Month: November 2006

Book Review: Slaughterhouse Five

The full title of this Kirk Vonnegut novel is, you may remember from the list of books you were supposed to get around to reading, Slaughterhouse-Five; or, The Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death. I needed a break from pulp fantasy so I decided to tackle something more thought provoking.

This is pretty obviously an anti-war book. The protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, is the world’s worst soldier and witnesses the firebombing of Dresdin, a town in Germany of questionable military importance whose 130,000 mostly civilian inhabitants are obliterated in an Allied bombing towards the end of World War II. This event is the macabre centerpiece of Vonnegut’s examination of war and how it obliterates lives and even free will.

The book’s other catch is that Billy Pilgrim is supposedly a time traveler who inadvertently slides back and forth along the time line of his life. He also describes how he was abducted by aliens and taken to an intergalactic zoo where he’s mated with a beautiful movie star. The aliens teach Pilgrim that time is just another dimension, and that every moment –past present and future– is inevitable and can actually be seen if you know how to look. If someone dies at one point in time, he’s still alive in all the others, so it’s no big deal.

Vonnegut never directly addresses this issue, but it seems fairly evident to me that both the time travel and the alien view towards the same subject are just figments of Pilgrim’s imagination that serve as coping mechanisms for what he saw in the war. If free will doesn’t exist, tragedy isn’t quite so tragic. If you can see the whole stretch of time in one’s life laid out like a mountain range and visit any part of it whenever you want, death loses its bite. But like I said, it’s left to the reader to decide.

So, good book if a bit weird with all the dancing back and forth along the plot line as Pilgrim time travels. It’s thought provoking, Vonnegut is a lyrical writer, and it’s definitely worth a read. But if I were to compare it to other things I’ve read, I think I’ve read at least one book that better communicates the horror of war, and another one that better captures the absurdity. Oh, and I’ve read a better time travel one, too. Still, this one manages to do all three, and that’s something.

Jamie2 Comments

Pulling my hair out…

Gah, this is driving me crazy. For the last few weeks I’ve been noticing a series of (likely related) problems on this site. The most visible to readers is probably that when you try to leave a comment the page a) takes FOREVER to post the comment, like 30-60 seconds, and b) all too often resolves into a stoic “500 Internal Server Error” message. Usually it looks like the comment doesn’t even post, though if you refresh the page it’s there. This often leads to double postings or people just giving up on commenting entirely.

I’m having my own problems on the admin side. The Movable Type interface has gotten really slow, and I’m frequently unable to even post entries or rebuild the site without getting 500 errors.

Some quality time with Google has clued me in to a variety of possible causes, but I think I’ve ruled out many of the most frequently mentioned ones. All my CHMOD settings are correct for Movable Type’s .cgi files. I’ve streamlined my templates to make them smaller and minimize hits to the database (and I’m using MySQL, which is supposed to perform better). I’ve turned off auto rebuilding of templates that don’t need to be auto rebuilt. Et cetera et cetera.

Based on what I’ve been able to find out, the problem is this: because of the way MovableType works, it has to rebuild most of the archives and a variety of other inserts whenever someone posts a comment or I update with a new post. This isn’t a problem when I had 50 entries on the site, but I’m getting close to 800 now and that’s a lot of chugging. Now, most hosts, including the one I use, have little digital imps prowling their servers looking for the kind of excessive resource use that Movable Type creates under these circumstances. When they see it, they point and start screaming “AAAHHH! AAAAHH! WHAT’S IT DOING? KILL IT! KILL IT!” And they do. With much viciousness. This is, more or less, what interrupts the communication with the server and creates the 500 Internal Server Error message.

This angers me much, of course. I’ve e-mailed Dreamhost asking them to up the limits on resource usage so their imps will lay off, but to date they’ve just replied with messages amounting to “We don’t troubleshoot Movable Type. Piss off.” I sent in a fresh ticket in to them with more detail this morning, though, so we’ll see if they come through..

In the meantime, I’m considering my options. I don’t want to continue on like this with a broken system whatever the cause. If DreamHost doesn’t help me out I may look for another host. But I’m not convinced I wont’ have the same problems there. Another option would be to dump Movable Type and skip over to tis competitor WordPress, which uses a more modern approach to dynamically generate pages with PHP when they’re requested by a reader instead of laboriously churning out static files every time I blink or you comment.

A Google search on the phrase “Movable Type versus WordPress” turns out a plethora of informative articles on the question, and WordPress comes out the winner in almost every comparison. Some of it may have been bad mojo over Movable Type’s decision to move to more of a pay model (WordPress is open source and free), but looking closer it’s not all that. WordPress just seems to be better and perform better, especially if you know PHP (which, alas, I don’t).

The thing that’s really giving me pause, though, is the work that would be required to convert all this to the WordPress system. I’ve customized these templates a bit, and I’m not sure if I’d be capable of doing the work involved with recreating it in WordPress. And let’s face it, I’d probably want to do a redesign while I was at it, and that’s certainly a lot of work. I’m just not sure I have the time required to do it.

A stopgap solution might be to switch to WordPress using one of the default templates (they have lots) and get things going, then work on a fancier design and template as time permits. I may do that, because things just can’t stay like they are now. Any advice from anyone who has been in a similar situation would be appreciated.

Update: I seem to have (mostly) fixed this problem by a combination of changing to dynamic publishing and adding a line to my Movable Type configuration file to enable rebuilding in the background. It still takes 10-20 seconds to post a comment and the administrator interface is still slow, but at least everything is usable now.

Jamie5 Comments