simultaneously proud and chagrined
Posted by Mark Thu, 26 Jun 2008 01:13:00 GMT
I just defined an emacs macro for the first time.
- it's really, really easy
- it's really, really useful
- i'm sort of embarrassed i hadn't done it before.
things i learned today
Posted by Mark Thu, 19 Jun 2008 06:06:00 GMT
for LWP::UserAgent, giving field-value pairs to 'post' sends them in the request. Giving them to 'get' sets them in the header, which is less than useful. *sigh*
anyway, hi. I've moved again since i last posted - back to Gordon this time. Am now working for Optus on a web hacking contract, which is keeping me off the streets and adequately stressed. Oh, and google dev day yesterday. Mad fun, even if Android's not quite as open (or GWT quite as un-java-y) as i'd like…
nerdboy
Posted by Mark Mon, 31 Dec 2007 12:21:00 GMT
ok, so that was embarrassing. 11:24 on NYE, and I'm still at home because I got interested in something off projecteuler.net. wonder if anyone's still around…
finally...
Posted by Mark Fri, 14 Dec 2007 05:53:00 GMT
feels like half the posts here are lazarus with a triple bypass… anyway, it’s up and running on the pretty new VPS. feels good to have root on a constantly available machine.
anyway, lately i’ve been working on some event planning stuff, as well as some routing algorithms. more once i’m sure this thing actually works - you might even get some capital letters.
i got ex-wives i like better than you
Posted by Mark Fri, 05 Oct 2007 13:39:47 GMT
oh, how very embarrassing. one “chmod o+x dispatch.cgi” later and I’m back. Hello.
as far as news goes, I’ve moved again, and am now living with an old uni mate in Redfern.
.
This is my room. It is a cube approximately three metres on a cube, and has a bucket in the corner to catch the leaks when it rains - the large structure above the berk grinning like an idiot is my loft bed, which is about three quarters of a metre from the roof, and behind is the impromptu bookshelf I just made from wardrobe planks and milk crates. I got undergrad ghetto chic down.
Anyway, I’m still working on Pink Pages stuff, as well as a few odd ideas. The Facebook app idea got scooped by some talented young bastard - check out Connection Cloud if you have a mind to.
fun file facts!
Posted by Mark Mon, 09 Jul 2007 06:09:36 GMT
so, I’m doing this odd little visualisation project. Part of it is to do with Facebook, which means that if it gets popular at all, my poor little server is going to get pounded harder than a goat at a furry convention. Therefore, I have some interesting constraints on resource usage.
I’m using the graph drawing library GraphViz, which is in C. I’m writing my app in Haskell using HAppS, and the Haskell interface to C is all fine and dandy: the difficulty comes because GraphViz wants to output its graph to a file, rather than making it available as a string in memory. This makes things difficult: I really don’t want even the possibility of hitting the disk.
To make this more concrete, I wrote a little C testing script to see how fast this is on my laptop. I took three approaches:
100 times, either:
- Copy the strings back and forth in memory - this should simulate what would be happening if GraphViz generated the graph in memory rather than insisted on copying it to a file.
- Create a ramdisk, and write the strings out to it
- Write the strings to disk, then read them in again: the hope here is that the built-in IO caching will save me
The results for each approach respectively:
10:47 ~/projects/current % time ./a.out -m ./a.out -m 1.68s user 0.09s system 71% cpu 2.480 total 10:47 ~/projects/current % time ./a.out -r ./a.out -r 0.43s user 2.56s system 48% cpu 6.233 total 10:47 ~/projects/current % time ./a.out -f ./a.out -f 0.49s user 4.09s system 28% cpu 16.107 total
So it looks like the inbuilt caching method is not so great. The ramdisk is faster, but still not as good as using the strings in memory - presumably system call overhead is hurting me. A third option I haven’t yet investigated would be for the Haskell process to open a named pipe and have C write to it, but I think that would require at least two processes: at the moment, I just have the one HAppS process and would like to keep it that way if possible. (My current host has a limit of 20 processes, which is a bit anemic.) In any case, it’d be at least as bad as the ramdisk approach, although possibly a bit more doable on a shared host.
In other news, I saw the Maladies play last night at the Hoey. They did an absolutely blistering set: I’ve never seen them quite that sharp. Roll on the album…
This thing is still here?
Posted by Mark Sun, 27 May 2007 20:00:00 GMT
So, hi. I haven’t blogged in forever and a day and am slightly embarrassed about it, but as Pete puts it, my shrug is entirely up to the task. shrug
Since I last wrote, I’ve been to Thailand with Hallie, drunk beer with ladyboys, floated down a river on an inner tube in Laos, beer clasped firmly in hand, and endured the Vietnamese overnight bus line. (Special props to the Vietnamese motos for their ascending trio of “Moto? Girl? Weed?”)
I have some photos somewhere, and will probably be putting them up. Somewhere. I’ve been agonising about writing a post about the whole experience, but it’s either too big or too small: it had a massive effect on me, but what on earth can I write that isn’t indistinguishable from a million other banal travelogs? Feh.
With Sisyphus’ stone neatly abandoned at the bottom of the hill, we can move on to other matters. I’ve just got a beautiful room in a house in Erskineville. No longer must I crouch in stygian darkness under the bed in order to type: my desk has a full metre and a half of headroom, and even some natural light. My flatmates seem extraordinarily pleasant - the other Mark living here even helped me put up my ridiculous loft bed.
As far as work goes, I’m working on my standard webapp contract stuff and looking to do some hacking on the new Facebook API. Let me know if you have a brilliant idea that you feel like sharing…
expat bar in Chiang Mai
Posted by Mark Sun, 21 Jan 2007 13:05:44 GMT
This post comes to you from the Mad Dog bar in Chiang Mai. There are many things to recommend against the Mad Dog: the beer is not outstandingly cheap, the atmosphere’s a little dingy, and instead of the excellent, ubiquitous and dirt-cheap Thai food, and they have expensive Western food cooked by people who have only vaguely heard about it.
The saving grace is this: power points for laptops, and fast wireless. I’m a helpless prisoner to my passion for TCP/IP.
In the past few days, I’ve been to Bangkok, Ayutthaya, and now Chiang Mai. Bangkok is as crazy as I remembered, but this time I stayed in Khao San, rather than Sukhumvit: people may bitch about the backpacker microcosm of Khao San, but this ignores the fact that it’d still be fun even without a skerrick of Thai culture. Ayutthaya was a bit of a change of pace - ruins and thai food seemed the order of the day. After Angkor Wat last trip, it takes an awful lot to get a reaction from me, but there were a few nice constructions - one oddly tesselated pyramid in particular. No pictures yet, unfortunately - my phone has finally given up the ghost.
Chiang Mai is a bit of a relief. It’s winter here, but 29 degrees and humid is still not the most pleasant climate in the world. Here in the mountains, it’s a lot more temperate. Soon I’ll be going trekking and attending Muay Thai matches (maybe even training for a bit) and all the other expected things, but for the moment, a beer and a laptop suit me just fine.
business class!
Posted by Mark Sun, 14 Jan 2007 02:56:00 GMT
the girl at checkin bumped me to business class because she thought i was cute! This is clear proof to me that the universe approves of my complete lack of planning.
rock over london, rock on, chicago
wesley willis: he was reclining his seat as far as he likes. With a belt.
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