Journal CmdrTaco's Journal: AnimeNext, Home Theater, Optimizations
My project lately has been my home theater. The last TV I bought was a big screen. I had no choice at the time because my old house had extremely volatile lighting situations. A projector would not have been possible. But my new house has a room that is pretty well situated for me finally to turn my TV room into a reasonable Home Theater. I've decided to select an inexpensive projector for my first one. I figure with just 2-3k hours of lamp life, in a year or 2, that'll give me an excuse to get something better. Plus with the instability of HDTV, I don't want to shell out thousands upon thousands of dollars for a projector that is obsolete. So I'm doing the whole theater for under $2k.
So anyway, I try to buy cables. I measure, and I need 27.2 feet to get from the projector to the stereo rack. But cables like to sell in 8m or 12m variations. I even called one place that made custom cables, and they would sell me a 9m cable, but charge me for a 12m to do it! So I bought the 8m cable knowing that it would be close. Last night Kathleen & I pulled the cables through the ceiling and it makes it with just inches to spare. Apparently our original measurements had a little more slack than we realized. Unfortunately the ceiling mount that I ordered shipped ground. Despite the fact that I paid for next day shipping, and was charged for next day shipping, they decided to ship it GROUND. Dicks.
Tim Vroom's latest batch of index.pl optimizations went live on Slashdot with this weeks code refresh. By caching a few oft requested bits of data, he was able to trim nearly 25% off the average time required to generate index.pl for a logged in user. Very cool. Thats like adding a whole new box! If Jamie's memcached research into users.pl proves similiarly fruitful, Slashdot should be ready for the Fall... usually we get a 5-20% traffic increase between september and october. This year, we're ready for it. Knock on wood.
