Advogato blog for bcully

27 Jun 2008

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 05:23:52 GMT

robertc: for persistent hashes, I have been pretty happy with qdbm. I can't say whether it fits all your requirements, but it has been faster and more stable than bdb for me. Its successor, which I haven't used, is called tokyo cabinet and there are python bindings floating around for it. It might be worth looking at if you haven't already.

13 May 2008

Tue, 13 May 2008 18:23:50 GMT

jch: In case you haven't already read them (though it seems unlikely), I believe the SEDA and Capriccio papers both contain similar evaluations of web server latency, SEDA from an event-oriented perspective and Capriccio showing what can be done to improve the performance of a thread-based model.

20 Apr 2008

Sun, 20 Apr 2008 05:56:08 GMT

rillian: 44 nano? nano?!

20 Sep 2007

Thu, 20 Sep 2007 02:55:01 GMT

rufius, as a Mercurial developer I would be interested in hearing what went wrong in your trial.

12 Sep 2007

Wed, 12 Sep 2007 15:56:45 GMT

ncm: I may be biased as a New Yorker and one of the more than one hundred thousand people who publically protested the war in New York City before it started, but I doubt you have any idea what "most Americans" think. Maybe you find it comforting to believe that the government wouldn't behave the way it does without the support of "most Americans"? I can see why, but it's unfortunately a bit naive. If you were American, what would you have done to prevent the invasion?

12 Sep 2007

Wed, 12 Sep 2007 06:35:52 GMT

ncm: are you being deliberately condescending?

28 Aug 2007

Tue, 28 Aug 2007 01:45:00 GMT

More mercurial hacking: I've written a remote diff extension, to allow you to diff against other repositories. This also supports diffs against local branches, which is why I wrote it.

25 Aug 2007

Sat, 25 Aug 2007 21:43:02 GMT

I've just rewritten "local branch" support for Mercurial. These are basically clones that share a working directory, making the cost of using branches much lower. One of the more common complaints I hear about Mercurial is from git users who miss git-style branches. Hopefully this extension fixes that.

14 Jan 2005

Fri, 14 Jan 2005 06:36:34 GMT

Weird. My account disappeared, but when I recreated it I got my old diary entries back. And I'm still a Journeyer, even though the actual certifications have vanished.

29 Jul 2004

Thu, 29 Jul 2004 17:11:09 GMT

Hmm, been a looooong time. I'm going to UBC for grad school. It was a tough choice between it and NYU, and if I'm being honest with myself, a lot of the decision came down to me wanting Canadian permanent residence. On that front, all my documents were mailed a couple of months ago, including the check (oops, cheque) and the medical exam. As far as I know, I'm just waiting for the final paperwork now. Of course I haven't heard anything from CIC since I sent everything out, and they are impossible to contact.

Anyway, I'm moving to Vancouver in a week! It's pretty exciting, even though the move is going to be really stressful (and I'm sure I'll miss New York quite a bit. Maybe I can get people to honk horns outside my window).

I quit my job and went to China for a couple of weeks to visit my sister (very cool, especially hearing her talking away in putonghua to various surprised locals). Now I've got some free time and I've been programming again. I did a few minor mutt patches, including SSL client side certificate support, and some icecast work: nonblocking libshout with theora support (both rewrites of initial code by the tireless Karl Heyes), and a crossfader for ices, which made me surprisingly happy considering how simple it was. After I put it in play, I discovered that a lot of my MP3s have a few seconds of silence at the end, so I wrote a little script to find out where that silence starts and trim it. It's too much of a sloppy hack to release, but I might fix it up, since googling came up with nothing that does the same thing. Why is that? It seems to be a common problem.