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The banner from the promotion campaign Rackspace runs for its Cisco firewall service, is kinda neat:

I am not a big TV fan. Tell you the truth - I do not remember the last time I turned on my TV. I should. probably, sell it or donate or smth. but what place better would I put scented candles on? Just kidding :)

Anyway, since iTunes introduced downloadable TV Shows, I have watched some of them. Good way to take a break and gives you another subject to talk on at a bar, so you do not look totally geek :)

I mostly download ABC series (Lost etc.). Then I learned that 2005 Golden Globes award was given to Mary-Louise Parker, from Weeds, for the Best Performance by an Actress in a Television Series- Musical or Comedy. That got me interested, but I there is still no way I could watch a series on TV and put up with all that commercials bullcrap. Then iTunes added Weeds to downloadable series and I started watching it.

I've been watching Weeds for a while now, on iTunes. God, it's awesome! Don't let your kids go anywhere near it, if you have kids, but other than that - this series is AWESOME. The most hillarious, the most well-done series I have seen for a loooong time. The acting is pretty damned good, too - quite rare thing in TV series.

Just check it out. If this is your kind of thing - you are gonna love it. Two bucks per show ain't that much, honestly. P.S. Almost forgot - Weeds soundtrack kicks ass.

I've been playing around with it for several hours, only but I really like it. The feature set is trully amazing (speech plugin is more than decent). Surprisingly, I have not encountered any compatibility problems, so far, either. GMail works like a charm.

Well, done, guys!

P.S. Opera is MUCH more lightweight than Firefox. This means - less freeze-ups, crashes and less memory eaten up by/wasted on your browser. Certain pages can open more robustly, faster, too.

Watch the video

I like Jetty's compact approach. It only takes two jars: org.mortbay.jetty.jar (664KB) and javax.servlet.jar (138KB) to get going. In Tomcat's case you need much more jars total worth of 3.5MB in size. I, also, like the simple syntax for configuring and starting a servelt container from Jetty. Tomcat's system is too cumbersome, for my taste.

On the other hand one can argue that Tomcat is much more supported. Even JBoss switched to Tomcat, instead of Jetty (I suspect it was more of a political decision, though).

One more thing on Jetty's side is that its 6.x version will handle sockets NIO way. Even though 6.x is still beta, it's still much closer than Tomcat 5.5 developers of which still refuse to use NIO. They think they are smarter :)

I like, small, simple and robust solutions so, as you can guess, I was well in favor of Jetty only if... Only if it can scale and perform at least as well as Tomcat. Taste is important but making sure application is fast enough is the most important thing, for me (as it should be for every programmer).

Anyway, I decided to do a test and see what's worth what. I used latest stable versions of Tomcat ( 5.5.15) and Jetty (5.1.10). Honestly, my expectation was that Jetty would be slower (because Tomcat is so much more visible and supported project) but I wanted to know - how much slower? Significantly?

Let me say a few words about the test I performed. I used a tool developed by a colleague of mine Velmurugan Periasamy. This tool opens N sessions to a host using NIO sockets and measures cumulative download time, as well as the elapsed (user-experienced) download time. Since the tool is heavily multi-threaded cumulative time is, always, much longer than the elapsed time, of course. I deployed a very simple application to both Jetty and Tomcat: a WAR with Hello World index.jsp. My interest was to compare the two servers in regards with how efficiently they handle socket connections. I believe that's the measure of servlet container's "speed". Even if very simple (or primitive), it should give a good feel.

I ran tests against standalone, vanilla installations of Tomcat and Jetty. Two settings were used: 500 sessions and 5000 sessions. Number of NIO threads in the tool: 25.

How surprised I was to find out that Jetty, actually, performs MUCH better!

Of course, it is not a lab-test and you should use your own judgement (or better - tests) before you "do it yourself home", but as far as I am concerned these tests are a good indication that Jetty's performance is, at least, as good as that of Tomcat's and I choose to believe - it is even superior.

P.S. I chose Jetty for the my project. Elegancy and performance in one - unbeatable combination.

A friend of mine shared this statistics with me. I am sure it is, most probably, an old joke that half of the world knows. Also, I do not know where it is from originally, so I might violate some intellectual property rights here, BUT it's toooo damned good not to share, so here it goes:

Why I Am So Tired!!!

For a couple of years I've been blaming it on lack of sleep, not enough sunshine, too much pressure from my job, poor blood or anything else I could think of.

But now I found out the real reason:
I'm tired because I'm overworked… and here’s why:

The population of this country is 273 million. 140 million are retired,  which leaves 133 million to do the work.

There are 85 million in school,   which leaves 48 million to do the work.

Of this, there are 29 million employed by the federal government,  which leaves 19 million to do the work.

2.8 million are in the armed forces, which leaves 16.2 million to do the work.

Take from that total the 14,800,000 people who work for state and city governments   and that leaves 1.4 million to do the work.

At any given time there are 188,000 people in hospitals, which leaves 1,212,000 to do the work.

As of today, there are 1,211,998 people in prisons.
That leaves JUST TWO PEOPLE to do the work...

YOU and ME!!

And there you are sitting there, at your computer, reading jokes.   Nice, real nice...

I am an Orthodox Christian. Throughout the history, my country (Georgia) has been opressed and conquered numerous times by muslim countries. Most frequently the two big ones: Turkey and Persia (now Iran). Those were the largest historical enemies of my nation for centuries. And they always had armies tens and hundreds times larger than a small nation of four million or so (much less back then) could ever have had. Fighting with the muslim invasion has been the matter of survival for at least 10 centuries.

So, I can not be blamed for being a "muslim defender". I can have more reasons not to like muslim culture than any stupid Danish cartoonist would ever.

Yet, the only feeling I have about this matter is disgust towards the so-called "free press". I can not believe the magnitude of insensitivity and lack of morale the western press displayed.

First of all, it is amazing how they perverted the substance of the matter. For example, BBC tries to tell us that the whole story is about painting the prophet, which is a sin in Muslim religion. As if that's what the whole thing is about. A lot of other publications, try to push the same line. Very few mention that actually, it was not just painting but highly insulting painting displaying prophets (Mohammad and others) as crazy bombers. Do you see difference?

The worst thing packaging all this up as "free speech". Oh, yeah? Since when is insulting somebody free speech? Leave alone insulting one of the largest cultures on earth? And how stupid you must be to do this when the relationship with muslims, is already tense and far from the best.

Yeah, yeah, "free speech". Let's ignore that media has long become a brainwash for masses. Its value as a driver for democracy is long gone, if it ever existed. But when it comes to messing up the whole word - well, how can we ban some dumb-f*ck Danish newspaper from insulting half of the word? Oh, that would ruin the Democracy! And there goes a long line of other dumb-f*ck european newspapers backing this crooks up.

Then be surprised when Madrid is bombed, next time.

Damn... How can people be so stupid and blind?