There’s a trial maintenance day this Saturday, May 14th to complete the new trail section that runs above the French trail. We’ll be connecting the trail at the top to the French trail. We’ll meet at 9, and ride the newly completed trail after finishing the connector.

I’ve now fixed all but one of the outstanding issues for 2.01. I think you’ll find that this site is now much faster and more stable than previous releases, which was the point of recent work I’ve done on it. My apologies for several bouts of downtime the site took over the last couple of days while I updated the code.

Most of the changes were on an infrastructure level. The Rails framework on which the site is built was upgraded to 0.11.1 (the latest and greatest). I also optimized the main page and the article display page (the most often hit pages), reducing the number of database accesses necessary to render the pages. The database itself has had several new indexes and hints implemented to serve up the data more quickly. The query that lists all articles on the main page is still rather ugly, and I will continue to work on that one.

The biggest change, and the biggest performance gain, was that I’ve moved away from the Apache webserver working in CGI mode. This old method required a new process for every page access and loaded the entire code-base from scratch every time. Now we’re running on lighttpd, a very fast, lightweight webserver. It’s using FastCGI, a container that is built to optimize the caching of several instances of the code and re-use them for requests as they come in.

Overall, the benchmarking has shown that the improvement is impressive: over 25x faster after all is said and done. I think you’ll find that this is now the fastest version of the website I’ve ever had. Database accesses for the most intense page (the front page) are now well under .05 seconds even under moderate load. And that page is the one with the killer unoptimized query.

Here’s an example of how long it took to create the main page before the update: Completed in 1.794307 (0 reqs/sec) | Rendering: 0.257199 (14%) | DB: 1.632127 (90%)

And after: Completed in 0.112052 (8 reqs/sec) | Rendering: 0.052303 (46%) | DB: 0.000865 (0%)

While I don’t expect future improvements to be so dramatic, there are still plenty of things to do to make the app faster. As you can see, rendering the page (handled by the Rails framework) is the biggest bottleneck now that the database has been reasonably optimized. The newest version of Rails has several new caching schemes available that I intend to try out, so that will probably be the next bump in performance.

I do still host the app in a shared environment, so load from other users can affect things, but I think things should be much better from here on out. As always, please let me know about things that might have been broken by this update.

Remember how Beau, Alex and I were heading to Arizona for the Spring Fling? Well, it was a complete bust.

First, Beau canceled at the last minute. Rather than seeing that as a sign, Alex and I decided to go anyway. I got to work late Thu. morning, having had to prep the vehicle for the trip seeing as how I wasn’t expecting to drive. Work’s been amazingly busy for me since KC has been out of the office all week, and he has me filling in for him. That all adds up to us leaving for AZ at 2 PM instead of noon. 2 PM + 12 hour drive = 2am arrival in Phoenix. Shit.

Feeling the need to give Alex ammo to make fun of me, I proceeded to run out of gas on one of my shifts. The RX-8 isn’t an economy car on the best day, and it certainly isn’t with two bikes on the roof. That, plus a 100+ mile break with no gas stations ended up with us out of gas. So we watched a DVD for an hour before the roadside assistance guy showed up with a couple of gallons to get us to the next station. Add another hour behind schedule. 😞

We got to Phoenix and remembered that Arizona is an hour ahead of us. That’s another hour gone. It was after 4 AM. We had to be on the trail at 9 AM, which of course didn’t happen. The alarm woke us up, but we were both too tired to pound out a long-ass hard ride, so we skipped it. On to Sedona, where we found that it was possibly going to rain. Then Alex got sick for a few hours, because we hadn’t had enough go wrong.

The forecast showed no rain until Sat. afternoon, so we figured we might get a ride in. Saturday morning rolled around and it was pouring. We decided to cut our losses and head home empty-handed. We ended up having to drive through rain and snow to get home, but arrived home without further incident. Oof!

Engadget has started a TiVo deathwatch page, with evidence of their decline. Let’s hope they’re wrong.

TiVo announced a standalone HD TiVo at CES today. It’s also planned to be CableCard-compatible, which means it can take the place of a cable box, eliminating the IR blaster and re-compression, just like DirecTiVo.

The downside? It’s not going to come out until early 2006. 😞

I’ve been working on a new version of this site, but haven’t wanted to mention anything until I was close enough to a release (so as not to tease). I’ve been working with a new language I wanted to learn (Ruby), and a new web framework written in Ruby, and it’s been marvelous.

I’m looking into changing web hosts (the database problems are getting worse again), so I’ll try and release the new version at the same time I do the move. I’ll keep everyone posted. I’m planning to have it up in the next couple of weeks.

As most of you who’ve ridden there know, there is no legal singletrack at Lake Chabot. There is an initiative to open a stretch of singletrack on the Brandon Trail to bikes. Even though we don’t ride there much anymore, please write a quick email of support. It can just be a couple of sentences; they count votes, not length.

