random($foo)

Staggering AIDS Report From U.N. – It appears we are living through the the greatest single assault on humankind that we’ve ever known. Quite sobering.

In parts of sub-Saharan Africa, where experts hoped the epidemic had reached a “natural limit” beyond which it could not grow, HIV is infecting as many as 39 percent of adults in some countries, according to UNAIDS, the international agency charged with monitoring the disease.

If there is a limit on HIV’s ability to spread, officials are uncertain what it is, said Neff Walker, a senior epidemiologist at UNAIDS.

Early this morning I was bugged enough to finally write a script to cull and reverse chronologically list referers, and well, like many things, I have no idea why I put it off so long. It took about 15 minutes to write. (open the file, move the pointer to near the end, parse into an associative array keyed to url, reverse, and display). I suppose I could turn into some functions / a class for future use. Includes, XML feeds, and the like.

I was feeling sort of patriotic today, so I celebrated Independence Day by contributing to the EFF.

I haven’t been reading Mark Pilgrim’s 30 days to a more accssible weblog, but I should be. The title is sort of a misnomer as the tips and information in this series (on Day 18 right now) are applicable to any web sites. As the de facto ‘S.508 guy’ for USCweb at the moment, this may be a good thing to keep in mind. Into the wiki it goes.

You know, when I was running for president, in Chicago, somebody said, would you ever have deficit spending? I said, only if we were at war, or only if we had a recession, or only if we had a national emergency. Never did I dream we’d get the trifecta.

Cam posted this MSNBC editorial which blasts Bush for the Trifecta one-liner he’s been throwing around. The author centers on the fact that Bush has been using Sept. 11 to cover for many of the administration’s failure. He also notes that no one can pinpoint when he had ever make the original remark while campaigning. Perhaps the final irony is that the Washington Post has in fact discovered the originator of the quote: Al Gore. (discussion @ mefi)

Business 2.0 has an article entitled Are Holograms Finally for Real? that highlights Ford’s use of Zebra Imaging‘s digitally mastered holgram technology. Now, while it’s no doubt cool (check out the gallery), I question Zebra’s claim that the stuff their doing are today the most advanced, most unique, and, we believe, the most wildly dazzling holographic images in the world. It seems that the volumetric displays that Actuality Systems are cooler (there’s no polymer film involved), and the fog display WAVE beats the pants of both of those as far as coolness factor goes. Of course, there might be much less of a demand for these holographic projection techniques if augmented reality and retinal lasers get to market first (which looks to be making good progress).

Here’s a page with a list of Advanced 3D Displays.

143-Year-Old Problem Still Has Mathematicians Guessing – this is a NYTimes article on the Reimann hypothesis. Fun math stuff, speaking of which, I’ve been meaning to write something on PAR parity archives, which have gained popularity in binary newsgroups, and which Andy brought up during dinner last week. A unique PAR file generated for a set can replace any missing archive file. (A PAR file is the same size as one of the files in the archive set)

The PAR format isn’t actual straight parity, but builds on that same sorta idea using some higher level math (linear algebra). Some explanations are here in this message thread. I never actually took any linear algebra (switched to Fine Arts after Calculus III but before taking the LA class), but my interest was piqued, so here’s a list of related links:

• Introduction to Finite Fields
• The Math Forum – Math Library – Linear Algebra
• The Mathematical Atlas – 15: Linear and multilinear algebra; matrix theory (finite and infinite)
• The Error Correcting Codes (ECC) Page
• Reed-Solomon Codes and CD Encoding
• The Ubiquitous Reed-Solomon Codes
• Google Directory > Science > Math Applications > Communication Theory > Coding Theory
• Google Directory – Science > Math > Algebra > Linear Algebra
• Notes on Linear Algebra (postscript files)
• Finite field linear algebra subroutines
• Solving Large Sparse Linear Systems Over Finite Fields – Introduction
• Reed-Solomon coding and decoding by Phil Karn
• Error Correction Techniques

  for Solid State Disk

• An introduction to Reed-Solomon codes: principles, architecture and implementation
• Computation of Discrete Logarithms in Prime Fields – Linear Algebra
• Error-correcting codes, finite fields, algebraic curves

PHP Everywhere: Web Architecture – a nice collection of articles. I’ll finish the rest of them someday.

Application Variables with PHP – first in a series of articles on developing an architecture for Enterprise PHP. My interest has been piqued on creating large-scale PHP applications, particularly on persistent state/application variables for clustering etc. I’ll be attending OSCON and the Advanced PHP tutorial, and it looks like they’ll be covering this topic in-depth. I’ve also been following some of the discussion that’s been happening on php-dev with regards to the future of PHP. While I don’t think that PHP should turn into J2E (shudder), it could do with some things to make larger-scale development easier without compromising it’s usability or accessbility. I think I’ve talked about this before, so I’m going to stop now.

While I don’t think Patrick Killelea‘s Top Ten Web Performance Tuning Tips is as bad as John Lim thinks they are, but I must say, that I do strongly disagree with Patrick’s #2 suggestion of not using style sheets. Despite the “separate download” (that’s what HTTP 1.1 is for right?), on average a styled page will save more than it’s weight in font tags. If you’re able to get away with ignoring ns4 rendering, a typical (X)HTML strict/CSS2 page will be one half to one third the size of a similarly laid out tabled page. Add in the spacer images and accompanying “separate downloads” and multiply by the fact that the style sheet will be cached and used across the entire site. If you can get away with it, CSS beats HTML layout hands down. Also, arguing that JS is source of pop-up advertising is like saying that GIF files are a source of blinking. It’s only a problem if you use it that way and isn’t some inherrent problem. Using JS code does not randomly cause pop-ups.

#5 I’d sorta agree with (although I would say that in most cases using CORBA or EJB won’t improve a programmer’s code-writing productivity) with the huge caveat that using CGI would probably be as slow or slower than a J2EE app server, and at least 1-2 magnitude slower than an embedded module like mod_perl, php, or even asp (although god help you if you’re going to run IIS). Never use CGI. CGI bad. Also, as is implied in #8, heavy middleware with powerful caching (for example, Vignette) can beat out less optimally coded but lighter-weight methods.

One thing that isn’t really a real tip, but is fun is that there’s a free analysis tool on Patricks’ website. According to his analyzer, [my] site kicks ass. No tuning needed. Slowest part was server silence, but it was fast enough.