Pargas

Kära grannar,

Vänligen, ge fan i att köra runt med era bilar på Pargas- och Torneågatan i onöden. Gatorna är nämligen gågator, sådana man går på alltså. Invalider och krymplingar med specialla behov undantages givetvis ifrån denna uppmaning. Observera även vårt fina parkeringshus där man helt i sin ordning kan parkera sin bil och inte rakt framför porten.

God Jul och Gott Nytt År

Arktis

Vaknade klockan fyra och mådde dåligt. Drömde att hela Arktis hade smält bort. Konstigt. Inget snus har helt klart sina bieffekter.

Idioter

Alltid när jag är sist och lämnar lunchrummet, vilket händer ganska ofta, torkar jag av bordet utan att gnälla. Det tar liksom inte längre tid för mig att göra rent hela bordet än att bara ta min plats. Men idag, har jag spillt lite, och självklart är det någon gnällig jävel som måste påpeka det. Suck.

Och jag har SLUTAT

Åtta dagar utan snus!!! Fan vad jag är grym! :) Jag har gjort mig förtjänt av min nya gitarr som jag snart ska posta lite bilder på.

Kasta in handduken

Känner mig så nära att kasta in handduken. Jag vill verkligen inte. Gör jag det får jag ingen ny gitarr och det vore verkligen illa. Det vore så jävla gott med snus nu. Måste hitta något substitut snart. Godis eller läsk eller nåt. Samtidigt är magen skit pga för mycket sötsaker. Aja.. Bättre det i längden.

Fortfarande utan snus

Har inte haft en prilla på 58 timmar nu. Det är rekord såklart. Jag försöker att koncentrera mig på jobbet, men det är svårt. I vanliga fall hade jag suttit med en skön snus under läppen och softat. Inte nu, det känns att det fattas. Dock känns det som att ifall jag klarar idag, klarar jag resten också. Sen när veckan är klar och jag slutat på riktigt ska jag köpa något fint till mig själv. När jag bevisat att jag kan ändra på saker och ting och bryta dåliga vanor. Det är ju inte enkelt.

Sluta snusa

Har nu varit snusfri i mer än 24 timmar. Jag har hållit tankeverksamheten i styr genom att spela Civilization 4. Det är ett sådant djupt strategispel som man kan spela hur länge som helst och som kräver ens fulla koncentration. Dessutom har jag köpt en massa godis och läsk som ska ersätta snussuget de närmaste dagarna. Får se om det hjälper, just nu kan jag inte tänka på något annat än snus.

Blog Action Day Spam

Two years ago, I participated in the Blog Action Day and wrote a small post about public transporation. Since then, I've decided against it for the following reasons:
  • Blog Action Day Recap: 31,000 Posts!, 16 okt
  • Blog Action Day is AMAZING so far!, 15 okt
  • Blog Action Day TOMORROW!, 15 okt
  • Al Gore and Blog Action Day, 14 okt
  • Ideas for Blog Action Day This Thursday, 13 okt
  • Blog Action Day is Next Week!, 7 okt
  • 2400 Bloggers Want Your Help, 30 sep
  • Announcing Blog Action Day 2009…, 23 sep
  • Big News: Change.org to lead Blog Action Day 2009, 26 aug
That is the amount of mass-mail I have received about it this year, and it has crossed my tolerable threshold and has became annoying. I know Blog Action Day is for a good cause, but sending this much mail in a short period gives me a very bad impression.

How do you aquire a parked domain name?

Dear Internet, how do you acquire a parked domain name?

I'm about to launch my start-up company which will sell software services. I'm deciding on an appropriate domain name to use, but all relevant names have already been taken by domain parked sites filled with ads. It is quite frustrating to see good names being wasted on worthless ad spamming pages. I don't mind paying for a com domain, but the prices these domain parkers ask are steep; 500 to several thousand dollars for uncommon names. Especially since they themselves pay at most 8-15$/year to keep the domain parked. So how should I go about aquiring a domain name? Should I use a broker such as Sedo or try and contact the domain owner directly? How do I ensure that I wont get ripped off?

Comparing EC2

Recently I've been playing around with Amazon EC2. A small project of mine, datalookups.com is currently hosted on it.

Performance wise, it is very good. Low latency when accessing it from Sweden and fairly decent bandwidth. Cost-wise, I'm not so sure. Without an instance reservation, the monthly cost is about $79 excluding bandwidth costs. But that's when paying on-demand so it wouldn't be a fair comparision to dedicated or VPS hosting where you have to subscribe to the service.

