Category Archives: Interesting

Obama Wins…

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A quick recap of Obama’s wins this weekend:

  • Maine
  • Louisiana
  • Nebraska
  • Washington (State)
  • Virgin Islands
  • The Grammys

What’s interesting isn’t so much that Obama won a Grammy, but that he was competing with Bill Clinton for the award, and that both Clintons and Obama have previously won Grammy Awards.

Another interesting trend, mentioned here (among many others) is that Obama wins in a landslide in every caucus. We saw that he can win plenty of primaries, too, but he really shines in the caucuses, which tend to be poorly-attended. Combine that with him having very enthusiastic supporters, the type of people that will spend hours at a caucus, and it’s not too surprising.

“The Votemaster” (at Electoral-Vote.com) has an interesting cartogram up. The Hillary states (pink) versus the Obama states (purple) almost seem to resemble the general 2004 vote: most Kerry states went for Hillary, and most Bush states went for Obama. We still have Wisconsin and Virginia this month, with 23 delegates up for grabs. Texas is coming up in March, and the latest polls (late January) show that Clinton has a lead. Whether this will remain the case or not is to be seen.

Tweaking SQL

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I was thinking last night about solid-state drives. In their current form, they’re really not that much faster in terms of throughput: a decent amount are actually even slower than ATA disks if you measure them in terms of MB/sec throughput. Where they shine (100 times faster, at least) is seek time, though. So where they’re ideally suited for in a server environment right now is something with lots of random reads, where you might find yourself jumping all over the disk. For example, a setup with lots and lots of small files scattered across the disk.

Many implementations of a database would be similar. Something like the database for this blog will have a lot of sequential reads: you’re always retrieving the most recent entries, so the reads tend to be fairly close. But there are lots of ways to slice the data that don’t result in reading neighboring rows or walking the table. (And what really matters is how it’s stored on disk, not how it’s stored in MySQL, but I’m assuming they’re one in the same.) Say I view my “Computers” category. That’s going to use reads from all over the table. Using a solid-state disk might give you a nifty boost there. So I think it’d be fun to buy a solid-state disk and use it in an SQL server. I wager you’d see a fairly notable boost in performance, especially in situations where you’re not just reading sequential rows.

But here’s the cool link of this post. I’m not sure exactly what goes on here in a technical sense, but they use solid-state drives, getting the instant seek time, but they also get incredible throughput: 1.5GB/sec is the slowest product they offer. I think there may be striping going on, but even then, with drives at 30MB/sec throughput, that’d be 50 drives. The lower-end ones look to just be machines with enormous RAM (16-128 GB), plus some provisions to make memory non-volatile. But they’ve got some bigger servers, which can handle multiple terabytes of storage on Flash, and still pull 2GB/sec of throughput, which they pretty clearly state isn’t counting stuff cached in RAM (which should be even faster).

I want one.

Super Tuesday Summary

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I’ve got to get up early in the morning, so I’m going closing down early. A summary of tonight.

For the Republicans, I can simply say that McCain was the winner tonight. This isn’t to say that he’s won the official nomination, just that he won most states tonight.

For the Democrats, results were all over the place, and varied.

Hillary Clinton took:

  • California (my projection)
  • Arizona
  • New Jersey
  • Massachusetts
  • New York (57% to 40%)
  • Tennessee
  • Arkansas (73% to 24%)
  • Oklahoma (55% to 31%)

Barack Obama took:

  • Utah
  • Alaska (my projection)
  • Colorado (2:1)
  • Idaho (by a huge 80% to 18% per CNN)
  • Minnesota (2;1)
  • Connecticut (close! 50% to 47%)
  • Kansas (73% to 27%)
  • North Dakota (61-37%)
  • Alabama (fairly close)
  • Delaware (fairly close)
  • Illinois (65% to 33%)
  • Georgia (66-32)

And some are too close to call right now:

  • New Mexico (a weak Hillary lead, but only 1% is in)
  • Missouri: with 98% reporting, they’re neck-and-neck in both parties

I’m biased (I’m posting this wearing an Obama T-shirt, on a laptop with an Obama sticker on it, with an Obama sticker in my window), but I’d say the winner of the night was Obama. The polls I’d seen left me expecting Hillary to take most states, but I was confident that the way we award delegates would keep Obama in the running. Obama has taken the majority of the states, some by a surprising majority.

Bringing Down the Web

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Engadget (but strangely, no mainstream news sites?) is reporting that a fourth underseas fiber cable has been pierced in the Middle East.

