Entries Tagged 'wtf' ↓

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.

Because I work on web software, other geeks ask me for help with really odd side-projects…

I want to repeatedly do a superpoke action on facebook.
like every 5 minutes
ok
what’s the easiest way to set that up?
I tried wget and it needs both to set the browser type and also a cookie for logged in which I don’t know how to do via wget
curl may be better for that - more options
alternative is Mechanize

…

so my facebook poking problem has been solved.
oh?
I just used a small amount of javascript and an iframe
hahahaha
I had it poke her once every other minute, however you’re limited to 100 pokes per day per person apparently before it starts deleting the old ones.
so I’ll set it to once every 864 seconds for now

For those of you puzzled by 864: 24 hours * 60 minutes * 60 seconds = 86,400 seconds.

Lisp in Small Pieces beats Harry Potter in bestseller list got dugg. My server survived, so this ain’t a post-mortem: it’s the obligatory “I got dugg” gloat-post. It’s my first time; sue me.

First off, welcome to all of you that subscribed to this blog. I promise never to post about my breakfast or any cat pictures. I will post about my work, why online dating sucks, the Montreal tech scene, and climate and environment-related stories.

Besides the sheer numbers, the main surprise was that people came to my blog from 104 countries. That’s more countries than I can name.

In the first hour the story became popular, 4,000 visitors came by - more than I got in the entire last year. 10k visits the first day, 3k the second; it’s now petering out. As far as I know the page stayed responsive, in no small part because of wp-cache.

Here are a few more data-points for the curious:

Browser | Visits | % visits
Firefox | 9,599 | 70.71%
Internet Explorer | 2,215 | 16.32%
Safari | 1,029 | 7.58%
Opera | 409 | 3.01%
Mozilla | 161 | 1.19%

In the first day: 10k visits, 500 diggs, 74 feed subscribers. Crazy.

My whole life is managed through the internet. It’s my phone, yellow pages, maps. I use it to connect with friends and make plans to meet ‘in real life’.

The wireless connection here has been pretty unreliable. My landlord has been putting off hiring someone to repair the system. There’s a router on each of the 10 floors of the building, and a company has quoted $10,000 to configure it. 10 grand… some people are obviously making lots of cash on this wireless thing.

If I had a key to the room that has the router, I could simply power cycle it, but I have to go through layers of bureaucracy in my apartment building to get someone to do it. Last night, that took an hour, two before the connection came back.

Some might call this a case of addiction. 15 minutes without net and I’m starting to fidget. I don’t mind going for hours without an email when I know the connection is there when I want it.

People would probably freak out just like I did if their cell phone died. It’s a social connector and being out of the social loop is a scary thing for us social animals. For nerds, that connector is your net.

Feel free to comment anonymously if you think I’m addicted though

The card was first mailed to my parents, who forwarded it to me.

It had to be activated by the phone listed on the account. So I called my dad on skype, and had him activate the card with the landline. He asked the rep if s/he spoke French, and was promptly transferred to the Spanish rep. They ended up working it out in English.

Maybe one day I’ll be able to call from any VoIP phone, and caller ID won’t matter much as a security feature. In the meantime, there’s plenty to be amused about.

Here are the photos mentioned in my previous post on the St-Jean Baptiste national holiday.