kdmurray.blog

The crossroads of life and tech

Monthly Archives: December 2006

Vote for Rory!!

Vote For Rory!In its infinite wisdom, the NHL has decided to allow the fans to select the starting lineup for the All Star Game. This in itself is nothing new, and has been going on for years. However this year, the process is being conducted entirely on-line… As with any first version of software, there is a bug: Anyone can vote as many times as they want for the same (or a different) player. The result? Someone has decided to try and get a write-in nominee to make the starting lineup.

Steve Schmid has created the site VoteForRory.com in an effort to get a fans’ choice write-in candidate into the starting lineup of the All Star Game. After three weeks of voting, his efforts, and those of dedicated voters have managed to get Rory Fitzpatrick into 5th place.

Personally, I think this is a brilliant opportunity for the fans to have a more direct impact on the game. If Rory manages to garner enough support, perhaps the NHL will 1: fix the bug which allows people to vote all they want, and 2: allow the selection of the All Star Team to be performed by people more attuned to hockey than your average web monkey.

So go, visit the Vote For Rory website and do your part to change the face of Hockey.

Of W3WP Processes and Application Pools

For several months we’d have an issue from time to time where an IIS 6 Application Pool would go rogue and take over one of our web servers. Invariably we wouldn’t be able to determine which one it was, and would either terminate the process, or run an iisreset to clear up the problem. The biggest concern with this is that you don’t know which application is causing you the headaches.

Microsoft it would appear has already devised a solution to this problem in the form of the IIS admin scripts that ship with Windows. These scripts can do all sorts of things, but I’m going to focus on the one that will resolve the problem above.

The scripts are located in %WINDIR%System32 and are in the format iis*.vbs. To get a look at which process is running for a given application pool try:

C:WINDOWSsystem32>cscript iisapp.vbs Microsoft (R) Windows Script Host Version 5.6 Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation 1996-2001. All rights reserved. W3WP.exe PID: 3492 AppPoolId: DefaultAppPool C:WINDOWSsystem32>

Yes. It’s that easy. If you struggled with it as long as I did, I’m sure you’re feeling the same combination of mirth and frustration right about now.

 

Jekyll & “Hide” – Where has the offense gone?

Vancouver Canucks LogoTonight, in what should have been a hard-fought, tight-checking, spirited hockey game, the Vancouver Canucks collapsed.  Again.  Averaging barely over 2.1 goals per game, Roberto Luongo has been the key to the Canucks’ limited success so far this year.  However, for the third time in less than a month, they’ve been shut out, and in those games the opposition has scored a total of 16 goals!  This is not the kind of goalkeeping Vancouver was expecting from Luongo.

That said, this is not a one man show.  There have also been five games in the past month where the Canucks have lost in regulation by only one goal.  In those games, they have a combined goal total of 9.  If you can’t score more than 1.8 goals per game, it won’t matter if you have a brick wall playing goal; you’re not likely to win the majority of your hockey games.

The effort is there most nights (with the exception of the three blowout shutouts).  Vancouver is outshooting the opposition almost every game (tonight vs. Edmonton the shots were 36-18 Vancouver).  So was Anson Carter really that important?  Does Nazzy miss Bertuzzi that much?  Will Alain Vignault promote some other hot shot from the Moose to become the saviour of the season?  Only time will tell… lets just hope it tells of a team with more than two goals per game…

Hawking: Warp Drive the Key to Survival

Speaking after being awarded the Copley medal in England last week Prof. Steven Hawking spoke out about the need for mankind to extend its footprint outside the Sol system. His proposed method for making this happen: matter/antimatter annihilation to propel a craft to near-light speeds.  This is the method popularized in the television (and movie) series’ Star Trek.

The key difference between Hawking’s proposal and the Warp Drive technology used in the Star Trek universe is the degree of speed.  Star Trek uses matter/antimatter annihilation to move a craft at many times the speed of light, something which Hawking and most other theoretical physicists consider to be impossible based on the physical universe as we understand it.  In Hawking’s proposal this technology would be used to reach sublight speeds which are very close to the speed of light.

His estimate is that with the ability to travel just below the speed of light, a craft could reach the next nearest star in about 6 years. A vast improvement from the 50,000 years it would have taken the Apollo rocket series (assuming it could ever carry enough fuel).  As far as organizations like NASA are concerned, faster-than-light travel is speculative at best.

Maybe this is yet another one of Gene Roddenberry‘s visions coming one step closer to reality.

50 years of programming history

For the geek in all of us…

I stumbled on a couple of articles recently pointing out the history of programming languages.  What originally pointed me at this was an article in Nikhil Kothari’s blog.  He pointed to a chart on O’Reilly’s website which listed out the history of programming languages from the 1950′s right through to the present.  A copy of the chart is availble for download as a PDF.  It’s amazing to see which languages influenced others… and how old some are.  I personally had no idea that Ruby had been around since February 1993  (Same approximate time as AppleScript).

Check it out… it’s worth a look!

There’s also a good textual history of programming languages in Wikipedia, not quite as visual, or as complete, but also interesting.