If you sign up for a European reserved small instance for a three year period, you get a monthly cost of $19.5: (350 + 0.04 * 24 * 365) / (3 * 12). That's not to bad when you take into account that one ec2 instance is more like a dedicated server than a VPS. But signing up for a three year lease is a very long time. The monthly cost for the one year plan is $48 which is much less cost competetive.

Here are some informative comparisons I've found. GoDaddy vs ec2, ec2 vs other stuff and ec2 vs VPS.

From everything I've read, it seems that Amazon EC2 underperforms when compared to other hosting options. On the other hand, the job market seem to favor ec2 experience so it might be worth going with it just for that reason alone.

Vart har getingarna tagit vägen?

I år har jag inte sett en endaste geting och bara ett fåtal bin. Nu är det bitande kallt om mornarna och om några dagar kommer frosten. Då dör de och kommer inte tillbaka förrän nästa sommar. Egentligen är jag skraj för bin och getingar, men det är ännu mer oroande ifall de skulle försvinna. Bananflugor däremot finns det gott om. De lägger ägg i bananskalen och låter man soporna stå en dag för länge får man en hel svärm hemma. Då måste man lägga ner mycket möda för att bli av med dem igen. Getingar äter bananflugor tror jag, men inte i år.

I can't belive..

I don't have more interesting stuff to blog about! First business meeting tomorrow with a potential supplier. Almost seen all DS9 episodes up to season 4. I can play Sultans of Swing much better than two months ago. My eyesight is likely worse and I do need lenses when riding my bike.

My Secret Project

Work is chugging along nicely on my secret project. Web app is built using Google App Engine. The domains are hosted using GoDaddy. What remains is to setup my company site with awesome design and many images. The product will be a B2B SaaS app with a hefty monthly subscription fee.

Me me me!

Today I actually did rock at the club. I were awesome. My friend were awesome. I am to damn drunk to write anything else. But I won, I feel validated, I can do stuff. Excusme while i punjke.

Guadec is great!

Been fucking awesome so far. I've met lots of great people all very friendly. The partyin has been long and tough with no nights ending before 3am. I have no clue why I'm not sleepy at all. Must be the strange Canary coffee... It's not hot, not cold and tastes kind of sweet, very different from what I'm used to.

The beach is great and the weather almost perfect. It's hot as hell but a cold breeze is blowing so it never becomes unbearable. I already sunburned which is as expected. The best thing about the beach is the topless girls. And I am a dirty bastard so I've been staring until my neck gets sore. Haven't taken a dump either. Probably I should be doing it right about now but I'd rather first walk back to the hotel. I don't like shitting in public toilets.

Fucking Fair Scheduling

I'm running a compile in a terminal which takes most of the CPU. In another terminal I'm viewing a log with less. And less is fucking lagging!! How fucking broken is that?

Deep Space 9

Turns out Deep Space 9 is quite good after all. There are a little to many similarities with TNG, but that's also good in a way since the TNG seasons was fantastic. Ben Sisko is the station commander and is in many ways comparable to Picard. Except he doesn't have the same interesting personality and charisma that Picard had. He is kind of a light version of Picard.

I almost wrote black version of Picard. It wouldn't have been accurate because he fits the role well and his skin color neither adds nor subtracts from it.

I like Julian Bashere as the stations doctor. He manages to convey his role very well and isn't as bland as Bevery Crusher was. My guess is that he will play even better in the next seasons of the series (I've only watch the first one so far).

Even the child actors are bearable. Nogg and Jake. They bring some mischevious funnyness into the series. Definitely not my type but since they are good actors it manages to become decent. That's in stark contrast with TNG in which all child actors without exception were horrible. Especially Wesley Crusher, yuck. I believe one of their reasons for existance is also to give Odo some "lighter" scenes.

Odo is a shapeshifter, grumpy and seem to dislike everyone and is the chief of security on DS9. I don't know who the actor is but I know it's someone famours. I just can't remember where I've seen him before. His character is in many ways like Worf, but I'd say his acting is a tad bit stronger than Worf. Or maybe like Data in that he is a non-human and have special powers.

I miss Data. There is no Data on Deep Space 9. And also no Geordie LaForge, which is a shame. Those were the best actors in TNG.

Then we come to Commander Kiera, Sisko's right hand. She is not bad and not good. Kind of bland so far and cries to much. Apparently one of the main storylines will be the Bajoran independence (DS9 is a Federation outpost in the Bajoran system). Since she was a member of the resistance movement during the Cardassian occupation. Undoubtedly there will be more sad, emotional and heart breaking scenes to come for her. Which is BOOORING.

Not to forget, Chief O'Brian were transferred from Enterprise to DS9 and now serves as chief of technology on the station. He is exactly like he was on Enterprise but now he gets more scenes. Good move by the produces, I like him.

