A few tuesdays ago we experienced the first rational event in American politics in nearly a decade.  (Ok, so that’s a bit of hyperbole but work with me people!)  I sincerely hope that politics based on an irrational fear of ‘them’ now lays gasping in the gutter.  Get a grip people… it’s not ‘Me the people’, it’s not ‘Them the people’, it’s ‘We the People…’.

I didn’t start out to write a rant, so I won’t.  😉

This rising wave of reason has carried away another irrational event; the long fought battle of a Connectitut teacher against well intentioned but over zealous and under educated local police & State’s Attorney.  Teacher Julie Amero was arrested on four felony pornography charges back in 2004 and convicted in 2007.  The case is a classic example of irrational fear (in this case a fear of ‘our children’ being exposed to porn) mixed with woefully uninformed yet overzealous constabulary.

The story has a happy ending.  Her conviction was overturned last year and the charges were finally dropped last Friday.

The sad part of this is that the State’s Attorney on the case remains convinced that she was guilty and that he was prepared to re-try the case.

“I have no regrets. Things took a course that was unplanned.
Unfortunately the computer wasn’t examined properly by the Norwich
police,” Regan said.

“For some reason this case caught the media’s attention,” Regan said.

Prosecutors often cite ‘Ignorance of the law is no excuse’; I submit that ‘Ignorance of technology is no excuse’ is equally valid.

The quote above was taken from this piece in the Hartford Courant.

This entry on MSDN (Microsoft Developer Network) is a good piece on the basics of web performance engineering.  While reviewing the steps covered in the article I discovered that one of my Apache servers had KeepAlives disabled, it appears that the default value for this has changed from ‘On’ to ‘Off’.  The performance improvement was immediate and obvious.

It discusses several basic concepts including TCP settings, web server options and to a lesser degree client side methods for improving web page load times.  It also explains the use of a free tool available from Microsoft (imagine that – something free from Microsoft!); Visual Round Trip Analyzer.  I am downloading it as I type this.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/dd188562.aspx