Posted by Joel
Fri, 18 Aug 2006 17:29:09 GMT
We set aside three tasks we were going to work on before our big marketing push, one of crucial importance I've been working on for a while now. I got some huge progress on it, and almost finished it, and then we needed an emergency feature which I've been working on the last day as it grows more and more complicated. It's a feature that we need because of time constraint. Honestly it can be a bit frustrating to have all of these things to work on at once, new things seemingly interjecting themselves as priorities every day.
I got home around 6:30 which means I got a free parking spot on Sacramento, which is a 4-6 no stopping zone. It's the main reason for me to leave work at 5 -- I basically don't have to worry about parking when I get home.
I worked out again. I'm making some definite progress but I need to step up how often I go. Working out is much less of a struggle though and I am very slowly moving up how much weight I can do, and how much effort I can put forth on the bike.
I still need to start dieting again, if I really want to lose 30 pounds by Christmas. I might go on the super hardcore diet I had before. I honestly didn't mind it, it gave me daily resolve.
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Posted by Joel
Tue, 15 Aug 2006 16:50:00 GMT
Sorry about that post. In the long scheme of things spending weekends by yourself isn't really that important. My work and health are improving so I can't consider this wasted time. I told myself I was going to dedicate this time to self improvement and damn the rest anyway; like I've never been out to a bar or restaurant before. And let's face it, I don't really like hanging out with lots of people anyway.
I worked out on Sunday and read some more of my book. I did order a North Beach Pizza, which I'd never had before. I got a small Barbary Coast which is basically a barbecue chicken pizza. When it arrived it looked absolutely delicious but upon eating it was somewhat bland. I ended up using Tobasco to give it flavor.
Monday was ok. I often stop at a gas station in the morning to get some coffee and a muffin but it has been out of muffins for like a week straight so Monday upon seeing that I just walked out. Screw that place. Work was reasonably productive. I went home at a reasonable hour and was determined to clean up a bit but instead just sat on the computer and drank a couple beers and watched TV.
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Posted by Joel
Sun, 13 Aug 2006 10:44:00 GMT
Please forgive this emo post but I feel like I need to talk about it.
My connection to my main social group here in San Francisco has been effectively severed thanks to pressure from someone who harbors an irrational hatred towards me.
Paul has been in LA more than he's been in Berkeley since I've moved here.
I'm still not intertwined in the web scene nor do I really want to be.
My roommate and I have little in common and he's always gone anyway. Presently he is in LA.
Justin never wants to come down.
My work friends all live too far away and probably have their own lives anyway.
And now that I work regular hours, I can't justify weekend trips to LA.
So the weekends have become a hard time. I enjoy having some time to read and work out and shop and generally lay about, but Friday and Saturday night are always painful, as they pass with me alone in my room or walking about the city aimlessly.
Tonight, armed with my book, I thought I would go and get some food, as I was very hungry and I haven't stocked this apartment with food since I haven't even eaten in this place in over two weeks. I almost fell into the comfort of ordering a pizza, but I encouraged myself to go out, even if it was by myself. I walked to North Beach, and everyone was with friends or as couples. Mostly people around my age, some older people. My neurosis in these situations can be incredible, as I instantly assume everyone is disgusted with me, and afraid of me (not in an empowering way). Recent events have helped feed this sense of universal rejection. I knew there was nowhere I could eat alone comfortably that wasn't junk food or a cafe, and most cafes were closed. So I got a philly cheesesteak.
The book is important because it fills the part of the meal where you are waiting for the food. Otherwise you sit around bored and feeling embarrased for your loneliness because you have no one to talk to. The book makes you seem like you're comfortable with it. Like you do it all the time and it's perfectly normal.
I've been tempted to pick up old vices. The familiar comfort of cigarettes can be a good friend when you are stuck in solitude. And, of course, Warcraft, and forums, and other internet communities... but I continue to refuse them all, and instead find myself lying about listlessly, flipping through channels, wandering about town, or working on my weekends.
I hate Saturdays now.
