PakYak

Well, I have been talking about making a PakYak for a while now. This weekend, and to some degree even more so tonight, I started on it.
 This weekend I cut down a sheet of 1/2 inch Birch plywood into 1 inch strips and a 2 inch strip with a bit left over. Hence the tablesaw.

 I bundled up the 1 inch pieces into groups of 8 like this and tied them together so that they wouldn't warp standing up in the corner like they are. Well, that's the theory. They are also easier to handle this way.

 The sheet of plywood I got looks to be a "bad" piece for what I am doing. I am looking for strength, and voids in the plys of wood weaken the piece. Well my sheet looks to have several voids all at the same spot dead center in the middle of the board. A firm flex breaks the piece right in half. I guess this made it easier to handle the pieces for cutting. But I need a lot of 24 inch long pieces and with an inch unusable in the middle, I can only get two 24 inch pieces out of my 8 foot length! How frustrating.

 This is about half of a complete boat's worth of pieces. I need to cut a dozen and a half 2 foot long pieces and a handful of little pieces between 7 and 4 inches yet.

Next step. drilling and shaping. They are all to be rounded with a 1/4 inch bevel. I am going to do this with a block plane instead of a router. The big reason is that the table saw ate up my power-tool allotment for a while and I don't have a place to keep the saw, much less a table router as well. I also just like the sound of a good sharp block plane. That sizzle and pile of shavings just really adds a hand crafted feeling to the piece. Between cutting the pieces to length with a hand saw, and shaping all the edges by hand my need to "Make something with my hands" should be satisfied.

Table Saw

 Katie dropped in Thursday night unannounced. Lucky me! She had her brother's truck, so after I took her to lunch today at a chinese restaraunt, we went to Lowes to pick up a table saw I have been looking at for a few weeks now and a sheet of plywood. The last saw they had. Every other person who walks through that door is likely to toss the box that the saw came in, but I am only going to use the thing every six months or so, right? Of COURSE my box is completely mangled. No point tearing the thing down and re-packing it for storage now.
 The saw is a "contractors" saw, so it is designed to be portable. The legs fold up, and it has a handle and wheels so it can be pushed around where you want it. Really quite slick. It weighs in at a trim 73 pounds. I am not going to want to put it up on a shelf or anything, but it is managable.
 The table expands to a pretty big size. The table goes out like 16" before you can expand the table out with the rip fence on it. Pretty cool. There is a section in back to help hold the material as well. I also picked up 2 adjustable, folding roller stands. I knew I was going to have trouble manhandling a sheet of plywood by myself. I am likely to go get 2 more if I ever need to do a full sheet of plywood by myself again.
 This is all that is left of my $26.95 peice of 1/2 inch birch plywood. I am cutting it into 1 inch strips to make the frame of a folding kayak I am going to make. I made $2.21 worth of sawdust in the dust collector which caught probably 3/4 of the sawdust and on the ground. I had to go to Target and get a little hand broom to clean off the saw and clean up my mess.

I am tired. I walked about 5 miles today between going to Target and Skyline for supper, plus I was on my feet all afternoon assembling and working that saw - I am used to sitting on my duff all day long.

Oh yeah! I put the whole saw together and only had one little un-opened baggy of spare parts! (I think they are adjustment shims to square up the saw blade to the table incase it is off. The instructions don't mention them beyond the parts list)

Library Thing

Ok, I have been a bit quite lately, I have been working on... stuff. You shall see, it's the biggest thing since, well, I moved to Florida.

Anyway, I digress, I have added a new feature to my blog. I have a random list of books that I own courtesy of Library Thing in the narrow column. You can also search my current books.

I had ran across them a while ago, how long ago, I don't remember, but it is that long ago (what, 3 minutes some of my friends may claim?). I have been meaning to check them out and whatnot, so tonight I did.