Here’s some more info about the issue.

For this fourth of July (aside from being Val’s birthday; happy birthday!), Beau, JoeEtta, Val and I hiked to one of the high points of Water Dog (where we ride bikes all the time) to see what we could see of the fireworks displays around the bay.

At first we thought the marine layer might prevent us from seeing much, but as the sun went down, the night cleared up pretty well. Foster City was the closest display to us, and was a good show. Redwood City timed their show so it began as Foster City’s ended, so we got two fairly close shows. We could see that there were many other shows, but none were close enough to really enjoy. Still, it was a good night, and crowd-free. The view from there is really nice, and it was a good way to celebrate the fourth, IMO.

I asked Val to marry me today, and she said “Yes!”

Obviously, plans aren’t firm yet, but we’re looking at doing it in Omaha mid-next year.

We met on Match two years ago, and decided to be “exclusive” on June 23, 2002. We’re looking forward to being a Match.com True Story. 😉

Beau, Alex, KC, Tony and I took our mountain biking trip to Fruita, CO and Moab, UT. Fruita was a great place to ride, but that’s about it. The trails were awesome (we rode Mary’s Loop/Horsethief Bench, the Perimeter ride in the Bookcliffs, and Moore Fun/Mary’s Loop on Fri., Sat. and Sun., respectively), and the weather was great. The food in Fruita pretty much sucks, and there’s not as much non-riding stuff to do as there is in Moab. Grand Junction is a bigger town, and only a few minutes drive away, so we ended up there a couple of times for meals and entertainment.

I bought a new Nikon D70 before I left, so I did take a few photos. Unfortunately, I didn’t take it on the most treacherous ride we went on (Moore Fun), and Beau ditched all of us with the only camera we had, so no pics of that area. >:(

We left for Moab on Monday, rode Bartlett Wash after settling in. We rode Slickrock on Tue. and Jeeped on Wed. After 5 straight days of riding, we were all pretty tired. Tony and KC flew out on Wed. afternoon (they had always planned to leave earlier than the rest of us), and Beau, Alex and I decided to pack up and head home early, by way of Vegas. 😉

A little sleep and a lot of poker later, we got back on Friday night. No injuries, some great trails, and a great trip all around.

I haven’t written up any details of the bike trip that Beau and I just did to Arizona, but here are some pics 🙂

I am the proud owner of the new Turner 5 Spot. After a month of not owning a mountain bike, it’s good to have my own steed again. It’s a work of art. 😃

It does have a shitty saddle, so I’ll yank that off ASAP. Otherwise, I couldn’t be happier. I’m looking forward to breaking it in this weekend.

After reading a lot about new bikes on the ‘Net, I kept reading about a bike from a fairly small manufacturer, Turner Bikes, called the 5-Spot. It’s a bit of a different bike than the Blur; the Blur is more cross-country (tight and light) and the 5-Spot has gobs of plush suspension for rocks and all-day rides.

There’s a bike shop in Santa Cruz that carries both, and Beau and I drove down on Sat. to check them out. Funny enough, they had a Blur very much like the one I ordered, sitting right on the floor. When I saw it (it was gorgeous), I figured I’d walk out with it, cancel my pending order at the other shop, and go riding. But I drove all the way down there to ride the 5-Spot.

Beau and I took the 5-Spot and the Blur out and pounded some curbs with them both, and I was amazed at how much better the 5-Spot felt than the Blur. I mean, I liked the Blur a lot, but the 5-Spot was just breathtaking. The Blur is a 4.5″ bike (suspension travel) and the 5-Spot is a true 5″ bike. The real difference is that the 5-Spot is an oil/coil suspension versus air. It feels like way more suspension. The main things the Blur had going for it was the weight (it was about 4 pounds lighter) and the looks (awesome).

So I did end up canceling the Blur order, but now I’ve got an order for a bright red, large Turner 5-Spot. 😃 I should be on it in 2 weeks. Of course, the bad part is that I’ve already been off the bike for 2 weeks waiting for the Blur. 😞 At least I’ve been doing a lot of rock climbing in the meantime. 😉

The components are pretty much the same as the Blur I ordered: SRAM X.0 (Grip Shift) shifters and rear, mostly XT everywhere else. The brakes will be either Hayes or Avid Juicys (both 6″ disc brakes). Wheels are up in the air a bit. They’ll either be Mavic 3/717s or Bontrager substitutions. Onyx hubs. The tires will be huge Nokian 2.3s. I’ll know more about exactly what and when on Wednesday when the shop can get ahold of Santa Cruz (where they’re ordering the parts kit from) and check spec and availability.

They paid off their last debt and have over $4 billion in the bank!

TiVo CEO says that DirectTV helped them hit the million subscriber mark ahead of their schedule.