Misc

I also installed WP-Cache2 (Thanks, Charles!) If you see any broken functionality, post here.

I just spent half an hour on the phone with Bluehost, my web hosting service. In the past, I’ve given them fits with expensive SQL queries and the like, but we were always able to resolve the problem.

This time, however, the verdict was, “You may have outgrown our hosting service.” The random “account suspended” messages you see are triggered by things as innocuous as serving up the favicon. The issue is just too many hits in a short span of time — the site may have just grown too popular. As I glance at the sidebar and see 40+ people here on a Sunday afternoon, it’s hard to argue with them.

They do have a “high CPU” option for twice the price, but they also said “at this rate, it’s a temporary solution for you.” So they suggested that I might want to look into some form of dedicated hosting.

Ugh. Expensive. Advice? Host recommendations? If I go to dedicated hosting, I may actually be obliged to actually push the ads I have on here so they are worth something, which would be annoying.

After taking a thorough backup, I will be upgrading to WordPress 2.1 today, in hopes that this buys me a teeny bit of headroom.

Hurricanes in Scandinavia. Ice in Austin. Snow in Malibu. And now, an inch and a half of snow in Tucson and Phoenix.

I think we broke it.

Mmm.

At work, we got dual 4:3 monitors, and I loved it. I’ve mentioned before that I’ve been using MaxiVista to extend my desktop onto my Tablet PC. But that has some issues — though the new version that just came out is pretty nice. For one, I use WiFi, and it really works better over a wired connection. For another, the Tablet’s TFT and my widescreen monitor are not the same physical size. Lastly, getting them to sit level with one another was annoying.

Read More “Dual widescreen”

This is geek heaven. A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods is a triumph of cool infodesign in and of itself. It’s a periodic table, where each element is instead a means of visually displaying information. Naturally, as in the real periodic table, “elements” are clustered based on similarity. It’s done via pop-ups, which perhaps Edward Tufte might disapprove of… but I could probably fiddle with it for hours.