Obviously I’ve been spending a bit of time tweaking Apache such that it is well optimized for working in a VPS environment. Truthfully though, Apache is a major resource hog. To be honest, I really can’t comprehend what it’s doing with all that memory it seems to hoard. One of the other major downsides to Apache is that it forks additional processes to handle server load, and processes are rather heavy (at least when compared to user threads).
Since I haven’t touched any C++ in about two months, I thought I’d try my hand at writing a quick web server to see if I can better understand ...
As you can see, I changed my theme around a bit tonight. I actually had something different going a few days ago, but decided to abandon it and go a slightly different route. I’m still tweaking the colors a bit and going through my old content and cleaning it up, but most of the functionality is here now. If you hit anything that’s broken, please let me know. ...
So I’ve had my website on Rimu for over a week now, and so far things are going quite well. I’ve actually had a few support requests in with them, mostly trivial items, and they’ve answered everything in about 30 minutes, which is great.
The one thing I’ve found out is that their base plan (which only included 160 MB of memory) just isn’t powerful enough to run more than a small WordPress site. I spent a bunch of time reducing the memory requirements of Apache and MySQL, but my efforts just weren’t successful. Every once and a while an application would crash with a kernel out of memory ...
I’ve been in Chilliwack close to two months now. It’s obviously a completely different lifestyle out here, one that I’m quite enjoying. I wake up every morning to an apartment that’s filled with light, and I go to sleep each night without the sound of loud sirens or drunken idiots screaming outside.
But without a doubt there’s one aspect of living out here that still seems unnatural — seeing children outside. Living in the downtown core of Vancouver you don’t really see a lot of kids. Sure, you see the odd infant, or on the weekend, a few kids going to the aquarium or what-not. But ...
Today is my mom’s 55th birthday, although she doesn’t look a day past 30! Last night we gathered over at her place for some prime rib and to sit around and have a few drinks.
When I gave my mom a hug at the end of the night she told me it’s been about 10 years since I’ve been able to make it to her birthday, something that hadn’t even crossed my mind until she had said it. But definitely one of the nice things about being back home is that attending family events like birthdays will be a whole lot easier for me.
So have a great day today mom, and enjoy your birthday! ...
About two years ago I decided I would test out Media Temple’s grid service package, mainly because it was highly recommended by WordPress users, and seemed to perform quite well. In fact, for the first few weeks I was a Grid Service user, I thought things ran actually pretty smoothly. Unfortunately though, over the next few months, things would degrade rather rapidly. My site was plagued by ever increasing latency, and would often go down for 4- 6 hours at a time due to MySQL outages or random, seemingly unannounced maintenance periods.
It got so bad at one point that I actually came to the ...
The $1 price point has long been touted as the holy grail for solar technology. At that price, it is basically comparable to fossil fuel based delivery of electricity, making it an economically viable replacement for current technologies. On Tuesday, that price point was finally reached. That doesn’t include the cost of installation currently, but it does show some real progress in that area. ...
That’s Rebecca and Teddy at my place in Chilliwack. Teddy was given to me by my grandma when I was less than a year old. I’ve had him ever since, and have been keeping him around for when my first kid is born. As a kid, Teddy and I went through lots of hard times, and it’s pretty encouraging to know he’s still around to see me through the bad times, even as an adult.
When my grandma went into surgery years ago, I thought I’d return the favour, and left Teddy under her arm in the recovery room at Chilliwack General. Since then, she’s made sure to see how he was doing from time to time, ...
I was doing a little research on carbon offsets this morning, and just for yucks, wanted to price out what it would cost to be a supplier of carbon offsets in Canada. There are various ways to offset carbon, but a fairly standard one is to plant trees in exchange for money. How many trees can you plant on an acre of land? Well, turns out this guy has it all figured out, at least for poplar trees. If you space them 10′ x 10′, you can get around 436 trees on an acre.
The average tree consumes about 1 ton of CO2 over it’s lifetime, which according to this website is around 80 years. So over ...
I saw this over on Matt’s blog and thought I should write about it too. Captured on digital film is the Vancouver police department tossing a pile of someone’s belongings into a garbage truck. The person who filmed the footage is David Eby, the Executive Director of the B.C. Civil Liberties Association.