And then to forget, Liuetenant Dax. Totally boring, emotionless and perfect in every way. She has a nice ass, firm tits and tight costume. I hope the producers were smart enough to include some shower scenes with her.

Quark is the ferengi bartender. Not in the least similar to Guinan. He has already got lots of scenes and been able to build up a lot of character. In the DS9 universe, ferengi apparently aren't as disguisting as in TNG. Nogg is even wearing some kind of "cute ferengi" costume. Like fewer wrinkles and better teeth. I can live with that.

Who ever is playing Q is playing well. But it just makes no fucking sense that he would stop harassing Picard and begin harassing Sisko. It's just silly and unrealistic. I always had a hard time for the Q episodes even the good ones (e.g. the trial against humanity), the DS9 ones will be worse.

All in all, I've enjoyed the episodes so far. I'll give it four out of five comm badges.

I'm an ASSHOLE

Alltid. Dagen efter jag varit full oroar jag mig för ifall jag varit ett arsle eller inte. Gjorde jag bort mig, var jag ett svin mot folk eller bara allmänt social och trevlig? Det är svårt att veta för jag kan ju inte fråga de inblandade vad de tyckte om Björns beteénde på en skala ett till tio liksom... Den här gången tänker jag inte grunna på det iallafall.

GUADEC 2009

Realized I'm in the exact same situation regarding GUADEC as I was two years ago. :( Excep this time no girlfriend. I really want to go, but damn is it expensive.

Branches..

are stupid. Very stupid. Especially subversion ones. :(

The Defragmentation Lie

It has been said for years that files on Linux does not become fragmented so it doesn't need defragmentation. It is not true!. Large files can certainly be fragmented on Linux, especially if they are written to often. Bittorrented files for example. Here is the proof:

$ sudo filefrag big-500mb-file filefrag big-500mb-file: 4316 extents found, perfection would be 3 extents $ sudo sh -c "echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches" # Clears fs caches and forces Linux to read from disk. $ time cat big-500mb-file > /dev/null real 0m24.842s user 0m0.032s sys 0m0.592s

Thats the time it takes to read the whole file sequentially takes when it is heavily fragmented. Compared to how long it would take if the file was not fragmented:

$ cp big-500mb-file 500mb-copy $ sudo filefrag 500mb-copy 500mb-copy: 6 extents found, perfection would be 3 extents $ sudo sh -c "echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches" $ time cat 500mb-copy > /dev/null $ time cat 500mb-copy > /dev/null real 0m6.501s user 0m0.024s sys 0m0.508s

Note that the file is still fragmented, possibly because other IO operations are going on in the background. Three things can be learned from this exercise.

  • Fragmentation does matter!. It took four times as long to read the fragmented file as it did the unfragmented one. The overhead could be even worse for smaller files because the seek time dominates. E.g. a 2mb file in 10 fragments could in worst case be 10 times as slow to read as if it was in one fragment.
  • Bittorrent leaves files in a heavily fragmented state. Likely because thousands of writes are performed to the same file and it is hard to get them all in order. But I don't understand why it could preallocate the files in advance and then write to them?
  • cp can defragment files.

Bazaar loses to git

And now I have tried bzr too. Maybe it is to early to declare a winner in the epic battle between it and git since I only have about 20 minutes of bzr experience under my belt.

Never the less, git is the winner and bzr is the total loser. I have used both tools to mirror the waf Subversion repository. Here are my conclusions:

  • Both tools take a long time to clone a Subversion repository. Like an hour for bzr and two hours for git for a repository with about 4000 commits.
  • bzr version 1.3.1 released in April 2008 has some severe performance problems. Simple commands like bzr diff, blame and log takes almost ten seconds to execute. Those commands are instanteous in git.
  • git log and diff are colized by default. Their bzr equivalents are not.
  • git uses some kind of smarts so that it automatically pages output through less when needed. bzr does not.
  • The Bazaar User Guide at least looks much more helpful than the Git User's Manual.

The last point is Bazaar's only redeeming quality. But it is a big one and I will spend some more time with it before deciding if Bazaar is rubbish or not.

The reason why I'm even considering bzr is because I'm getting sick of gits branch model. It just doesn't fit my brain. There is no such thing as a branch in git, branches are just pointers to commits. That leads to annoying problems when you want to rebase a branch tree.

Say that you are working on feature branch foo. In that branch you branch of to an experimental branch bar-foo. Then you want to update foo because some new commits has arrived at master while keeping your private branch structure intact. The only way to do that, I've found, is to rebase both branches. First you rebase foo to master, which probably involves solving some conflicts. Now your branch structure is messed up, the bar-foo branch will contain all the commits from the foo branch. That is, the foo branchs commits are duplicated!

