Posted by Joel Fri, 01 Sep 2006 01:15:46 GMT
So Labor Day weekend is coming up and of course I was too stupid to make plans. So as much as I'd like to go to Chicago I didn't buy a ticket. And as much as I'd like to go to Burning Man I don't have anyone to go with.
I'll probably end up going either to my mom's or to my brother's.
Posted by Joel Thu, 31 Aug 2006 00:10:00 GMT
So I'm switching some of our production tables over to MyISAM. This is a pretty radical shift for me. I used to be a big PostgreSQL advocate, but now that I'm working on such a big site, it's all about speed. And MySQL is just much faster.
And why MyISAM over InnoDB? Because I don't need foreign key constraints. And I don't need transactions. All that stuff looks good on paper, but in reality, it comes at a huge performance hit. And for what? It helps you detect bugs. In short, it's basically like running your production application in debug mode to use an ACID-compliant database.
Any sort of validation, on delete cascade, anything can be done on the application layer if you really need it, but when's the last time you have ever really had data integrity issues that didn't become obvious quickly? Ultimately we're talking about application errors being caught at the database level, and that's a convenience that just isn't worth the cost.
The main cause of this is that I want to use the Fulltext indexing in MySQL and it is only supported by MyISAM.
Posted by Joel Tue, 29 Aug 2006 15:39:00 GMT
Sunday I went exploring Nob Hill looking for places to eat. I'm mostly right in the middle of a ton of residential. There's corner convenience stores, but not much else.
The Gallery Cafe is on the end of my block and I've already been there a bunch. I did find a small sushi restaurant up the hill. Walking past California opened up a bunch of other places and I went to a place down there and got a burger and fries. Found another cafe that was too packed with hipsters on laptops to sit down so I moved on.
Now I need to find Chinese places.
I stayed up too late playing Warcraft on Sunday. Playing by myself no less. Although this was largely because I wasn't that tired, as I'd slept in really late.
I'm already getting kind of bored of the game. I'm already thinking of what else I can do with my time after work and errands. Sure, I could pick up a constructive hobby or something, but I kind of want to just do something fun. I'd play another game but Warcraft is about the only game available on the Mac (ha).
The Daily Show is on too damned late so I'm going to try to catch the evening rerun instead.
Posted by Joel Sun, 27 Aug 2006 23:31:00 GMT
Yesterday Justin came into town and we went to the SF MOMA. We watched Drawing Restraint 9, the avant-garde film by Matthew Barney. It starred Bjork as well.
For the most part I found the movie interesting to watch. The tea ceremony part in particular was my favorite, as I was able to just completely zone out and watch their graceful movements. The bit where they cut each other to pieces was pretty difficult to watch, though. And dragging the huge whale turd through a restrained oval of petroleum jelly (the "field") which had had its midsection removed might have been a bit much.
And while I am skeptical of modern art, I have to admit the imagery from that movie isn't likely to leave me anytime soon. What an odd concept.
We didn't have a ton of time for the rest of the museum but my favorite bit was a sculpture of sorts which was basically a huge structure you could walk into, with spiky metal pyramids exciting it from all angles. Once you walked in, it was like you were inside a kaleidoscope. Really incredible.
Afterwards Justin and I walked around the city. Through Union Square to Chinatown to North Beach. We went to the City Lights bookstore, as I knew Justin would like it. And then we got some food at Cafe Puccini, which I didn't really like. Finally we walked back to his car in SOMA through the financial district and marveled at the buildings and the forces they represent.
Posted by Joel Fri, 25 Aug 2006 07:23:24 GMT
The last few days were oddly stressful at work, I guess because I'm spending most of my time right now experimenting with various methods of speeding up some new features. I've already learned a lot about database optimization. I've never really worked on data sets this large, or on a site this popular, so it is an excellent learning experience, and thus far I've been pulling my weight pretty well. At this point, I've expanded my skillset to the point I could probably land system administrator or database administrator jobs with a big company if I wanted to, in addition to software engineer. I like this job in particular, though, because it lets me exercise all of them.
Wednesday after work I worked out for an hour. I pushed myself to burn more calories on the bike than I was before, but I can tell I'm a bit tired lately, probably because I've been somewhat sick all week. I continued to read Snow Crash, which has more action than before, but I tire of waiting for the mysteries to be solved. Maybe I'm just impatient.
Then I played some Warcraft. We did some Battlegrounds and lost every game, it was pretty miserable.
Today I attempted to watch my diet more strictly and did a good job of it. After work, I played on my warlock, and Will and I brutalized the same three people over and over. Then we played some more Battlegrounds on our main characters, and this time we did much better. I love when the battles are intense, and I know that my heals landing properly can really make or break a territory we control; it's really a lot of fun. We love to trap unsuspecting intruders, as our characters can turn invisible.
And about an hour ago I stopped playing, because I refuse to let myself stay up too late. I admit already I'm playing more than I thought -- 2 or 3 hours a night the last three nights. Time I would have previously spent chatting with people online, flipping through channels, reading news. Is it so bad if I spend that time doing something fun?
