11.29.07

Bear meets dog – and finds a friend.

Posted in Home at 10:17 am by JohnB

I wanted to share this for no other reason than I think it’s fantastic.

Norbert Rosing’s striking images of a wild polar bear playing with sled dogs in the wilds of Canada’s Hudson Bay

Norbert must have been pretty sure he’d be walking back home with no dogs when this HUGE bear appeared

But it seems the bear is looking for fun and friendship, not food. Good doggie!

The huskie responds to the friendly overtures positively…

And snuggles ensue.

The bear and dogs were very comfortable with each other and Norbert reported that the massive Polar Bear returned everyday to play with his new pals.

There is a message here I believe. Different isn’t good or bad, it’s just different.

Permalink Comments

11.23.07

Parallels, Leopard and a Firewire drive = problems ahoy!

Posted in Home at 11:15 am by JohnB

I had one of the most frustrating days yesterday. I needed to run up on of my virtualised PCs in Parallels so that I could run some of the Microsoft eLearning software. Initially there where no problems, I started up the PC and ran through the installer and downloaded some of the courseware… then everything just stopped. The multi-coloured spinny disk sat in the middle of the screen and I could do nothing.

A reset of the Mac brought everything back to life and I shrugged and carried on. Evrything was fine right up to the point I started the PC again and pinged up IE to look for a new wallpaper (I get easily confused when I’ve got multiple desktops all looking the same.. more later!) BANG! It all stopped again.

Again a reset brought things back to life, but this time a didn’t even get through the PC boot up before things stopped. At this point the 360 was switched on, the Mac was switched off and I spent an hour on Assassins Creed venting my frustration.

This morning I got the exact same problem again.. but this time I noticed that the Firewire drive I have connected as my backup unit was spinning up and chattering away. Curious, I watched it flash and chatter for a few minutes thinking that things may spring back to life in a while. The drive stopped and then another reset was required, but an idea had formed… maybe… Hmmm.

So. Firewire drive is switched off. Mac is up and running. RDP session open to my server system running Windows 2003. Parallels PC booted up and running sweetly. Another RDP session open to a virtual PC running on the server (I said I had a lot of desktops!). Everything is working!! This is GREAT! Except I now have no Time-Machine..not so good.

So I now have to remember to power off my external drive before starting up Parallels. Not a major chore really, but not ideal either. I’m going to keep an eye out for updates or other information, but in case anyone else is having issues, this is how I worked around.

- J.

UPDATE

The problem has returned.. I’m so annoyed. Everything is fine apart from Parallels. BAH!

Permalink 1 Comment

11.17.07

FastCGI for IIS released

Posted in Work at 8:46 am by JohnB

Microsoft have announced the public release of FastCGI for IIS. This package is part of the collaborative work which has been going on between Microsoft and Zend to improve performance and stability of PHP on the Windows platform and aims to help PHP developers achieve improved performance on the Windows platform by using the new IIS FastCGI feature together with Zend’s on-going work to improve the PHP engine on Windows.

So what is this “FastCGI”?

CGI programs are executables launched by the web server for each request in order to process the request and generate dynamic responses that are sent back to the client. Because many of these frameworks do not support multi-threaded execution, CGI enables them to execute reliably on IIS by executing exactly one request per process. Unfortunately, it provides poor performance due to the high cost of starting and shutting down a process for each request.
FastCGI overcomes this performance penalty by re-using CGI processes to service subsequent requests, while continuing to ensure single request concurrency. there is a whitepaper available on the FastCGI site explaining exactly how this all works.

So why is this important?

Most applications built for IIS take advantage of the native, multi-threaded extensibility model of the server. Many popular applications, particularly those not written specifically for the IIS environment, are not multi-threaded, and instead take a multi-process approach to concurrency. While the PHP engine itself is multi-thread capable, many of the popular PHP extensions are not, requiring a single concurrent request guarantee to operate reliably, this forces the use of CGI and can result in poor performance. FastCGI helps these application frameworks to achieve improved performance on Windows over CGI, while allowing stable operation in production environments.

The FastCGI installer for Windows 2003 Server and IIS6 can be downloaded here at the IIS.net site. If you are running Vista of Windows Server 2008 with IIS7, you already have the capability of running FastCGI and there are instructions for enabling it also on the IIS.net site.

As a sometime PHP user this is something which I will be taking a keen interest in and I think it represents a strong step forward for IIS.

- J.

Permalink 1 Comment