Cynical-C Blog

The new theme allows for nested comments meaning you can reply directly to a commenter.

From ThinkGeek:

In ages past, before men walked the Earth, the Elder Gods came to this world – a walking mountain of awful claws and writhing feelers. Some say that, even today, he sits in the sunken city of R’Iyeh, waiting and dreaming. But, dreaming of what? The day when he’ll rise again? Spread madness to the four corners? Bring rise to the Deep One, and continue his war against Hastur the Unspeakable?

Or is he just a huge fan of Egg Nog, Fruit Cake and Charlie Brown Christmas specials? I’m hoping for the latter ’cause we have our own plans for world domination, thank you very much.

I’ve put up the default Wordpress template since it is basic as it can get without any frills so I can test to see if that has any effect on performance.

I got in this morning and my server was eating up cpu’s again. Since making the change to the the default template, it has been quiet. I’ll keep it up for a few hours this morning to see how it handles the noon traffic.

Update

For those who want to be in on the loop. Here is what my server is looking like right now:

The number you want to look at is the 223628k used which is how much RAM the server is eating. 223MB is about normal for my blog which gets about 500 to 700 hits an hour. It hasn’t gone above 250MB since I put in the default theme which means either:

1. The type of traffic that was giving me problems hasn’t shown up.

2. There’s some script in my old theme which is eating up cpu cycles and memory (the temp theme I used last week was a poor test since I was too quick too add the old theme’s code to it.

3. I dunno. I haven’t thought this far ahead.

I’ll keep this default theme up past noon so I can keep an eye on the memory being used. In the old theme, we would spike past 800Megs throughout the day. I have no idea how to debug a theme so if the memory stays low, I’ll have to find a nice clean efficient theme so I can concentrate more on blogging and not keeping the damn thing from crashing every 20 minutes.

From Mental Floss:

I can’t begin to imagine how hard it would be to leave my family for months at a time, especially if my destination were Iraq or Afghanistan. And I don’t know how I could deal with my wife being deployed overseas. These reunion videos—for me, at least—shed a tiny beam of light on how emotionally draining being a military family can be. They’ll also make you want a dog. To commemorate Veterans Day, here are some overjoyed dogs greeting returning soldiers.

Letters of Notes has a letter written by Kurt Vonnegut to his father after getting out of the POW camp. (Click the link to read the rest) Too bad he never wrote a book about his experience as a Prisoner of War.

So, I got caught up reading Atlas Shrugged and suddenly it all made sense. I needed to go Galt to save the internets and the world. Then I remembered that Objectivism is dried out and used to fertilize crops in third world countries….

Oh, I can’t lie to you. I caught a cold (or the swine flu. Try telling the difference between symptoms if you’re a hypochrondriac) and when I got back to work yesterday, our internet connection was dead.

So I’m back amongst the tcp/ip connections now and blogging will resume at some point. Thanks for the well wishes and.. PRAYERS? ARE YOU KIDDING ME? HAVE YOU BEEN PAYING ATTENTION TO THE DAILY ATHEISM?

Was kind of nice being unplugged from the matrix for a little while though…

At least for the weekend. I’m catching a cold and I’m fed up with struggling with this server. I’ve put in another support ticket with Knownhost so we’ll see what happens. If I wanted to spend all day fiddling with software I’d go back into programming and at least get paid for it.

Knownhost’s response:

We can see that the resource usage of the site cynical-c.comis very high in “WHM >> Server Status >> CPU/Memory/MySQL Usage”. The PHP scripts in the site increases the CPU/memory usage of Apache. Also the SQL queries of the site is resource intensive. We suggest you to contact the web application developer/community of the CMS used in the site to optimize the scripts.

Are there any wordpress gurus out there who have any tips. (Yes, supercache is installed) Or maybe it’s time to find a more wordpress friendly host.

I’ve been having problems with this site becoming incredibly slow a few times a day and I have a feeling that the old theme has some code in it that may be the culprit.

I’m putting up a clean temp theme to see if there’s any site slowdowns with it.

Update:

The site still has spikes where it becomes slow for a bit but the slow queries that was slowing down the database seem to have been eliminated.

We’ve installed DDOS deflate and APF firewall on the server side to cut down some of the nefarious ip addresses that have been sucking cpu resources and hopefully this will help speed things up.

In the meantime, I’ve actually started liking the temp theme. It feels a little cleaner than the last one so I think I’m going to keep it for now until I get bored. I also added the WPTouch theme for iPhone users which is easy enough to turn off if you’d rather not use that.

From this site but it seems to be the consensus amongst the superstitious:

The most important commandment. “A lawyer asked him a question, testing him: ‘Teacher, which is the most important commandment?’ And he said to him,… ‘Love the Lord you God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength. This is the great and foremost commandment. The second is this: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. There is no commandment greater than these’” (Mark 12:28-31).

Consider me underwhelmed. I get threatened with eternal damnation by followers of a man who they claim to be the omniscient creator of, well everything (or at least his old man did although if you listen to them, he is his old man) and the two most important lessons he has is unquestioning, unconditional love to a tyrannical god and a rewording of The Golden Rule?

I mean the Golden Rule is a fine sentiment and all but he can’t take credit for it. And besides, don’t treat me the way you want to be treated, treat me the way I want to be treated if you please.

I hear Christians pointing to that all the time as a way to show Christ’s wisdom and benevolence. Wisdom? It’s common sense.

You know what would have been a pretty nice thing to know back then? What about if one of his teachings was to wash your hands before taking care of an open wound. I’m sure that basic knowledge of germs and infections was something not out of reach of somebody who was, you know, GOD! Maybe if he spent a little less time practicing his Criss Angelesque magic trick of walking on water and a little more time on the Sermon of the Mount he could have slipped something in like:

Blessed are the meek for they will inherit the earth.

There. Now that’s a sermon from a mount that we could actually learn something from.