Once a month, I take our recycling to the road. This is something far more annoying than most city-dwellers may suspect.

For one thing, the road is about 1/4 mile away. Over a month, we fill up at least three large plastic trash cans full of recycling. If I walked each of those there to be picked up, then walked them back to the house after, I’d have walked 3 miles.

So, I use our $75 pickup to get the trash to the road. The process is a long one, and it starts two days before the recycling is due to be picked up.

Monday, 5:30PM: Find an outdoor extension cord in the basement. Put on snow-suitable shoes. Go outside, plug the extension cord in at the elevator. Grab the battery charger, hook it up to the pickup. Unfurl and untangle the extension cord, plug it in.

Blog about it if desired.

Tuesday, 5:30PM: Go outside. Disconnect the battery charger, coil up the extension cord. Plug in the air compressor and get it going. Run the hose to the tire that keeps going flat and hope it reaches. Fill up the tire. Return the air compressor hose to the elevator, turn off the air compressor.

Go to pickup and actually get in. Remove the bungee cord from the brake pedal that is holding it up, preventing the brake lights from being on 100% of the time and draining the battery even faster.

Start pumping the accelerator. It’s not a fuel-injected engine, after all. Crank the engine. Stop cranking, pump some more, trying to avoid the hole in the floor under the accelerator. Eventually get it started, hopefully.

Roll down the windows to prevent the exhaust fumes from getting too strong.

Drive the stuff to the road. Unload the three cans, plus all the extra cardboard from Christmas that didn’t fit in them and is now soggy and snow-covered. Drive the pickup back to the yard. Park it. Replace the bungee cord on the brake pedal so it’ll start again tomorrow.

Wednesday, 5:30PM: Dress warmly yet again. Go to the pickup, hoping the tire is still inflated and the battery is still charged. I’m going to be optimistic and assume they are. Hope that the pickup starts after only a few minutes of pumping. Go back to the road, only to find that the Kansas wind has scattered the trash cans and their lid all over the county. With luck, I’ll be able to find them on foot. Sometimes, I have had to get in the pickup and drive down the road to find all my lids. Stash all of this in the pickup, drive it back to the yard, park, replace the bungee cord, and close it up for another month.

I’m promising myself that when I upgrade to a better pickup, it’ll be one worth at least $200.

In Egypt’s sandy silence, all alone,
Stands a gigantic Leg, which far off throws
The only shadow that the Desert knows:
“I am great OZYMANDIAS,” saith the stone,
“The King of Kings; this mighty City shows
“The wonders of my hand.” The City’s gone,
Nought but the Leg remaining to disclose
The site of this forgotten Babylon.

We wonder, and some Hunter may express
Wonder like ours, when thro’ the wilderness
Where London stood, holding the Wolf in chace,
He meets some fragments huge, and stops to guess
What powerful but unrecorded race
Once dwelt in that annihilated place.

—Horace Smith

Many of us that can afford an Internet connection still qualify as exceedingly rich compared to, for example, many poor people in Africa. On a scale of centuries, the ancient centers of civilization and wealth tend to collapse. Even Rome, with over a million inhabitants in its day of ancient prominence, shrank to only 20,000 over the course of history. Some other ancient cities no longer dot our maps.

It helps us, perhaps, to have some perspective. Those magnificent working monuments to wealth in New York, London, or Tokyo probably won’t be there 1000 years from now. What will?

Everyone seems to be familiar with ebooks these days. I own a Kindle 2, and of course we’ve spent weeks hearing how great the Nook will be, then weeks hearing how terrible it turned out to be. But nobody seems to be casting an eye back towards paper, so I thought I’d rectify that here, especially since paper books have some serious stability issues that are often overlooked!

Before I begin, I feel it wise to offer this hint to the reader: this review should not be taken too literally. If you have an uncontrollable urge to heave a volume of the Oxford English Dictionary at me as if I am some European prime minister, please plant your tongue more firmly in your cheek and begin again.

