Author: Ben

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Favorites from the Oscars

I don’t usually watch the Oscars, but Mandy loves watching for the dresses, so this year, I’m actually remembering to sit down and watch. I have to say, the opening was really very funny. Michael Moore being crushed by an Oliphant while criticizing the Hobbits for fighting a fictitious war; I was on the floor for that one. A couple other great quotes from Billy: “Thirteen years ago when I was hosting, things were so different. Bush was in office, the economy was tankiing and we were just coming out of a war with Iraq.” “Lord of the Rings, with 11 nominations, one for each ending.”

It also exposed me to a few movies I hadn’t heard of that I need to check out now, like “In America”, and reminded me that I really need to see “Lost in Translation” and Ken Wantanabe in “The Last Samurai.”

Now on to enjoy the acceptance speeches….

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The many faces of blowery

Some days, you’re just curious what google really know about you. I’ve done the standard google search for myself, but I hadn’t done the images.google.com search. Some highlights:

blowery as an austrailian footballer
blowery as a member of the John Leggott College Men’s Hockey Team

I always found the other blowerys on the net very interesting. When I try to register for things like my credit card account, or slashdot, or whatever, and the account name “blowery” is already taken, I’m always curious who got there first.

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Third Places

Rory mentioned something that
I really loved to learn about in a former life: Third
Places.  Third Places are basically the locations in a community where people
gather to talk and catch up and mingle, and really be a
community.  Many have talked about the sad loss of these Third Places in modern
society, with suburban sprawl and super-highways and hour-long, energy-draining commutes
from our First Place to our Second Place and back.

Personally, Tarrytown has been a great source of Third Places.  We have a wonderful
little downtown with some good restaurants and a good coffee bar.  We also have
a very social apartment building and Hackley School, which are extensions of our First
and Second places really, but also function as Third Places to some degree.

Where are your Third Places?

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7.1 Surround on the cheap?

Mike pointed me to an article over on Tom’s about the new Creative
DDTS-100 , a surround decoder that handles all the new formats that have
come out recently, like DTS ES and Dolby Digital EX, used on the recently released
Lord of the Rings DVDs.  The cool thing about this decoder is that for comparatively
little money, you can have a system that sounds great and supports the latest and
greatest for decoding surround sound.  If I didn’t already have my surround
system, I might consider this setup.  It would probably go over better with my
resident interior decorator, as the speakers are all quite a bit smaller and it wouldn’t
take up the majority of the living room…

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HttpCompressionModule under stress

I just got this mail from someone who’s using my HttpCompressionModule. 
He took it upon himself to do some performance testing on the module and here are
the results:

Tool:
Microsoft’s free “Web Application Stress” tool.

Network:
WAS ran on a server with a T-3 Internet connection to the test server.

Test Server:
Windows 2003 Server
~1800 MHz AMD CPU
500 Megs RAM

WAS Settings:
All default except:
Stress Level (threads) 60
2 sockets per thread
Test Run Time: 3 mins

RESULTS:
Without HttpCompressionModule
CPU Averaged 31%
Number of hits:              
23,908
Requests per Second:          133.37
TTLB (Time to Last byte) Avg: 639.31
Resultant File Size: 6807 bytes

WITH HttpCompressionModule
(deflate and gzip nearly same results)
CPU Averaged 97%
Number of hits:              
56,221
Requests per Second:          311
TTLB (Time to Last byte) Avg: 317.17
Resultant File Size : 1758 bytes

Interesting!