It is totally stupid and absolutely not what i wanted. The solution is to rebase bar-foo on top of foo. But now you will have to resolve all the conflicts from the foo branch again!

Multiply with the number of branches you have combined with gits unwillingness to automatically resolve conflicts and you get lots of work needed just to keep some feature branches up to date with a Subversion master. I really hope bzr's workflow is better.

The Year in Review

It is the day after New Year's Eve and yet another year has passed. Most people are doing these reviews of the past year so guess I have too.

In my life there has been upsides and downsides. I have accomplished some goals and failed to reach others. Has it been a good year? I don't really know, maybe I should have been able to complete more goals or been able to avoid more of the bad moments.

On the relationship front, Im Western nicht Neues, sums it up nicely. I haven't gotten a new girlfriend and I haven't really looked for anyone either. I don't think I want to maintain a full-time relationship that I used to have. Though I am completely over my last one. A girl that I would only have to visit a few times a week or something would suit me better.

I have still met some girls over the year and have had some kisses. It is still hard for me to meet people, but at least I've learnt the basics. I'm especially proud of my performance with the chubby teacher. But I'll keep the details to myself. :)

The autumn vacation in France was totally awesome. I went alone to Lacanau for surfing and got to know some wonderfully cool people. It was a total blast. One of my new year's resolutions will be to keep in touch with them. I definitely want to visit Jeff, Jean-Sebastien, Olivia and the others some time this year. I have some great photos from it that I should publish somewhere.

I did some great stuff last year. Unfortunately, I did almost everything on my own. Sometimes that can be a little lonely. I bathed in Mälaren twice, saw Dark Knight in the movies and went to the gym dozens of time, but all by myself. I even went out to nightclubs alone.

Which brings me to the major downside of the year; I didn't make very many close friends. That's simply it. I should be good friends with the boys from Ericsson, I should be closer to the guys I go out with, I should have someone I can play guitar with. But it just hasn't happened and I can't explain why really. It is my biggest goal not reached this year. I hesitate to call it a failure, but that is probably what it is, I'll try harder this year!

I bought a condo in Akalla (actually in December 2007) which I moved into from Södertälje. It is three times larger than my old apartment and I'm quite happy with it. Close to the metro and 20 minutes to the city. Of course I know it was a bad deal and the housing market has tanked. Bo fucking ho, I'm much happier here than in Södertälje. Now I can vacuum clean without having to move the furniture around. :) And I have an oven!!

I like the girls in Husby, they are all dark brown and very hot. I met one in the summer but it didn't work out at all. :) And the mall by Kista station that is open to 21:00 every day is extraordinarily convenient. Hell, it is almost walking distance to IKEA too.

But the major thing in 2008 is that I'm learning to play the guitar. Now I have two hobbies, programming and music. Practicing guitar is like meditation for me, it takes my mind of all the problems and I can't stay sad while strumming my six string. I'm not very good yet but I have no doubt that I will be someday, because I'm practicing very hard. I even took a course.

Now to the shitty things. It doesn't work out with my family. Maybe we are to different or something. I believe that everyone can accomplish their dreams as long as they put their minds to it. They do not agree. So if you can't do something you set out to do, I'd say try harder, they'd feel sorry instead. And I can't stand people feeling sorry for themselves or others. The ambient undertone quite often becomes very inconvenient.

I have to run to the gym soon, because I want to get out before the sun sets. So the last thing I'll mention is that I've taken a new job! I also got a pretty sizeable raise which I'm more than happy with. I can't mention how much I earn for obvious reasons but my salary is now quite decent. :) My previous job wasn't bad at all, and working with Erlang in Ericsson is a total blast. But I couldn't refuse the offer I got from Caliber Media. The new language is Java which frankly is a huge step below Erlang. J2EE has a very time consuming deployment cycle which means that for each change you do, you have to redeploy the application which takes closer to five minutes. That is about four minutes longer than it took to compile an Erlang module, scp it to a live blade cluster and reboot the site. Nevertheless, there are girls on this job which is a big plus. :)

What else is new? Obama won in America! It restores some of my faith in the human race. It is hard to describe how important that was to me personally. It shows that stuff is still possible despite everything. Some things never change though, Israel's recent massacre in Gaza is despicable. Our government apparently has nothing to say about it. Fuck the foreign minister, fuck the rest of the corrupted scoundrels.

That's all for my year. Next year I will quit snuffing. I'll get abs on my stomach and go through another accutane regimen. Oh yeah, my acne/rosacea got worse this year. I'll also double my salary, get a whole harem of fuck buddies and move to a 120m2 flat in Vasastan. Then I'll be golden, but maybe I should move to Japan instead... Hm. Life is still full of possibilities and I enjoy it very much.

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