Linkstew

Would you like a quick recipe for making me paranoid? Here you go:

1. Be my roommate.
2. Talk on the phone with your friends a lot.
3. Then, have one of your friends call me some evening when you know you won't be home.
4. After I say "No, she's not here," have him ask "Oh... is this Benjy?"
5. Laugh when Benjy gets very nervous and starts wondering exactly what his roommate has been telling her friends about him on the phone.

note: The roommate in question wasn't female, and I'm not trying to say anything about said roommate by using feminine pronouns for him. I just used feminine pronouns to hopefully avoid the potential referential ambiguity in step 5.

I finally got around to fixing Linkstew's slowness.

So what was wrong?

I started by putting in timing code to see how long each piece of the page was taking to render, and I found that all of the hang up was in building the central list of posts. Further poking revealed that it was the sql query itself that was taking anywhere from 4 to 10 seconds to execute (depending on mysql's mood), and this was the source of the long loading delays the site had been exhibiting.

Now, I hadn't changed that query in months, so I still can't account for why Linktew suddenly got so slow last month. But using the "explain" SQL command, I was pretty quickly able to deduce the source of my problem:

My comments table has a column that keeps track of the post number that any given comment is associated with. However, the entry number column (which I was joining my posts table to my comments table on) wasn't indexed. So to display the comment count for any given entry, my query had to do a full, unindexed scan of my comments table in order to find out how many comments any given entry had. Multiply this by every entry on Linkstew, and I had one expensive operation on my hand.

A simple little alter table comments add index ... fixed the problem good, and the query that was taking 4 to 10 seconds now takes 0.15 to 0.30 seconds.

Which means that Linkstew is once again faster than Fury.com, and all is again right in the world. ;-)

(I'm just trying to make Kevin's life difficult. He knows I love him.)

The latest TMBG announce email had some new tour dates for their summer tour to promote No!. Notably, there are some west coast dates:

• 7/19 Portland, OR - Crystal Ballroom
• 7/20 Seattle, WA - Paramount Theater
• 7/26 Los Angeles CA - John Anson Ford Theater
• 7/27 Anaheim CA - House of Blues
• 7/28 SPECIAL KIDS SHOW Los Angeles CA Storyopolis

They better announce an SF show or two in that gap between Seattle and LA, because I already planned two other trips in July, and as much as I want to, I don't really have time to take a third trip to socal to go to a couple of TMBG concerts.

Hm. Though if I didn't go to AX, I'd have the time and the money to go to those socal concerts... And I'd be going to AX more to hang out with my Bakersfield friends than for the anime content... But if I went to the TMBG concerts, I don't know if I'd have anyone to go with me. Blah, I suppose I should figure this out soon.

Blahhh...

Basically, my final didn't go very well at all, and I'm looking for things besides the final to worry about. Let's put it this way: 16/100 points on the final were for being able to recite the details of 2 phase commit, the details of which I did not to commit to memory. It was purely memorization, and didn't test our understanding of it at all! In contrast, last year's final said "Here is how 2 phase commit works. What happens if it fails at this point? This point? This point?" Last year's question actually tested that the students understood the concept, while this year they just tested to see if we could recite the stupid thing from memory. 16 points! And another 4 points were for knowing what caused a particular bug in a particular processor that he only talked about in lecture. And so I'm not a very happy camper. I could have gotten an A in the class if I'd done well on the final, but now I'll be happy if I get a B.

It's an established fact that Linkstew is well indexed by google, and it averages about 200 google hits a day. These hits result in all kinds of irritating things like this (incomprehensible) slashdot comment (I just cite this one because it's the most recent) or linkage of the mockups I did comparing the size of the G4 cube and the gamecube in forums.

I just noticed that my google search hits have gone up by about 30 hits a day in the last couple of days. When I looked at my database, I saw that the increase in hits was due to queries like graduation+speech+ideas (7th) or graduation+speech+topics (1st!) that took the unwitting googlers to my graduation speech of yore.

In the last three days, I've gotten more than 50 hits for some variation of "graduation speech." Of course, my unconventional little speech probably isn't going to do them an ounce of good, so nyah nyah!

Here's Kevin's suggestion for what to do with them:

Kevin (23:21:32 PM): you should replace the target page with "You're fucked. Now go write your own speech and watch out for flying tomatoes."

Here's another joke in the "It's Irony" series:

Inventor of the 'eat as much meat as you want' Atkins Diet had a heart attack. When asked if he had any comments on his protein-rich diet in light of his recent cardiac arrest, Atkins replied, "It's irony."

(Credit where credit is due: Kevin emailed me this link and the joke.)

A few days after we came up with that first ironic joke for my ironic punchline, Dave came up with another one:

What did the doctor tell Tonya Harding after she broke her leg doing a jump and had to have her knee replaced with an artificial joint?

It's iron-knee!

The only real problem with this joke is that it's a little dated these days, but I'm sure future circumstances will arise for which the basic premise will be able to be recycled.

