JMeter is a cool open source tool for evaluating the load performance of web servers. You can setup scripts that have computer-controlled users login to a web site, do something, and then log out, and log the results while it’s doing it. This allows you to easily simulate a few hundred people hitting a site simultaneously, which is something I need to do at the day job.
I always hated busy work in school, and I’m hating it now as I update my home’s various computers for tomorrow’s daylight saving time switch, the one that our ingenious Congress decided to foist upon us. The goal of the change in DST — it now happens about three weeks earlier in the spring, and … Read more
When last we saw our villain, he had just destroyed his Samsung integrated receiver/home theatre system with a touch as a spark of static electricity leapt from his finger to the power button of the system, destroying it in a flare of blue LED light. Flash forward two weeks, and see our heroine Sue calling … Read more
It’s only fair that since I complained mightily when my Xbox 360 died, I should also let everyone know when it was resurrected. During the week after my machine died, I spent a lot of time on the phone with Xbox and Best Buy, determining that a) either of them would replace the broken Xbox … Read more
And lo, a great many spammers visit the forums of Nuketown and The Griffin’s Crier, descending like a plague of locusts upon the land. They come seeking page rankings from their great link god Google, and thus, offer endless sacrifices of strange herbs, impossible enhancements and the vast riches of Nigeria. Yet from this plague … Read more
If you’re ever feeling like, gee, you’re just not geeky enough … try downloading some polyhedral dice icons for your computer. Available for Windows and for Macintosh. Now if only they had one that matched my glow-in-the-dark d20…
My trusty, usually dependable 512 MB iPod Shuffle died a slow, tortuous death this weekend. It ended a year-long run of iPod-augmented home-impovement and exercise, and I’m exceedingly sad to see it go.
What killed it? I’m not sure — one day it was working just fine, the next it continued to play its store of MP3s, but could no longer connect or draw power via USB. I tried it on several machines, including my G4 PowerBook, G4 Power Mac and even my Windows XP desktop machine, but none could see the device, nor would it draw power. Resetting the Shuffle had no effect, nor did leaving it sit for 24 hours.
I’ve been tinkering with a C#-based RSS ScreenSaver for Windows based on the example screensaver project included with the Visual C# Express Studio. Things were going well — despite the fact that I’d never done anything in C# before — until Friday when I tested it on a production box and discovered something … odd. … Read more
Stellarium is an open source sky simulator that allows you to view the constellations as they appear from any place on Earth, at any time you choose. It’s a beautiful piece of software, with fantastic sunsets and night skies (as you can see from the screenshots). I’m still exploring it — I’m still not sure … Read more
Things have slowed to a crawl around Nuketown, and I can blame a lot of that on two failing computers. The first to go was Sue’s Vaio, which had been freezing up and hibernating unexpectedly since the day she first powered it up. Within the last few weeks however, things got much worse; where as … Read more