Today I picked up a paper book to read just for fun — The Happiest Days of Our Lives by Wil Wheaton. Long-time (since this spring!) Kindle user that I am, I immediately noticed the dashing use of color on its front cover, but when I opened it, I was disappointed that I couldn’t scale the font size down from the default. It seems that paper books have only one font option — what are all these Kindle forum posters complaining about with its six sizes of a single font?

On the very first page, I encountered a word I wasn’t familiar with (Namaste). I thought I knew what it meant from the context clues, and even had the thought that on the Kindle, I could just highlight it and confirm my guess. But my paper dictionary was in the basement, so I didn’t bother looking it up until I wrote this post. (My hunch was reasonably correct.)

Interface-wise, the paper book is solid, and crashes, lockups, or other malfunctions are rare. I have, however, noted severe stability problems when attempting to read outdoors, especially when it’s windy (which, since I live in Kansas, is pretty much always). Pages start turning themselves, even without me making the “turn page” gesture. Sometimes the book will even lose its memory of my last page read. This is rather annoying, and might even involve a lengthy search for a suitable temporary replacement bookmark. Also, I haven’t tried it, but I suspect that the trick of putting a Kindle in a ziplock bag to read at the beach or in the tub without risk of getting it wet would be impractical with a paper book.

Paper does have its advantages. For one, it’s faster to flip rapidly through pages on paper than on an ebook reader. If you know roughly where in the book something was written, but not the precise wording, searching can be faster on paper. On the other had, if you are looking for a particular word or phrase, the ebook reader may win hands-down, especially if the paper book has no index.

Paper is so stable that some would argue that the extreme impracticality of making good backups isn’t really a problem at all. But on the other hand, paper books degrade slightly each time they are used, and this condition can be aggravated by placement in bags for transport. Eventually, they will wear out. If my Kindle wears out, I can always restore David Copperfield from my backup copy to a new one. If my printed edition (all two volumes) of it wear out, then I have to hope that the used bookstore will still sell me another one for $10. Otherwise I’d have to either drive 45 miles to find one for sale, attempt to deal with the DRM for paper books at a library, or wait a couple of days for Amazon to get it to my door. A fire or flood could be devastating.

Paper books also have some advantages for showing photos; no ebook reader is close to the size and resolution of glossy paper photos books in a reasonable price.

The contrast on most paper books is better than that of my Kindle, but some older ones are actually worse, smell dusty, and suffer from occasional display corruption as bits of them actually break off of the book device.

As to cost, it is a mixed bag. Out of copyright classics are free as ebooks from Project Gutenberg and the like, while still costing money on paper. I have found that the accuracy of some of these paper editions can be rather questionable — people have sometimes manually removed important bits of the story to save on printing costs, rather than let Google Books OCR mangle it for them automatically. On the other hand, used paper editions of more current works can be found for a fraction of the cost of the new ebook edition — though you are often limited in selection of these bargains. But you can usually browse a paper book for a few minutes before buying it, which is rarely available for an ebook.

What’s more, libraries might let you borrow paper books for free. But you often have to expel greenhouse gases to get to them, and then they enforce DRM on you — you only get to read it a certain amount of time before they start adding fees. You could easily wind up paying $2 if you keep it a week longer than you should have. With ebooks, of course, there is no free borrowing (and the Nook feature it too limited to count.) And you of course know that most libraries are run by the government, so they have your address. Trying to circumvent a library’s DRM could wind up involving the police, so you had best comply.

Making copies of a paper book is expensive and requires specialized equipment, even if you just want a copy for backup.

Compatibility problems with paper books are rare, and are usually found among readers with poor eyesight. A few works can be found in “large font editions,” but most can’t, so those readers are left needing expensive specialty magnifiers.

All in all, I prefer reading books on my Kindle, but still read on paper when that’s how I have a book.

Thanks everyone for the helpful comments yesterday on Apache vs. lighttpd. I’ve taken the first few steps towards improving things. I’ve eliminated mod_php5, switched all PHP to FastCGI, and switched from the prefork to the event MPM.

The event MPM docs say that it’s incompatible with mod_ssl, but it worked, and googling for that turned up mailing list posts from 2006 saying it was fixed.