People are now starting to draw the conclusion I draw the second time: something fishy is going on. (Err, no pun intended there…)  Underseas cables don’t get cut that often, but for four of them to get cut in a week, and all to a war-torn region?

Someone is pretty clearly trying to cut off the Internet to that part of the world, and they’re doing a pretty good job. Fortunately, the Internet has always been designed to route around failures like this, but it seems like they’ve taken out a huge chunk of the backbone to some parts of the world. There was an earthquake to that region, too, though. But still, I’m suspicious.

Of course, some are saying that the fourth line wasn’t actually cut, but apparently just suffered technical issues not related to the underseas line itself. But still, I’m calling shenanigans. I’m just not sure which motive is at play: are they resisting Western influence? Trying to prevent technology? Obsessed with censorship? There are multiple motives, just as there are many, many possible culprits.

Although I have to hand it to them: those underseas cables look incredibly resilient, and I can’t imagine that too many people know where every single one is located.

Hey Oh!

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Song of the night: “Snow (Hey Oh)” by the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Incredibly awesome musically, the music video is pretty neat too: I’m not really sure who we’re seeing, but, among the cliche video of them singing on stage, you get ‘video portraits’ of probably hundreds of seemingly-random people. Simple, and yet strangely novel.

Unlike some of their other songs, this one didn’t find its way into Guitar Hero or Rock Band. I think that the first people in charge of making the decision of what songs made the cut got distracted and are still in an office somewhere, playing the video over and over again, singing along quietly. Unable to break them from their trances, the others decided the song was simply too awesome to be fit for general consumption.

I’m on my fourth time in a row. And when it’s done, I’m probably going to go for #5. Roommates, I apologize in advance if I advertently wake you up tonight while I mumble about snow and the cover of another public wonder in my sleep.  You might play this song to drown me out.

A Big Day

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John Edwards has dropped out, leaving the Democratic race between Obama and Hillary.

The news from today that really shocks me, though, is that Giuliani:

  • Dropped out of the race, and
  • Endorsed McCain (!)

Giuliani scared me the most, but I think McCain is the one Republican that stands a chance of winning in 2008, which is equally as scary.

If the race had come down to Obama versus, say, Giuliani, I think it would be a landslide victory for Democrats. But if it comes down to Clinton versus McCain as early signs are showing? Clinton’s disliked enough, and McCain’s moderate enough, that he might just win it.

McCain is a rather interesting candidate. On one hand he’s taken many issues I like, such as speaking out against torture, among others. On the other hand, he’s part conservative, part lunatic…

State of the Union

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Tonight is the State of the Union address.

As an aside, if I’m ever President, I think I’m going to direct those familiar with the speech to keep mum. I know that the State of the Union isn’t exactly the place for suspense and drama, but it’s kind of upsetting, in some way, to know exactly what he’s going to say before he says it. USA Today comments that Obama and Hillary will both be present, and ads, “Those two alone will draw most of the reaction shots shown on television.” So not only do we know what will be said, but we seem to know, as fact, what the cameras will be focusing on.

I hope Congress will vehemently oppose his push for permanent codification of warrant-less wiretaps into law, and am pretty leery of him being the one behind tax cuts (they seem to be given to the wrong people), but I do support (strongly!) his plan to curb earmarks.

The frequent Reagan comparisons (on the part of USA Today) are borderline creepy, by the way.

MySQL

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Sun bought MySQL.

Also, Sun’s CEO {has a blog, doesn’t know how to resize images other than changing the HTML attributes}.

Remember back when they were a little below $5 a share and I said I thought they were going somewhere?

Next time I’m putting my money where my mouth is. They closed at $15.92 a share on Friday.

Of course, some are wondering whether this was a good buy. Not necessarily whether MySQL is good (it’s perhaps the most widely-used database in the world), but whether it makes sense to pay a billion dollars for it, when it’s (1) primarily an OpenSource product, and (2) going to take something like 20 years of revenues to break even. While I don’t quite buy the bit about it being a conspiracy with Oracle to kill the project, you should check out the page they link to, Sun’s list of acquisitions. It’s so bad that Sun appears to have a photograph of a dumpster with the Sun logo on it. (Okay, it’s a shipping crate. But it doesn’t make a ton of sense, and you have to grant that it looks a little bit like a dumpster.) It reminds me of when Sun bought Cobalt for $2 billion, and Cobalt went belly-up shortly thereafter. (I still think RaQs could be hot sellers today, by the way, if they were still being made. To take a company doing incredibly well and have it go belly-up in under a year takes some incredible mis-management.)