bytex64.net/blog

I have regrettably fallen out of my habit of writing regularly in my blog. It's definetly not because of a lack of things to discuss — I've still got plenty of things going on in my life. I think the problem is more that I've been discussing interesting things in person lately and I've been neglecting to write any of it down. It's sort of like having a Twitter account, except it's a social positive instead of a social negative. I will be making an effort to write more often if only to update my distant friends on my goings-on, but like most things I do, you can expect this effort to be half-assed.

I learned a neat Linux trick today: The ionice program. Ionice manipulates the CFQ I/O scheduling engine in Linux, allowing you to give some programs more time accessing the disk than others. If, for example, you have two web servers on a machine — say, one for production and one for testing — you can set the priority for your production server higher so that your paying customers don't have to wait. In another scenario, you can use it to give realtime class (DISCLAIMER: may not actually be realtime) scheduling to a process that outputs time-sensitive data, or idle class scheduling for processes that do routine cleanup. It's a handy tool, and it should be Just Works^TM in most versions of Linux these days. Linux uses CFQ by default since 2.6.18, and ionice is part of the util-linux-ng package that should exist on most systems.

In other news, I've been working on a highly modular web browser in C# using WebKit. I'm calling it WebThing, but our tentative official "marketing" name is SpaceFerret. It borrows heavily from Vimperator and is inspired by uzbl... but only because I think I can do better. I'm using it right now to write this post. The source is available on my git repository, and I'll have a release out... oh, y'know, whenever.

I made bulgogi tonight from discount meat and leftover vegetables. It was fantastic. :D

Also, I have made a Photobucket clone called Cardboard Box. It's a simple image upload and share web app. If this sounds interesting, let me know and I'll send you a link. I don't want to put it up here because google crawls my blog and I don't want to actually have all of Photobucket's traffic. :)

That's pretty much the state of things. Good night.