Need for Speed
I've been doing some pretty exciting things recently with website performance. I always disliked doing IT work in the past, but the challenge of setting a server up to be able to withstand crushing traffic is now quite intriguing to me.
To wit, here's a funny moment from a recent experiment. I was using incrond to run a script to minify some JavaScript whenever Drupal created a new JS file. Unfortunately, my script also created a new JS file (a backup, unminified copy,) and the protection I put into place wasn't quite working correctly. I think the image below speaks for itself.
Fritz Wunderlich - O Wie Angstlich
One of the greatest singers of German music of the last century, doing what he did best.
Why I Hate Drupal: Friday the 13th Edition
Now that I'm back from my month-long blog hiatus and from DrupalCon DC 2009, I thought I'd throw up a little post in the same vein as walkah's brilliant Why I Hate Drupal talk.
A friend was building a Drupal site and asked me what I thought the best way to prepopulate a lot of HTML into a node body field was for a newsletter. Now, she's using Simplenews and Simplenews template isn't yet out for Drupal 6, but that's no problem. In the past, on sites like YPOGP.org, I implemented the newsletter by using a little module called nodeformtemplate to fill in the node body with a full HTML newsletter, and letting the user type in the extra HTML they needed. That module makes it easy, right?
An MTA Train at 96th
Here's one of my first videos from my original Flip mino. (Not my new HD mino.)
It's an MTA 2 train pulling into the 96th Street station.
Tree House Flips Out
I work for Tree House Agency here in NYC, and we gave out custom-printed flip minos (one per company) to our corporate partners as Christmas gifts.
Each of the employees also got one. Our CEO Michael Caccavano played Santa and left them in the NYC office for us to pick up this last Thursday, and I couldn't resist getting a shot of it with Photo Booth.
Gotta love it - yet another perk of working with Tree House.
Back to Blogging
Welcome to the new (and completely empty) Grenade Sandwich. My name is Steven Merrill, a classical singer and technologist, and I'll be your host.
The title of this site comes from a season finale of The Shield, and I think you'll understand what I'm talking about if you're a fan of the show.
Microblog Updates
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Suppose I want to run a plugin to SOLR, like LocalSOLR in Acquia Search. Is that currently supported? #acquiasearch3 days 8 hours ago
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A search for "summit" on newegg.com returns 95% Weber-brand grills, 5% OCZ-brand SSDs. Hrm.3 days 22 hours ago
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Google Page Speed has reawakened my need for speed. First project completed: auto JavaScript minification via incrond and YUI Compressor.6 days 5 hours ago
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I am one of two people on the LimoLiner bus ride from Boston -> NYC. Wow.6 days 8 hours ago
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Lazyweb: Issue solved. An unneeded float:left was causing text to disappear when the page scrolled, but only in late WebKit browsers. Weird.6 days 10 hours ago
Linkblog
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Open-source fonts for great justice!
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Which SSD uses which storage technology and controller? Find out here.
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A ready-to-go AMI which installs Drupal and which has kcachegrind-friendliness built in. Wow.
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Fire linux commands from filesystem events.
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Run commands when a file notification happens on linux. Neat!
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Yep - another Varnish config file.
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A peek into search.twitter.com's use of Varnish.
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A sample Varnish VCL.
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Why you might not need bzr rebasing.