I found a use for my CueCat. That's right, they allow you to scan in the ISBN bar codes with your CueCat directly. How is THAT for convenient. Talk about a BFO (blinding flash of the obvious). Pure Genius! The only thing I saw about it, is that I was mentally saying "beep" in my head every time I scanned a bar code. I was running around my apartment (read: stand up, reach, sit down) thinking "beep beep beep this is so cool beep beep".

Now, too bad most of my books are in storage, at my folks place, etc. Now I have yet another reason to go back to Barnes & Noble's and get more!

Ten Dollar Dates

A friend of mine has started a new website. The site is all about inexpensive date ideas. http://www.tendollardates.com/

I think this may be an excellent resource for us guys to get a woman's perspective on what we can do to be sweet. Cheap.

This should be an excellent resource for me down the road - good thing Katie doesn't know about the site yet. I am going to subscribe to the RSS feed and get my daily dose of do-good ideas.

Lets all leave comments or trackbacks, and let her know we are interested so she gets into the habit of posting an idea a day. If you have any suggestions, feel free to leave a comment here with them or email them to me and I will forward them on to her.

Homepage Caching

I have been having a problem at work. My homepage is now getting 100,000 hits a month. My home page is big unfortunately, about 43Kb plus auxiliary files. But the worst part is the 10 different calls to the database under 5 different modules, each with it's own connection to the DB. This racks up some serious MySQL disk IO along with logs, and all that other stuff. Needless to say, I have been encountering some minor performance issues.

Simple solution is to cache the homepage.

I want to be able to regenerate the homepage whenever I want. I want the homepage to regenerate itself periodically, especially immediately into a new day as much of the content on the homepage is date specific. I don't want to do any extra work to process this cache.

For my implementation, I am taking advantage of the fact that Apache will search for an index page: index.html, index.php, default,htm etc. I let index.html be my rendered, static copy of my homepage with index.php being the dynamic version. The big trick is that every time index.php is called, it writes out to index.html. Now it's just a matter of getting index.php called at appropriate times.

In index.php, I am using php's output buffering to capture the content of the homepage. I then write that buffer, unchanged, out to index.html and to the web-browser.

At the top of my homepage you would see the following:

/* Output Buffer
* We are doing something a bit odd here. The home page is the most hit page on the site. There are a LOT of calls on the home page to database, etc.
*
* In an attempt to make the server load go down, this index.php file will write out an index.html file as a static file
* This takes advantage of the fact that apache is looking for index.html before index.php
* running index.php will create index.html
* removing index.html will cause index.php to run and create index.html
*
* A cronjob removes index.html hourly
* Admin tools that modify data that could be displayed on the homepage should cause to have deleted index.html
*
* You can manually force an update to index.html by loading www.r-world.com/index.php (a clever way is to have the webmaster bookmark index.php as his start page.)
*
*/

function callback($buffer)
{
// lets write this page out to index.html.
$indexbufferfilename = 'index.html';

$indexbuffererror = '';

if (!$handle = fopen($indexbufferfilename, 'w')){
$indexbuffererror .= "Cannot open file ($indexbufferfilename)n";
exit;
}

if (fwrite($handle, $buffer) === FALSE) {
$indexbuffererror.= "Cannot write to file ($indexbufferfilename)n";
exit;
}

//echo "Success, wrote ($somecontent) to file($indexbufferfilename)";

fclose($handle);

if(!empty($indexbuffererror))
{
mail('webmaster@r-world.com', "Error in creating homepage", $indexbuffererror);
}

// send the page to the browser
return $buffer;

}

ob_start("callback");

I then have the content of my homepage. I then end the page with a ob_end_flush(); as the very last line of code on the page.

This takes care of the creating of the homepage cache.

In order to dynamically have the cache created, I added a few lines of mod_rewrite to my .htaccess file that will check to see if index.html exists and has something in it or it calls an alternate file, my index.php. I found the idea on theApache1.3 URL Rewriting Guide.

