Sometimes the web seems like a small place. I know I sometimes seem to have only a few core sites that I visit when I get surfing time and then I’m at a loss. There are the so-called “social bookmarking” sites that can be useful like del.icio.us, but the most popular links usually seem to have limited appeal, catering to web designers or hawking time management solutions. Very rarely does something of genuine interest percolate up the chain. If you just want new, interesting things it can be tough to find them.

StumbleUpon appears to fill this gap. A combination of a browser toolbar — with apparent support for the popular browsers — and a website, StumbleUpon is founded on the premise of what I’ll term “guided stumbling” to find sites of interest. Upon signing up, you’ll be presented with a collection of topics for which you may have interest. For me, the topics of interest I selected included Software, Video Games, Humor, Guitar, Satire, Running, Encryption, and Software Development among others. Once configured you really don’t need to visit the StumbleUpon site again unless you want to add your own comments to a site that you want to add, or view reviews of sites that you visit.

The StumbleUpon Toolbar

The toolbar is where the magic happens. If you find yourself floundering while searching for something to view, simply hit the button marked “Stumble!” in the toolbar. You will then be “randomly” directed to a site that corresponds to those interests that you selected. If there’s something you really dig you can hit the “I like it!” button and suggest the site to others. If you find something that isn’t your speed, hit the “Not-for-me” button. Supposedly your own suggestions and tastes are taken into account for future stumbles so that you’ll get more sites that you like and fewer that you don’t.

StumbleUpon has a concept similar to Netflix’ friends list so that you can share sites and be recommended new things by people you know that share similar interests. You can further tailor your stumbles if you’re in the mood for something in particular. Let’s say I’m in a guitar mood. I can tell the toolbar to only return results in the Guitar category for a while to slake that 6-string thirst.

For the casual web surfer with limited time but broad interests, this is a very useful tool indeed.

Hell. Now Spectra, the US publisher of George R. R. Martin’s next book A Feast For Crows, is reporting that the release date is November 8th. That totally sucks in comparison with my original hopes for an end of July release.

What’s even worse is that those sorry bastards in the UK get the book in mid-October. October! There is no justice.

I don’t like to wait. Few people do, granted, but I really don’t. Standing in line waiting for the twit in front of me to figure out how to work the self check-out machine at the grocery is an exercise in forced patience. I continually resist the urge to reach forward and poke the enormous blinking button on the screen that certifies that “no, indeed I do not have anything under the cart.” The fact that the machine is asking in perfect, crystalline English this exact question doesn’t deter our twit from continuously attempting to run his credit card through the inactive card reader trying ineffectively to pay. Next time, please reserve the self checkout for people capable of following rudimentary instructions.

My impatience extends to my computer as well. I’ve got some number of gigahertz of processor, I have some number of gigabytes of memory, I should not wait for 20 seconds for a previously minimized application to pop up and be responsive. I know the reason but it still irks. It’s worse when I watch Cat switch over to her login and click on her dormant Thunderbird tab and wait. She hates the wait. Doesn’t understand why it’s not popping up now. Clicks the button a couple more times to hurry it along. That drives me nuts, primarily because it’s my computer that is failing us. This beast that is inordinately powerful and can perform miraculous tasks is now struggling gamely to bring an email program up after some time not using it.

I had a big, long explanation up and — even in the presence of the ever-helpful Twilight Autosave… note to self: clicking the “Save and Continue Editing” occasionally is actually not the best way of working when this plugin is around — lost it when I closed my browser. So, instead I’ll just tell you what I’ve done to improve my performance and reduce my waits.

The tweaks, finally

1. Get more RAM. That seems obvious. I bumped my home machine up to 1.5G of memory and I’m very happy with how snappy things are in comparison.

2. Defrag your hard drive. Regularly defragmenting your hard drive can help reduce some latency in launching applications especially.

3. Defrag your page file. The basic Windows defrag utility cannot defragment your page file. The link takes you to a program that can. I was a bit surprised to discover that my page file on my work machine consisted of over 36,000 fragments. You can’t tell me that that didn’t cause some churn.

4. Turn off the paging executive. This will keep some of the core OS components — kernel, drivers, etc. — in RAM at all times and reduce latency. Note that you should have a minimum of 512M of RAM to do this. Re-read number 1 above.

5. On that same page there’s instructions for enabling a larger system cache. Do that too.

What will all this buy me?

With these changes Cat and I both are much happier. On my home machine it used to take 30 seconds to switch users between our accounts. Now it happens almost instantly. If I’m flying around in Google Earth and decide to look up something in Firefox, it responds immediately instead of churning for 10 seconds.

Now to find a solution to the self checkout line. I’m thinking some sort of bladed weapon. Preferably long.

We bought our new house back in January of this year. Seems like longer in a lot of ways and I can honestly say we have zero regrets. We both find ourselves looking around and sighing, knowing that we have it much better in the new place. And we’ve still been working: adding the new counters, changing fixtures (few things make me feel more manly than installing a new faucet in the bathroom and slinging around terms like ‘new 3/8″ to 1/2″ feeder lines’ and ‘Teflon tape’, but I got to do that this weekend), finally getting things up on the walls. Every day it gets a little better.