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Posted by Joel
Fri, 11 Aug 2006 19:35:09 GMT
Thor invited me out for a drink and we met up in Soma. We talked about all sorts of things, and then we went to an industry party, and talked tech stuff with various people. It was really a pretty good time, and I feel like that gap is closing now that everything is more stable.
A lady got mad at me yesterday because she thought I hit her car while parking. She pointed to the front of my car, noting the damage, which has been there for over a year. She did not seem to care that her own car was completely undamaged, mainly because I did not hit it, and in fact pulled in some distance behind it because I especially didn't want to risk hitting it while she was standing right there, and it was a fairly roomy space. I've gotten pretty good at parallel parking since I do it every single day. She left a nasty note saying she was "po-po" and had taken down my tags. Oh no!
We had another event for work yesterday. We rented a space and brought photography studio setups and hired two models and people took lots of photos. It was pretty fun. Plus we had snacks.
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Posted by Joel
Wed, 09 Aug 2006 04:59:45 GMT
Last night I watched United 93 and it was very good and you should probably see it.
I got some work done today.
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Posted by Joel
Tue, 08 Aug 2006 04:09:00 GMT
Well, that was kind of lame. I never liked the G5 case. The handles need rubber on them, at least; doesn't anyone notice these things? I don't really care about the Mac Pro though, I'm a laptop guy.
And, yeah. Leopard. I'm down with doing the time warp again; but do we really need virtual desktops? Isn't that a problem solved more elegantly by Expose? I dunno. Options, I guess; I know some weird people who'd installed software to provide that functionality. I was hoping for more. And what's with the release date?
Then again, I can cut them some slack because they had to spend a lot of time on that whole Intel thing this year. And really, they've done a good job. I'm still clutching feverishly to my PowerBook G4 hoping it doesn't die, because there are two major reasons I don't want a MacBook right now: heat and DarwinPorts.
I guess, looking back, it's not that bad. The only really good feature of Tiger was Spotlight, and Time Machine could compare in usefulness to that. I could still happily forget Dashboard ever happened, since it doesn't have much usefulness past eye candy to impress PC users.
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Posted by Joel
Mon, 07 Aug 2006 18:32:00 GMT
I went to Rock the Bells and I regret it. Oh, sure, it gave me lots of names to drop... Del tha Funkee Homosapien, De la Soul, Mos Def, Talib Kweli, Immortal Technique. Even Dave Chappelle made a cameo. But in general it was what I really don't like about hip hop. I thought it would be interesting to see a show a bit out of my general category, but I didn't realize it would be an all-day affair. That and lots of artists I didn't like so much -- such as Wu Tang, the headlining act -- made me feel sorely out of place.
It was in Concord, again. I had hoped to never return to the horrible Sleep Train Pavilion, but I rationalized the event by bringing my book and saying "If I don't like it, I can always get drunk." Little did I know that unlike the rock show I had been to previously in Concord, hip hop shows were evidently refused alcohol at their all-day summer events. Sure, alcohol advertisements adorned the refreshments area and seats, but a sign displaying "NO ALCOHOL TODAY" made their feelings on the genre clear. The rappers were surprised at the level of inhibitions at the predominantly white audience, and encouraged us to drink more, evidently oblivious to the discrimination taking place. Well, that and a lot of their performances just sucked, so I can't say audience reaction is that surprising. So I was sober as a judge while I learned that cash rules everything around me. Did I mention Rza wasn't even there? Not that I really care. Aside for a brief appearance in Coffee and Cigarettes bumping his cred, to me he is most memorable as the unfortunate stain on the first Kill Bill soundtrack.
The best acts were Immortal Technique, Del, and Mos Def, in that order.
The cops were out in force afterwards, guarding random things. They'd shut off a local Chevron "on request of the owners". Can't have darkies buying gasoline!
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Posted by Joel
Sun, 06 Aug 2006 06:43:32 GMT
Friday was rather dull, aside for making some good progress at work. I made plans with Thor to catch a drink which caught me a bit off guard. Stayed in at night.