My .htaccess file looks like:


Directory Index index.html index.php

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-s
RewriteRule ^index.html$ index.php [L]


I have several administration tools to edit data that is being displayed on the homepage. I have added an include to a file that simply deletes the index.html page. Now, whenever I modify data that may be displayed on the homepage, it is automatically displayed on the homepage as the homepage is re-created. I also have a cronjob that runs this file at the top of every hour.

As for how well it works. My average number of MySQL connections per second fell from 32 to 26 for a 20% reduction in MySQL calls. The CPU usage used by MySQL fell a couple of percentage points on the server, as several of the SQL statements for the homepage are 7 SELECT UNIONs that aren't exactly trivial. The system Load Average also dropped about 33% as MySQL and apache aren't hitting the drive near as much anymore.

The best part is that the PHP processing time has been taken out of the Load Time for the homepage. 1 poor sod per hour, and the first person to get the latest update will need to wait for the PHP processing (which everyone used to do anyhow) and writing out to disk. I also set me and my bosses bookmarks to load the index.php version of the page as whenever one of the two of us are looking at the site, we are likely looking to verify a change, and this will force an update.

Clever, eh?

Florida Renaissance Festival

 I went to the Florida Renaissance Festival this sunday with a bunch of friends. It was a lot of fun. One of the gals was ambushed by a groveling poet reciting the virtues of her feet. The falconer's falcon flew away. I got sunburned. All in all, a lot of fun.
 

Hawking Technologies USB 804.11G wireless adapter.

 
A friend of mine was looking for a Wireless card for her computer. I saw this at CompUSA and recomended it to her. She hasn't picked it up yet, but when she does I will report here how well it worked for her.

I think I want one of these. The USB form factor is really nice, no cracking a case and using up a PCI slot. I like how it has a removeable (and extendable) antenna. I also think that the 2 inches that the length of the USB moves the antenna away from the computer case would probably help with interference. You could also plug the USB devise into a hub or at the end of an extension cable to optimize location for reception. All in all, I like it. Now if they would only add a gig of memory to the device, and install the drivers right on the unit.

Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us

I stumbled on this video on You Tube. I think this is exactly what You Tube is about - enabling somebody to create and share their insights in a visually stimulating fashion. This is that pearl dredged out of the ocean.

I set back and just think WOW.

I can't wait for the final edition.

Sautéed green beans with shaved asiago cheese

Sautéed green beans with shaved asiago cheese

This little gem of a recipe is from a friend at work. Yes, That friend, of MANGIAA fame. She is so funny, I know she loves to cook Italian, so I always ask her for recipes and advice. She gets SO excited that she brings in a can of this, or a jar of that which is impossible to find in a store. This time she gave me a jar of Alessi Ira Diavolo Italian Red Chili in Extra Virgion Olive Oil. This stuff is freak'n awesome man. It has great heat without tasting like your chewing on a jar of Tabasco sauce. I opened it when she gave it to me, touched the inside of the lid and stuck my finger in my mouth. WOW, that lit me up pretty good. I think I am going to like this stuff.

Anyway, this is one of the two awesome sounding recipes that she gave me for tonight's supper club.

One large bag of green beans
4 cloves garlic sliced extra extra paper thin
Imported asiago cheese in a wedge
Extra virgin Olive oil - coat the bottom of the pan about ¾ of an inch
1 cup dry white wine
Kosher Salt

In a large frying pan on med-high heat sauté garlic in olive oil until lightly toasted golden brown.

Add 2-3 chili peppers or three drops of the pepper oil to make it hotter.

Add green beans. Toss until green beans are fully coated with the oil.

Add wine and put heat on high stirring frequently until wine is reduced by half and beans are still firm add kosher salt to taste.

Put beans in a warm serving plate (you can put platter in a warm oven until beans are ready).

Shave large thick ribbons of asiago over beans with a cheese shaver or knife and serve.