To be honest, I don’t even think about the old house any more, the house where Julia was conceived and to which she was first brought home. Don’t miss one damned thing about it. Yes we were really happy there while we were there, but the new house is simply better in every way as I mentioned before. I still hear about it since my best local friend lives directly across the street from it and it happens to be about 500 feet from our new place. No, really, 508 feet as the crow flies as you can see in the picture… the new place is the one on that lovely, lovely cul-de-sac and the old one is the one with the ugly grass.

The Flip

The woman that purchased our old house is now flipping it which is likely for the best as she has not really ingratiated herself with the neighbors for various reasons. That’s a mild understatement as she’s made the incredibly sweet lady that lived next door to us cry on several occasions over silly shit. Yesterday was the day she moved out of the place, so we went to visit the neighbors and peek around. She tried gamely to make something of our previously unusable back yard and it’s a very good start. It’s actually flat and there are no more trees in the center, but the grass is having a hell of a time getting going and it looks pretty threadbare and “harsh.” Worse perhaps is the front yard where the bermuda — the bane of my existence while I was there but really a decent lawn — got shredded from the trucks trying to reach the back yard and someone threw some fescue seed down to try to fill the ruts. Oh that looks not great. The front yard, which we thought had decent curb appeal with the shrubs, bushes and trees that were pretty established has been greatly modified: bushes and shrubs out, trees cut down (to be honest, I don’t blame her for one of them as it was a pine, though I would have put something in its place) and the beds haphazardly reshaped. Looks rough, really rough and will be downright ugly in the winter.

So, the house went on the market. Here are a few things to bear in mind: the house is around 1730 square feet. When she bought it her realtor made a written “complaint” that the house was overpriced. As a datum, we paid about $93 a square foot for our new house 500 feet away, but we got a pretty good deal. So, imagine our surprise when that same realtor who complained about our overpriced house put the same property up for sale 6 months later for $240,000. “Wow, $138 per square foot?” you might ask. That’s where the “creative” part comes from. She was claiming that it was 2140 square feet.

Constructing square footage from thin air

Yes, I was surprised too. You may inquire whether any renovations had been done to perhaps tack on an additional 20×20 room or something but you will find nothing. No, these were what we call “magic feet,” constructed of nothing but wishes and fairy dust. By the time I learned this there was actually a buyer on the hook for $235,000. Luckily for them it finally dawned on their realtor that it sure appeared a bit, say, cramped for a 2100 square foot house. Of course, had no one actually thought to measure it or even look at the tax records freely available online that spells out the exact square footage for all to see, my conscience would have been obligated to alert the poor duped (elderly as well according to my sources) new owners.

But they did discover it and the deal was torn up. Now it’s listed at around the correct square footage for the low, low price of $220,000 or merely $126 a square foot. No, that’s obviously not overpriced.

I just hope that this time someone moves in that won’t make that nice neighbor cry.

You may have noticed that I’ve been “closed for business”, so to speak, the past couple of days. Let me explain and beseech the community to help me get to the bottom of this.

The day before yesterday I found my hosting account had been suspended due to me using too many server resources. Upon pleading and promising to research what happened I got my account unsuspended and I pulled up my logs. What I noticed was… odd. I initially thought it was some kind of DoS attack, but it really didn’t look like it. I saw someone visit a page — unfortunately my logs are currently gone — then start requesting all of my monthly archive pages at a fast rate, re-requesting them when they didn’t get the data fast enough. Apache was returning a 200 success code at them, but apparently they weren’t getting their data fast enough as the kept re-requesting. That was when the account was suspended.

Yesterday at about the same time my account was suspended again. The pattern was about the same. Someone — from General Electric, apparently — visited me from Google. The requests were perfectly innocuous. About 12 seconds following the final ordinary request, the same IP initiated a flurry of requests for all of my monthly archives again. What occurred to me this time was that all of these archives were only linked via <link rel="archives" ...> tags in the header of the page. So, something was fetching/prefetching all of those links programatically at a high rate of speed.

I’ve heard of Google prefetching under certain circumstances, but only for <link rel="prefetch" ...> or <link rel="next" ...> tags. This makes me think that someone is trying to one-up Google and accelerate browsing even more, but they’re doing it in a particularly hamfisted way. I’ve seen a couple of add-ons for IE6 — Browster and something called KybIE GetEmAll — that will prefetch pages for you but I have yet to catch them pulling the links from this type of link.

That’s where you come in. Do you know of an Internet Explorer add-on or some wacky version of IE6 that performs prefetching to speed up access? If so, please post in the comments about your experiences so I can investigate. I’ve since removed those (useless) link tags from my header, so I think I’ll be okay. I’ve also removed some features — you’ll no longer get “welcomed back” to the site and have an indication of how many and which posts and comments are new — and I’m trying a static caching plugin to boot to try to reduce my overall burden on the server.

However, this is literally my last chance. My hosting provider has assured me that if I get suspended again because of this behavior, I’m gone. And I don’t have the desire or the cash to pay for a more robust hosting solution. Those of you that may recommend other hosting solutions — and I would love to hear your suggestions, believe me — please bear in mind that my requirements are 1G storage, at least 10G of traffic to allow for growth, multiple MySQL databases and a cost that’s not too much more than $5 a month… if it ain’t got all that I ain’t interested.

Thanks for your assistance and patience.

Addition: If Else has a wonderful writeup on the perils of prefetching. Well worth the read.