So during the Whistler trip, I finally found a joke for my "It's Irony" punchline. On one of the train rides, I explained the punchline and my sad lack of a joke for such a good punchline to my company, and after some thought, Tyler finally came up with an appropriately ironic joke:

What did the coroner say after determining that Andrew Carngegie had been stabbed to death with a railroad spike?

"It's Irony."

This all started because I was getting violently sick of my old background color (#ffffcc, for those of you playing along at home), and I figured I could change it to white (#ffffff =p) without disrupting things too much.

But when I made the background white, everything started to blur together, because the backgrounds on my posts were white to contrast against the formerly creamy color of the page... So I decided I needed a vertical stripe to separate the posts from the sidebar.

Now, I've always been a big fan of vertical stripes, but with html it's easier said than done. So I grabbed the first site I could think of with a vertical stripe (which happened to have been AJ's) and pulled the code and images straight from there, which explains the dotted line as opposed to a solid line.

But then I felt off balance, and I've been toying with the idea of adding another column for a long time anyway (because that damn date navigation is *really* long), so I added it, and now the whole thing is nice and symmetrical, and for the moment, I like it.

I actually really like the dotted lines, and assuming AJ doesn't object, I'm going to leave them there for now. However, I'm also thinking about changing the green soon, because I don't even know how old that color is or why I have that green.

Later: So I decided that with the symmetry the lines provided, I wanted the green bars to come closer to being evenly spaced on each side, which meant I had to alter the comment links some. And that got into issues of having the colored dot load on a background the future color of which I'm not certain...

So I just made the comment widget text yellow and extended the green background, but changed the permalink/recency indicator to be a colored arrow at the beginning of the text. I like the way it looks, but I'm not entirely happy with the implementation at the moment. First of all, I was having some CSS issues so I had to give up and wrap the arrows in colored font tags. And the second problem is that posts that don't start with a <P> tag at the beginning (Of which there are 58, according to a quick check via SQL) won't get arrows put in correctly. But aside from those implementational issues, and the still standing puke green issue, I like it.

Oh, I also made the title bar truncate seconds from the post date, since they're useless. Hopefully the dates will be a little easier to read now that there are two fewer numbers there in that bar.

Part of my iPod purchase involved subsidizing the purchase by selling my Rio 500. I didn't feel bad about selling it to someone, because despite being a year and a half old it was still in really good condition, and still worked like a champ.

So I sent out the offer to misc, and Dima offered to buy it for his girlfriend a few minutes later. I met with Dima tuesday to make the sale, and I walked and talked with him for awhile.

He and I had bought our Rio's at the same time, so we talked about how they had been holding up. He said his still worked great, but compared to his mine looked like it was brand new. I can only hope that my iPod can go through as much abuse as his Rio and still work.

We also discussed head phones. I had bought a pair of Sony ear plugs on his recommendation when I had got my Rio, and I've been very happy with them for the last year and a half. But he asked me if I'd had any trouble with them breaking, because he's apparently gone through 5 pairs to the single pair that I've gone through in that time.

Of course, as soon as I mention something, if it's bad it happens and if it's good it goes away.

This morning when I picked up my iPod with the faithful headphones, I noticed that the side decoration had broken off of one of the plugs. The headphones were still fully functional, but I'm such a freak for aesthetics that I would have bought a new pair of headphones if the side piece had been lost. But the piece was sitting there next to the iPod, so I super glued it back on and that was that.

I was briefly amused by the thought of accidentally gluing a headphone into my ear, but then I remembered that as soon as I mention something, if it's bad it happens and if it's good it goes away. So I banished the thought from my head, and that was that.

Last summer, a project I took on myself was to overhaul the interface of one of our more confusing systems. The interface was a pet peeve of mine, and I was scratching an itch, as it were. And so I spent a little time, and I made it a lot more useful and consistent, and I was very happy with myself.

And so I called my boss over to show him what I'd done. So I opened the old page to start with, to which my boss replied "Good job! Keep up the good work!"

"But... This is the old page. Let me er, show you what I changed." I said meekly.

I suppose it should be noted that thanks to his having been an RCC the year before me, my boss had never actually used the system in question, and hence did not know what it looked like.

But after that, "Good Job! Keep up the good work!" was a running joke, which he'd use as a useless reply. And now that I have my boss's job (since my boss graduated in May), "Good job! Keep up the good work!" has become a part of my vocabulary.

I use it when I'm complimenting someone on being useless, or having done nothing at all.

By the way, this is the first post in a series of posts in which I'm going to talk about why I say the strange things I say. (Aka, "Benjyisms")

Good job! Keep up the good work!

"Some of these sprites are older than the people who are playing the game."
--My roommate Michael, on Capcom vs. SNK 2

So I was reading Keith's Blog tonight, and I idly thought to myself "Man, Keith should register kcblog.com to go along with kccomics.com so that I can get to his blog with an easy URL." And then I started laughing madly when I realized what a bad idea that name would be.

(Since I'm pretty sure that Keith won't catch that reference, or understand why it's not kosher, here's a hint.)

Heh. Heheh.