Category Archives: Rants & Raves

Instincts

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I was just trying to play some Team Fortress 2 on my laptop… Without a mouse. It wasn’t going so well. Plus, I couldn’t find anyone on the map. (It was a big map with only a few people on it.)  So I’m just moving around trying to find where everyone is.

And all of a sudden a Scout comes through the door and fires his shotgun. I don’t think he even hit me on the first shot.

But I totally panicked. I jumped back in my seat and began flailing my arms. He proceeded to shoot me again and I died.

Me: 0. Pathetic: +1.

Lost in Translation

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Check out this radio‘s description. It’s got excess value and pettiness! And a phrase-lock-loop. And “LCD aphellotropic lights of showing screen,facile operation in dark” has got to mean “backlit screen.” (Facile is Spanish for “easy,” no your mom jokes.) Oh, and you can’t forget the Auto-charger rabbet. And it comes with a chargeable battery.

Anyone else confused? (Bonus points: I tried to copy-and-paste a quote, and it carried over the HTML tags, which included at one point….?!)

memcached

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On my continuing series of me poking around at ways to improve performance…

I accidentally stumbled across something on memcached. The classic example is LiveJournal (which, incidentally, created memcached for their needs). It’s extraordinarily database-intensive, and spread across dozens of servers. For what they were doing, generating HTML pages didn’t make sense that often. So it does something creative: it creates a cache (in the form of a hash table) that works across a network. You might have 2GB of RAM to spare on your database server (actually, you shouldn’t?) and 1GB RAM you could use on each of 6 nodes. Viola, 8 GB of cache. You modify your code to ask the cache for results, and, if you don’t get a result, then you go get it from the database (or whatever) as usual.

But what about situations like mine? I have one server. And I use MySQL query caching. But it turns out it’s useful. (One argument for using it is that you can just run multiple clients on a single server to render moot any problems with using more than 4GB on a 32-bit system… But I’m not lucky enough to have problems with not being able to address my memory.)

MySQL’s query cache has one really irritating “gotcha”–it doesn’t catch TEXT and BLOB records, since they’re of variable length. Remembering that this is a blog, consisting of lots and lots of text, you’ll quickly see my problem: nearly every request is a cache miss. (This is actually an oversimplification: there are lots of less obvious queries benefiting, but I digress.) (WordPress complicates things by insisting on using the exact timestamp in each query, which also renders a query cache useless.) I just use SuperCache on most pages, to generate HTML caches, which brings a tremendous speedup.

But on the main page, I’m just hitting the database directly on each load. It holds up fine given the low traffic we have, but “no one uses it” isn’t a reason to have terrible performance. I’ve wanted to do some major revising anyway, so I think a rewrite in my spare time is going to experiment with using memcached to improve performance.

Simple English

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I had someone on a forum I frequent ask me a question. It’s in broken English and he explained that he’s not a native speaker. In my reply, I tried to be sensitive to that by speaking somewhat simply. Not in a demeaning way, but in my attempts to learn Spanish, I learned very quickly that short sentences expressing one simple idea are much simpler than elaborate sentences conveying a complex range of thoughts, such as this one.

And that reminded me of the Simple English Wikipedia project, which I think should get more attention. They treat it like another language: there’s English, Spanish, Simple English, etc. A really awesome idea in my opinion. (Although the sexual intercourse page–warning, has an illustration of the process–is still pretty sketchy… Maybe because it’s not a topic that lends itself to being explained in simple, direct terms?)

I think “Simple English” is something everyone should practice, though. As some of the pages on the simple.wikipedia.org site show, writing in a simple manner does not necessarily require coming across like a dimwit.

The Problem with Wikipedia

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No, not that one.

I consider myself a talented writer. And I’m obsessive-compulsive about things being well-written. So giving me access to edit things is a recipe for awesome.

So I was doing some research for class. My research into Lynch v. Donnelly made me realize that the page was pitiful. So I cleaned it up to get it to its current state. (Which still needs a lot of work.) The Nautilus, Inc. page also got some updates after another class project on the subject.

You should get extra credit in class when you become the top contributor to the Wikipedia page on the subject.

The Spare Box

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I don’t blame the OS directly, but life in Windows-land always involves me sitting around twiddling my thumbs.

So I brought back an ancient laptop with me. 512MB RAM (I think–it might be 256), a slow processor, a tiny hard drive, and a battery that doesn’t hold a charge. It’s running Ubuntu, and its two duties are as a web browsing machine and an IM machine.

So now while the system is unusable, I can get stuff done over here.

(Psst: Steam, when your game is so hard to start that I lose interest before it’s launched, you’ve failed miserably. Go get stuck in a lift. A burning lift.)

Terrible Software

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Two different things that boggled my mind today:

  • CCleaner offered clean up Symantec’s log files. All 5 gig of them. (?!?!)
  • Team Fortress 2 just crashed after spending about ten minutes “loading.” It complained that there wasn’t enough memory and that I probably had the paging file disabled. The latter is true: I never recreated it after disabling it since it was in 600 pieces. But RAM? I’ve got 2 GB of it. If you can’t write code to fit in that, you deserve to be stuck in a lift. A burning lift. With a corpse.

Seriously, 2 GB RAM isn’t enough to load the game? And you need 5 GB of log files?

The Thing with the Rows?

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After years of not knowing any better, I finally learned the answer to, “Are you good with Excel?”

It’s an emphatic, “No.”

Of course I actually know my way around it really well. But, every single time, I have soon realized that I’d have been better off lying. “Hey Matt, I have this list of numbers and I want to find the standard deviation” would be easy. So wouldn’t, “How can I get this formula to apply to these cells?”

But, “Why isn’t my data importing from Excel to PowerPoint properly?” I don’t have the foggiest clue. Why doesn’t some complex formula you wrote work? I don’t know, you wrote it! Why doesn’t the SQL in your query work? Wait, what? You asked me about Excel.

I’m warning you. When someone asks you, say no, play dumb (“Naw, I don’t get it at all… That’s the thing with them numbers and rows, right?”) And, if there’s any signs that they’re not taking no for an answer, simply turn and run.