I haven't used Firefox a lot, lately, but it's still a browser I keep updated because I read that it's starting to turn things back around. The new OpenH264 in Firefox 33.0 should be an interesting take on the video streaming, and it's fast enough, so maybe I'll look at it a little more.
I really did like the workspaces concept, but I just didn't get the feel that it was as smoothly integrated as it could be. Maybe it's getting better?
Well... I guess I can hit the major updates, and this morning dropped the move to 40.x.x.x for Google Chrome. It's pretty amazing to me that for as long as I've been using Chrome, it's gone from not good enough to be second-tier, to very good, to primary for work. It's amazing what a boatload of money will do when it comes to getting things done. Case in point... why did they add the name button to the tab-bar?
They used to have a little face up in the same level, or when you had only the one profile, they didn't show anything. Why not that now? I have only one profile on all my machines, but they insist on showing me this box with "me" in it.
Someone didn't put a lot of thought into this. Keep working, guys...
I've got a lot of streaming data in Storm, and I'm doing quite a bit of analytical processing on that data, but I can't store much of it because the cost of storage is so high - latency. So I end up using a lot of redis boxes and having boxes read out of that into more conventional storage - like Postgres. But I'm starting to hear good things about Cassandra and Storm working well together.
My concern is real speed. I have an average message rate of 40k to 50k msgs/sec, with peaks as high as four times that. I need to be able to handle those peaks - which are by no means the once a month peak levels of several times that, but it's something I see on a regular basis, and we need to be able to take all this data from the topology and not slow it down.
If I can really do this on, say, eight machines, then I'll be able to have the kind of deep dive we've needed for looking into the analytics we're calculating. This would be a very big win.
I've reached out to a few groups that are doing something very similar to this, and their preliminary results say we can do it. That's really good news. We'll have to see what happens with the real hardware and software.
I have done a lot of work with redis, and of late, the most work I've been doing with it was to shard (aka cluster) many redis instances on a single box - and on multiple boxes. This isn't bad, but let's face it, it'd be great if redis could do this all on it's own - like it currently does replication.
Then I read:
Basically it is a roughly 4 years old project. This is about two thirds the whole history of the Redis project. Yet, it is only today, that I’m releasing a Release Candidate, the first one, of Redis 3.0.0, which is the first version with Cluster support.
Very nice! I'll be very interested in seeing how it works, and how it will scale with network load and if it's able to be configured for on-box vs. off-box connectivity. That could make a huge difference in the communication bandwidth.
Nice to see that it's almost here.
I spent some time this morning going over my Git commit logs trying to find out what I've been doing in the last two weeks - and then converting those into decent posts - at least as decent as I could make them in hind-sight. The reason for all this is the re-org, and the resulting group that's I've been thrust into. It's not a pretty sight - and I've seen this far too many times in my professional life to think it's going to end well.
I had a conversation with the larger group about why I see so many git force push messages in HipChat. I'm sure there's a reason, and it's part of some work-flow - I just haven't used that, and it seems pretty harsh to be used so often. Fact is, their reason was that it just made the commits "prettier". That they wanted to edit their commits like they edit their code.
I was silent because that was almost certainly one of the most insane things I've heard in a long time. Yes, by all means, let's risk the corruption of the git repo on the server because you didn't take time to think about what you were doing before you decided to commit it. Yeah, that's a good plan.
Better yet - let's make it part of the standard work-flow that you teach new developers. Yeah, that's a great idea. I just can't wait to start messing things up because I refuse to put forth the effort to think about what I'm doing prior to doing it.
In another meeting, one of the other developers felt that a Core Value of the new group should be that... and I quote: We all should have fun. Yeah... I don't even have to respond to this because unlink this developer, I understand the point of a public company, and that they really aren't in existence to make their employees happy - or make sure they have fun - they are in the business of making money.
I tried to say that fun is a great thing to have, but holding it up as the reason we're doing - and not doing - things is kinda crazy. That we don't have to have fun to get work done. It would be nice - but it's not necessary. Flew right over his head.
And the odd thing is that this is not a bad guy - well... I've heard he's a good guy, so I want to believe that my assessment of him to date is way off, but when he goes on about how I couldn't be more wrong... well... it's hard to give him the benefit of the doubt - or write it off to a miscommunication or something.
