WinINet is the name of the Windows API for making URL-based network connections.
Maximum number of simultaneous HTTP 1.0 connections that Wininet allows to a single server: 4
Maximum number of HTTP 1.1 connections: 2
Times this limitation is mentioned in the Wininet documentation: 0
ID of the Microsoft Knowlege Base Article describing this limitation: 183110
Hours we’ve spent over the last few months debugging intermittent performance problems caused by this limitation: I don’t want to think about it.
Time it took to find the KB article after Googling for just “wininet”: about 15 seconds
If I weren’t so happy to have solved the problem, I’d be really upset right now.
Family resemblance?
| Gillette Fusion | Ford Fusion |
|---|---|
|
|
I wonder which one came first? And what comes next: the Ford Sensor or the Gillette Explorer?
Help me fight cancer: The Pan-Mass Challenge
No, I don’t have cancer. But many people around me have had their lives changed or cut short by the many diseases we know as cancer. That’s one of the reasons I signed up for the Pan-Mass Challenge. The PMC is a primary fundraiser for Dana Farber Cancer Institute (through the Jimmy Fund), and last year raised over $23 million for DFCI.
My part in all this is modest, but challenging nonetheless. On August 4th and 5th I’ll ride the 192-mile route from Sturbridge (in west-central Massachusetts) to Provincetown (at the extreme end of Cape Cod). For that privilege, I’ll need to raise at least $3500. But I’d like to raise a whole lot more. That, of course, is where you can help me. You can donate through my PMC Profile Page, or by getting in touch with me.
Over the next few weeks I plan to write more about the specifics of why I’m riding, how my training is going, and who is coming along with me. Until then, thanks for reading, and take care.
Ten-year-old boys, rejoice!
We caught a few minutes of last night’s episode of Modern Marvels, featuing (among other things) everybody’s favorite jelly bean company, Jelly Belly. Apparently they make the Harry Potter tie-in “Bertie Bott’s Every Flavor Beans,” which include such delicacies as Dirt, Earwax and Booger. If that’s not targeting the fourth-grade demographic, I don’t know what is…
Friday Night Googlefight
Late Night with Andrew
Here’s a transcript of a midnight exchange between #1 son and myself from a couple of days ago.
DAD: ZZZZZZZZZZZ
ANDREW (from down the hall): AAAAAAAAAH!
(DAD wakes up and goes to ANDREW’s room)
D: Andrew, what’s wrong?
A: (Wailing) AAAAAAH!
D: Did you have a bad dream?
A: (Sobbing) I want my bagel!
D: Andrew, it’s the middle of the night! You can have a bagel for breakfast in a few hours.
A: WAAAAAAAAH! I’m still hungry!
This went on for about ten minutes until Andrew abruptly threw his head back down and resumed snoring. When I got back to bed, Elise told me that Andrew’s teacher threw away his partially-eaten lunch bagel, before he had a chance to finish it. Obviously this left its mark on his psyche.
In other news, Maggie – all 7 kilos of her, as of last week’s checkup – has started crawling. She’s now agile enough to get into whatever Andrew happens to be playing with, and has developed a particular taste for his Finding Nemo-themed Go Fish cards. Let the sibling rivalry begin!
Recommended download: IE Dev Toolbar
If you’re developing for IE as a browser client, I highly recommend the beta IE Dev Toolbar. It’s like the Firefox DOM explorer, but more featureful. The element outlining and window resizing are especially handy when you’re trying to get your element positioning just right.
Now, if they’d just give me a standalone Javascript debugger, I’d be all set.
Laughter Therapy in the news
Dad’s laughter therapy project has been in the news lately; it got a mention on NPR’s Day by Day last Friday. If you go on to read the USA Today story that Luke Burbank mentions, it’s pretty easy to figure out where the reporter found his sources. Also, for those of you who know Dad, some of Luke’s characterizations are pretty laughable. Patch Adams and George Patton would mix about as well as matter and antimatter, but it makes for good radio I suppose.
At first I dismissed Dad’s media prohibition (mentioned in the NPR story) as some PA officer with a limited imagination, but I changed my mind after reading the letters that USA Today received in response to their story. It’s all too easy to dismiss laughter therapy as yet another tool for public relations. With respect to the commenters and the challenges they face, it’s all to easy to draw the wrong conclusion from such a short story. This is not a Pentagon public relations tool, it’s just one program – and more like a labor of love for Dad – that the military has for family support. Nobody expects families to laugh off the situation, but the need for stress management should be evident to everybody.
ND Liturgical Choir Concert
Over Christmas break, reminiscing about what I used to do with my time before work and family started intruding on my whims, I was moved to check out the Notre Dame Lit Choir website. Elise and I sang with this group in college and have very fond memories of that time, and the winter tours are a choir tradition. Sure enough, I found that they were coming to the Boston area this year. I quickly alerted our good friends Tim and Kathleen (also lit choir alums) and scheduled a babysitter. I spent a couple of weeks eagerly anticipating the concert, and not just because it meant a Night Out Without Kids.
Tonight the choir treated us to two hours of wonderful music. Some of the old favorites were on the program, including Mendelssohn’s There Shall a Star, Viadana’s Exultate Justi and of course Ain’a That Good News – still a little too slow for my taste, and still a little square, but I wouldn’t have it any other way. However, a couple of new-to-me pieces really grabbed me: Hail Gladdening Light by Charles Wood, and Anton Bruckner’s Os Justi. Can’t get enough of that Bruckner.
I get to performances like this so rarely these days that the music transfixed me, though the fact that the performance was of outstanding quality certainly helped. I must admit that I don’t think we ever sounded as good as the current group. Gail Walton did her usual trick of extracting an exquisitely blended and dynamic sound with barely perceptible direction, which to this day leaves me awestruck. As Elise noted, we are more than fortunate to have studied with someone so talented and so obviously enthusiastic about her work. She opened a beautiful world to us, and every time I find another piece that I like, I think of Gail.
The other neat feature of events like this is that we generally run into people we haven’t seen in a long time, and tonight was no exception. Laura H – she’s something else now, of course, but I won’t dare trying to spell it – and Eileen…uh, somebody help me here…sat right in front of us. Eileen drove from New Hampshire to see the choir. Now that’s love!
Smarten up your StringBuffer usage
Folks, I’m ticked. I’ve recently lost several hours to correcting some third-party Java code that did a terrible job of managing object allocation, and therefore used a lot of memory in a very short period of time. Apparently there are some programmers out there who aren’t aware that memory allocation remains a concern even in a garbage-collecting runtime like the JVM. While Java may not require you to think about every byte allocated and deallocated, sparing a couple of moments to think about memory can yield tremendous performance benefits.