And still I feel like I should push myself to do something else with that time, to pursue an art or something. But I am already focused on two things for the time being: my work and my fitness. Should I really feel guilty for trying to relax every evening and just have some geeky fun? I don't know.
Posted by Joel Wed, 23 Aug 2006 06:58:00 GMT
Been an interesting few days. Monday I ended up signing up for WoW again. Fear not, though, I'm only going to do PvP. Honestly, I mainly signed up because I have some friends who play, and there's no other game I have to kill time on this Mac. It's been a lot of fun so far, but I am wary of the game's addictive qualities; we'll see how it is a week from now. In my defense, though, I never really was all that addicted to the game. Even when I felt lots of obligation to play a lot from my guild, it was a constant argument, and I eventually left over it. Now, I don't even have a guild, and I'm not trying to progress in any way, so I should have no obligations of any sort. It's been over six months and I'm tired of telling my friends I can't even PvP with them, when really I want to, so I signed up.
I watched the Anthony Bourdain where he is, by astounding coincidence, in Beirut at the time the captures happen and the Israeli attacks start. It starts with him enjoying the Beirut cuisine, people, and nightlife, but then the attacks start and he spends a week or so trapped there, as Israel had destroyed the airport, and it's sad to see his slow and steady increase in optimism towards life and the world suffer the severe blow it took while witnessing what he did.
Today after work I went and saw the Mountain Goats. I like the guy a lot, but am disappointed with the more overtly sad tone of the new album. On top of that, the dude showed up in typical emo style; dyed black hair just long enough to land in his eyes, so he had to constantly flip or push it out of the way. This is not his typical fashion, normally he's a geeky type; I think he's trying too hard to appeal to his audience. The crowd were hipsters, of course. It was at the Haight Amoeba. Regardless, in between his overly somber tunes, he was quite a funny person. The highlight of the show was one of the two fun songs he played, Golden Boy. The other was Jenny. Afterwards he expressed annoyance that people thought he was a "funny" songwriter and had resolved to stop writing such enjoyable music. I don't know why he doesn't embrace it.
Did laundry, then played WoW with Will and Ben, and now I'm going to bed. Yay.
Posted by Joel Mon, 21 Aug 2006 21:36:54 GMT
Well I didn't end up going to MOMA. Justin cancelled at like 1 pm. David had called me to go to a show but I didn't really feel like it. I was going to work out but again I decided I didn't want to.
I was just kind of exhausted, and I have a chest cold which is really screwing up my voice and leaving me coughing all the time. Bleh. So I've just been cuddling up in my sheets. Wasn't bad really.
Posted by Joel Sat, 19 Aug 2006 23:06:53 GMT
So I'm using upcoming.org again. Go to my list of stuff here:
Posted by Joel Sat, 19 Aug 2006 20:12:00 GMT
Yesterday I rolled out two large new site changes, the second of which I'd been working on for some time, as is crucial to future site stability and user experience. Our live server has an odd tendency to sometimes hang or stall when resizing large images which the dev server doesn't, and despite my best efforts I couldn't figure it out. I got around the issue by handling how resizes are done very differently.
Naturally, when any change goes live it never works properly, so I was stressing over it.
Our intern, Nicole, has a boyfriend who works at Google Base so I asked if he knew Marc, and he does. Evidently he's got a housewarming party going on Sunday but unfortunately I have other plans to go to MOMA with Justin.
Bryan, Ryan and I went to see Snakes on a Plane in Campbell. It probably wasn't the best venue -- my observation of this made them laugh, as they often think I knock the suburbs too much, but I like to think that when the movie started and they realized the audience participation was the major point of seeing it, they realized it could have been better in a more densely populated area such as San Francisco.
It was a lot of fun! It's no Rocky Horror, but I really enjoyed it. Again, it might be crucial to see it this weekend (or, arguably, the Thursday which already passed) but it was a good time.
We went looking around for bars before realizing Ryan was only twenty. Then I crashed at Ryan's place where we watched Seinfeld and Three's Company because despite his lack of cable he has lots of old sitcoms on DVD.
The next morning I got up and we walked to the office. There, I think I solved the mysterious problem of our image resizing stalling out; RMagick's number_colors method was having variable completion times or even stalling altogether. And for some reason (which I will investigate, now) this doesn't seem to happen on the dev server. Removing this useless call should greatly improve site stability.
I drove back, listened to Beck's One Foot in the Grave, got an instant parking space, now I'm waiting for the cable guy. The city is alive and sunny today so naturally I'll be spending it inside waiting in a four hour window for some jerk from Comcast. Again.
Posted by Joel Fri, 18 Aug 2006 19:18:11 GMT
Another weekend looms ahead. As usual I have lots of things I'd like to do and no one to do them with. Does anyone want to see Snakes on a Plane?
Older posts: 1 2
