Recently I read about speeding up boot times on Windows PC’s. The gist of the article was that there are two sources of contention for your processor, startup items and anti-virus/spyware software.
Startup Items
Most Windows-based computers sold today come with a plethora of pre-installed software, much of which is already configured and ready to use. And we, as happy owners of a new computer, add our own software favorites soon after. Any of these programs may offer to “start automatically” when you log in or sign in to your computer. Every time you agree to this option you add to the CPU load when your computer boots, and you increase the amount of time a boot will take.
Unless you absolutely need a piece of software running the instant your machine boots, there is no reason to have it start automatically at boot time. Following the direction in the Coding Horror article mentioned above, you can use the configuration utility “msconfig” to disable as many or all startup items as you want.
On my 1.87 Ghz ThinkPad Z60m I disabled all startup items, reducing my reboot time from 8 minutes and 19 seconds to 3 minutes and 40 seconds. A savings of 4 minutes and 39 seconds or 55% faster boot time.
Fifty-five percent faster.
Anti-Virus
In order for anti-virus software to be effective, it must be running all the time. It must be aware of all the processes on your computer and interact with them at a very low level in the operating system stack. While this provides the protection we all want and need, it can reduce the speed of your computer dramatically. The Choosing Anti-Anti-virus software article suggests that we can avoid the necessity of anti-virus software at all if only we run as a non-administrator on our XP or Vista systems. By default your user account as administrator rights to your computer. This means any process your start (or that you appear to start) can do pretty much what ever it wants in terms of altering the system. By running as a normal user we would effectively prevent malware from doing harm to our computers. Of course, we would have to log in as the admin account in order to make changes to our system or install some programs.
Personally I haven’t taken this step yet. I am intrigued by the idea of not having to run anti-virus software on my machine 100% of the time. Perhaps after the next full backup of my computer I’ll setup a new user account and try life without a net.
One of the potential drawbacks to switching content management systems for my website was losing the permanent link to specific postings. I receive a fair amount of traffic due to some Google searches, and I have posted comments on a couple of sites that generate a few links per week. I didn’t want to lose this traffic simply because the link had changed names.
In my case there were three issues I needed to address:
If you search the Wordpress Codex you’ll find an article about importing Moveable Type entries to Wordpress, which contains a section on Preserving Permanent links. Using the template suggested in the article, I created a new Moveable Type template that output a line for each Moveable Type entry, like this:
<?php
require('wp-config.php');
header('Content-type: text/plain');
?>;
<MTEntries lastn="999999">
Redirect Permanent /archives/<$MTEntryID$>.html https://zanshin.net/blogs/<$MTArchiveDate format="%Y/%m/%d"$>/
<?php echo sanitize_title("<$MTEntryTitle$>"); ?>
</MTEntries>
Redirect Permanent /blogs/######.html https://zanshin.net/yyyy/mm/dd/ <?php echo sanitize_title("Title"); ?>What I needed was a pure .htaccess file to permanently redirect visitors to old URL to the new URL. In order to do that I needed to strip out the php references and manually sanitize the titles. You see the URL scheme I had chosen for Wordpress uses a sanitized version of the posting title in the URL. Quotes, dollar signs, exclamation points, parenthesises, et cetera, aren’t allowed in these sanitized titles.
Making a backup of the redirect.php file the template code above had produced, I set out to accomplish this by hand. (NB: I did try, through the help of a friend to use awk and regular expressions to automate the title sanitazation. While this was largely successful, I ultimately ended up using a file I had converted in TextMate using a series of find and replace commands.)
The resulting file had 1330 lines that looked like this (and, yes, had I been quicker thinking I could have come much closer to this format with the template described above):
Redirect 301 /blogs/######.html https://zanshin.net/yyyy/mm/dd/title/
Points of interest in this format:
Upon loading this file to the root of my site on the new server I promptly got an internal server error (500), meaning that the .htaccess file had a mistake (or two or three). I am not ashamed to admit that I used a brute-force method for finding the errors: I commented all 1330 lines out, and then in blocks of 100 lines each un-commented them and reloaded the site. When it again threw the internal server error between lines 600 and 700, I knew where the problem was located. Two lines had problems. One was missing a “-” for a space, and the other was missing the closing “/” at the end of the URL.
Hopefully now people coming to my site via old links, be they from a search engine, an embedded link on another site, or a bookmark, they will be redirected to the new location of the page.
My site lives on the long tail of the Internet. The long tail, in this case, is a reference to a power curve. Unlike a Bell curve, a power curve is what happens when a very few things have most of what is being charted, while a great many things have very little of what is being charted.
Web sites on the Internet are a prime example of a power curve. There are a few sites that garner most of the visits, and millions of sites that get little or no traffic. For the most part I am OK with zanshin.net languishing on the thin end of the power curve. The site exists primarily for my enjoyment. Still, I am not above tracking my visitors and wondering what causes a surge in my daily count.
