This Ars Technica article talks about the politicization of energy saving products. Pitch energy efficiency as a cost savings, and liberals and conservatives alike are willing to buy. Pitch it as environmental-saving, and moderates get turned off while conservatives get even more so. The lesson to marketers: Sell energy-efficient products as technology that promotes energy [...]
All posts tagged traffic
These study results on energy savings aren’t surprising
Posted by Dave Farquhar on May 2, 2013
http://dfarq.homeip.net/2013/05/these-study-results-on-energy-savings-arent-surprising/
Value Village and Affton could be very good for one another
There’s a Value Village thrift store in Shrewsbury that’s being displaced because the plaza it’s in–the same place I used to go to buy Commodore gear–is going to be demolished to make way for a Wal-Mart Supercenter. Whether Shrewsbury needs a Wal-Mart Supercenter when there’s one six miles away is another question for another day. [...]
Posted by Dave Farquhar on April 23, 2013
http://dfarq.homeip.net/2013/04/value-village-and-affton-could-be-very-good-for-one-another/
Exploiting Twitter
It’s interesting that I read two things about buying Twitter publicity today: John C Dvorak’s experiment for PC Magazine and an interview with my classmate and friend Ken. The idea is that people buy Twitter followers to make themselves look bigger than they are, whether they’re celebrities trying to make themselves look like they’re on [...]
Posted by Dave Farquhar on April 10, 2013
http://dfarq.homeip.net/2013/04/exploiting-twitter/
Use Apachebench to test your webserver optimizations
If your web server is slow and you want to fix it, it’s nice to be able to quantify what you got. Enter Apachebench, which is part of Apache and probably already on your server.
Posted by Dave Farquhar on February 14, 2013
http://dfarq.homeip.net/2013/02/use-apachebench-to-test-your-webserver-optimizations/
A minor (but vital) Apache performance tweak
My problems seem to have become more rare since I started blocking spambots and tuned PHP and Apache but last night my server ran out of memory again and started timing out. It turns out I still had a critical problem, but one that’s easy to fix with a relatively simple Perl script.
Posted by Dave Farquhar on January 27, 2013
http://dfarq.homeip.net/2013/01/a-minor-but-vital-apache-performance-tweak/
R.I.P.: Netbooks
The last two netbook vendors standing, Acer and Asus, have both announced they’ve produced their last netbook. So they’re joining the Playstation 2 in the land of the digital dinosaurs, though I suspect more people will miss the 12-year-old game console than the netbook. The Guardian has an analysis, but basically they blame the emergence [...]
Posted by Dave Farquhar on January 1, 2013
http://dfarq.homeip.net/2013/01/r-i-p-netbooks/
Sorry about the downtime
MySQL crashed on me sometime late Sunday or early Monday. Somehow the server managed to serve up 5-6 pages per day in a catatonic state on Monday and Tuesday. So I spent my lunch break digging into the problem.
Posted by Dave Farquhar on November 28, 2012
http://dfarq.homeip.net/2012/11/sorry-about-the-downtime-2/
Somehow I started it
Friday night, my wife and I attended a baseball game with several of my new coworkers and their families. We rode Metrolink–St. Louis’ light-rail train–to the stadium to avoid traffic. The ride to the stadium was peaceful and relaxing. The ride from the stadium was peaceful and relaxing too, except for a brief interruption between [...]
Posted by Dave Farquhar on August 5, 2012
http://dfarq.homeip.net/2012/08/somehow-i-started-it/
Four simple steps to optimize WordPress
A couple of years ago, I stood up a WordPress server. I made no effort to tune it, let alone turbocharge it, which is a decision I later came to regret. If your site gets more than a few hundred hits per day, you need to tune it. If you want to get more than [...]
http://dfarq.homeip.net/2013/02/four-simple-steps-to-optimize-wordpress/