Advogato blog for haruspex

11 Nov 2010

Thu, 11 Nov 2010 17:25:29 GMT

fozbaca You should take that "Grammar Cheat Sheet" with a grain of salt. Some of it is dubious or plain wrong. To top it off, the cutesy labels on the comment form are excruciatingly poorly worded - so the post is not a very good advertisement for the guide.

13 Sep 2010

Mon, 13 Sep 2010 05:30:56 GMT

ncm: Amen to that

1 Mar 2009

Sun, 1 Mar 2009 06:22:50 GMT

nconway, I don't see why people try to solve races like the Doctors problem through transactions and isolation levels. Row level locking in InnoDB prevents the race regardless of the isolation level in use.


BEGIN;
SELECT COUNT(*) INTO @n FROM Duties WHERE Shift=@s AND Status='on 
duty' 
FOR UPDATE;
if @n > 1 then
    UPDATE Duties SET Status='reserve' WHERE DoctorId=@d AND Shift=@s;
    COMMIT;
else
    ROLLBACK;

If you're not familiar with InnoDB, the SELECT establishes a critical section covering the on duty doctors. This same sequence executing concurrently will block until the connection with the lock has checked the count. The COMMIT (or ROLLBACK) will unblock the other connection waiting for the lock. In case the first connection committed an UPDATE which reduced the count to 1, the second connection, when unblocked, will see the new count of 1 and not make any update.

21 Nov 2008

Fri, 21 Nov 2008 03:40:29 GMT

lkcl: The buyout has been off the table for a considerable time. You may relax, it won't happen.

9 Oct 2008

Thu, 9 Oct 2008 04:14:19 GMT

@ marnanel: Sounds like you are best finding another country.

Come to Canada, at least we respect and are knowledgeable about other countries and cultures. The condescension of your child's teacher and your bank is not worth tolerating.

2 Oct 2008

Thu, 2 Oct 2008 16:25:37 GMT

Bailout, schmailout.

Bob Ellis:

For I wrote a book, you see, .... It was about how, if you sack too many people, or you underpay and impoverish too many people, there aren't enough customers left to sell things to, and the economy goes to hell. I wrote it in 1998 and nobody attacked any one of the arguments. They tiptoed away from the argument. They were above such things.
And lo, it has come to pass. Americans too impoverished to buy houses had stopped making their payments, and cash their creditors owed to lending entities further up the money chain could not be paid either, and like bird flu the illness swept across the planet, and here we are. And I was right; and Michael Costa and Peter Costello and all the neocons and Friedmanites and Tim Blair were wrong. And we are now in big trouble.
...
Decide how long Alan Greenspan should spend in gaol. For he nearly wrecked the world, in my view, with his one percent interest rates and house loans to fools as dumb as Barney in The Simpsons, ... Decide how long George Bush should spend in gaol for squandering a trillion dollars (thus far) on two needless unending wars and another trillion thus far bailing out his upperclass coke-sniffing accomplices who like him couldn't add.
And, boy, they really couldn't add. They thought the dollar could be floated for instance, and China's command economy with its fixed undervalued currency and low house prices was doomed to fail. They thought they'd won the Cold War against such barbarities, and socialist command economies didn't work. And they borrowed money from China, trillions of dollars from China, to prove their system worked better. China, which quietly won the Cold War by lending it to them, if you care to add up the figures.

16 Nov 2007

Fri, 16 Nov 2007 21:26:47 GMT

etbe: Neither. One should use ZFS (>> RAID).

13 Nov 2007

Tue, 13 Nov 2007 16:45:25 GMT

Signs of the Apocalypse:

Via Jos Kirps's Popular Science and Technology Blog, we learn that complete source code for the final release of Multics has been released by Bull Technologies and made available by MIT.

7 Oct 2007

Sun, 7 Oct 2007 12:02:09 GMT

bradfitz: What was scarier than the text of the article - let's face it, we have known for years the man is a moron - was the photo accompanying it. A pile of sycophants, clutching their cameras for a chance to photograph the most potent symbol of their country's failure in every sphere. Not what he's earned: A lynch mob.

17 Sep 2007

Mon, 17 Sep 2007 12:08:04 GMT

salimma: "once" anti-GPL?!