..

Anyone watching in the past weeks would have noticed the CFA and DSE websites struggle under unusually high load from visitor traffic.

Taken from Tuesday 24th, 2008 Financial Review - "In order to keep this valuable resource online, techies at Google took the CFA's data and overlaid it onto Google Maps to create a map of the state dotted with coloured balloons showing the location and status of each blaze"

"The number of queries went from two per second to more than 200 per second within less than 24 hours"

If the database server is overloaded because the site is making live queries - that is, queries based on user page-requests, it could easily be resolved by outputting the query data to a static .html file, which is then served to clients by the web server. The query for generating the file could be run as often as every second, giving people 'to the second' information which would still only equal 1 query per second on the DB server, an improvement on the the claimed 200 queries per second during the bush fires.

Something like the below code stops the client browser caching any pages, and gets the new version from the server with each request.

header("Cache-Control: no-cache, must-revalidate");
header("Expires: -1");

Now the web server is doing all the hard work, and that is limited to serving static text based content to clients... which is much easier to manage.

Something like this would improve performance assuming the database server and web server are network connected (ie, not both the same box).

The poor old Bullit is still going to have to last a few more years yet... as i just cant afford the $5k+ for that shiny Sunday.

The main problems being poor brakes and the play in the rear linkage.

So... wanting the job done this year... i took the Delrin bushing (sits between the inner steel bush and the shock) to John at DCH Engineering in West Melbourne, who machined me up a brand new bush for as little as $20 in a few days. Good as new, no play in the rear linkage. There wouldn't be any way of getting that problem sorted quicker!

And those 6 year old Hayes really do need an upgrade but... a new disc and set of pads will have to do for now. As long as they lock up, its good enough for me...

Struggling to see the value of Twitter, it occurred to me how useful can be to anyone wanting or needing regular status updates on a disastrous event like the recent problems at social bookmarker Ma.gnolia. Any members or anyone wanting to get an update on how recovery or status is going, can simply check Ma.gnolia's Twitter Page to satisfy their urge for up-to-date information.

So perhaps the infamous Miki ticketing system roll out in Melbourne which has hundreds of thousands of punters watching and waiting for the next phase, or a general update on the latest delay... in the absence of promised or expected service, i suppose people appreciate even the most basic information on the issues at hand.

I never considered the difficulty he would have had with needing to be in a high gear for landing but needing to drop of so slowly...

http://mail.google.com/mail/rc?a=af&c=fff1a8&w=30&h=30

Adjust the color width and height of the circle on the fly... fruity.

As easy as it is to plug in Googles Analytics JS code into the base of your website, you still wont get a good idea of what spiders are crawling your site, and how often, as well as a few other limitations / omitted abilities.

<?php
$myFile =  "hide_melogs/".date(dMy).".txt";
$fh = fopen($myFile, 'a') or die("can't open file");
$stringData = @gethostbyaddr($_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'])."
 ".date("d/m/y : H:i:s", time())." ".$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']."";
$stringData .= " ".$_SERVER['HTTP_CONNECTION']."
 ".$_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER']."\r\n";
fwrite($fh, $stringData);
fclose($fh);
?>

That is a simple way to use your own custom code to log what's happening on your site. No fancy graphs here. The fact that it's completely server-side cleans up the front end code and simplifies the loading of said HTML, with no external references on each page load. Sending it to a database would be one of the first desirable improvements.

NOTE: Be wary of using a single log file that isn't purged, its fine for a few lines, but once it reaches a few thousand PHP needs to cycle right through it which drastically reduces performance, and pageload.

The following line creates a new file each day, which depending on how many pageloads are expected, should be fine...

$myFile =  "hide_melogs/".date(dMy).".txt";

http://blog.phil-taylor.com/2006/05/08/troubled-times-for-mambo-open-source-cms/

I've been meaning for a while to get my head around these... and why certain functions / formating cause errors in Citrix...

The function the browser looks for is:

function FindProxyForURL(url, host)
{
return "DIRECT";
}

"Return DIRECT" tells the browser to look locally for the address.

return "PROXY 192.168.0.254:80" tells the browser to send the request to the specified proxy.

It can be a bit tricky to find the often disputed technicalities and obligations behind riding on public land.

Vicroads, The DSE, Parks Victoria and the Police all seem to have a say in the rules and regulations that riders need to conform to while riding on public land. Amongst the ambiguity are the restrictions and requirements placed upon the "recreational registration".

Some useful Info:

DSE Riding Guide

Riding On Public Land