Tech, music, sports, and other stuff.
I just bought myself two new tees. I've got a couple of old reliables:
The Peeps T:
The Jelly Belly T (this isn't the exact one I have, but it's close):
My Dear Leader lion shirt, which I can't find online, and my Ben Folds "Rockin' the Suburbs" shirt which I also can't find online.
Courtesy of Busted Tees, I'll be adding two new ones to the rotation:
The Oregon Trail!:
Saint Dorothy Mantooth!:
I'm quite excited.
I really, really do. I despise it. Over the past few weeks, we've been battling in our hosting environment to come up with solutions to a myriad of issues with ColdFusion and how it scales. Now, I don't think that ColdFusion was really designed to be used in a shared hosting environment, with hundreds of sites and thousands of hits per second throwing traffic at it. It certainly doesn't scale well enough.
Now, I know there's a ton of heavily trafficked sites that use ColdFusion. It is possible for it to scale. It's just not possible for ColdFusion to scale when the code in question isn't specifically designed to do so. We've got thousands of customers spread across a handful of servers, and they've all written code that, well, let's say it's not professional. It's all basic "open database, run query, output data" code, 99% of the time against an Access database.
75% of the time, ColdFusion handles its end of the bargain pretty well. We're running IIS6, Windows Server 2003, all the normal stuff. The problems end up being two fold:
Our two basic problem scenarios are cases where we get a lot of concurrent database queries and ColdFusion's ODBC service simply decides it can't handle it. Rather than fail gracefully (allowing us to catch the stopped service and restart it accordingly), the service just keeps running, but simply doesn't do anything. It actively rejects all TCP/IP database connections, and leaves customer sites basically dead in the water.
We've worked around the ODBC issue by having a test page that makes a database connection, which we query every X seconds, determine if the ODBC service is still working, and if not, we actually kill the process and restart it. Obviously, we're adding a little overhead to the box by doing this (not a ton, but it's overhead) and we're not really solving the root cause, which is that the ODBC service doesn't behave the way a normal Windows service should.
This issue is sort of hinted at in this ColdFusion TechNote, but there's no solution other than to limit connections, which is not easy to do in a shared hosting environment (well, not in any meaningful, cost-effective way). Not to mention the fact that using ODBC and DSNs is pretty antiquated and I'm not sure why ColdFusion hasn't deprecated it completely in favor of DSN-less connections (which are not only more reliable and have marginally better performance, but are far far far more portable).
The second issue is simply that ColdFusion uses Java. There's nothing inherently wrong with Java (just as there's nothing inherently wrong with .NET or any other run-time environment). They all have their places. This just isn't a place that Java works well. The Java process gets progressively larger because customers don't write applications that really care about garbage collection or optimization. They're not homogenized. There's hundreds or thousands of very different applications, that instantiate different objects, and then the Java garbage collection has to try to figure out exactly how to handle it. Sometimes it works well. Other times it thrashes the CPU usage up to 100% and causes the box to simply hang out while it decides what to do.
We've been mucking with ColdFusion and JRE settings to work around this, and we've basically mitigated this problem through trial and error, and also some monitoring that will push traffic over to another server if the main server is "hung" and then route traffic back again when things are back to normal.
It's taken us a few months to get to this point, a few calls to Adobe, and a whole bunch of trial and error. Each time we solve one problem, another pops up that needs investigation and resolution. Having now played with ColdFusion for about a year, I can safely say that I would never pick it over Perl or PHP, but I can see why someone might select it over ASP or .NET, which have slightly more difficult methods of connecting to and handling database info.
Still, I despise ColdFusion. It encourages its users to do stupid things (I cannot even tell you how many customers I've had to inform that their code doesn't work because they're using a reserved SQL word as a variable or table name -- something that happens far less frequently with ASP or PHP users). It relies on a bunch of server-side technology that renders its usage fairly non-portable. It's got a horrible design for IIS, leading to cases where ColdFusion dying can cause IIS to stop serving HTML pages on the box (thanks wildcard ISAPI filter!). In a nutshell, ColdFusion has pretty much been the bane of my existance for a few months now, but we seem to have it handled at this point. If I ever ran my own hosting company, I'm 99.999% sure I'd never offer ColdFusion, at least not without charging a significant premium.
I despise ColdFusion.
I went out after work a couple of nights this week. Good times.
Then I came home.
I'm slowly working through it all. Thankfully, looks like the weather will cooperate and this will be a nice weekend to catch up on some TV and movies. I get weirdly stressed when this happens. But then I just browse through it, remind myself I'm not really missing out on anything, and I feel better about things. I lead a somewhat puzzling (lame, boring, ridiculously stupid) life.
So, I'm a Nintendo dork. I talked about the Nintendo DS a while ago, and I still play the crap out of it.
I'm now completely enamored with their next system, the Wii. Silly name, awesome idea. I'm sure I'll talk about it more at some point.
But I just realized today that, because the Wii is going to support the Opera web browser, and because it's going to support Flash .... I can watch YouTube videos on my TV through the Wii. I can't tell you how awesome that is. I don't love watching TV on my computer. Well, I do, but not as much as I love watching it on my actual TV.
Think of all the stupid stuff on YouTube. Now think of how much more stupid stuff you'll watch when you can do it while laying on your couch. That right there is icing on the cake.
My friend Greg has started posting again and running his movie on his website, Project Working Stiff. It's a funny movie, more of a romantic comedy than you'd expect from the subject matter. It has a couple of literal laugh out loud moments, and some really great indie rock/pop music.
Go watch it. If you like it, post about it, or tell someone else to watch it.
Heck, I might setup a little spot on this here site for you to watch it (except it means I need to setup a Brightcove account, which I don't have time to do right now ... but stay tuned).
