Microsoft’s answer to Ellen Feiss

A continuation of my Why WROX failed theory:

Last week…

Me: Lauren is a cheap ass. 😀

“I’m a P.C.” sounds like the person has bladder control issues. “I’m just not cool enough to be a Mac person” is so much better.

M—: Oh yeah, I saw that yesterday… It’s a good commercial though. 🙂

Me: Only because she’s a redhead.
Me: Admit it.

M—: Haha.

The beauty of this ad is that finally Microsoft hits the right buttons in these politically divisive and tough economic times.

Too bad there’s no mention of Microsoft products. Seems like HP should be airing this.

Ahh… good times

Bailout redux

A continuation of my article one year ago on the bailout:

But in the late Nineties, a few years before Cassano took over AIGFP, all that changed. The Democrats, tired of getting slaughtered in the fundraising arena by Republicans, decided to throw off their old reliance on unions and interest groups and become more “business-friendly.” Wall Street responded by flooding Washington with money, buying allies in both parties.
—Mark Taibbi for Rolling Stone

Paul Krugman and Obama never will see eye to eye on economics. Liberals are not the same, and Obama’s people comes from the Chicago school—the part that was the mess Clinton made, not other half of the Chicago school that made the mess than Bush and Reagan created. No matter which administration it was under, this school of thought has held the econo-political power for the last thirty years in this country.

Given that, I find that the fact that Krugman says “this budget looks very, very good” very positive. The other shoe finally dropped, and Paul Krugman continued articles against the bailout plan is now engendering attacks on the blogs from the right and left.

But I find some of the reactions truly atrocious. Here is one example:

Does Krugman, or any of these media monkeys jabbering their opinions on the administration’s plan to resolve the biggest crises facing our nation since the Great Depression, have access to the inner circles and behind doors meetings regarding what’s really happening in the financial industry?
passerby on Balloon Juice

Careful there. You’re starting to sound exactly like some administration official that assured us that if we didn’t invade Iraq, “the smoking gun would be a mushroom cloud.” and we didn’t have the information they had to argue that the all those brains in the Pentagon wasn’t preparing for the aftermath of that war.

Obama was supposed to (and I believe is honestly trying) to usher a new era of transparency. But the amount of transparency he’s given us here so far has told nearly every economist worth their salt that the bailout plan has a good chance of being a very costly ineffectiveness.

Why not address those valid criticism without resorting to “trust us”?

Continue reading about Arguing from the left after the jump.

Circles

E-mail from a high school classmate:

Pretty crazy that our class has gotten it together enough to navigate through facebook. But something tells me you’d run circles around us all!

I doubt I’d run circles around anyone.

I probably could if you young ‘uns in the tech world didn’t keep stealing my walker. Did you know when I was a kid, I had to dial a phone to use the internet? And I had to push my bits through the line static uphill both ways.

Bah!

The origin of my affinity with Asian culture, which is frankly superior

Reading a friend’s blog via vanity feed, I thought…

Whee! Me!

I don’t know how many times I’ve successfully argued a woman into dating me. Let me think about it…

I guess I’ll have to go with “None.”

I don’t know why I have bad luck. I’m very intelligent, I’m great in bed, I make great money. Believe it or not, I’m a complete catch. 🙁

Perhaps I need to be a little on the chubby side?

ladies of the internet

Clearly I need this t-shirt

Don’t worry, Ladies of the Internet (pref. Nihonese), I’ll wait while you look up passive-aggressive personality disorder. 😀

(Thanks to Andrei for alighting me to these gems over the past year, his kevorka notithstanding.)

setlocale

Small little annoyance we found in the process of internationalizing the site for European locales.

setlocale(LC_ALL, 'es_ES.UTF8'); // Spanish from spain
$a = 1.2;
echo 'hi'.$a;

This prints hi1,2. Take out the first line and it prints hi1.2 as you might expect.

Not a big deal right? Well imagine if that is the index into a cache key of an object? Now when someone from Spain views the page, it thinks those objects aren’t in cache. Big mess ensues.

I noticed that I suggested object versioning to be integers in the documentation, but some of us were using floats and I wasn’t type-checking. Whoops!

Our solution is to only set the locale when rendering output from a template and then setting it back. It’s ugly and I’m a definite fan of using integers only for version numbers in my next life.

Possesives

In a unrelated note, the people at work had a long discussion of how to render possessives when internationalizing. The key in the U.S. is to stop being clever and follow the first rule of the Elements of Style. This way it’s just,

printf(_('%s’s pictures'), htmlspecialchars($display_name));

Hopefully, the long argument I had trying to convince someone to do this will be returned in less neutered quotation marks on the site. I’m not holding my breath.

How much is your millisecond?

At Tagged, I’ve been working on the project for the last month. Basically it allows us to cache dynamic parts of throughout the site and keep the caches from having stale data. Since we call the APIs both externally and internally—over 20 calls to generate a user’s profile page alone—the caching is turned on at the API level.

The initial hit to the system was severe.

Basically, I was causing the profile page to take 30 extra milliseconds to render. The profile page accounts for 17% of all page views on the site where we do about 220 million “views” a day. This 30 milliseconds, believe it or not, was dropping profile page views by 5%. And it took about 20 hours of back and forth before I finally resolved to rewrite the whole thing so that it can be rolled out gradually without any performance hit.

That means I cost the company one and a half million ad impressions. 🙁

The second day’s cached piece is actually measurable on the live site with tools I wrote. I am saving between 17 and 900 milliseconds depending on the state of the backend and load on the server.

Since I can’t measure how much actual page views I’m adding back into the system, I was curious about how much extra server capacity these changes are getting me.

In other words, how much is a millisecond?

Continue reading about Measuring milliseconds after the jump.

Vers mini-review

In 2000 I asked someone to pick up an alarm clock from Target—something simple, stylish, and loud. Of the three, it was only the latter. Now you can’t unset the alarm! Argh! And I’ve since learned to wake up to much less noise. In my life I’ve averaged about an alarm clock every decade.

I purchased the Vers 1.5R clock radio from Feel More Human.

DSC_5186.JPG

I’m hoping my desk and bed won’t be next to each other forever

Continue reading about mini review after the jump