The banana. Recognized worldwide as the standard size by which new technology is judged.
Speaking of technology and size, I’ve edited the blog’s template to make the text bigger. On high res screens it was getting too tiny, and I didn’t want to buy stronger reading glasses.
Here’s a super-duper instrumental I heard today on BBC Radio 2 that I meant to post when Paul O’Grady played it weeks ago. It’s Jools Holland’s Beatroute. He really captures the 60’s theme song sound.
[audio:https://s3.amazonaws.com/dogratcom/Audio/2012/05/Beatroute.mp3|titles=Jools Holland – Beatroute]Holland was in the British band Squeeze, later becoming a big band leader like his contemporary Brian Setzer did after the Stray Cats.
These are a couple of NPR reports that caught my ear while I wasn’t blogging. Paul Krugman is always worth hearing, which is more than I can say for a lot of economists.
[audio:http://pd.npr.org/anon.npr-mp3/npr/atc/2012/04/20120427_atc_15.mp3|titles=NPR: Paul Krugman]Operation Tiger was a practice run for D-Day, with a disastrous outcome.
[audio:http://pd.npr.org/anon.npr-mp3/npr/atc/2012/04/20120428_atc_05.mp3|titles=NPR: Operation Tiger]Ted Nugent is supposedly the son of an Army sergeant, but I think he resembles Russell “The Professor” Johnson, from Gilligan’s Island. Hmm….
Last week, Bluehost sent this notification:
SERVER PERFORMANCE UPGRADE
Dear DOUGLAS,
We’re pleased to inform you that the server hosting your dograt.com website will be undergoing a major software upgrade, from CentOS 5 to CentOS 6, within the next 48 hours.
This upgrade includes newer software packages (including Python, Perl and gcc), as well as all the security and performance benefits that come along with CentOS 6. In addition to this, the server will be redeployed with a different file system type simultaneously, further increasing performance.
Although a bulk of the upgrades to your server are being done with it online and functional, in order to safely finalize these changes our Administrators will need to temporarily take your server offline in the early morning hours. Barring any extenuating circumstances this outage should only last about 2 hours.
Please note that while we do not anticipate your software having problems post-update, it may be required to re-compile any module(s) you are using to take advantage of the newer included libraries. We suggest reviewing your site afterward to verify that it is functioning as it should.
The case can be made that the upgrade actually reduced performance, because after the update was run I saw that Gzip compression wasn’t working. In the cPanel manager for my Bluehost Pro account the Optimize Website option is gone, and that means something called “mod_deflate” in the Apache Web server is no longer supported. So I wrote to Bluehost and here is their reply:
I’m sorry to inform you but we did away with that icon as it caused problems with other things in the hosting account, this was done fairly recently and wont be coming back in the near future or ever that I am aware of.
First they were pleased to inform me, then they were sorry to inform me. From this I am inferring the real issue is that CPU power is more expensive than Internet bandwidth. The loss of Gzip means that every character of text in this post and the page it’s on is being sent, rather than going across the Internet in a compressed format that uses about one quarter the amount of data, before being unpacked by a browser. If I want Gzip compression, I’ll have to force it in PHP, then see if Bluehost’s dreaded CPU throttling returns for the first time since upgrading to their Pro plan.
Behold! My venerable and beloved Sony 32XBR100 has left the porch and is now being used by Eric for his “classic” video game setup. In its place is a Samsung LN40D630, and this one came without a vertical line of red pixels. The LN40D630 has received uniformly positive reviews, with the most comprehensive of them being at this link. The stand came from Target.