I've seen Dear Leader a whole bunch over the past few years. I'd say they're easily my favorite local band, and I'll pretty much see them whenever they play. But, after playing the Best Music Poll earlier this year they headed into the studio to record a new album and didn't play any dates in the US.
When I saw them show up on the TT the Bear's Calendar, I knew I'd be there. The fact that Campaign for Real Time, the latest winner of the Rock 'n Roll Rumble, and apparently a pretty amazing live band, would be opening, it made for an interesting bill.
So, fighting a little bit of sleepyness, I headed out to Cambridge to catch the show. I got there a little after 9:30 to catch the tail end of Boone's set. There were moments of good here, but it just didn't resonate with me. They, honestly, sounded a bit noise rocky to me (though, it could have just been the mix at TT's last night, which was atrocious), but it just didn't work. I like my songs to be a bit tighter.
The second band was the New Idea Society, which features Stephen Brodsky of Cave In fame. I've never been a big Cave In fan, but I'd seen him play a live solo show where he showed off his musical tastes, covering Brian Wilson and a bunch of great little pop tunes. Some of that pop goodness bleeds into the New Idea Society sound, and there were a couple of songs that had me nodding along and wondering how I had missed these guys before. Then they'd break out a song so excrutiatingly navel-gazing that the crowd literally didn't react. They finished a song, stopped, and there was just no reaction from the crowd. Just sort of stunned silence. At this point, I was dreading having to wait another 75 minutes for Dear Leader to arrive.
Then Campaign for Real Time took the stage and pretty much owned the place for the next 45 minutes. I don't even know how to describe it. It's a rock/funk band with some smattering of the new wavey sound featuring some Moogs and organs, and then the occasional drop of some hip-hop. All topped off with more energy then anyone should be allowed to display. Ever. It was impossible not to be drawn in. Just a great show, even if the mix was so bad that I really had no clue what they were ever saying. Given that Dear Leader's sound is a bit more straight ahead and driven than the manic energy of C4RT, I was a little curious how they'd follow up this act.
Well, they did it by just playing straight ahead balls out and blowing the doors off the place. It's not always a good thing when a group takes the stage and basically plays all of the songs from their new album, right in a row. But Dear Leader's been working on some of these songs for the last 6-9 months, so most of the crowd had heard them before. Starting off with the amazingly anthemic "Nightmare Alleys" and moving right into "Radar", opened the show fantastically. They just blew through songs from the new album, one after another, with little more than a couple of sentences to the crowd, instead just milking in the fact that pretty much everyone there knew most of the words to a bunch of unreleased songs.
Finishing off the set, they broke out the crowd favorite (and my personal fave) "My Life as a Wrestler" with crowd participation, segueing nicely into "Raging Red", including the chorus from The Pixies' "Monkey Gone to Heaven". They walked off stage leaving a pretty raucous crowd behind, before coming out to blow through two high energy versions of "Corroded Anchor" and "Billions Served" before the rest of the band bowed out while Aaron Perrino finished with the newish tune "Lead the Way".
We got one more Aaron solo encore, and is was well worth it, as he came out and broke into the opening riff from The Sheila Divine's "I'm a Believer" and it was pretty much crowd singalong time, which seemed to amuse Aaron to no end, and finished off a tight 75 minute set. Well worth the 10 bucks to get in and has me pretty amped to get the new album (in November) and hoping that they start playing more shows to continue to show off the new stuff.
Remember you can keep track of the shows I'm interested in my checking out the Concert Calendar.
I have no idea why there's a bunch of fireworks going off outside my apartment. But there they are. Maybe we're under attack.
Nope! Apparently it's Town Day. Exciting!
Monday holidays are useless, especially in a global business. You come back to work and rather than just having 2 days of email and issues to deal with, you have 3 days. On top of that, you need to compress all of your normal work for the week into four days.
All holidays should be moved to Fridays. That is my decree for the day.
I'm always forgetting what concerts are coming up, and then remembering too late to get tickets, or too late to actually go. I'm also trying to use Google Calendar more and more, since I think it works pretty well for my particular lifestyle (i.e. I don't have to keep track of a ton).
Oddly enough, it only took me a few weeks of thinking before I realized "Hey, calendars let you track things with dates! So, I can put concert dates into Google Calendar and then I can keep track of them!"
No one has ever accused me of being swift on the uptake.
So, I started poking around some websites, and came up with a list of shows I'd like to see that are coming up. I probably missed some, but I checked out TT's, the Middle East, the Paradise, Great Scott, Harpers Ferry, Avalon, and the Orpheum. Then I poked around some band sites (check out my last.fm profile to get an idea of what I tend to listen to).
I threw it all into Google Calendar, made it public, and now I can share it with you:
The Cool Shows Ryan Wants to See in the Next Few Months Public Calendar
Now you can curry favor with me by offering to take me to shows! Or you can stalk me and find out why I've had people tell me I look like Maynard from Tool, or Moby, or Michael Stipe (can you guess the trend?!).
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Recently, I also came across The Decemberists' new album The Crane Wife, which is scheduled to release sometime in October. I'm a pretty big fan of the The Decemberists and their interesting brand of folky, orchestral, verbose, literate, indie pop/rock. I wasn't prepared for just how great the new album would be. It's poppier, without losing the trademark Decemberists' sound. And, outside of FNX, you probably won't hear it in Boston. So, go buy it when it comes out. Or ask me nicely and I'll play it for you and then you'll go buy it.
I also picked up (legally) The Long Winters new CD Putting the Days to Bed. After a single listen, I had 3 or 4 songs stuck in my head. Each Long Winters album gets hookier and poppier and just generally awesome. Go download "Pushover" from their site and tell me it's not stuck in your head all day.