Month: May 2005

Site speedups

I’ve been getting a lot of complains lately that my blog is very slow. I experienced it myself too, but I couldn’t recall which changes caused it. I checked all logs and configurations and everything looked just fine.

I asked Vladimir Ivaschenko to help me track down the problem. He is known as The Master of strace, so I was pretty sure that he would be help me. And I was right.

Within minutes, we found out that problems were caused by del.icio.us Smart Tagging plugin that I have installed not so long ago. With plugin activated, wget would take anywhere from 15 to 90 seconds to load the front page of the site. Deactivating the plugin, makes wget finish in less than 3 seconds. I consider the difference to be big enough for the functionality that this plugin brings in, so I disabled it. Maybe I will use it later again, when things get faster.

Thanks a lot Vladimir!

Weather forecasts monitoring with Bloglines

Bloglines added yet another feature its amazing array of options. Now it is even easier to monitor weather forecasts for locations. The announcement of the new functionality is here.

Sin City

As some of you may remember, I had some really high expectations for “Sin City“. I went as far as forecasting it to be a movie of the year. Today I finally got a chance to see it. I spent close to one tenth of a second considering if I should wait for the local cinemas to catch up with the world or to watch a mild quality cinema screener that was in front of me.

Directed by: Frank Miller, Robert Rodriguez
Genres: Action, Crime, Thriller
Cast: Bruce Willis, Mickey Rourke, Jessica Alba, Clive Owen, Nick Stahl, Powers Boothe, Rutger Hauer, Elijah Wood, Rosario Dawson, Benicio Del Toro, Jaime King, Devon Aoki, Brittany Murphy, Michael Clarke Duncan, Carla Gugino
IMDB raintg: 8.3
My rating: 10.0 [rate 10.0]

Continue reading Sin City

Advertising clip

Advertising clips are always a great source of fun. This one is one of my favourites now. I won’t tell you what it advertises, because that’ll spoil it.

Update: don’t forget to turn the sound on

Newspaper index

I came across an interesting resource today – Newspaperindex.com. Practically, the site consists of two parts. The first part is the list of online newspapers categorized by country (example: Russia, Cyprus, Greece). There is also a convenient “EN” flag near links to newspapers in English language – very convenient. The second part of the site is the blog. As it says on the site:

Newspaperindex.com – Daily blog on newspapers and free speech.

According to articles’ posting dates, the blog is not exactly daily, but very close to one. There are a number of interesting posts. Check, for examlpe, this one, this one or this one.