Caleb and Reagan’s Blog

Last Wednesday my team from the office went to the lake for a day of fun. As I was being pulled 30 mph behind a wakeboarding boat I realized that I hadn’t laughed this hard in a long while. Holding on as if my life depended on it we whipped side to side. My goal was to hold on, the drivers goal was to send us flying off the raft. Good times. As you can see from the video we took a pretty nasty spill.

I now make daily visits to the chiropractor. 4 down, 44 to go over the next few months.

Was it worth it? You bet. I needed a good laugh.

I heard something downstairs tonight and figured that Reagan couldn’t sleep because she was thinking of the upcoming school year. I look to my left and I see that Reagan is still fast asleep. “Oh well, it was probably nothing”, I convince myself. Minutes later I hear the distinct sound of a computer keyboard. I have to go check it out.

I couldn’t believe my eyes.

Burning the midnight oil was my four month old daughter all hopped up on Dr. Pepper. Mastering Regular Expressions? I can’t even get through that entire book…

There’s a great column in the Atlanta Journal Constitution about how it must feel to be Michael Vick these days:

How must it be, being Michael Vick?

From prince of this bustling city to pariah of an entire country; from idol of millions to cheap joke on the “Tonight Show;” from having too many friends to having no friends at all — how must that feel? How must it feel to arise each morning believing the walls have moved ever closer in the dark of night?

You can, and should, read the full version here.

John blogged about his first DIY Macro Studio attempt and it was enough to motivate me to bring mine back out of the closet. Here’s my first attempt from a few months ago:

Now that I have two flashes I could hit the light box from both sides. Here’s today’s version:

Can’t forget the setup shot:

John, you had two pieces and I didn’t get any?

I’m a big fan of the Colbert Report and my favorite recurring segment is called “Better Know a District”. Colbert interviews a member of Congress and asks questions about the district that they represent. The combative interviews are always full of laughs. Here’s one of my favorites:

If the video does not show above here’s a direct link.

I was reading a little bit about Apache optimization tonight and an article suggested offloading all image requests to a lighttpd server via mod_proxy. On the surface it made a lot of sense because a sysadmin can throw mod_proxy and lighttpd up without needing to notify web developers or change site content. However, from my tests it looks like Apache + mod_proxy + lighttpd is slower than just Apache and much slower than a standalone lighttpd server for static content. For my tests I used the http_load application.

Case 1 - lighttpd v1.4.15 serving a 9.05k image file

# http_load -parallel 10 -seconds 10 url
183259 fetches, 10 max parallel, 1.69881e+09 bytes, in 10 seconds
9270 mean bytes/connection
18325.9 fetches/sec, 1.69881e+08 bytes/sec
msecs/connect: 0.0889203 mean, 3.338 max, 0.023 min
msecs/first-response: 0.340411 mean, 9.85 max, 0.11 min
HTTP response codes:
code 200 -- 183259

That’s 183,259 requests handled in 10 seconds.

Case 2 - Apache v2.2.3 serving a 9.05k image file

# http_load -parallel 10 -seconds 10 url
88581 fetches, 10 max parallel, 8.21146e+08 bytes, in 10.0002 seconds
9270 mean bytes/connection
8857.92 fetches/sec, 8.21129e+07 bytes/sec
msecs/connect: 0.115481 mean, 5.775 max, 0.021 min
msecs/first-response: 0.799573 mean, 69.448 max, 0.102 min
HTTP response codes:
code 200 -- 88581

88,581 requests in 10 seconds. Clearly lighttpd is faster. What happens if we combine them as the article suggests?

Case 3 - Apache v2.2.3 + mod_proxy + lighttpd v1.4.15

# http_load -parallel 10 -seconds 10 url
39435 fetches, 10 max parallel, 3.65562e+08 bytes, in 10.0001 seconds
9270 mean bytes/connection
3943.47 fetches/sec, 3.65559e+07 bytes/sec
msecs/connect: 0.180241 mean, 7.756 max, 0.022 min
msecs/first-response: 2.05521 mean, 150.937 max, 0.301 min
HTTP response codes:
code 200 -- 39435

38,435 requests served in 10 seconds. This is worse than a standalone Apache web server.

My conclusion: Use http://images.domain.com/ for your static content and let lighttpd serve it as fast as possible.

My team spent the afternoon in the park playing sand volleyball, flag football and kickball. John Strunk used his new digital camera to create some videos that are now on YouTube.

Me nailing BK during kickball:

Me throwing a touchdown pass to Elaine:

I have been posting a fair amount of baby pictures to my Flickr page. Still can’t see them? Let me know.

Dad and I made the quick drive over to Houston this past weekend to watch the Texas Rangers visit the Houston Astros. The weather was perfect and the seats were great thanks to StubHub. Good times. With the open roof we were on the wrong side of the field for good lighting so I didn’t have the camera out for very long.

Houston starting pitcher, Wandy Rodriquez

Houston’s Roy Oswalt

Rangers reliever, Wes Littleton

Holy crap! We’re parents as of 8:59 AM to an awesome baby girl. 8 lbs, 13 oz, 21.25′. I have uploaded 19 pictures here. You will need to be listed as a friend or family member on Flickr to see them. If you’re not on that list yet and you want to be, email me (caleb@calebgroom.com) your Flickr username or give me your email address and I will send you a Flickr invite.