Raible Designs

Speed up your site

Zeldman hooks us up with another cool web tool, WebSiteOptimization.com.

Andrew B. King, author of Speed Up Your Site: Web Site Optimization (New Riders: 2003) and founder of Webreference.com, announces a free new service for web designers. Submit your URL to the Web Page Analyzer and it will tally the weight of your markup, images, CSS and JavaScript, then offer advice on how to improve your download and display time.

Here are my results - looks like I have too much HTML. I think I'll cut my displayed number of posts from 20 to 10.

Gentoo Linux

A friend hooked me up today with some knowledge I didn't have. He told me about Gentoo Linux, which, according to him, is 3-4 times faster than any current Linux distribution! Wow - that's a LOT faster. This might mean that my 300 MHz, 256 MB (RAM) machine is usable again. Here's some snippets from our IM conversation.

You build from the command line through lynx, then update your kernel through a tool called 'emerge'. Want cvs? type 'emerge cvs'. Want jboss, type 'emerge jboss'. Basically, you emerge what you want and ignore all the rest of the stuff you typically get in a pre-canned, pre-built linux os.
...
works great on intel, sun, powerpc and the mac.
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no more rpms and tar balls. just emerge. Each week, if I want to update all the apps I have emerged on my machine, I type, as root, two commands "emerge sync" (updates my portage tree), then, "emerge -u world". This says, look at all the apps I've emerged, and update them. Emerge then finds the tar balls, pulls them down, unpacks, compiles into the kernel and goes onto the next one. Want OpenOffice? 'emerge openoffice' (this takes about 8 hours to compile).

Sounds very cool - has anyone tried it?

Where's Erik?

My best source of news (Erik Thauvin) is MIA. I hope everything's OK. Erik is at the top of my Blogrolling list, mainly because he's always on top of the latest tech news and he posts often. He hasn't posted since Friday and my blog reading just isn't the same without him.

Update: Go figure - whithin mere minutes of my posting this, Erik posts. Good to have you back Erik!

[ANNOUNCE] Tomcat 4.1.24 Released!

At least that's what Erik reports (it's not reported on Jakarta's site). [Download · Release Notes] I especially like the part about it being significantly faster than 4.1.18. I'll have to upgrade in the near future.

Life as a Contractor

This weeks sucks to be a contractor. It's a 2-day week and that's all I'm getting paid for - 2 days. Damnit, wish I was full-time. Then again, if I were making the big bucks, 2 days would be plenty to pay the mortgage. Alas, I am not - and I'm tempted to work this weekend. What the hell is wrong with me - work on the weekend?! I make fun of my friends when they work on the weekend - now I'm a hypocrite. I have a to do list that makes my weekend boring as all getout:

• work 10-12 hours at day job
• add user administration to struts-resume
• release appfuse
• finish new design prototype for client
• release displaytag (no one else seems to want to do it)
• clean the house before Julie gets home

No wonder I miss Julie and Abbie so much when they're gone - I sit in front of the fricken computer all the time! When I get out of the house (or simply off the computer), I find I miss them much less (it's been almost 2 weeks!). I might have to scrap my to do list (save the paid part - item 3) and get off the damn computer. Booking happy hour and ski dates shortly... ;-)

Apple to use Intel Processors?

Erik reports that Apple may switch from Motorola to Intel processors.

Dvorak: Apple will go Intel in 12-18 months.

Puleeze let this be true! I'd love to buy my next Apple and have it run on an Intel (3 GHz?) processor. Even better, I hope Microsoft makes VirtualPC as fast as a PC. Or will I be able to install Windows/Linux on a Intel-enabled Mac? That would be sweet!

Is the blizzard over?

I think the worst of the storm is over, it didn't snow all afternoon and most of the roads are snow-free. The only bad roads are in the neighborhoods. Driving into my house tonight reminded me of driving into the Cabin (in Montana) when I was a kid. I spent a couple of hours shoveling out the driveway today, and couldn't help the urge to digitize my work on video (QuickTime, 2.7 MB).

RE: Long live WROX.

Dave is optimistic about our Wrox Chapters. We received an e-mail over the weekend stating that we should wait a week or two to see how things shake out. My guess is, if we wait, nothing will come. Just a hunch. I've seen a lot of empty promises in my career and this definitely feels like one. I really, really hope it's not though. Thanks to all for the encouraging words about this book - I hope you can read it someday, and I also hope I can get a kickback from neglecting my wife and child through the Christmas Holiday. If all else fails, at least I won't be so excited about writing a book next time (if there is a next time) and maybe I'll learn to just say no.

The Trip Home

I'm in the Seattle airport right now. My flight to Denver is still planning to go, but I have my doubts. It departs in about 40 minutes. The only Alaskan Airlines flight out of Denver was cancelled this morning (due to weather). Listening to some passengers next to me - the rumor is that we're going to try to "bust in" through the cloud over Denver when there's a break. If there's no break, then we'll fly back to Salt Lake City to refuel, try again, and if no luck, we'll come back to Seattle. Man would that suck - let's hope we get in on the first try! I'd better charge up this laptop battery - maybe I should try to rent a movie somewhere or something.

This post was made possible by my Amex card and the Wayport network in this airport.

Update: It's been confirmed by the airline that the scenario I described above is indeed the plan. If we can't get into Denver, we'll refuel in Salt Lake City or Boise (Idaho), then they'll try again. If unsuccesfull, we'll return to Seattle and we're on our own for lodging and other ammenities tonight. The only good thing about this adventure - Alaska Airlines has free microbrews (beer) on all their flights. Too bad I get sick when I drink and fly. :(

What to do with my Chapters?

Julie suggested I just post them on this site. Then I got to thinking - what if all the authors made a PDF version of the book, and it was downloadable as the whole thing or as selected chapters. Let's say $5/chapter and you can pick and choose whichever ones you want. Sounds like a good idea, but the problem would be protecting the PDFs from being shipped around between friends. Or we could just give them away, in hopes that our knowledge would inspire others to hire us (as in a new job or a new book).

I don't know what to do, but I'd like to get my chapters out somehow. I'm afraid that if I just sit and wait, they'll never get out, and the technology will be old news shortly. The stuff I wrote about has staying power, but only until the next version of XDoclet and Struts.

I guess the good news is that I'll keep struts-resume up to date with the latest version, but the writing will be out of date by the end of the year.