Author: Andrew
If Gmail Were Built With Drupal
So I saw this post show up in Twitter If Gmail Were Built With Drupal, and this is what I get when I visit:
Is that the joke? Oh, wait there’s a Google Cache version, which points out other issues with Drupal. I think the “max_user_connections” error is probably sufficient to make point.
OSX 10.9 Mavericks
I’ve been contemplating a new Macbook Pro for a while, mostly because my Macbook Air with it’s 4GB of RAM and 128MB of SSD were just getting too cramped. The battery is getting tired as well, giving me “only” 2 1/2 – 3 hours of life before dipping into the 10% range (First world Apple problems, most Windows laptops don’t see 3 hours when they’re brand new). But mostly it was the 4GB of RAM. I would routinely run up 8GB of swap space which would then eat into my almost full SSD space.
Now one of the features of Mavericks is Compressed Memory, which intrigued me a bit. Well, after a day of usage, I’m only using 40mb of swap, when normally I’d be off into the 4GB range:
On top of that, before the installation started, I had ~9GB of free disk space (with a 8GB swap file active). The install was 5GB but I figured I would recover some back. After the install finished? 36GB free! I must have had some major cruft laying around from 10.8, but I won’t complain about 20+GB of free disk space.
I haven’t had a chance to test the battery life increases yet, as I’m mostly tethered to a desk, but with WordCamp Boston coming up this weekend I should get a pretty good idea what the improvements there are.
How to lose $172,222 a second for 45 minutes
Another lesson in automated deployments. This time related to high frequency trading. The biggest WTF is near the end:
Knight did not have supervisory procedures to guide its relevant personnel when significant issues developed.
In one of its attempts to address the problem, Knight uninstalled the new RLP code from the seven servers where it had been deployed correctly. (But not from the 1 server that was causing the problem)
…recommends new human processes to avoid a similar tragedy.
http://pythonsweetness.tumblr.com/post/64740079543/how-to-lose-172-222-a-second-for-45-minutes
Also related is the HN discussion with other cringe worthy anecdotes.
The week after this we had a trader in our office who had a meeting at Knight on the morning it happened.
The craziest thing is that it went on for so long. No one caught it until their own traders so it come across Bloomberg and CNBC. They actually thought it was a rival HFT and tried to play against it.