We recently returned from a trip to Mexico and I’ve started organizing the pictures from the trip.
Since that will take a while, I decided to post some panorama’s of the ruins of Tulum. Click on
the smaller images to see a larger version.

4097|400
4101|400
4104|400

Today was the official launch of Credant Technologies.
For those of you who don’t know, this is the company I went to work for after leaving the last one.
The “coming out” press release is entitled CREDANT TECHNOLOGIES (tm) First to Deliver Trusted Computing for Mobile Enterprises.

So for those of you have been wondering what the heck I’m working on, some information is now available.

Last night we were working late in the yard when this toad appears. Apparently he
wanted some affection, because he kept trying to climb up into Laura’s lap while
she was pruning plants. Since she was in a working mood, she wasn’t thrilled about
having him interfere.

The image was taken (2272x1704 with super fine compression, ISO 50, f 2.5) using my Canon G2.

2874

function sister() {
cd “`pwd | sed -e s/$1/$2/`”
}

function sist() {
sister main test
}

function sism() {
sister test main
}

It’s sometimes hard to believe that we actually live in a suburban neighborhood.
In the "I wish I had my camera" department, I was greeted by the honking of two canadian geese as they flew by me about 15 feet off the ground. Today, I walked up to a tree in our back yard and found a nesting dove.

It took a while to get these pictures, but in the end, she cooperated and provided me with the opportunity to share them with you.

It was a cold winter night when an opossum decided to visit us. Laura saw him walking around on our porch. When I got outside, he moved up into the tree and posed for these pictures.

I’ve added archives of past articles to the site. It will take me a while to get the templates configured like I want them, but I noticed that some information was dropping out google so I wanted to get it back in.

Before you say…”you really should pay more attention”, I just want you to know
I’ve been REALLY swamped at work. We have a really important deadline
looming so I had to let some things slide. On to the mystery!

For the last couple of weeks I’ve been wondering why this website has been
taking 5 to 6 seconds to return a page. This website and
John’s are
webapps under Tomcat 3.2.2 and have been running that way for quite a while.
When we first set up our sites, I remember being impressed with the
responsiveness of Tomcat. But lately, it has been depressingly slow and I
just couldn’t imagine why. The normal Apache sites were responding very
nicely, but the JSP based sites were sluggish.

Having a hard time waking up this morning, I decided to do a little
sleuthing. I spent a good deal of time with
my friends google and the Tomcat mailing list archives and found absolutely
nothing that was related to my problem. Finally waking up at the office and
getting busy, I forgot my search … for a while.

Having a few extra minutes before bedtime, I decided to explore the server. Acting on a
whim, I decided to check disk utilization. At this point in my story most of you
probably just slapped you head and said “DUH! What do you expect!” and you’d
be right /var was out of space.

Knowing how expensive exceptions can be in general, and especially since
Tomcat was logging to /var I decided to do some spring cleaning. After
moving the logs to another filesystem for archiving, I
restarted the server and then slapped my own head.

My website returned in < 3 seconds on the first pull and < 2 seconds on the second.
John’s site being lighter weight than mine
now has a sub-second response time! All this time I had been worrying about
Tomcat as a deployment platform, and it was simple sloth (on my part) that
caused the whole thing.

Ok, normally, I never use the work “Rocks” in a sentence unless I’m telling a bunch of kids to stop throwing them, but it this case I made an exception. In general, cygwin (you can find it at http://sources.redhat.com/cygwin) provides a unix type environment under windows. Which by itself, is a major plus.

What prompted today’s outburst was a simple question I asked…”I wonder if it is possible to run sshd under Win2K/XP”? The simple answer is YES. Using google, I found this link http://www-co.ch.cam.ac.uk/facilities/misc/cygwin.html which gives a quick walk through of how to do it. Now I can access my box from the network using command line tools over a secure channel instead of relying on GUI tools. Once again, the open source movement comes through.

Every once in a while, you find an article on Microsoft’s knowledge base that actually helps answer questions you’ve had for a long time. While researching why a process was eating up so much of my CPU I found the following article - A Description of Svchost.exe in Windows XP (Q314056).

For years I’ve wondered how to find out what tasks were behind svchost.exe; this article shows you how. At a command prompt simply type tasklist /svc.

I discovered a good discussion on Tapestry vs Struts at The Server Side. Tapestry 2.0 has just been released and is now available. I haven’t had time to do a review, but it does look like the component approach of Tapestry has some real benefits.