Have you ever wanted to dress up like a geek for All Saint's Day, but were concerned that you might not look revolting enough, or that you weren't getting your daily allotment of unusual substances? Look no further. Courtesy of the Chinese and Goodwill, I present: GEAK Instant. Do not be forgetting to read the important instructions for maximal usefulosity. I heartily recommend this costume for football games and All Saint's Day, but your results may vary.
This is a working mod_mcpage patch for lighttpd 1.5. The issues working with compressed data, mod_deflate, uncompressed data, and some other strange combinations has been ironed out. Local files, fastcgi, and proxy data have been testing with various combinations of mod_deflate being turned on and off (in lighttpd and the backend), and it's all working now. Took some jumping around, too. This module stores content, either local or proxied, in memcached so it can be served out of there rather than hitting the disk or the backend server.
Another preliminary patch for lighttpd 1.5 mod_mcpage has been released. It has all the features of the previous version, with some resolved issues: Checks added so it doesn’t try to load objects larger than 1MB (or a limit you define at compile time) into memcached. Stores Expires: and Cache-Control: HTTP headers. To do: Needs to be non-blocking. Option to MD5 keys Binary & local data needs more testing MIME type checking for compression & appending debug data to pages.
Equipment: Orion Skyview 6 Deluxe EQ, using the 32, 15, and 6 mm eyepieces. New objects observed: M81, M82, M33, M110 Previous objects observed: M31, M32, M57, M13 New Location: Sunrise Point, Mt. Rainier National Park Notes: This was a pretty big day, observing-wise, but very short. The weather and moon had been very uncooperative for the last couple of weeks, so I hadn't been able to do any observing at all.
Equipment: Orion Skyview 6 Deluxe EQ, using the 32, 9, 6, and 4 mm eyepieces, and the 2x Barlow.
Previous objects observed: Neptune, Jupiter
Notes:
Didn't do much last night, but after I was able to resolve Uranus as a disk the other night I thought I'd give Neptune a shot again. I got up to 250x magnification with the 6mm and the 2x Barlow, and I'm pretty sure I saw a tiny disk. I spent some time comparing Neptune at that magnification with some nearby stars, and they were definitely more point-like, so I don't think it was a weird optics thing. So, tentatively I think I was able to resolve a disk from Neptune, albeit a very tiny one.
After I was done with Neptune I looked at Jupiter for a bit. It was its usual banded self, all four Galilean moons visible. Didn't spend much time on it.
Equipment: Orion Skyview 6 Deluxe EQ, using the 32, 9, 6, and 4 mm eyepieces and the OIII and broadband filters. New object observed: NGC 6934 Previous objects observed: Vega, M57, Albeirio, M13, M31, M32 Notes: Despite the Clear Sky Chart saying that last night was going to be super transparent, sadly the Tacoma smog was pretty bad last night, dashing hopes of super good observing. I could see long beams from the headlights on the C17s flying in and out of McChord all night, and the skyglow was pretty bad.
Equipment: Orion Skyview 6 Deluxe EQ, using the 32, 15, 10, 6, and 4 mm eyepieces and the ultrablock filter. New object observed: Uranus Previously observed objects: Epsilon Lyrae, M57, M31, M32, Pleiades Notes: Sadly, it looks like tonight (the 22nd) will be the last really good observing night at least for the next several days. Last night was pretty darn good, but tonight looks like it'll be absolutely amazing. Mostly last night I just identified objects to show my daughter when I take her out tonight rather than looking for anything new.
Equipment: Orion Skyview 6 Deluxe EQ, using the 32, 25, 15, 9, 6, and 4 mm eyepieces and the broadband, ultrablock, and OIII filters. New objects observed: M17 (Omega Nebula), M16 (Eagle Nebula), M18, M11 (Wild Duck Cluster), M26 Previously observed objects: M31, M32 Notes: Not a long night. Conditions were actually better than they've been the last few nights I've been able to observe, but I was too tired to stay out very long; also, Monday night (and quite likely Tuesday night) are supposed to be even better.
These benchmarks are for the Perl tiered caching modules discussed here originally. Ruby tiered cache benchmarks shall follow later.
All tests performed on a Xen virtual machine with 512MB of RAM using one core of an Intel Core2 Duo E8500 @ 3.16GHz. The Perl version is 5.10.0 running on Debian 5.0. The remote memcached server is 1.2.5, local memcached is 1.2.2. The modules tested were Cache::Memcached::Fast, Cache::Mmap, Cache::FastMmap, and the custom Cache::Tiered and Cache::TieredFast modules (modules and benchmarking code are here.
The tiered configurations all use a remote memcached server. Cache::Tiered using a local Cache::Mmap cache, Cache::TieredFast uses a local Cache::FastMmap cache, and Cache::TieredLmc uses a local memcached server.
Benchmarking results below the fold. The first set of benchmarks is read-heavy, setting a value and reading it back 50,000 times (and resetting it if need be), the second set of benchmarks set and read a value 50,000 times. The test value used is the zlib HOWTO html file. NB: Right now, with the tiered cache modules, you pass in the memcached or mmap objects you want to use. Eventually, they will make them themselves.
Update:Forgot to add that the mmap files are stored in /dev/shm, but any memory based filesystem should perform the same. Disk-based mmap were not tested, but they don't seem as likely to give the same speed benefit.
Equipment: Orion Skyview 6 Deluxe EQ, using the 32, 25, 15, 10, 6, and 4 mm eyepieces and the broadband, ultrablock, and OIII filters.
New objects observed: Saturn Nebula (NGC 7009), M103, Double Cluster (NGC 884 and NGC 869), Stock 2, Blinking Planetary Nebula (NGC 6826)
Previously observed objects: M31, M32, Owl Cluster (NGC 457)
Notes:
Better observing this night than the previous couple of nights observing, but there seemed to be some seeing issues. The Saturn Nebula, sadly, did not show enough resolution to show the weird lobes on the side, but it was kind of cool nonetheless. After I found the Saturn Nebula I tried to find M72 and M73, but they were sadly right below the top of the wall of my viewing shelter in that direction, and I didn't feel like moving the curtain. I'll have to get those a different night.
After I was done with the Saturn Nebula and trying to find M72 and M73, I turned my attention to Cassiopeia. After some fumbling around I figured out which bright stars were which, and observed the Owl Cluster again. I then observed M103 for a bit, and while trying to move my scope to observe a group of clusters further down from M103 (I was looking for NGC 659, 663 and 654), I managed to get lost and ended up finding the Double Cluster by accident. Fortunately it's a lovely sight and well worth finding. I was also able to observe the somewhat obscure open cluster Stock 2, which was pretty big but nothing to really write home about.
At this point in the night clouds were beginning to come in from the north, so I swung south to M31 and M32 again in hopes of finding M110 again. M31 and M32 were fine, but once again I was unable to see M110. I half heartedly tried for M33 while I was in the neighborhood, but not surprisingly had no luck there.
To wrap the night up, I swung my telescope towards Cygnus and quickly spotted the Blinking Planetary Nebula. I wasn't actually able to get it to blink, but I observed it for a little while before the clouds got too menacingly close.