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Fri Jan 13 17:03:20 2006 GMT: New Year in London
Sun Nov 27 14:33:04 2005 GMT: omniORB and Ice Performance Compared
Thu Nov 24 21:43:52 2005 GMT: The end of USENET
LWN has published an article (subscriber only content) on it's front-page claiming that Usenet is dead. Well, like most others who have posted comments, I don't really agree. Maybe some of the non-technical hierarchies might have lost most of their users to Web forums, but there is still lots of useful content on Usenet. And even though some ISPs are shutting their news servers down (mostly because of the bandwidth and storage cost of running a full-feed), small privately run free text-only servers are appearing (see this small list).
Tue Nov 22 00:12:51 2005 GMT: Moving to Swindon
The rumors that I will be moving to Swindon, UK are true. A few weeks ago I have accepted a new job as a Senior Software Engineer at Lucent Technologies in Swindon.
Last weekend I visited Swindon (for the first time) to take a look around and sort out some temporary accomodation. I have already updated my Web site accordingly.
So, there are now only a few days left for me in Salzburg before moving to Swindon on 1st December and starting in my new job on 5th December.
Sun Nov 13 14:39:56 2005 GMT: The CGI Dilemma
Some time ago I installed SquirrelMail in a private area of my Web site to be able to get access to a remote IMAP server. While the setup was fairly easy, performance just sucked. The reason, of course, lies in the statelessness of the CGI (Common Gateway Interface), but running PHP as an Apache module doesn't help here either. So, a PHP (or CGI) script can't keep resources open between requests, and therefore, in the case of SquirrelMail it has to establish the IMAP session every time which considerably slows down the whole thing (and increases resource consumption on the IMAP server side, because these IMAP servers aren't really optimized for short-lived sessions).
Well, in most cases you can get away by storing some session information in a database, but this doesn't work with network connections. Of course, having some background daemon running on the Web server machine would be the answer to the problem, but this usually requires at least having shell access on your Web server (which most low-cost hosting provider don't offer).
Another alternative would be to fork a daemon on demand from your CGI script, let it run for some time in the background and communicate via Unix domain sockets with it. Using this technique should be possible with all low-cost Web hosting accounts that at least allow you to write your own CGI scripts and should drastically improve performance of Web applications like SquirrelMail. But on the other hand, making use of a daemon process is a big architectural change.
Sun Nov 13 12:13:40 2005 GMT: Jabberd2 epoll Patch Updated
A few days ago I noticed that the server-to-server communication component of my cmeerw.org Jabber server crashed after logging an XML parse error (junk after document element). I have tracked this down to a problem in my epoll patch for jabberd2 which could cause a double-free memory allocation error leading to a program crash.
I have now updated my epoll patch on http://svn.cmeerw.net/src/jabberd2/epoll-patch/ to fix this bug.
Thu Nov 10 20:21:25 2005 GMT: Visual C++ 2005
A few days ago Visual C++ 2005 has been released. One of the good things about the release is that you can download the Express Edition for free (after registering, although you might get away without registering if you only use the command line tools).
I have just updated my Free C++ page to include this freely downloadable compiler. Interestingly, the for statement condition test case triggers an internal compiler error and the two phase name lookup still doesn't work, but they have updated parsing of right angle brackets to be in line with the upcoming C++ 0x standard.
Sun Nov 06 17:00:23 2005 GMT: https Support for JabRSS
Sun Oct 23 14:36:31 2005 GMT: Updating to Breezy Badger
Sun Oct 16 20:24:26 2005 GMT: Ubuntu Breezy Badger Release Party
Sun Oct 16 20:01:07 2005 GMT: Linux Kongress 2005
Wed Sep 28 20:14:49 2005 GMT: The OrbZone
