Entries Tagged 'wtf' ↓

“A man, working in a laundromat?” It wasn’t really a question, nor a rhetorical device. She was just floored I’d ask why the help wanted sign on the window explicitly said “Woman wanted for 3 evening shifts per week”.

When I indicated the laundromat on Duluth St. had 2 men working there, she told me that when they hired a man at their previous location, they lost a lot of customers.

See also a blog entry from a year ago: Women can’t lift heavy weights.

What should I do? Report, boycott, ignore or try and cajole?

We lived through crunch mode and the site is live. Since we’re no longer in stealth mode,  I can now tell people what I do. Well, after I kvetch a bit.
We found out the issue we were having had been reported 4 days ago as Bug #10926. We have only managed to replicate it in our production environment, but not in staging. The consequence for us was a 404 (page not found) error when logged in users tried applying for a job. While we did work around it, let’s say that error pretty much sucks for an app that’s supposed to help companies hire people.

It was a horrible type of bug to track down. The only difference we could see? More Mongrel instances, and a 64-bit version of the OS.

• Is it in Rails’ incredibly complex routing code?
• Our own subdomain support?
• Is Capistrano doing a clean restart and getting all the Mongrels running the same version?
• Is caching an issue?

Unable to replicate the bug on staging and given it only appears randomly (1/3 to 1/2 of the refreshes, both hard and soft),  it’s the kind of experience you want to avoid on launch day.Anyhow, the site is live and the inflow of bugs has slowed. We’re still madly fixing any issues as they get reported, and we’ll have refinements over the next few days before we tackle new functionality.

Overall this is a great success. I’m happy to be working with this ‘A team’, and will have more stuff to share as soon as things calm down.

Crunch mode needs to end soon before all the Standout Jobs crew goes nuts.

After initial silly discussions about purchasing a pony after our Series A, or having a guard cat to secure our offices, one of the more psychologically vulnerable members of our team brought in both, for terrible results:

As you may be able to tell from the photo, this is NOT a PONY. It is a unicorn! If your company is considering putting its devs on ‘crunch-mode’, consider some members may lose all semblance of sanity, willy-nilly replacing ponies with unicorns.

I was told Bell sucks so much that I have to go with Videotron. After I ordered a package online, they said they would call within 24 hours.

A call came from Synergy, one of their subcontractors known to call with dead air and hang up. I called back, gave some info to a person who could not speak clearly. They put me on hold 4 minutes, and disconnected me. The next person also disconnected me, after a total of 20 minutes spent on the phone.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot. Before agreeing to pay $136 deposits, I’d like to know when a company will deign connecting their service. Is that really too much to ask?

Recommendations of ISPs that don’t suck - or just suck less - would be heartily appreciated.

The thread on Montreal Tech Watch’s Capazoo Update got increasingly surreal this week, first with their Director of Communications heralding their strategic partnership with the National Lampoon. To contact him, anyone in the press should just do so through the service he is promoting (!).

Capazoo is a multi-level marketing scheme. Like Amway and countless other MLM schemes, it turns people into money-grubbing zombies that erode our social capital.

Today one Jean-Christophe decided to comment as a satisfied customer, pleading for us to see for ourselves how fantastic and lucrative Capazoo can be. Naturally, he finishes by giving us his profile page. If we sign up after visiting it, he earns zoops. So far, he’s earned 806 zoops - or $8.06.

So I looked at the referral scheme:

For every friend you invite who upgrades to Privileged Membership, you’ll earn 100 Zoops!

For every friend you invite who upgrades to VIP Membership, you’ll earn 130 Zoops!

The Capazoo.com Referral Program lets you earn Zoops when your friends refer friends – up to four generations!

Ick. Capazoo will quickly fill up with amateur spammers looking to make a single dollar of each of their social connections. Maybe one day they’ll have Amway-style rallies and conferences. Unlike other MLM organizations that manage to stick around for years however, this socio-economic virus should peter out once they burn through their cash reserves and exhaust their possible partnerships.

I hope Capazoo goes out with a bang rather than a whimper, that it serve as a reminder to other idiots that would try similar ideas.

I can understand people being low in January. What am I missing about the September that makes it such a happy time?

(While this seems totally random, I’ll explain soon. Data is US-only. Thanks! )

After solving Word Numbers, maybe I should solve ITA’s other current puzzle, Sling Blade Runner. I wasn’t sure how to solve it, so I made a pretty picture:

ITA provides you a list of over 6,500 movies, and the objective is to make as long a chain as possible of overlapping titles: Sling Blade Runner, License to kill a Mockingbird. Every dot in the graph is a movie, every arrow connecting them indicating their titles overlap. In comments on Reddit, a few people found solutions of around 230 titles.

