I found this great article about Con Kolivas on Slashdot today:

Linux is burdened with ‘enterprise crap’ that makes it run poorly on desktop PCs, says kernel developer Con Kolivas. Kolivas recently walked away from years of work on the kernel in despair. APCmag.com has a lengthy interview with Kolivas, who explains what he sees is wrong with Linux from a performance perspective and how Microsoft has succeeded in crushing innovation in personal computers.

This article is personally the first time I have heard of Con Kolivas, but in the article he makes many great points about performance and usability that every software developer should be concerned with. He also talks about the disconnect that the Linux Kernel Developers have with the common user and the weight corporations hold over the changes that go in to the Linux Kernel.

One of the many techno-geek religious arguments that comes up a lot is which web server has a faster response time under load, IIS 6 or Apache? I am happy to say somebody actually put this to a test using what is known as the Digg-effect, basically a constant hammering of the server to keep it under load. The results may surprise some of the zealots out there and the test might be buried because of an unpopular fact. Here is the setup from the site:

This is a page to test the effect of high reddit and digg hits on two different servers one running IIS6 and the other Apache. The purpose is to see how each handles high hit loads and is the most reliable.

By using one server to load this page (not being tested) then calling a page from a dedicated IIS6 server into an iframe and a second page from a dedicated Apache server into a second iframe. The entire process is using PHP scripting and mysql data to store the results. To eliminate cache hits on both test servers, the page being returned to the iframe is dynamically created each time from a php script.

After the pages are completely loaded, an ajax call is made to the primary server to record the times back into the sql database for statistics. All three servers are the same physically and in the same rack and network. Bandwidth is not a measurement issue, since only the execution of the php script is being measured.

I have taken the liberty of making a screen shot of the following site just in case it is taken down. The screen show is dated 2007-06-30.

I have included the results below for the same reason.

This is a very interesting study, and I am going to keep following this site for updates.

David Cheong, a fellow software developer, has some very good tips for how to wake up early on his blog. I personally use half of them to get my self out of bed in the morning. The most important one that I use is:

I’ve found this to be the single most important element in being an early riser. Days in which I did not crystallise the reasons for getting up were more likely to result in sleep ins. Now, I make it clear the night before what it is I want to wake up early for. Initially, I found writing things down to be helpful, but this isn’t always necessary, as long as it is clear what the reasons are.

Basically you have to enjoy what you are doing in life, and once you do that it makes waking up so much easier. Even after a long night of coding where you worked on a mind-boggling problem that kept you up till 1:00 AM. It is a very good read even if you are not a software developer.