Cooking Tips:
Wash and clean green beans before you put the garlic on. I couldn't clean the beans fast enough, and the first couple of handfuls that went in got a little over cooked.
I like my beans still crunchy. I overcooked mine.

HDR Video Camera for Automotive Use

I want to put a video camera into my car so I can have it take photos and video for my car blog.

I would want it to have maybe 24 hours of recording time set up so it it erases the oldest footage automatically. It would be set up so that it talks to the main computers in the house at night when the car is in the garage and moves any video footage over. I may have a button on the dash to flag important parts, such as an interesting car, license plate, or somebody doing something stupid.

The hardest part of this is getting video of stuff at night. The camera would either adjust for the darkness and the lights would completely blow out the image, or the camera would adjust for the lights, and everything else would be pitch black.

I am thinking that the video source could possibly alternate between the 2 extremes, every other frame. Basically half the frames would be balanced for the darkness, and the other half would be balanced for the lights. You could then take any 2 frames and create a High Dynamic Range HDR a composite image together to create an image that is usable. You could even possibly HDR merge a video together merging each frame into the following frame. It may be easiest to just cut the final frame rate in half if this was done.

I don't know if the camera CCDs are tuned at the hardware level or by software.

Maybe 2 cameras placed very close together so the parallax is minimal? Have the cameras manually set to +4 and -4 or something? No, probably would need to be hard set for night time traffic. Maybe 3 cameras, one allowed to auto-adjust, and the other two set up for night.

Interesting Bits

I have added a new feature to my website. It is the "Interesting Bits" section at the end of the narrow side column, below my Del.icio.us bookmarks. This is a running list of the last 10 blog posts that I have decided to share in Google Reader. This is going to be stuff that is interesting to me for whatever reason. Some of you have similar interests to me, and this is a way to share the articles I found interesting.

I am currently subscribed to 15 different blogs, and the posts listed would be the best out of all of them.

Car Phones

I recently read an article on cell phone usage while driving and I think I figured out part of the why cell phones and driving don't go well together.

First, the difference between holding the phone and the hands free set.
Driving with the hands free set allows both hands for the wheel. This most closely emulates having a person in the car with you. I even notice a concentration difference between having the set on my right ear (easier) and my left ear(seems harder) probably because I am more used to having the passenger on my right side.
As for hand-holding the phone, I think this shifts your focus from the steering wheel and driving to your phone and the conversation. I seem to "loose" where I am at much more often with the phone in hand.

Needless to say, I try hard to not drive hand holding the phone, but when I need directions, I find that I miss turns more often and have a harder time reading the road signs with the phone in hand then with a hands free set.

Now as for why having a passenger is better. I think the reason is the passenger is participatory with the driving. The report even mentions that the conversation switches to current the traffic twice as frequently with the passengers then when on the phone. I also believe that passengers help navigate. I know I ask my passengers to play an active role in navigation when I am driving to a new location.

For example, I was talking to Katie tonight on the phone on my way home from some friends' house. Traffic was pretty bad (probably post Superbowl traffic) and it was wet and rainy. I shifted focus from my conversation to completely focus on the road while navigation my exit. Katie kept talking, oblivious that I had tuned her out. If she had been in the car, she would have noticed and paused the conversation until I was through the intersection. I think this example shows how phone conversations while driving can be distracting.

What do you think?

Beer Cheese Potato Broccoli Soup

Beer Cheese Potato Broccoli Soup

Quick, Superbowl Sunday, you need to bring a dish to a party where there will be a dozen HUNGRY people. What do you do?

Bear Creek Soup to the rescue!

2 packages of Bear Creek Cheddar Potato Soup.
1 head fresh broccoli
1 pound of shredded cheese
1 bottle beer.

In large crock-pot, add 15 (of the requested 16) cups hot water, bottle of beer, and 2 packages of soup. Cut up broccoli into small pieces and add to soup.

Cook on high for a while. Probably a couple of hours. So you can start this and forget it a while ahead of time.