It would seem, on the surface, that switching to Wordpress has gently nudged my site one infinitesimal notch towards the meaty end of the curve. Most days I see 10 to 15 browser views of my site. The last two days, the first two days of my back-end being Wordpress, have seen 26 and 22 (so far) visits. Hmm. Only another 39,978 per day and the site will support me financially.
At approximately 12:15 am this morning, January 2, the registration transfer I initiated last week, completed. Along with the DNS changes I made then, this meant my site now resolved to the new server at Blue Host.
I hope to post a much longer, more detailed version of the story soon, but for now it is enough to sit back and bask in the warm LCD glow of my site in its new home. Along the way I created two new sites, backed up several hundred megabytes of data (several times), researched dozens of minimalist Wordpress themes, and fretted endlessly about the details. Being a nerd meant I had to have a project plan, and I created one in Excel and used it throughout the process to keep track of all the little details involved.
The current theme is only a starting point. Over the coming weeks I want to mold it into my own look and feel. Some of pages that used to make up my site will reappear, others probably not. One new feature that I am excited about is the introduction of tags to my site. If a category is a large, fairly statically defined grouping of posts, then a tag is a fluid, cross-cutting keyword. You can see all the tags I’ve created so far by clicking on the Tags page link in the sidebar.
Comments have also returned to zanshin.net, after a long hiatus. Leave me a note, please.
Zanshin.net is moving to a new host this weekend. The DNS change has been initiated and should complete in the a day or so. (For the uninitiated, Domain Name Servers provide the translation between the URL you type (zanshin.net) and the actual IP address of the site. Moving to a new host requires that the whole hierarchy of DNS be updated with the new information. This can take 24-48 hours.)
Since I am also changing registrars, there is a lock-out period where changes can’t happen. Domain theft has caused the registrars to insert numerous layers of protection to insure that your site is not stolen from you. That lock-out period is what will complete early next year.
Hopefully all you, dear reader, will see, is a change in the site’s presentation from the old visual format, to a new (temporary) format. Should there be a brief outage, please come back later, and hopefully I’ll have all the tubes plugged in and working properly again.
Much to my chagrin I must admit that I had never read the following editorial before today. Sibylle pointed it out to me and I am pleased to present it here for you.
Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus
In 1897, Frank Church, an editorial writer for The New York Sun, wrote this response to a letter from a young reader. It became one of the most famous editorials in American history.
We take pleasure in answering at once and thus prominently the communication below, expressing at the same time our great gratification that its faithful author is numbered among the friends of The Sun:
“Dear Editor: ‘I am 8 years old. Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus. Papa says, ‘If you see it in The Sun, it’s so.’ “Please tell me the truth; is there a Santa Claus? “Virginia O’Hanlon”
Virginia, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men’s or children’s, are little. In this great universe of ours man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect, as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge.
Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! How dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus. It would be as dreary as if there were no Virginias. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The external light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished.
Not believe in Santa Claus! You might as well not believe in fairies! You might get your papa to hire men to watch in all the chimneys on Christmas Eve to catch Santa Claus, but even if they did not see Santa Claus coming down, what would that prove? Nobody sees Santa Claus, but that is no sign that there is no Santa Claus. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see. Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but that’s no proof that they are not there. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world.
You may tear apart the baby’s rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived, could tear apart. Only faith, fancy, poetry, love, romance, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, Virginia, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding.
No Santa Claus! Thank God! He lives, and he lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay, 10 times 10,000 years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood.
www.kansascity.com | 12/23/2007 | Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus
Over the past couple weeks I have become increasingly aware that fewer and fewer people you meet say, “Merry Christmas.” While my interactions with other members of the public, or store clerks, is by no means a representative sample, it seems like we are suddenly afraid to say the two words that have always (in my experience) been said this time of year.
That it appears we are allowing fear over offending others to curtail our expression of joy and happiness at this time of year saddens me. Rather than tip-toe around the delicate sensibilities of others (or worse, the imagined delicate sensibilities) shouldn’t we ask them to learn to take care of themselves? If society is going to allow itself to be molded and shaped by the most fearful among us, then I fear our society is headed in the wrong direction.
When I say “Merry Christmas” to you or anyone else I meet I am not trying to impose a set of beliefs, or dictate the way one should feel or act. If the recipient of such a greeting prefers not to have “Merry Christmas” said to them, they should tell me that, calmly and rationally. Tell me what you would have me say instead. But don’t expect me to not say what pleases me.
So I say to you all, Merry Christmas. And I wish you and your families, friends, and loved ones the very best.
There is a new type of weblog available, called a tumblr or tumble blog. You can set one up in just a couple of minutes by visiting the tumblr home page. I did yesterday, and already I’ve got several postings.
Rather than leave the choices up to you, tumblr has specific posting types (links, video, audio, quotes, pictures, text, or chat) that you can add content through. There’s even a handy bookmark that you can use to popup a window while visiting a site you want to reference on your tumble blog. Just click the bookmark, and then add your note to the captured content and click save. The stock templates are decent as well. You could have a blog up and running, for free, in less than 5 minutes.
Read more about it here: Geek to Live.