit. Your web browsing won't benefit. Email, nope. Music playing, nope. Office suite-nope. The only thing I can think of that might benefit would be music/video related encoding.
But this is a big deal for environments such as mine, where you have to deal with lots of users running lots of CPU intensive jobs that take days/weeks/months and you want to efficiently use the CPU resources available.
I'm sure others can think of other scenarios where this can be actually useful.
-h3
OpenMosix takes about 30 minutes to set up and it then works with every application you run.
;).
Well, not *every* application. Some don't migrate, depending on I/O, threading, etc. But a lot do, and it really is easy to setup.
We use it at work on a bioinformatics cluster and the best part is that it'll transparently balance user jobs without them having to do or learn anything new.
Ob topic: we happen to run MySQL on one of our cluster nodes, but it doesn't migrate
-h3
Wow, you must be my doppleganger - I never would've expected anyone else to have recently read Murakami and Lemony Snicket.
My favorite Murakami works were Norwegian Wood and Wind Up Bird Chronicles. Norwegian Wood is a beautiful love story, the likes of which I haven't enjoyed since Garcia-Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera. Wind Up Bird Chronicles - it just blew my mind. It affect my mood for days afterward.
I've also been somewhat disappointed to the Lemony Snicket series, they're quite repetitive.
A couple of works I rarely see mentioned but I would guess the Slashdot crowd would like: Stephenson's Diamond Age and John Barnes Mother of All Storms.
I like Diamond Age best of Stephenson's works, but Snowcrash and Cryptonomicon seem to get all the hype (they were OK, too).
Don't be put off by the dumb title - Mother of All Storms isn't quite what you'd expect. Sure, it's about storms, but it's set in a near-future as fully realized as I've read (on par, if not surpassing Snowcrash) and it makes the weather interesting to boot!
Another recent read is Ken Follet's Pillars of the Earth, quite entertaining as well.
-h3
Looking at the timeline, the 10 years refers to the commercial releases of BBEdit, which began in 1993 at v2.5x.
:p.
I recall using it for a programming class in college ca. '89-'90, so it's been already a bit longer than that. Probably longer than some slashdotters have been around
I also remember reading the README that came with the original freeware BBEdit, where Rich proclaimed that BBEdit will always and forever be FREE (as in beer).
For whatever that's worth.
-h3
There's probably lots of stuff I've forgotten or don't know about, but to me it seems clear that the PHP folks take their website seriously and have spent considerable time improving usability.
A couple of neat links:
-h3
Another place to get some opinions is the Webhostingtalk forums...
Well, while the specific dot version may only be two years old, I believe the NS4 series was released in the '97-'98 timeframe, making the codebase in the area of 5-6 years old! That's half the age of the web!
And no, it's not hard to code a page that will look correct in NS4. It is hard to code a page that will look correct and good, and do so in the most recent browsers, and use proper and conforming markup, and so on.
I've given up on NS4 as a developer. I make sure my pages are viewable and functional but I completely strip them of any layout- basically, they don't get styled at all, except for any tweaks required to make them viewable and functional- and provide a little notice of what to expect and urge them to upgrade. They work, but it looks like crap, but I think anyone using NS4 in this day and age probably understands the consequences of that decision (whether it's their own, or not).
-h3POST-GRES-CUE-ELL.
They have an mp3 on their web site.
I usually just call it "postgrez" or "pee-gee".
-h3
Cuz it freed us from having to use Font-DA Mover- arrghh!!
-h3
I forget where I learned this tip, but it's useful and doesn't seem widely known: many routers provide NTP service. So you can do a traceroute from your server out to anywhere (say google.com) and get a list of upstream routers. Don't forget to try the "-I" option (or whatever the equiv is in your version of traceroute) to use ICMP instead of the default UDP datagrams if your firewall is blocking those.
If/once you have a list of routers, try time syncing against them. It's worth a shot.
-h3
Aaah, mea culpa.
It appears that the "don't send referrer" behavior is something that Galeon, my primary browser, does. I just tried in Mozilla proper and I was blocked.
It never occurred to me that this particular behavior would be Galeon-specific. My apologies.
-h3
links to bugzilla from slashdot are disabled.
* Middle-click (on *nix): defaults to opening link in a new window I believe, so no referrer sent, no bugzilla block. Non-*nix: right-click, open link in new window
* Since presumably people most people reading Mozilla stories will be using Mozilla - open the link in a new tab. Again, no referrer, no block.
For the longest time, I didn't understand what people were talking about with this blocking business, until I realized I had been circumventing via one of the two methods above as part of my usual browsing behavior.
Both ways also have the advantage of not losing your place in the Slashdot discussion- just close the window/tab and you're back to where you were without reload/re-renders, etc.
FWIW, it bugs me when people *don't* link. Copy-paste is slightly more work, and sucks when Slashdot injects spaces into links.
-h3
* LED flashlight (get different colors, let people trade amongst themselves)
* USB key drive
Yeah, that's what I'm talking about! Now if only my bus would sign up with NextBus...
-h3
Something I've been hoping for for years is that bus systems would utilize something like this to deliver real-time position information for their buses.
I would love to be able to load up a page and see where my bus currently is so that I can better gauge when I have to leave to catch it.
Even better, something that delivers to portable devices as well (cell phones/pdas) so that when I do arrive at the bus stop, I can check to see if I just missed it and I should hop on an alternate or if it's a couple blocks away.
Seems like all the technology is in place - anyone seen a bus system doing something like this?
-h3
I held off until I realized I could use user preferences to turn off Jon Katz posts.
-h3
I've been using spamprobe for a little while now and have been happy so far. One interesting bit about spamprobe is that it self-adjusts: after classifying each incoming email, it adds that email's data to its database, so as the content of spam (or your "good" mail) shifts, it's filtering criteria will shift with it.
Perhaps this is why I like it more than I did SpamAssassin (that and the messy perl-ness of SpamAssassin) - I don't have to worry about updating rule sets.
One caveat: the database can get pretty big. I seeded mine with about 600,000 lines total of spam and good mail and the database clocks in at about 83 MB.
-h3
(for example, split is an alias to explode and join is an alias for implode)
Actually, watch out for this - split is not an alias for explode. split uses regular expressions, explode uses strings.
-h3
Then, adding the line mentioned above "took" and when I went to access the dup app I was presented with an alert about security before it went and loaded it (it takes a few seconds).
FWIW, it works fine under Galeon 1.2.5 and Moz 1.0 under Linux as well - which is why the quick launch bit didn't occur to me at first.
Hope this helps.
-h3
You have to add the following to your prefs.js.Remove the slashdot-injected spaces appropriately.
The only *working* example I could find online is the bugzilla duplicates app. I just didn't have the time to work out how exactly that was working while my app wasn't. I'm hoping come a few more revisions' time, things will work better and be better documented. It's very cool technology, and I can think of many uses for it.
Nevermind the last paragraph - I miss understood the process. I thought the article was novel technically, but it appears that they just created a DNA clone, ripped RNA off it, and use that to generate virus. While not novel technically, it is novel conceptually.
-h3