Tue Oct 27 13:47:34 CDT 2009
Tags: programming, mapreduce

Any of you have a concrete, real-world example of using
the map/reduce idiom to solve a problem more interesting
than collecting word-frequency data for a document corpus?

Tue Oct 20 12:58:21 CDT 2009
Tags: green, hunger, energy

Since you didn't ask, my stance these days on the issue of
anthropogenic climate change is this: Even if it's not real,
when we have the technology to do better, why shouldn't we?
One argument that Clark made the other day, is because there
are people in the world without food or clean water. That's
certainly compelling. Tough mental ground to cover.

Mon Oct 12 23:13:57 CDT 2009
Tags: tags

I've been noodling over an idea for a rails project which may
eventually replace this sad little text file (among other, more
interesting goals.) One really important aspect of the project
will be tagging. Rather than reinvent the wheel I'm on a hunt
for a good tagging plugin for rails. Apparently there are
quite a few of them. So far has_many_polymorphs looks the most
interesting. http://blog.evanweaver.com/files/doc/fauna/has_many_polymorphs/files/README.html

Let me know if you know of something better.

Sun Oct 11 17:38:40 CDT 2009
Tags: People I'd Buy a Beer, Ruby, linux, PHP Performance

Whatever happened to Why the Lucky Stiff? I'd buy him a beer any day.

I spent some time helping a friend diagnose poor performance of a
recently completed site (http://maccreate.com). It's a typically
impressive work. More than anything, though, working with it made
me appreciate just how little I miss PHP. Incidentally, the
performance issue was likely just an issue of under specced
hardware. Those amazon EC2 small instances are not workhorses.
This is not to say that there aren't any code improvements
possible. I was wearing my sysadmin hat for this period, though.

The only changes I made that improved things in any noticeable way
were increasing the PHP memory limit (WPmu + plugins can use some
resources) and installing APC (the php opcode cache.) I also
corrected the WP install as per
http://trac.mu.wordpress.org/ticket/215 . This had little
discernible performance impact but was generating a lot of log
noise.

I had never encountered the term "steal" in reference to linux
perfomance counters. It refers to CPU time a VM would have used
that is stolen back by the hypervisor.