No doubt, police officers have a difficult job. They are asked to protect, to serve, and to make real-time decisions that are never easy. That being said, given the current conditions in the lower mainland with respect to violence and gangs, one has to question the actions of these officers, ...
My walls in my new place are still pretty bare, and that’s something I’ve been trying to fix lately. I went down to Ikea a few weeks ago a bought a pile of frames, but unfortunately finding anything to put in them has proved to be fairly difficult.
The first problem is that I don’t really have great photo backups of shots I’ve taken. If I were smart, I would have been uploading everything to Flickr at full resolution so I could use that as my archive. Unfortunately, I haven’t done that, so most of my photo originals are scattered amongst various DVDs and directories. I’ve always found ...
A few years ago I sat down to write my very first WordPress plugin, and ended up writing Crossroads. My goal at the time was to integrate Flickr comments into the normal comments on my blog, which was something I ultimately did. Unfortunately though, some of the limitations of the Flickr API made that feature fairly slow to use, and so it’s something I ditched on my own blog a long time ago.
A few days ago I sat down and started working on version 2.0. It’s a 100% complete rewrite, which given the state of the old code is definitely something that’s going to improve it. I’m writing it ...
Last night I was fortunate enough to be invited to a social media gathering in the penthouse of the Loden Hotel In Vancouver. The reason for everyone coming together was to discuss how social media can help the BC Children’s Hospital annual “Chip’s Not Dead Yet” Memorial Mile fundraiser that takes place in Vancouver
The actual event is a one mile race where everyone is welcome to participate. Part of the fun is that people can dress up in whatever costumes they want and simply participate in an effort to help raise money for the children:
Think of this as part run, walk, parade and party. ...
This is actually a pretty big deal. Most people don’t realize it, but North America is one of the few places in the world that uses high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) to sweeten drinks and other items. Most other places in the world use pure glucose, which is the main sugar our bodies are built to run on. Fructose is far sweeter than glucose so you can use less of it to sweeten a product. High fructose corn syrup is typically composed of around 55% fructose and another 45% glucose. If you order a coca cola in the Caribbean, you’ll notice that is has a very different (and far more enjoyable IMO) ...
Well, given that Rebecca has Surrey covered in terms of blogging, I might as well take the reins here with Chilliwack. I’ve spent most of my time here at home since I moved back, but I’m going to start venturing out more and more.
I’ve been keeping my eye out for Wi-Fi spots in town, and wanted to present a list for anyone ever looking for where they are. I’ll keep updating this post over time as Chilliwack slowly emerges from the dark ages.
Starbucks out in Vedder Crossing – (paid hotspot) | map
Java Hut (near Future Shop) – (free hotspot) | web | map
Major Leagues 2 Sports Pub – ...
One of the reasons I ultimately moved back to Chilliwack is because I wanted to sort of take a well deserved rest from the last ten years of my life. Basically since leaving high school, my life has been one non-stop rollercoaster ride. My time in Ottawa was spent doing 60 hour weeks mostly at work, and I don’t even really remember that period of my life. During my master’s degree I was doing lots of research at school, and I also did a part time job on the side to help pay some bills. My first few years at CounterPath were crazy hectic as well, and most of us spent the first few years of ...
Well, well. After nearly a lifetime of waiting, Raymi and Phil have decided to officially tie the knot.
You guys are awesome, and I wish you nothing but happiness in the future! Congrats! ...
My friend Jason sent me a link to this video this morning, and I thought it was pretty cool. I contacted the guy who made it, and he gave me permission to show it here. It’s a time lapse out a window during an airplane trip.
Video by James Leng, All Rights Reserved. ...
At the current population growth rates, by the year 2500 people will be standing shoulder to shoulder on every piece of habitable land on this planet. So while our immediate problems have to do with global warming and obvious aggressions in various parts of the world, at some point population is going to become a focus as well.
It seems somewhat obvious to me that at some point there needs to be a type of population control on this planet. I’ve been racking my brain trying to figure out how to implement something like that that doesn’t have any massive moral implications, and truthfully, ...