Author: Ben

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?

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…

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!

From Florin
Lazar’s WebLog, a link to a piece
on grey market items and the crazy prices you sometimes find from online retailers. 
I’ve dealt with similar vendors for computer parts in the past, and my only
advice is to do some research on whomever you’re going to buy from first and
if you have any doubts at all, order from a reputable vendor instead.  The extra
money is not worth the headache of unusable rebates, void warranties, and no customer
support. 

 From jwz & Wired:

“Adobe Systems acknowledged Friday it quietly added technology to the
world’s best-known graphics software at the request of government regulators and international
bankers to prevent consumers from making copies of the world’s major currencies.”