LarsonsWorld -- just another persons /dev/null

Everything ██████ ███ is ██████ fine. The government ███ ██████ is ██████ ███ ████ here ███ █ to █████ ██████ protect █████ ███ you.

When I recently set up Peter's Cycling Blog, I set it up as a subdomain of LarsonsWorld with it's own Drupal install. For a few days I was totally thrown for a loop by one simple difference in the installs.

With LarsonsWorld, on a Drupal story, page or block, I found I could always use 'image-folder/image.jpg' without having to use the complete URL and the image showed everywhere. When I set up Peter's Cycling Blog I found this didn't work. Yes, it worked on the PCB homepage, but once you started going into the website hierarchy, the image didn't show. Thus, with PCB, I started using complete image URLs.

Since LW uses Drupal 6.22 and PCB uses 6.28, I figured this was the reason. Or, it was a subdomain. Or, I was doing something wrong. Or, something.

Nope.

I originally installed Drupal on LW in late 2010. At that time, the PHP used by my host, Hostgator, couldn't use the 'Clean URLs' option in Drupal. So, '?q=node/' was used by default. When I installed Drupal into the subdomain this past month, the PHP had been updated and 'Clean URLs' could be used and '/node/' was set as the default.

This creates a very interesting change in how everything is referenced. Once you start using 'Clean URLs' your website has a real hierarchy and is no longer based on the '?q=node' database, or whatever it is. Once I unselected 'Clear URLs' on PCB, all my images started showing on all pages.

Maybe I'm old school. LarsonsWorld is 11 years old now and I've had a website of some kind since 2000. In the early days, it was faster to reference images in folders rather than using the full URL. Looking back at my hand coded pages, there where many that had image sources like '../../../folder/image' so the pages would load faster. I'm use to it.

Or maybe, I rather enjoy not having to type the whole URL or figuring out how many folders down the hierarchy an image is.

I'm going with a combination of both.

Looks like the tracking site sitemeter has bit the dust. The tracking image is gone from the bottom of my pages and the web site has just a static base page that is fed from sitesense.com. Strange that there was no word of this change. I even received an email report two days ago from them.

The bummer part is I had used it for tracking this web site since 2006 and their records showed 608,000 + hits. Now those records are gone.

This is from that report on the 1st of April:
LarsonsWorld - just another persons waste of time
(s24larsonsworld)

-- Site Summary ---
Visits

Total ...................... 608,476
Average per Day ................. 97
Average Visit Length .......... 2:35
This Week ...................... 678

Page Views

Total .................... 1,221,369
Average per Day ................ 168
Average per Visit .............. 1.7
This Week .................... 1,174

~~ Update: 16:00 ~~

Well, I guess not. The image is back and so is the site. After years of no issues, this is the second time in 11 months the site has had issues. I've been thinking of going to the pay premium account, but this makes me nervous of doing that.

~~ Update: 06 April 08:57 ~~
Hmmm. Sitemeter is back to it's odd behaviour again. Strange. I really don't know what to think.

... consider Human Resources the cafeteria?

or you could go with this:

Two cannibals walk into Human Resources. One look at the other and asks "Who do you want to have for lunch?"

Man, what a beautiful day here in Denver, Sunny and 68.

Took a ride down Cherry Creek to Wash Park and back after work. Great day to ride, and the riders where out today. Body was hurting a bit, but it felt good to go out spinning for 90 minutes.

And I have to say, the scenery was awesome! ( hee, hee, hee)

Volvo unveils cyclist alert-and-brake car system -- BBC

Volvo has announced it is releasing a cyclist detection facility which should prevent fatal accidents.

The auto firm says vehicles fitted with the system will be able to detect threats including a cyclist suddenly swerving out into a car's path.

Read on ...

Next they will need to come up with a system for when a car suddenly swerves into a bicyclists path.

Not that these Pearl Izumi's don't still pull their weight,

but Petey is ready for new ones.

With close to 10 years and 25,000 miles, those Pearl Izumi's up top have set a high bar for the new ones.

We'll check back in another ten years and see how the new ones are doing.

~~ Update -- 6 March, 2013 - 10:30 ~~
It was strange riding to work with the new shoes this AM. Hell, even walking in them is so different.

Source: The Internet

This was the car I drove in High School, a 1954 Ford Coupe. My grandmother had bought in new for $1500 and I eventually let it go for $1000 in 1982.

It was a big old lunker with a tiny 239 V-8 and just sucked fuel.

My previous post talks about the difference in start up times between my Dell and Acer laptops. Based on visually watching them start up, I view a good 20 second difference between them. As i mentioned in that post, I installed Bootchart to check out what was causing this difference.

Uh-oh.

Bootchart is showing, at best, a difference of 6 or 7 seconds between their boot speeds. On average, the Dell, just under 65 seconds, the Acer, just over 70 seconds.

So, now what do I blame? Just a slower throughput speed on the Acer? Or, maybe it is a graphics thing. Didn't think about that.

Here are the png files created by Bootchart from the last couple of days. The Dell is Neuromancer with Wintermute being my Acer.

* Yea, like I'm not easily confused to begin with!

Today, a friend of mine asked me whether I found my Acer Aspire One slow. I said yes, but it didn't bother me much.

Once, home, this got me thinking about how slow it is.

Is it slow? Compared to what is available today, hell yes. Compared to my Dell Inspiron 6000, which is a few years older? Yes. This is even though the Acer's Atom and the Dell's Pentium M have the same 1.6 GHz speed.

The performance of a single core Atom is about half that of a Pentium M of the same clock rate. For example, the Atom N270 (1.60 GHz) found in many netbooks such as the Eee PC can deliver around 3300 MIPS and 2.1 GFLOPS in standard benchmarks,[17] compared to 7400 MIPS and 3.9 GFLOPS for the similarly clocked (1.73 GHz) Pentium M 740.

Source: Wikipedia

As an additional note, this is even though the Atom uses HyperThreading and the Pentium M doesn't.

What I have found, from my personel experience, I am not bothered by this.

On any given day, I mainly use my computers for email & internet surfing and occassionally LibreOffice, graphic manipulation and watching video. I am going to skip the email and internet to focus on the last three.

Lets starting with video. I limit video to my Dell with its 15.4" WSXGA+ screen. This is two fold. First, who wants to watch video on an 8.9" screen? Second, anything 720p -- 1280 x 720 -- and above eventually stutters on the Acer. Thus, the Acer is out for most video watching.

Next, graphic manipulation. This applies to my photographs I post here. I use JAlbum to resize and watermark the photographs*. JAlbum uses the Java Runtime Environment so it can be cross platform. Because of the JRE, it tends to run a little slow to begin with. On the Acer, I do notice a longer production time verse the Dell, but I find it acceptable.

Finally, spreadsheets, ie LibreOffice. I have a couple spreadsheets I edit every couple of days. Once again, I find the application running slightly slower on the Acer. At most though, it is a couple of seconds.

Other that the video, I really don't notice a real speed difference between the two.

Then I found something really interesting. I had written the above and decided to check out the difference in start up times.

I was thrown by what I found. I always knew the Dell started up faster, but didn't realize where the diffence was. It takes the Acer about 5 more seconds to show the login screen than the Dell. Once logged in, and this threw me, the Acer takes an additional 20 seconds to show a fully rendered desktop. Whoa, 20 seconds.

I am not sure what the slow down is. They both have the same applications set for start up along with the same toolbar and desktop image.

So, I have installed bootchart on both and in a couple of days will check the results.