Polyphasic sleep - sleeping less and better? - Not really

I finished my polyphasic sleep experiment. I just couldn't catch up enough sleep in proper period. Kid wakes me up twice per night - so it's hard to maintain core 4.5 hour sleep block. It was very hard to get up and you can imagine the rest of the story. I guess that my overall "time and productivity" ratio decreased. I lost my dream memory too- it's an early sign of sleep deprivation for me.

So I decided to break it and gain more rest from my classic 6 hours sleep schedule, plus occasional power nap at late afternoon. After about two weeks of adaptation I feel like I had never changed my sleep habits. I feel more rested now, so probably it was good move.

The most important lesson I learned during that experiment:
Shortened sleep time needs maxed out rest results during sleep. Taking naps with regular schedule and doing it in comfortable way (comfy place, silence and darkness) is a must.

Maybe next time when I could organize my bed time without interruptions, I will try polyphasic schedule again. Besides, I'm still working on improving my sleep habits.

Thought of a day- unplanted easter eggs

The funniest easter eggs you can find sometimes browsing source code with distance. There are unintentional pearls of some kind of evil genius.

Digitize your life

Everyday I try to organize my life using mix of paper and electronic means. Sometimes workflow between different areas is seamless, but in most cases I finish up with nothing more that little scrap of papers and information bits. All data is scattered across dispersed information islands. I have to be very fast to visit them all.

Have you heard about MyLifeBits project? It's based on an MEMEX idea of ubiquitous personal information storage. It may include pictures of what you are seeing, sound you are hearing, coordinates of your current position, trail for your electronic activity like emails, phone logs etc. All data is interconnected, tagged and ready for text searching. It's compelling idea but more important are practical applications. The whole stored information may be used as a kind of human memory extension. For successful usage I think it's needed to invent more powerful tools helping seamlessly storing and automatically retrieving important for as bits of information.

Drawing of Bush's theoretical Memex machine (Life Magazine, November 19, 1945),
picture posted by p373
Some rights reserved.

I need now only small part of that information, and probably make simple home brew personal information workflow system using pack of separate gadgets like cellphone with camera with GPS and some software. What is it for? I'm not sure yet, but maybe it's worth to try something like that to use it in future. And again another question - what today information will be worth in future after next 10 years?

I'm going back to figure out how to connect online calendar software with one on my cellphone.

Firefox2 and css caching issue - part 2

I have tried out to change settings for expire headers, and figured it that application adds its own headers to dynamic generated css files. Then apache2 mod-expire tries to add own settings.
After tweaking application settings there are resulting headers:

Date: Mon, 1 Mar 2008 06:46:02 GMT
Server: Apache/2
Cache-Control: max-age=600, max-age=604800
Expires: Mon, 6 Mar 2008 06:46:02 GMT
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Content-Encoding: gzip
Content-Length: 18128
Content-Type: text/css


Expire times:

• max-age=600 - given by apache2 global settings


• max-age=604800 - given by applications itself

It's ugly - but surprisingly caching works under Firefox with these headers. I haven't checked yet which expiration time is taken by Firefox. I need to clean it and remove one of extra headers anyway.

Below are old headers for the same resource fort comparison - when Firefox caching was not working:


Date: Sat, 01 Mar 2008 07:28:31 GMT
Last-Modified: Sat, 01 Mar 2008 07:26:56 GMT
Expires: Sat, 01 Mar 2008 07:36:56 GMT
Cache-Control: max-age=600
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Content-Encoding: gzip
Content-Length: 18128
Keep-Alive: timeout=10, max=98
Connection: Keep-Alive
Content-Type: text/css


There are removed last-modified and keep-alive headers, but it's hard to understand how it can change Firefox caching.
I have to check difference between 600 and 604800 expire age, that may be solution.

Probably all headers should look like those added by apache mod-expire for static files:


Date: Mon, 1 Mar 2008 06:46:04 GMT
Server: Apache/2
Last-Modified: Thu, 6 May 2007 02:52:18 GMT
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Cache-Control: max-age=604800
Expires: Mon, 6 Mar 2008 06:46:04 GMT
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Content-Encoding: gzip
Content-Length: 3588
Content-Type: application/x-javascript


Firefox 2 and css caching issue

Last week I had strange issue with Firefox cache. One of web application needed tweaking to be more responsive. After playing with apache configuration I tested page load speed using YSlow.

All files have expiry headers and all text files are deflated. Results are still mediocre. Some of dynamically generated css files aren't cached by Firefox 2. IE works as it supposed to do - any subsequent request is handled blazingly fast. I tried it on different installations of Firefox to exclude my browser optimizations side effects. Still the same.

Below are HTTP response headers of css that isn't going to FF cache:

Date: Sat, 01 Mar 2008 07:28:31 GMT
Last-Modified: Sat, 01 Mar 2008 07:26:56 GMT
Expires: Sat, 01 Mar 2008 07:36:56 GMT
Cache-Control: max-age=600
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Content-Encoding: gzip
Content-Length: 18128
Keep-Alive: timeout=10, max=98
Connection: Keep-Alive
Content-Type: text/css


I can't see anything suspicious. Content type is proper, all expire headers are set. Requested file name is named as css.php - does FF makes some assumptions on file extension? I tried turning off Cache-Control header and leave only Expires, but it doesn't work too.

It must be simple detail. Anybody has any clues?