Puzzles are useful to learn. Since I’m not an engineer, they force me to learn about computer science theory I never learned. Looking up graph problems of the sort, I found out that this class of problem is defined as a ‘hard’, and it is far too computationally intensive to try every possibility (’brute force’). The only way to solve it elegantly is to use shortcuts, and those depend on the type of graph in question - which is why I decided it might be interesting to have an actual picture.

Tools like graphviz are slow for very large graphs, so this picture doesn’t represent the whole graph. Still pretty, no?

I don’t usually worry about performance. Today, when a simple AJAX request sending back an empty body took 2 seconds to complete, I started digging.

Oddly, Firebug indicated over 2000 ms, while my log showed under a half-second. Since it’s on the same machine, there’s no way network issues can account for 1.5 seconds. I tried several avenues, and Marc-André suggested several possibilities before suggesting running it in production mode.

We were both suprised at the difference. Before / after:
Firebug: 1755 ms

Log: Completed in 0.47638 (2 reqs/sec) | Rendering: 0.00010 (0%) | DB: 0.15976 (33%) | 200 OK [http://standoutjobs.dev.com/****]

Firebug: 121 ms

Log: Completed in 0.11076 (9 reqs/sec) | Rendering: 0.00007 (0%) | DB: 0.06037 (54%) | 200 OK [http://standoutjobs.dev.com/****]]

A full order of magnitude! I’m used to logging and other debug overhead to have about a 10% performance hit, so this was very surprising.

If you’re like me, you have some personal web apps running in development mode. My first instinct was always to look at the logs, and see if there are some unnecessary requests being done, or anything that is taking far too much time. There’s also Marc-André’s tips for improving rails app performance. Still, those are a lot of work compared to the simple step of setting that production flag.

Campfire / office chat:

Daniel H. : This is annoying:
The name ‘employer’ is reserved by Ruby on Rails.
Please choose an alternative and run this generator again.

Fred N.: emplyer

Daniel H.: what? come on

Fred N.: wait
employr

Daniel H. : Aah yes, spelling 2.0

Efficiency Measures Could Cut Data Center, Server Energy Use by Half, or how to get suckered by the anti-Kyoto crazies.

A few years back a story circulated meant to stir FUD against Kyoto. The gist went something like this: computers are using a huge percentage of our electricity consumption! If the US signs on to Kyoto, we will cripple our high-tech economy! oh noes!

The story keeps getting reused, recycled and repurposed. In that way at least, it’s green.

It makes for great marketing material if you’re selling SUN servers (see my comment: That VP is pulling numbers out from where the sun don’t shine). “Data centers alone, Sun calculates, account for 2-3 percent of total world energy use.” That of course is completely outrageous.

Now it’s the EPA’s turn to release numbers. They’re not quite as crazy as SUN’s: now US data centers only consume 1.5% of US electricity (as opposed to energy!). Even the usually sane Worldwatch Institute is being used as a megaphone for this ideologically-driven hack-job (it also got reprinted through Worldchanging).

First off, the EPA report clearly says they’re estimating these numbers:

These energy consumption estimates were derived using a bottom-up estimation method based on the best publicly available data for servers and data centers. The estimation was performed as follows:

• estimated the U.S. installed base of servers, external disk drives, and network ports in data centers each year (based on industry estimates of shipments and stock turnover);
• multiplied by an estimated annual energy consumption per server, disk drive, or network port; and
• multiplied the sum of energy use for servers, storage, and networking equipment by an overhead factor to account for the energy use of power and cooling infrastructure in data centers. (EPA report: executive summary)

Estimates multiplied by estimates, multiplied by an overhead factor. Makes you feel confident public policy is based on sound advice, doesn’t it?

If the numbers were true, it might matter. However many vendors are already trying to sell more energy-efficient servers, and data centers are also looking for cost-effective ways to save money. It’s unclear what the US government could do that the market isn’t already doing.

It’s also doesn’t matter in the sense that energy use in data centers shouldn’t be considered in isolation. Servers are also displacing other energy-intensive applications. If people file their income tax through a server, that’s energy that wasn’t used to transport paper - let alone pulp wood and printing costs.

The EPA report had two objectives. One was to create FUD, the other to delay action. It’s worked admirably well.