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| Wednesday, July 1st, 2009 | | 10:24 am |
| | 1:43 am |
Prefetching CSS, JS and JPG can save you seconds
I spent a fun couple of hours tonight tinkering with link prefetching and preloaded Javascript on wikifur.com. The idea is to use the time between the user seeing the front page and them clicking a language to download a few of the files we know they'll need - rather than having to load the page, figure out what other files are needed, then open connections and load them while the user waits. In ideal circumstances, fr/de/ru/es.wikifur.com et. al. now display in under half a second for users who've never visited before if they go via the front page. Firefox users avoid the distraction of the header loading in the background, too, which can make it seem slower than it is. ( Here's how it works... )On an unrelated note, I wonder when phishers are going to realize that it's a bit of a giveaway to send mail in English using Cyrillic encoding . . . Current Mood:  tired | | Tuesday, June 30th, 2009 | | 11:03 am |
| | Wednesday, June 24th, 2009 | | 11:53 am |
Google wants to speed up the web
Looks like Google feels as I do - speed matters! They're offering a multitude of tips, and asking for more ideas. Personally, I'd like to see wider use of input decompression. They have their own reasons, of course - to start with, a faster web means faster updates for them (Googlebot is WikiFur's largest single user by a wide margin, making 42,118 hits so far to our non-English projects this month alone). Edit: Found a way to save a bunch of bytes in the header of every MediaWiki page - which comes to over 10Gb/day for Wikipedia, plus associated cache space. Happy norn is happy. :-) Current Mood:  hopeful | | Sunday, June 21st, 2009 | | 4:58 pm |
Coding, coding, coding . . .
I had a fun time adding interlanguage search to WikiFur this weekend. It's a bit of a hack - it only searches English, for a start - but it's what we need . . . and given that PHP is not my first language, I was happy to get it doing anything. The alternative was Lucene search, which would be overkill right now. I also snuck in links to article lists on wikifur.com. Current Mood:  productive | | Sunday, June 14th, 2009 | | 8:31 pm |
Anthrocon room slot free
I have one room slot free for Anthrocon from Thursday night to Monday morning in the Westin (main) hotel. $131 for all four nights, or proportionately less if you're only staying for three. Bed space can be arranged - there should be only four people in the room and it's got two beds. Anyone interested? | | Monday, June 8th, 2009 | | 5:46 pm |
| | Sunday, June 7th, 2009 | | 2:02 am |
Emoji bring pawprints, pouting cat faces to Unicode
While looking for a Unicode code point for "paw", I came across the proposal for a standard for "emoji" characters ( more info), which do indeed include PAW PRINT. The proposal also includes many other amusing code points, including SEE/HEAR/SPEAK NO EVIL MONKEY, WOMAN WITH BUNNY EARS, POUTING CAT FACE, FLEXED BICEP, FACE SCREAMING IN FEAR . . . and, yes LOVE HOTEL. More controversially, it also includes points like WESTERN PERSON and MAN WITH GUA PI MAO (which came after several debates about the cultural sensitivity of BLOND PERSON and MAN WITH LONG MOUSTACHE [aka Chinese person]). Apparently some have come to the iPhone. On the wiki side of things, we've finally started to move languages, although English is going to be a little trickier. Current Mood: amused | | Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009 | | 3:57 pm |
Sharing localisations between MediaWiki instances
MediaWiki has a large number of translations. Individually, they are not large; about 200KB each (300KB for Russian; Chinese totals 1.2MB in six files + 1MB of conversion tables). Unfortunately, if (say) a Russian user visits wikis in other languages, it caches a copy of the Russian translation for each wiki visited. Normally, this is what you want. However, if you have ten wikis on one machine, sharing the same cache, all running the same version of MediaWiki, it's just wasted space - the contents will be the same. Instead of marking each translation's cache entry with the name of the database, we now use the pool database name instead. (This is also how we share compiled PHP bytecode - it lets us keep the production and test versions of the wikis separate.) We did the same with the "fallback" cache entries, which say what language to use if there is no translation. This cut our cache usage by about 3-4Mb, decreases future usage, and sped up access to all cache entries (each is an item in a linked list; walking it takes time with lots of entries). ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) timduru hosts several other servers on that machine, so every little helps. As a bonus, it should now be possible to avoid caching the files with each language's messages in (as they only need to be loaded once) - and each of these is twice as large as the messages inside. Savings lead to more savings! For the 90% of you who don't know what I'm talking about, here's some pretty pictures. Current Mood: accomplished | | Wednesday, May 27th, 2009 | | 5:19 pm |
| | Friday, May 22nd, 2009 | | 4:19 pm |
| | Friday, May 15th, 2009 | | 3:17 am |
Timing Social Security for fun and profit
I've adjusted my withholdings in previous years to avoid giving the government an interest-free loan. But did you know you can do the reverse once you turn 62? Sign up for Social Security, invest the income, and then pay it back by the end of the year - pocketing the difference - without permanently affecting the amount you can claim once you turn 65. | | Thursday, May 14th, 2009 | | 1:04 pm |
| | Friday, April 17th, 2009 | | 11:14 am |
Furries run the Internets
Something that appears to have been missed by the rest of the world: Baidu, arguably the number-one search engine in China, has a blue paw right in its logo. Coincidence? I think not . . . In other news, the ToneMatrix is pretty neat, although it jars nastily if the browser is doing anything else. Current Mood: amused | | Tuesday, April 14th, 2009 | | 11:33 am |
When it comes to rebates, pestering pays off
About four months ago, I bought nine 4GB Sandisk SD cards for Christmas presents. My co-workers thought I was crazy - until I told them about the $60 rebate for each of three sets of three cards. Amazingly, I found a reputable retailer selling the cards for $19.95 including shipping - free after rebate - so, naturally, I bought as many as I could. ( Of course, there was a catch. )Edit: And on May 11, the card arrives, valid through September! Mission accomplished. | | Thursday, April 9th, 2009 | | 2:56 pm |
| You Are a Pirate |  You have learned that you must rely on yourself, and yourself alone, to live a happy life.
You are understand the world better than most people you know. You are very perceptive and intuitive.
You need lots of space to think. If you don't get the space you need, you're likely to bite someone's head off.
Because you are so thoughtful and solitary, people find you to be intense and mysterious. You're even seen as intimidating. |
What Criminal Are You?OK, so I didn't like any of the cat options . . . Current Mood: naughtyCurrent Music: Lazytown - You Are A Pirate | | Sunday, April 5th, 2009 | | 7:19 pm |
| | Saturday, April 4th, 2009 | | 9:04 pm |
Perfect Day?
Today was moderately productive. I did a bunch of stuff on Wikipedia (some of you might recognize one subject I worked on), and furried up my LinkedIn profile. I sometimes feel a little guilty about spending time on Wikipedia when there's a long list of things I could be doing for my "home" site. But then I think about the reasons I started WikiFur in the first place, and I don't feel so bad. Wikipedia's furry articles are the first port of call for the curious; it's important to get them right, and that takes time. Current Mood: busyCurrent Music: Mechwarrior 2 - Pyre Light | | Thursday, April 2nd, 2009 | | 5:06 pm |
| | Sunday, March 29th, 2009 | | 1:11 am |
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