Nope, I'm in a group that doesn't seem to share a single value I have. They think it's acceptable risk to have git force push in their workflows, and they think that they have to have fun or they don't have to work. Wacky.
It's been hard to get things done, and if I took their lead, I wouldn't have done a thing - but thankfully, I didn't, and did a good chunk of work each day. In the end, I need off this group. I like the work, I just can't stand the management and co-workers any longer.
Today I spent a good bit of my day working on speeding up a few postgres stored procedures (functions) to get the speed up to the point that it's possible to do what we need to do in the time we have allotted. The original implementation was to create a temp table, populate it with the complete history of the time-series, and then filter it out based on the clever use of row_number() and picking just one value in a repeating sequence.
This was fine as long as the time-series didn't get too big. Then the temp tables were crushing us, and the time was insanely long. What really helps is to not make the temp table - but just get everything ready for a single SELECT where sub-queries do the caching for you.
Like I said, it was most of the day, but the difference was more like 50x to 100x difference - well worth the time.
This morning I was getting ready for a roll-out of some new code, and I didn't want to have to re-populate the production cache with a lot of data that I already had in my UAT cache - which has been running for more than a week, and populating data as it goes. The script isn't all that hard - is just runs through all the servers that need to be cloned, stops them, copies over the data file and then restarts the redis server.
#!/bin/bash for b in {1..8}; do echo "working on redis_${b}..." echo " stopping redis${b} server..." pid=`top -Unobody -c -b | grep redis_${b}.conf | awk '{ print $1 }'` sudo kill -9 $pid echo " copying data from caliban over..." scp opt-analytics-redis4-uat.snc1:/var/groupon/redis_${b}/dump.rdb . sudo cp dump.rdb /var/groupon/redis_${b}/ sudo chown nobody:nobody /var/groupon/redis_${b}/dump.rdb rm dump.rdb echo " restarting redis_${b} server..." sudo /usr/local/etc/init.d/redis_${b} start done
Yeah, it's nothing special, but I'm trying to be a little more diligent on the posts, and this was kinda fun to write, and it works perfectly.
I've been looking at Atom as a potential replacement to Sublime Text 3 - my current editor, and it's getting closer, but it's not there yet. They have come up with several new themes - and at least one of them is very nice. They have put in the vertical space option, which was missing for me. They have even put in enough hidden defaults to make it possible to hide the tabs and the left-side bar.
So it's close. Really close.
But it doesn't remember it's state on exit. That's huge for Sublime Text 3, and something I just feel is important enough not to leave behind. I'm expecting the "find anything" that Sublime Text has, and BBEdit doesn't is coming - if it's not there now, but that really doesn't matter to me at this point. Lack of restart state is a killer.
But it's nice to see the GitHub crew aren't stopping with their initial release. And I've read that they are looking to add this back in - which will be nice. But they'll also have to do a lot about the memory footprint - Sublime Text 3 is a lot smaller footprint.
Today I had my first real run-in with a Process Over Progress at The Shop, and I have to say, this is really the reason that I enjoy leaving jobs. Nothing is a clearer sign of the decay of an organization than to have process seen as an end unto itself, and that things like the form of a document are more important than the content. Where the reviewers of a document can't be bothered to read the document they are reviewing, but still feel perfectly justified sitting in judgement of the author of the document.
I know this is a people-problem, which is exactly why I'm not in management at an organization that I don't own. It's when the people problem rots the management structure to the point that otherwise good managers can't be bothered policing the process monitors, and the lunatics start running the asylum.
There is no solution that I've found - short of leaving the organization, so I guess that's the next step. There is, of course, blatant disrespect of authority, and while that works short-term, it's not something that really is sustainable in the long-run. The trouble-maker can point out the problem, but then has to get back in line or he's a real danger to the authority of those in power.
I'll look back on this post in the future and point to this being a significant turning point in my career at The Shop.
I like Google Chrome. I use it everyday for all kinds of uses. But every now and then, they make a really silly change, and I find that it's just amazingly annoying, but there's little I can really do about it. A few versions ago, they added a drop-down in the tab bar for the logged-in username. This used to be a little image in the location bar, but they moved that out, and into the tab bar.
I know it's me - and it seems to me that the simple change would be to look and see how many profiles are defined for this guy, and if it's less than two, then don't show a thing - like it used to be.
I must be in such a minority that it's never thought necessary to fix. But it's ugly.