karma released Nucleus 3.1 after a SQL security problem is found.

After doing some benchmarking, I found my blog is really slow.

After more detail benchmarking, I found NP_MostPopular and NP_WeatherReport are the offending parties. I re-implemented MostPopular and the author of WeatherReport added caching. This lessened the processing time.

The proceesing time is cut from 1.2+ seconds (sometimes even 4-10) to ~.6 second now. A very good improvement.

Nucleus 3.01 is out. I upgraded first thing since it is a security update.

My Duron 950 server got a CPU fan failure over the weekend, and I took the chance to get 2 new 80Gb HDD to upgrade the existing 15G s/w RAID.

I am upgraded to Fedora Core 2 now as well, running a 50Gb RAID-1 on / and a LVM of 2 partitions of about 50Gb in total for /tmp.

So far so good.

Now, maybe I can get the TV capture card working in 2.6 kernel.

[update]
Fedora 2's 2.6.6 kernel comes with sa7133 driver already! Cool!
[/update]

Coupling of software is bad (maybe even all kind of coupling??)

By coupling, I mean designing software/system that a component is depends on another entity in order to function, or part of the functionality is located in another object that does not related (directly or indirectly) otherwise. Functionality should be clearly partition in a way that a component can be replaced without causing other part of the system to fail. There are many scenario that limitations and flaws are caused by this.

Software should be smart

There are bugs and there are scenarios that the system just failed (foreseeable or else), so we need defensive programming. The best defends is to design/write good software that not even getting into a bad case like this. But in case of problem does araise, the software should be self-healing (that's detect the error, report it, and take corrective action) if possible. If this route failed, it will rely on auto-recovery (ie reset) if unable to calm with the error. The worst is the software just failed and go into freefall and OoC (Out of Control).... ultimately unacceptable: just crashed

Global/Static data is bad, we should all know by now

I thought all 1st year students learnt it already. This shoud be imprinted into their brain: prevent global/static at all cost! Static data in the global scope is accessible by any software, someone can make a mistake, or change the data by bad design when it should not. There are also a chance of race condition if the static data is in multithreads environment. What if the data in the future needs to have multiple instances in the future? Use the singleton design pattern.

To help our civilization find the ET out there, I have updated my SETI@Home client with the new BOINC platform based client.

Cool.

Nucleus 3.0 has just released over the weekend. I finally back from Toronto and upgraded to it. But since all the plugins issues with Radek's split from Nucleus and starting BlogCMS, I'm still missing a few plugins. Also, many plugins/functions/XHTML CSS validation need to be done.

Update:
- NP_RSSItem still broken
- NP_BlogWithOffset and NP_PageLinkList still not working fixed

Missing:
- NP_PDF
- NP_Poll
- NP_Chat
- NP_Weather
- NP_ExtraSkin
- NP_Table

Misc.:
- Fix plugins that not use sql_table, supportsFeature fix later
- Fix plugins that not use createItemLink fix later

Fedora 2 was released this week, after download and install it. I struck on setting up WLAN. It was caused by a race condition from my housemate's router. Now it's all working.

I even installed synaptic on FC2.... it's the perfect toy for a upgradeholic like me.