We’re working on migrating to a new hosting provider, and have run into some minor issues.
THIS DOESN’T COUNT AS DOWNTIME.
Monthly Archive for March, 2009
As some of the Sector members know, I’m having problems at work. I basically hate my life from 0800 to 1800. As I hate it more and more, I realize how much I miss my cave. I love the cave. I do not like being away from the cave. In it, I feel comfortable and at home. I am surrounded by the things I love.
Ever since I bought a house, I have not really had time to properly build my cave. I have not been able to organize it or to flesh it out. I hope that one day, I will get that time. Until then, I will spend a lot of my work day longing to return home.
I do several things when I wake up in the morning. Several of them involve my computer.
1. Press Snooze
2. Press Snooze
3. Stare at Ceiling
4. Check Email / Twitter / Facebook / Fark
6. Look Outside Window for Soviets / Zombies / Satin-Clad Nymphs
7. “Damn. Damn. Damn.”
The rest of my AM routine is a variable combination of showering, pop-tarts, and dwelling on my past.
I got to the “Internet” part this morning, and let out a grunt of frustration; Facebook changed their homepage again, for the 9,000th time in less than a year. ”The new home page” has been in the pipe for a while now. Typically, things become nicer when they’re updated, like the new iPod Shuffle or Xbox 360 OS. New features, new functionality.
Mark Zuckerberg and his posse of Facebook cronies, on the other hand, sit around their carbon-fiber conference table and have the following conversation:
MZ: “As you all know, the essence of Web2.0 lies in usability and the ‘architecture of participation.’ Our strategy has always been to make major updates to Facebook which are universally hated by our users, who create groups devoted to how shitty our site is. See, when our members attempt to actually get ‘50,000 AGAINST THE NEW FACEBOOK,’ we actually draw more traffic.
Cronie: “Of course, by the time they get that many people in the group, they’ve forgotten what they were upset about in the first place.”
MZ: “Exactly. By creating an endless, self-serving cycle of shit, we make ourselves the common enemy of the people. It’s the most effective participatory community in existence: one based entirely on people’s bitching. Last month’s ToS update was just too effective; I guess our users don’t want us to take ownership of their information, even though we practically own most of them.”
Cronie 2: “But we’ve already removed filters, browsing, sorting, network statistics, searching by major, and generally made the site crowd the browser window with huge amounts of crap, thereby completely eliminating anyone who has a netbook from viewing it…how can we make Facebook even more useless, but doubly addictive?”
MZ: “Let’s just make it look and behave exactly like Twitter.”
To his credit, Gardner Campbell actually got me thinking about this when he posted about the alarming similarity to Facebook this morning.
I’m going to post screenshots here; I want you to notice that they use the same font.
twitter sample
facebook sample
Facebook, again, goes the extra mile, and fills the page with more clutter than I, or any mortal, can comprehend, and I have a widescreen laptop.
i've seen better finger painting
You actually have the option of hiding the people who show up in the twit…facebo..whatever the fuck it is…feed, too, which pisses me off as well, especially because you can’t hide the “suggestions” given to you by the actual site. If you don’t want me to show up in your feed, why are you friends with me? If you don’t even care what I write about in my FB posts, you’re not going to care when I get pinned by a statue. And if I did get pinned by a statue, I’d tweet about it first.
“about 2 die. crushed by marble dong. edwin, take xbox.”
Am I going to deactivate my Facebook account? No, but that shit sucks, and my reasons for going to Facebook have now been reduced to looking at Brad’s profile images and rejecting friend requests from people I knew in high school.
If anyone sees their name up on my screenshots and wants it removed, I’ll blur it out, but I think sanctity of name is complete BS. Just don’t unfriend me.
As some of you know, I pretend to be an Oracle DBA as part of my day job. Oracle is the Microsoft of the database industry. It’s bloated, hard to use, and entrenched in businesses around the world. One of its biggest customers is the US Government.
The main component of the software that resides in memory is the System Global Area (SGA). It contains all kinds of caches and sort areas where Oracle does all the work on behalf of database users. If you’re running a critical production server with nothing else but Oracle on it, the System Global Area should be as large as possible while still leaving some RAM for the operating system.
One day at work, I was poking around the server, and I noticed something. The amount of memory installed on our production server is:
12 GB
Cool, I thought, that’s good bit of RAM. I figured I’d take a look at the size of the SGA. I found out it was this big:
528 MB
Now, I don’t really know how much money my federal government spend on a spiffy Solaris server with 12 GB of RAM and 6 processors, but I bet it was a lot. And here we are using about 1/12 of the available RAM, when we should be using about 2/3.
I took this to the head DBA, my government client. I told him that we were using 528 MB of the 12 GB of available RAM for the use of Oracle. The first thing he asked was, “Is that high?” I tried to keep from laughing in his face and calmly told him no, we should be using about 8 GB. The next thing he asked is, “Is that more?” This is the same guy that, when I told him we should probably thoroughly document our backup and recovery strategy, he responded that the reason we don’t write that stuff down is because we forget how to do them.
Oh yeah, remember those 6 processors? We have Oracle’s parallelism feature turned off.