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Another URL shortening service!

Nothing at all new here—but I thought it useful to point out another way to turn long URLs into short ones, so you can paste links into emails without them wrapping (and therefore becoming unusable).

Bookmark this one, because it belongs to a friend. Just visit the site, enter the URL you want to abbreviate, and there you go!

You receive a new short URL that should last forever. If you have firefox, it can also be added to your browser toolbar via Javascript—which makes the whole thing even easier.

Anyway, shorten that URL by clicking here.

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Posted 22 October 2007 § Miscellaneous ‡ Comments (0)



LinkBag, a new bookmarking service

Keeping abreast of the huge number of new web-based applications that are appearing every day is, frankly, an impossible job—not one that I would want to undertake. But as there are some very interesting betas around and its nice to lazily keep an eye on what’s going down.

I have recently discovered a new bookmarking service called LinkBag. LinkBag is new and is currently in beta, but is promising in its simplicity! Linkbag allows you to save and share web sites and pages of interest much the same way Del.icio.us does. Users can ‘bag’ a site, annotate it, and save it to a group of similar sites.

For example, here’s my Linkbag.

Have a taste for bookmarking and organizing a large number of Web sites? Linkbag can whet that appetite, giving you simple tools to organize those pages, access them later from any Web browser, and share what you save with other users or on your blog. Plus, you can tap into the Linkbag community to find sites that other users have saved. I find it to be a lot more delicious than some tools out there—but then maybe I’m a little biased! Not because it offers a greater feature set, but because it retains the simplicity and grace of the aforementioned website.

To get started, just visit Linkbag to create a free account, verify it, and log in. You can add new bookmarks individually within a simple form at Linkbag, or drag a bookmarklet to your browser’s bookmark/links toolbar, so that you can click Post To Linkbag without leaving the window. It’s pretty cool.

Saving sites is made simple by the use of downloadable browser buttons. An RSS feed is available for your links and a forthcoming widget can be displayed on your web site or blog, previewing your most recent bookmarks. Although very similar to other bookmarking services in its functionality, LinkBag is a very nice addition. LinkBag also has the edge on other services with its aesthetically pleasing and simple interface.

The text-and-white-space interface of Linkbag remains monochromatic with a touch of blue, which is simple in its execution. The overall lack of design means Linkbag loads in a snap, so you don’t have to wait for big images to appear if you’re stuck with a dial-up connection.

Text ads appear within the Linkbag site, but they’re pretty low-key.

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Posted 17 October 2007 § Interweb ‡ Comments (0)



Happy Bug

Snapped on my cameraphone at the corner of Fairview and Guelph Line around 2pm.

Happy Bug

That’s a photo on the door (I think) of Barbara Eden from “I Dream of Jeannie“

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Posted 13 October 2007 § Moblogging ‡ Comments (0)

Death of the hyphen…

Of primary interest to me, as of late, is the use of the hyphen—particularly as it relates to foreign words (especially Japanese)—as we work through Yoko Danno’s translation of the Kojiki. I prefer to use them only where it is established convention to do so or where omission would result in ambiguity or confusion. My mantra: when in doubt, leave it out!

However, it’s a different kind of game when dealing with foreign words in english — I have learned that, wherever possible, hyphenated forms of Japanese terms should be avoided. Instead, we’ve aimed to treat the hyphenated word as a single compound word. This is because we, in the West, have a strange understanding of kanji as a written language, which has led to the improper usage of the hyphen within the various transliterations.

The concept of placing two or more representational characters together to form a new word or idea, is no different than stringing letters of an alphabet together to form new words. We don’t write “w-o-r-d-s” on a page, neither do the Japanese use hyphens to connect multiple kanji together to form words.

Regardless, right or wrong, the hyphen has become ubiquitous in english when faced with non-romanized characters! Let’s get rid of it, I say! Well, we are making good strides — according to the Quill & Quire’s blog—about 16,000 hyphens have been eliminated in the new edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, a scaled-down version of the 20-volume OED, The New York Times reports.

What’s getting the heave are most hyphens linking the halves of a compound noun. Some, like “ice cream,” “fig leaf,” “hobby horse” and “water bed,” have been fractured into two words, while many others, like “bumblebee,” “crybaby” and “pigeonhole,” have been squeezed into one.

Check out the excerpt here.

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Posted 12 October 2007 § Copyediting ‡ Comments (1)

Trying to determine the best maxclients setting…

… is really difficult!

I have a Plesk box with Apache 2. The server doesn’t take a lot of hits, but runs a lot of scripts, so its pretty memory intensive. However, the load isn’t too high. I am trying to determine what are the best setting for my prefork MPM settings. I am getting conflicting suggestions on MaxClients.

I’ve learned that MaxClients limits the number of children Apache creates to handle requests. Each child only accepts one connection at a time and so these ‘children’ should equal the total number of concurrent connections.

Setting this too low has a very negative effect on performance. While all clients are busy handling connections, new connections will be put in the TCP queue and eventually timeout, while the machine itself will seem perfectly responsive and fast.

I’ve learned that it is generally a good idea to set MaxClients as high as the machine can handle in terms of memory. However, setting it too high will cause the machine to swap memory between hard ram and cache needlessly, which effectively kills performance.

I found this on ye old interweb, from Webmonkey:

The single biggest hardware issue affecting Web server performance is RAM. A Web server should never, ever, have to swap. Swapping increases the latency of each request beyond a point that users consider “fast enough.” This causes users to hit Stop and Reload, further increasing the load. You can, and should, control the MaxClients setting so that your server does not spawn so many children that it starts swapping.

Anyway — any suggestions for my Maxclients setting? Anyway, I created a LinkBag full of Apache performance tuning tips, as I’ve been reading through the interweb. It’s here, check it out! And feel free to comment if you have any suggestions.

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Posted 12 October 2007 § Interweb ‡ Comments (1)