daniel bigham.ca

This section lists all blog posts, regardless of topic.

Music
April 8, 2007

There have been two songs on Grey's Anatomy that have really caught my attention. The first is Chasing Cars by Snow Patrol, and the other is How to Save a Life by The Fray. Both songs have a certain musical simplicity about them, a moderate range, are sung by male vocalists, have elements of piano, and when I ponder what I would be trying to create if I were to put a lot of energy into writing and recording a song, these songs are what I'd have in the back of my mind. (Especially How to Save a Life for it's use of the piano) I know little to nothing about the fascinating topics of recording/compositing/editing, so this could be a fun adventure... and some motivation for learing some new instruments!

16 km
April 8, 2007

On Friday, I joined our Running Room group as we embarked on our attempt of 16 km. It strikes me odd that our program was structured to have the long weekly run at 10 km for a month and a half, and then wham, increases to 12 km, 14 km, then 16 km, over just three weeks!

This week has been a struggle for me. After my 14 km last week, I felt some tightness developing in my left leg, about four inches above the ankle. The next day I should have run really slowly and let the group get away from me, but not only did I keep up, I felt energetic so I stayed to the front of the group. When I got done my run, that left leg felt very tight, almost to the point of feeling injured. I came home and put ice on it, elevated it, and tried to rest it as much as possible the next two days. I think that helped, but having a 16k run on Friday was rough. I simply couldn't keep up with the group. Rather than quit and go home, I decided the best thing was just to take it very slow and try to favor my right leg a bit to take some additional stress off of my left leg. I made it, and by the end, my left side felt fairly loosened up. Not to my suprise, my right side now feels a little strained from overcompensating!

So I'm not sure where to go from here. I should probably talk to my chiropractor about getting some ART (active release therapy) done on my calf muscles to work out some of the tightness and possible scar tissue, but that doesn't answer the question of how I should modify the training program so that I maximize the benefits while mitigating the risk of injuring myself.

HTTP
March 31, 2007

Something occurred to me today. I'm working on an application that, unfortunately, consists of about 2MB of JavaScript code that needs to be downloaded to the web browser. Each time the JavaScript is modified a little bit, and the page refreshed, the web browser has to completely re-download that JavaScript file. And because there are 50+ JavaScript files, my understanding is that the web browser has to make an HTTP GET request for each one.

Idea #1: My experience with the 'rsync' utility has been that it is a phenominal piece of technology. Why not use it in conjunction with HTTP so that only the parts of a file that have changed are re-downloaded?

Idea #2: Making 50 HTTP GET requests when the server replies back for each one that the file hasn't changed is quite slow. Why not introduce a "MULTIGET" request where each file that needs to be gotten could be listed within the same request. The server would then send back a two-part response. The first part would list all of the files that had not changed since last gotten, while the second part would be the rsync differences of each file that had.

That could be an order of a magnitude faster in some cases... I'm tempted to simulate this to see just how much faster it would be.

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