geekery

For the last month or so, I’ve been having performance problems on my web hosting provider: Process were (and still are) getting randomly killed for allegedly using “too much CPU.”  Log file activity had entries like this:[Wed Dec 26 19:43:04 2007] [crit] [client 67.161.90.241] (12)Cannot allocate memory: default_handler: mmap failed: /i/wunderground_dec252007.jpg Disabling some WordPress plugins

[This is the remaining set of mental notes on the AGU conference, mostly as a mark for me to look up more later. Because it’s been a week two weeks, including a week of doing real work to ship products (w00t!), my recollection isn’t as good as it could be.]

With my products’ release imminent, I spent last weekend coaxing Amazon’s Elastic Computing Cloud (ECC) into action. The ECC is appealing for a few reasons: It’s someone else’s high-throughput network – product distributions, especially with demo files, are in the hundreds of megabytes. The T1 at work is 1.4Mb/s. Sharing, firewalls, and proxies reduce my

While I was driving around Tucson, I was struck by how differently the traffic lights sequenced.  (Phoenix didn’t seem to have the noticeable differences.)  Consider this intersection of Some Boulevard and No Way: Some Boulevard is the moderately-trafficked arterial going left-right. In this intersection, left turns have to yield to oncoming traffic. The pedestrian crosswalk