Ah, its nice to be on holiday. What holiday is on September 13th you ask? Programmer’s Day, of course!!! Internationally recognized as ‘the’ holiday of choice, Programmer’s Day is all about celebrating the fun of being a geek. So come on everybody, live it up!
In the quest to continually update our language and give it new forms of expression, and because I === geek, I am going to help promote an alternative to the geeky “you got owned” and its various l33t spellings, one that should hopefully appeal to a broader audience.
Now, instead of getting “owned”, its “you just got Mario-ed!”. This is short hand notation for saying “You got one-upped”, and as we all remember, 1-ups were fairly elusive in the original Mario Bros. So there you go, inspired by xkcd, I challenge you to let people know when you’ve Mario-ed them.
Not in the textbook of plays or shots…
Having setup a backup server for work and home, I was looking into how to remove archives that were a week or older. Initially, I wrote a simple script to search a path for files that matched a naming convention and whose creation dates exceeded the week limit. This was fine and dandy but not the most elegant and didn’t really increase my linux-fu. So I decided to delve deeper and find a good one-liner that embraces the linux way of life. My result:
rm `find /path/to/backups/ -mtime +7 -name ‘*.bz2′`
The breakdown:
Slap that sucker into a cron job and you have yourself an automated way to maintain a certain number of files that do not exceed a certain time frame. find is enormously useful and has so many wonderful options to assist you in your file searching. So there you have it, a simple one-liner to remove files based on their timestamp.
Via BoingBoing, a video remix of a scene in Empire Strikes Back, making Lord Vader appear as a smart ass. Great stuff.
These are some l33t skillz
So what’s a guy to do on Friday night / Saturday? Probably look for something really nerdy to do, right??!?? That’s probably the response of most guys right? Okay, maybe not; but when your significant other is still playing in Florida, and the movie theatre is running on partial power and not showing movies, it is easy to become absorbed by something new and shiny. My new toy: YAWS, (Yet Another WebServer for those not in the know).
I am a web developer and as such spend a healthy chunk of time leveraging the Apache webserver to serve up the web applications I develop. So when another web server makes performance claims like this (thoughput ( load(x-axis) vs KBytes/second(y-axis)):
Our figure shows the performance of a server when subject to parallel load. This kind of load is often generated in a so-called “Distributed denial of service attack”.
Apache dies at about 4,000 parallel sessions. Yaws is still functioning at over 80,000 parallel connections.
Intruiged, I upgraded my version of erlang, got myself YAWS up and running, and am now delving into the world of erlang web development. I think I’ll write a simple application in both erlang/YAWS and PHP/Apache and run some benchmarks to test these claims myself. To see my YAWS development, tune your browser to my compy. Currently it only has the default site, as my erlang fu is in development.
The graph is non-trivial and if it proves to be true, even partially true, that YAWS can handle 20x the number of parallel requests Apache can, that may be just the advantage we need over our competition.
More to come…
Whilst using the internets in a non-professional manner, I found a home plan that I would not mind living in at all. Half the house is a living room type area; the other half - a cylinder that rotates to reveal three compartments. The bedroom, kitchen, and bathroom all reside within the cylinder and can be rotated with a remote control. I gotta say, for the single life, this is a pretty cool looking place to live. Currently only a prototype, the house covers 36 meters square. I wonder how long it will take to start stacking them like legos…
Absolutely hilarious advertisement!