There’s been a lot of evil crap floating around “teh Intarweb” about MacZot!, Mac Heist and other shareware-highlighting deals lately, and I think that a lot of folks are talking out of their asses pretty loudly about something that isn’t that big of a deal.

This whole mess started with MacZot! a while back, which was trying to coin an idea from sites like woot.com where there’s one heavily-discounted item per day in limited numbers that everyone gets to drool over and buy if it fancies them to do so. Well, when this idea was applied to Mac applications this came to be a bit of a problem in several ways. The first is that there’s only so many Mac applications that can be sold in bulk. The rest are niche products or pure crap, so while at first the site really ran high with familiar products on the cheap, over time it really just ran out of people to market the concept to and fell into either not offering items for periods of time, re-offering old items, or offering one gem in a week of crap — at which point no one is paying attention and the sales are slow for that item.

Until the 25th, Notae and a whole lot of other software is 20% off over at Mac Santa.

And yes, the developers are getting paid on this one.

This one’s priceless. This goes to show the level of stupidity at Apple Defects, that he intends to harm Apple’s image without concern for accuracy, and that he’s trying desperately to find things to “report” on.

More Electrical News…

A user on YouTube has posted a video of his MagSafe Power Adapter issuing electrical discharges from around the rubber base. The MagSafe is a great invention however it is not without problems, in the past users have reported their MagSafe adapters igniting into flame and melting, amongst other issues. One would assume this particular MagSafe adapter is slowly beginning to fray and the protective rubber shield is no longer functioning problem.

So I’m investigating leaving Sprint after the news of the previous entry, and this doesn’t inspire confidence in the brand for Verizon.

One would think to place basic computational arithmetic well within the realm of web monkeys that can make a web store for a multi-billion-dollar communications giant. One would also, apparently, be quite wrong.

Exactly how do you pay so

People are slow. The masses that comment at Digg and Apple Defects especially so. Two words are being thrown around that are really being used out of context in all the discussion about MacBooks and MacBook Pros.

Yellow Journalism

When someone accuses you of yellow journalism, you have been accused of whoring the truth. You are not being called a liar, or being told that anything you said is factually incorrect. What’s being said is that you’re saying it out of context, missing data, or using a small data set to imply a much larger problem than really exists.

If I said that Apple iBook G3s had a far-reaching video problem and that one should question Apple’s design of the product, that would be correct as there is ample evidence to support that. In fact, if I were to talk about such a thing I could prevent the accusation of yellow journalism by actually quoting and naming sources and making myself available for contact about the issue.

I have a new design rule: Three pieces of embedded media, at most.

This, at least, holds true for large sites on smaller servers. The reason being that MG managed to get Dugg yet again but this time (unlike the last) it took the server down again. In spite of all my previous tweaking. Why?

A big part of the Slashdot Effect (first come, first named) is the number of hits to your server. MySQL and Drupal caching get you absolutely nowhere if you’re loading 20 pieces of media per page when the traffic comes. At peak, this time, we had 10 hits per second to the server. Most of those were media. I’d added some little graphic badges to the bottom of the page and every post had four service icons (for, ironically, posting stories to Digg…) and other little things. Those caused most of the damage. The server was pushing the HTML out instantly, as it was tweaked to, but the images were a whole other story because they were not in memory, but on-disk. So, there are three solutions I’m going to look into for this:

I now know the power of Digg. Sadly, I had no chance to prepare.

I took an old article from this site from a few years ago and refactored it to be relevant to today’s world and posted it on Mac Geekery. A day later, the site cratered (taking CP and OBS with it). It briefly hit the Digg front page, and, briefly, Oberon was hit with enough requests that the kernel stopped passing them off to Apache.

So, there were some design flaws here, mostly mine. First, I’m on a VDS. That’s good and bad. Good in that I get control, bad in that I get so very little RAM and space to do what I need to do. I can’t run more than a dozen forks of Apache, so that limits the incoming requests and presents a slow server to the world when hammered. This is bad. It’s also bad because I can’t give MySQL enough cache memory so that it doesn’t have to hit the disk. This, too, is bad, since disk access is shared with other machines. Overall, running a “dugg” site on a VDS … bad.

This update ensures that periodic background maintenance tasks run as scheduled in launchd.conf.

About the Mac OS X 10.4.2 Update (Delta),

This is what prevented launchd from handling multiple CalendarInterval iterations. That stuff should work now, presuming this is honestly fixed.

I recently discovered that there’s a pretty decent introduction to launchd over at the University of Utah’s website and that about 18 minutes into the thing he demos Launchd Editor. Pretty spiffy.

launchd by James Reynolds

Of all the places to have this information, Microsoft was the last on my list. Even then, even that they have it, the funniest part is how seriously they take it.

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