It's been a long, stressful week. I'm looking forward to a relaxing long weekend with my two boys (Monday is a holiday). The boys have gotten interested in the Zelda games again, so I've been playing those with them (with lots of kibbitzing). I completed Ocarina of Time last week and this week I'm working on Majora's Mask. It's nice to have these games that can help me connect with the boys. They recently got interested in MuppyVille again and so I've been revisiting that a bit. I've mostly forgotten all of the administrative commands and so when they ask me how to do stuff, I say I don't remember. I'll let them figure it out this time.

I've gotten several cool things set up at work recently. I've set up a CMAP server for the IHMC CMAP tools. Unfortunately, they don't provide a good interface to browse in and look at the concept maps . You can make links to individual maps though. I'm trying to get people to start using concept mapping to support teaching in the department. Although most faculty aren't interested, a few are and we're beginning to try out the system and see what we can do with it.

I also set up the BCRC server to use Turck MMCache -- one of the PHP accelerators. I had to hack the Makefile to get it to compile, but other than that it was straightforward to get it working. The server has been laboring under some of the web applications we're using now and I hope this will improve performance when the server is loaded. It seems somewhat better, but I haven't tried it when my whole class in the lab trying to hit the same application all at once. I also did a bunch of mysql tuning with the same goal. Not very interesting, but potentially really important.


StevenBrewer