Thoughts and Ramblings

General things I find of interest.

Trac.fcgi Memory Usage

I’ve been slowly transitioning to using nginx as the web front-end in an effort to reduce Apache’s memory usage. In keeping with this task, I’m moving more and more off of Apache. One piece I recently moved was trac, transitioning to using it directly by nginx by running it in fast-cgi mode where as previously it was running as cgi though Apache. While fast-cgi is faster, it has inherent issues, such as any memory leak can result in ever growing memory usage, which is exactly why Apache has a setting for each child to serve a limited number of requests before exiting.

Google Link Redirection (cont.)

Earlier I wrote about google’s link redirection. I have finally finished my testing of a Safari extension which kills this behavior. I didn’t want to release this extension until the updating mechanism worked and that is what took me so long. Anyway, here is the the extension. Enjoy, and let me know what you think.

Google’s Link Redirection

Google, for quite some time, has been redirected clicks on links in their search results to www.google.com/url?…. While I don’t approve of such practices, I didn’t mind it so much since this is presumably an effort to improve their search results. That changed recently, when I noticed that my history in Safari was filled with entries containing that URL as the title. Considering the fact that I often use the history to re-find a page with pertinent information, this is bordering on making my browser usage useless.

Text Compression Code Released

After it’s original post, I got a request for the code I used in my text compression technique. I’ve not gotten around to cleaning up the code and separating it from it’s test environment so it can be distributed separately. You can read more about it in its own page. Sometime soon, I’ll get around to releasing my code for fetching old Escape Pod episodes that I hinted at earlier.

Common Media Player Framework

About 3 weeks ago, Kevin (developer of NitoTV) and I decided it was a bit silly how we were each writing playback mechanisms on the AppleTV with little to no collaboration between us. So, we decided to write a Common Media Player Framework, which is licensed using LGPL. Kevin sent me the code he used for DVD playback inside NitoTV as a place to start. I stripped it down to a smaller piece, and started the framework.