Entry 338, on 2006-05-29 at 13:41:19 (Rating 1, Comments)
I've got a really random mix of comments today. Just some idle thoughts, about events of the last few days, I have had while sitting here in a cafe with a triple-shot long black!
Yesterday, my daughter performed in a concert which included the orchestra she plays flute with, and a few others of varying degrees of experience. The concert lasted about 90 minutes, and many people seemed to be getting rather bored with the whole thing. Most of the performances by the kids were short and snappy, if not totally brilliant musically. But some of the adult performers didn't really understand the audience, I think.
Many people have minimal exposure to classical music and its important to keep performances approachable. Either keep them short, or play something that's recognisable and not too challenging. Unfortunately, that didn't happen yesterday. That's not going to help the common opinion of classical as being boring, even though it is good to try to introduce variety to peoples' musical experience.
So here's comment the second... Its near the end of May and we are getting into some colder winter weather here in New Zealand. My family is always busy doing something, and we are often away from the house so its hard to keep it warm, because in the past we have relied on our wood burner for heating. But last week we had a heat-pump installed, and at this early stage, I've got to report that it is a good thing.
Heat pumps work by moving heat from outside to inside. Even if its cold outside they can make it even colder and move the extra heat inside - like an air-conditioner (which they also do) in reverse. So by using 1 or 2 kilowatts of energy they can generate 6 or 7 kilowatts of heat - as much as a small wood burner. Just how much this will affect our power bill is yet to be seen, but I must admit the convenience is hard to beat!
Finally... Sometimes computers can be a real mystery - even to an experienced professional like myself! I have had a strange fault with some of my web servers where web pages built with PHP code accessing MySQL databases weren't refreshing. You could visit a page with content from a database, modify that content, go back to the page but the new content wouldn't be there, because Apache used an old version (at least, that's my assumption).
It was obviously a caching issue of some sort but I couldn't figure out where to fix it. The fact that it happened on some servers but not others was also bizarre. After hours of research I acted on a vague instinct and disabled an Apache module called "expires_module". That fixed it. I still don't know totally why, and I usually don't like doing things just because they work without knowing why, but at least I have a working server again. BTW, any ideas on this problem would be gratefully received!.
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