The only real glitch was that egroupware inexplicably depends on libapache2-mod-php5. It works fine without it, but I had to create a fakelibapache2-mod-php5 that provides libapache2-mod-php5 to convince the system not to remove egroupware when I switched to the event MPM.

I went from 28 Apache processes to 4 Apache processes plus an average of around 2 php5-cgi processes — which, despite the name, actually do grok FastCGI. Three of my Apache processes now have an RSS of about 20M, and the other of about 30M. The php5-cgi processes are at around 40M. My old Apache processes ranged from 18M to over 40M. So there is some memory savings here, though not drastic.

My Redmine processes, two of them, each use over 50M. Ruby on Rails still is leaving me with a bad taste. At least it’s not a Java app; it seems a lot of those allocate 2GB before they ever start accepting connections.

I’ll see how this goes for awhile, but for now I doubt that moving to lighttpd (or similar) will yield enough benefit to make it worth the effort. But there may be some benefit in inserting a caching proxy in front of Apache, so I may yet do that.

I’ve had a somewhat recurring problem that Apache on my server is a memory hog. The machine has a full GB of RAM now, but even so, heavy activity from spidering bots or reddit can bring it to its knees.

I’ve been trying to figure out what to do about it. I run Apache on there, and here’s an idea of what it hosts:

• This blog, and two others like it, using WordPress
• Several sites that are nothing but static files
• gitweb
• A redmine (ruby on rails) site
• Several sites running MoinMoin
• A set of tens of thousands of redirects from mailing list archives I used to host over to gmane (this had negligible impact on resource use when I added it)
• A few other smaller PHP apps

Due to PHP limitations, it will only work with the Apache prefork or itk MPMs. That constrains the entire rest of the system to those particular MPMs. Other than PHP, most of the rest of these sites are running using FastCGI — that includes redmine and MoinMoin, although gitweb is a plain cgi. Many of these sites, such as this blog, have changed underlying software over the years, and I use mod_rewrite to issue permanent redirects from old URLs to their corresponding new ones as much as possible.

I do have two IPs allocated to the server, and so I can run multiple webservers if desired.

lighttpd is a lightweight webserver. I’ve browsed their documentation some, and I’m having a lot of trouble figuring out whether it would help me any. The way I see it, I have four options:

1. Keep everything as it is now
2. Stick with Apache, discard mod_php and use FastCGI for PHP, and pick some better MPM (whatever that might be)
3. Keep Apache for PHP and move the rest to lighttpd
4. Move everything to lighttpd, with FastCGI for PHP

I know Apache pretty well, and lighttpd not at all, so if all else is equal, I’d want to stick with Apache. But I’m certainly not above trying something else.

One other wrinkle is that right now everything runs as www-data — PHP, MoinMoin, static sites, everything. That makes me nervous, and I’d like to run some sites under different users for security. I’m not sure if Apache or lighttpd is better for that.

If anybody has thoughts, I’m all ears.

It’s been awhile since I’ve made a blog post, and it will probably soon be evident why.

For myself, I am taking two college classes — philosophy and gerontology — this semester, and still working full time. That’s busy right there. I’m really enjoying them, and in particular enjoying the philosophy class. I will, at long last, graduate this December.

Oliver is about 3 months old now. He’s starting to smile at us more, make his cute little baby noises more, and is very interested in taking in all of his surroundings. He has his opinions about things, but isn’t expressing them too loudly just yet.

Jacob, on the other hand, is sometimes.

Our person from Parents As Teachers was talking to him for his 3-year-old evaluation. She said, “Jacob, are you a boy or a girl?” “I a kitty.” “Are you a boy kitty or a girl kitty?” “I just a PLAIN kitty. Meow.”

He seems to delight in catching someone saying or doing something in a manner he considers wrong. “No, not like THAT!” is heard a lot in our house these days. Or perhaps, “No, not RAILROAD tracks. They TRAIN tracks, dad!”

Jacob’s imagination is very active. Sometimes if it is time to go use the potty, he will insist that we all stop because a freight train is going through the kitchen, the crossing guard lights are flashing, so we have to STOP. He pretends to be kitties, runaway bunnies (he has a book called Runaway Bunny), and occasionally other things.