The Year in Review

Tomorrow my blog is one year old. So thought it was time to review it's value. In the last year I have made 44 posts, not quite once a week based on the math. But truthfully, I appear to blog in bursts directly related to when I am doing open source stuff. And since any open source work can only be done in my free time, which is hard to find as I try to balance life between work and family, there are large gaps of time between these bursts. I am in awe of the open source developers that seem able to hold down a day job, produce heaps of amazing code, and also update their blogs most days. Have these people discovered a secret source of free time, or can survive with 2 hours sleep a day, or maybe they are younger than me :-)

In reviewing what I have blogged about, it is great to see that the focus in the WSGI world has moved from server gateway implementations to frameworks and components that use it. In the future, I expect to write more posts on using WSGI and Paste as I implement systems at work using them.

Having a blog has hopefully improved my writing skills. When I started a year ago, my first posts were based on my thoughts, saved as drafts, then tweaked until they became coherent, then published. Now I find myself able to get these thoughts in something readable in the first attempt most of the time. Also having a blog means, other people leave comments and links to their blogs. This has meant greater exposure to others thoughts and experiences.

So this blog is of great value to me and hopefully the odd thought I have posted has been of value to someone else.

Why is the PC running so slow?

At work we created a new VMWare image of the latest release of our Financial Software. Since it was required for a demo at our KL office, we needed to compress it prior to sending over the Internet to them. Since it was over 4GB, we used WinRAR to compress each virtual disk. It took forever and transferring via scp was just as bad. The cpu was the bottleneck, not because of the compression but the virus scanner scanning the VMWare image :-(. Morale of the story disable scanning for your VM image directories.

I guess a sign of times, were there are more background tasks running than "real" work being done in the foreground. And please, no comments about moving our work desktops to Linux or buying Mac's. Our server components are developed under Linux and run under most versions of Unix and Linux, but all our customers use M$ operating systems for the clientside. So we need to as well.