Tim's Bits and Pieces

Poor Octopus

Timothy Pollard — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 09:03:57 EST

Exhausted octopus dies picking Oz election result.

Speedup of Trac Static Content

Timothy Pollard — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 19:36:37 EST

At work I recently spent some time working on getting our hosted Trac to run faster. I found one simple little trick that gave up to a 20% speed improvement, so I thought I'd share it here.

The basic idea is that Trac has a lot of overhead due to executing a pile of Python code for each requested file including static content like the logos, background images, CSS, etc. If you tell Apache just to skip the Python code for the static content you can save a lot of time and processing power. All the default static content is under "/python/library/path/site-packages/trac/htdocs" which Trac servers up as "/chrome/common/". Basically a request for http://server.com/trac/chrome/common/logo.png will get a file from somewhere like /usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/trac/htdocs/logo.png on the harddisk. To skip Trac for this we want to add something like the following to the Apache configuration (AliasMatch is part of mod_alias):

	AliasMatch ^/(.+)/chrome/common(.*) /usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/trac/htdocs$2

This matches any request for a path that matches /something/chrome/common/something_else, and then sends back the file located at /usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/trac/htdocs/something_else; preventing the Trac Python code from running. Since there is about a dozen images, CSS files, and JavaScript files for each Trac page the time saved by this very quickly adds up.

The Stupidest Thing on the Internet Ever

Timothy Pollard — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 11:56:02 EST

A review God's Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science. I strongly recommend reading this post; It's both entertaining and educational. Note the title of this post is not a reference to Author himself, but rather something he talks about in his post (about a third of the way down).

I also recommend the review of God's Battalions: The Case for the Crusades by the same author. It was also an eye opener, but I was a bit more uncomfortable reading it; mostly because I actually agreed [Past tense is intentional] with the Author of the book he was reviewing.

Hattip to TJIC for pointing out that blog.

Henry Review Income Tax Recommendation

Timothy Pollard — Mon, 9 Aug 2010 21:48:48 EST

Apparently the Coalition is thinking about looking into implementing one of the recommendations of the Henry Review [of the Australian taxation system] for a [pseudo-]flat tax rate. I think this is a great idea, and I hope they do implement it.

Hattip to Menzies House.

Astronauts' Insurance

Timothy Pollard — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 11:28:57 EST

This is rather interesting.

Hattip to Menzies' House