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Mon Jan 30 19:06:53 2006 GMT: OpenWatcom 1.4
Sun Jan 29 12:25:15 2006 GMT: Swindon Library
Fri Jan 13 17:03:20 2006 GMT: New Year in London
After a short visit to Salzburg over Christmas, I decided to spend the New Year weekend in London. As expected, the area around Big Ben (particularly Westminster Bridge) was awfully crowded around midnight, so I only made it to Parliament Square where the fireworks (which reportedly cost around one million pounds) were only partially visible.
But the main attraction this weekend was London's New Year Parade which started at 12 noon on New Year's day on Parliament Square and lasted for more than three hours (with around 10000 artists from 20 countries).
And to round the weekend off I even managed to make it to the guard change ceremony at Buckingham Palace (which turned out to be quite useless). Of course, I also walked around an awfully crowded Oxford Street and to Harrods.
Sun Nov 27 14:33:04 2005 GMT: omniORB and Ice Performance Compared
Duncan Grisby has compared the performance of omniORB with Ice. Even though ZeroC claims that "Ice provides features that make it inherently faster than other middleware technologies, such as CORBA", Duncans comparison shows that omniORB beats Ice in most cases.
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
Thu Nov 10 20:21:25 2005 GMT: Visual C++ 2005
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