Saturday I got a lot of sleep, went to the local cafe and read my book, and then worked out again. I've definitely been losing some weight which is great. I haven't been really dieting, but my present lifestyle is one that doesn't involve much calorie intake.
Eric and I went to a Brazilian cafe near Civic Center. A reasonable ambiance was largely ruined by not one but two excessively long and intruding dance performances by scantily clad women, one of which was not particularly attractive. This show was preceded by an annoying flickering of the lights on and off, designed to distract you from any present conversations you may be having. At one point certain audience members, which is what I guess we became, got up and danced with them in a conga line of sorts. The food was ok, not what I expected for the price, but at least it was a little different than standard fare.
I want to go to Burning Man but I'm not sure who I will go with.
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Posted by Joel
Fri, 04 Aug 2006 03:15:00 GMT
Yesterday was stressful at work because of stability problems. I ended up getting rid of Lightty and Pen and going back to Pound balancing four Mongrel processes. Furthermore I had to disable session management in Pound and increase the timeout (Pen worked just as well really, but Pound has virtual hosting, making Lightty largely unnecessary).
The problem is that our site has to resize images frequently and when it does one processor is going to get eaten up. It employs a simple caching system so that when people click on a size to download, it will see if it exists and if not resize the photo for that size. This means the customer has to wait anywhere between 3 seconds and a minute, depending on the size requested, the size of the source image, and the traffic on the server. The 15 second default timeout on Pound resulted in 500 errors when a request took longer than 15 seconds (either because it was crunching an image, or was waiting in a line behind a request that was). So I increased that.
We have two processors. Pen and Pound (with a Session set) will try to send you back to the same server you used last time. This means that if your server is presently spending 30 seconds crunching an image, you wait 30 seconds. In Pen you can solve this by putting it on a more traditional round robin load balancing, so it will always use the available processor, and in Pound you can remove the Session attribute for the same round robin functionality.
However, if two people crunch images simultaneously, everyone gets to wait until one of them finishes. It's not ideal. And while one solution is to scale out and get fifty processors, another solution is to just approach resizing images more intelligently.
And that's how I found BackgrounDRb. A pretty cool system that will shift stuff off to another server which you can then run at a low priority. I can just queue up photos to resize in there and have it resize them all immediately after they are accepted into the system, not when a customer requests it. Meanwhile the web servers can easily ask this server whether or not it's done working on stuff. I think this is going to become a huge part of scaling sites. Why get new hardware when you can just increase the efficiency of your software? More info on the basic concept at Mongrel's site.
I've been messing with it so far with pretty good results. Responsive mailing list community.
I was confused by this because I thought requests would just share processors and multitask happily but it seems like they monopolize it. I tried running good ol' Lightty and FastCGI and got the same two maxed-out request limit. And my processors have hyperthreading, so I thought it would be four. I wonder if there's something I'm missing.
This seems like a basic CS issue. Is there a point to having more than two Mongrel web servers running if I only have two processors available? Why doesn't hyperthreading grant me four processors? Apache always spawned lots of processes, FastCGI always does too; so why would it do that if the simultaneous requests were limited by the processors? I need to do more research.
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Posted by Joel
Wed, 02 Aug 2006 19:17:00 GMT
Monday was meh. Tuesday was better. I worked out again after work and read Snow Crash while on the bike. So far the book is pretty amazing. I was able to lift more in my reps than last time, probably because I awoke dormant muscles. Now when I do the bench press I can put weights on the bar! Truly, an achievement. I don't hurt so much as I did last time afterwards either.
Afterwards I went with my coworker and friend Robert to a show at the Independent. A couple of his friends from Santa Cruz were there as well. It was sold out but he got me a ticket. The band was Hot Chip. They had an opening act which at first we disliked but grew on us called Bobby Birdman.
This show itself was a lot of fun. Funky electronic music that doesn't get repetitive, pretty accessible really, and some of the people on stage, in particular the heavyset guy in the Flaming Lips black t-shirt hunched over a tiny keyboard, were real characters.
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