RjSteinert.com

Two weeks ago I was reading another Drupal optimization article and then a Mozilla post on their JIT (just in time) javascript compiler for Firefox when I had a brief moment of clarity. Why the hell isn't there a PHP compiler out there? A quick Google search later I found a handful of PHP compilers. Ok...

Debating the merits of Ruby vs PHP with a friend a few weeks earlier, my friend made the point, "You're going to hit the wall a lot faster with a noncompiled language." (Note that Ruby is an interpreted language but they do have some successful JIT compiler projects). While websites like Facebook have proved that websites running PHP can be scaled, I know plenty of Drupal sites that could use a speed boost. So why aren't these compilers being used I ask? Well, the logical conclusion could be perhaps be that PHP is not necessarily the bottle neck of on most site's system. In my experience more often MySQL has actually been my bottleneck, but PHP still takes a slice of the cake. If PHP could run faster, why the hell not compile it?

Well, Hallelujah our prayers may be answered thanks to Facebook who reportedly has rewritten the PHP runtime. There is some speculation out there as to exactly what that means, but the consensus is leaning towards a legit PHP compiler.

The CleanTown.org grant application for Knight Foundation's 2010 News Challenge has been made public on NewsChallenge.org. Please show your support for the project by giving it high ratings! :-) The formatting on the News Challenge website is a little wacky so I posted the application on CleanTown.org.

CleanTown.org is officially coming out into the open. CleanTown.org has a grant application going public soon for the Knight Foundation's, 2010 Knight News Challenge and efforts are ramping up for private Beta Testing. Check out the full post on CleanTown.org.

I found an interesting post from Paul Lutus, the author of Apple Writer. I enjoyed reading about how he preferred living in the woods and his speculations on lost human interaction. In his last section he argued the following point:

"I believe the computer age favors the individual and that resistance to the individual work style is the last gasp of the dying industrial age."

I disagree with Lutus that working in teams is dying work style. Computers, especially since the popularization of the Internet, have enhanced our ability to communicate thus making collective efforts far more effective than ever before. While an individual's efforts can benefit through productivity by their very own way of doing something, the Internet allows us to collaborate on a mass scale.

We make sense of this massive collaboration by setting standards and guidelines. Take for example a team of 20, 5 of those people may find those guidelines unacceptable thus sacrificing productivity of the whole team. But in a group of millions, like we have on the Internet, you will find thousands of people who find those guidelines acceptable thus allowing thousands of individuals to work harmoniously together.

Last night I released OG Location For Atrium Beta5 onto my Drupal Feature Server. This feature lays the ground work for the Non Profit project I'll be announcing soon and is also a big step towards integrating the Location module into the Open Atrium project.

This feature utilizes Atrium's project management groups and gives them a home! With the OG Location For Atrium Featured installed, Users now have a Group tab to see activity streams for Groups in their own town and a tab to see activity streams for Groups in their own State/Province.

I found a nice summary today in the Harvard Law blogs explaining how large banks are pulling off Billion dollar monthly profits. It explains how U.S. banks are borrowing from the U.S. government at 0% interest and then turning around and buying short term Treasury bonds with a return of 2% to 3%.

"So the money is just being shuffled from one Federal bank account to another, with each Wall Street bank skimming off $1 billion per month for itself.."

On face value it seems banks are just funneling out tax dollars and putting them in their own pockets. I'm wondering if anyone is aware of a fiscal policy where this was the intent with a positive outcome for America's middle class?

Now that my JetBlue All You Can Jet pass is over and I'm settled in Portland, I no longer completely depend on my iPhone for survival and figured it was a safe time to walk the risky road of upgrading my iPhone from 3.01 to 3.1.

The result:

I did a little research on the problem and found other people having similar troubles with my application stack. Here's my relevant config:

Base OS: Linux Ubuntu 9.10 Virtualization Suite: VirtualBox 2.2.4 Guest (VM) OS: Windows XP iTunes: 8.x(?) and then upgraded to 9.04 for a second go around

The most promising info I found was on the VirtualBox.org forum in a post titled Success installing iPhone 3.0 in VM.

"My solution was to shutdown the VM (while my iphone was essentially bricked from being interrupted mid-update), change the USB filter to only match the Apple Vendor ID (thus not caring what specific Apple device it saw), and start the VM up again. It then detected the phone and did a full recovery, restore, and sync to bring the iPhone back to working condition again (it took a hour or so to do this)."

This made a lot of sense to me because on my first go around I found I had not set up a filter at all and was simply manually pointing the iPhone back to the VM everytime it restarted. This first go around let to a 1604 error.

So armed with this knowledge I upgraded my iTunes to 9.04 for good measure and set up a filter.

For those of you that doubt that cellphones emit harmful radiation, watch this video of four cellphones cooking steak.

Before we begin, here's a quick gem from CNET's report on Cell Phone radiation:

"...all users, children and adults, should not sleep with an active phone next to their bedside or under their pillow."

I use my iPhone. ALOT. Not just to look up random useless facts on Wikipedia but for the neverending soundtrack to my life. I use the lovely custom Internet radio program Pandora but ever since Rhapsody, the $15/month a la carte music service, released their iPhone app, I haven't really found a reason to use any other device for music or any reason to stop listening to music for that matter. So in my mind this places users like me a step or two above your average cell phone user for usage.