Because of all the kerfuffle generated by LJ changing its cookie handling, my LJ client broke. I've written a patch for it. It now works :)
Tag: geek
Fuckin' hell!
Continuing my investigation on bandwidth usage, I did some number crunching on my raw access logs. on a daily basis, half of the unique referrers in my apache logs come from myspace.
HALF!!!!!
bloody 'ell!
huzzah! huzzah!
Woohoo, indeed, for many reasons.
One of which is that I have finally finished my paper, which has been reviewed by my pass as suitable for submission for publication. I just need the ok from zebigboss and it's off to the publisher. If it gets accepted (which it should, touch wood), that'll mean that I'll have been published twice in the last 6 months: once as a 1st author, once as a 2nd. This pleases me to no end.
Another reason that I'm happy is that I've released a new version of my pet project, the Ontology Lookup Service live to the world, with tons of cool new bells and whistles. Try it! Go on, you know you want to.
The final reason to be happy is not mine to tell, but it makes me the happiest of all.
Those were the days
I have just been down the geekdom memory lane. It was fun. A coworker is having problems with his laptop. It's running windows 98. His PCMCIA network card won't work. Dealing with OEMSETUP.INF files, VXD drivers, hell, dealing with DOS and memory management and IRQ/DMA conflicts. Most of you won't have a clue what I'm talking about. That's ok.
Playing around with that stuff brought back memories of Michel and I spending waaaaaaaaaaay too much time putzing around on my 486DX33, trying to install windows 3.1 on floppies, tweaking arcane S-registries on my 14.4kbps USR sportster v32bis modem to get the last baud possible (hell, I think I knew those settings better than the engineers who designed the thing at one point).
Then his Norton Disk Doctor flashed up during boot, telling him that he had lost chains and lost clusters on his HD. That brought a tear to my eye. I remember fighting with QEMM, an evil! piece of software to try and get as much base RAM† so I could finally get Castle Wolfenstein to load :) *happy sigh*
† Remember Bill Gates saying that nobody would ever need more than 640kb of memory? That innocent lack of vision caused so much pain to so many gamers :)
I'm a weak-willed person
I finally broke down and bought a shitload of icon space.
I'm suck a geek.
It's sad.
I got my liver
Die, struts, die! I fixed you, mwahahahahahahaha!
Hmmmm, Charlize
I just found out I share the same exact birthday as Charlize Theron. Yummy!
On the value of database indexes
Been trying to wrap my head around a bug at work, why a simple database query never returned a result set and crashed the server. The query is a simple left join from a “term” table with 40K records to a “term_synonym” table with 140K records. It should be straightforward. It should work.
It didn't.
For a very, very stupid reason on my part.
I'd forgotten to create indexes on the tables and it was doing full table scans. That comes out to 5,600,000,000 iterations over the term_synonym table. No wonder it was slow.
After creating the index:
mysql> select count(*) from term t left join term_synonym ts on t.term_id = ts.term_id; +----------+ | count(*) | +----------+ | 156746 | +----------+ 1 row in set (1.72 sec)
Um, ya, I suck.
I've been told I haven't been writing enough
The last few days have been rather uneventful, really. Work has been mostly aggravating, to be honest. We're at the point where we're testing the code in real-life scenarios with actual data and it's making gremlins pop out of the woodwork. I spent the whole day today wrestling with Oracle JDBC. We're trying to load data that has very long text blobs to load. We found this out the hard way when JDBC was complaining about strings above 4K. We then changed the back-end tables to handle CLOBS, but then we found that the oracle:thin driver didn't handle CLOBS above 4K, so that was rather useless too. We tried to switch to the oracle:oci driver, but that needs oracle client library binaries. I spent the afternoon trying to get a windows oracle installation to play nice with java ant under cygwin. Basically, I was asking for trouble. In the end, we gave up on my laptop and we got it to run on Phil's laptop (a native linux install) and lo and behold, everything worked. I'm happy that I got it to work, but I could have done without the aggravation.
On a completely different issue, I installed a wiki on my website (http://www.flubu.com) so I have a rapid sandbox for notes and such. It's basically the electronic equivalent of my little yellow post-it notes I always carry with me.
On a final issue, I have too active an imagination and this is going to bite me in the ass shortly. Katy's become obsessed with a TV series called Millenium (I got her the series on DVD). In the last few days, she's gotten through something like 10 hours od it. Some of the themes in the show give me the serious heebyjeebies. Not good.
Have you hugged your geek today?
I've just setup a CVS server on my website to hold all of my programming projects. It's something I've been meaning to do for a while now.