Dave Lachapelle

Well, you may or may not notice I’m now running WordPress 2.3 on my site. The upgrade went very smoothly, and I’m hoping it fixes my theme problem I’ve been having. Only time will tell, as it apparently is random, if it happens again, I’m going to go hunting for the source of the problem. I’m really hoping it doesn’t though, as its going to be a pain to diagnose.

I’ll have more to write about later on a small project I’ve undertaken (and no, it has nothing to do with computers for once).

I have to start off by apologizing, I had intended on posting this last week, but got tied up with a lot of work stuff. Our Windows server decided to throw a hissy fit, and I really hate windows. Somehow the permissions got all messed up and IIS wouldn’t read any of the web files, we spent almost three full days trying to get the permissions set back up. Finally we just gave up and decided to back up the system and re-install it.

Anyway, continuing on the theme of system optimizations, I thought I’d talk a little bit about a simple optimization you can make to MySQL, that will greatly increase your server performance. In comes MySQL’s Query Cache or qCache for short. Its already built into MySQL, all you need to do is enable it. “But caching data is bad” or, “My boss says we update our data too much to make it worth caching”. Both of these ideals are in fact wrong. I used to hold to the one that said that caching data is bad, yes, it generally is a bad idea if done improperly, but if done properly it’ll save you a lot of time.

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And no, thats not APC as in American Power Conversion, thats APC as in Alternative PHP Cache. At the office, we host a fair number of high traffic websites, sites that routinely push a few gigs of traffic a day each. Obviously, thats a lot of web traffic, and we do have to keep our servers running fairly well. We also have a few, what we refer to as “seasonal” sites, where traffic for the sites spikes during certain parts of the year.

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Very recently i have come to a shocking conclusion about Guelph’s supposedly acclaimed transit system. As a pre-cursor to this whole rant, I would just like to state that these are my own experiences, however, they are mirrored by others that I know. It would appear, to the majority of people I know, that Guelph Transit thinks their transit system is too convenient for the general public, and thus have gone out of their way to inconvenience passengers.

As can be seen on the Guelph Transit Website:

Beginning September 2, 2007, Guelph Transit changes its scheduled 30 minute service to 40 minute service, Monday to Friday during peak hours on all regular base routes*.

The asterisk refers to this bit of text:

* Regular base routes: 1 Woodlawn; 3 Waterloo/Fife; 4 York Road;
6 Auden/Eastview; 7 St. Joseph’s; 8 General Hospital; 9 Stone Rd. Mall;
10 College/Niska; 22 Conestoga; 23 Paisley/Imperial; 24 Industrial; 51 Gordon;
52 University/Kortright; 61 Victor Davis

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Okay, so, recently I’ve been having this really annoying problem, where my wordpress homepage would just come up blank. I kind of ignored it, but I knew it had something to do with themes causing problems. For some reason, every now and then my blog’s theme gets set back to “default”, I’m still not 100% sure why, and after spending a good amount of time trying to “fix” it. I just ended up removing the “default” theme and doing a symlink from my theme’s folder to the old default folder, that way I can at least keep my blog up.

I’ll definitely keep hunting around to try and figure out why, and post here when I do find out.

In terms of life stuff, been super busy, as per usual. I think I’m going to be donating a bit of time to helping out my new guild on Norgannon with their website, but thats another story for later. For now, its back to work.