The Rose of Versailles
I dreamt I was making out with Lady Oscar. Weird, but not really surprising, I guess...
The Rose of Versailles
I dreamt I was making out with Lady Oscar. Weird, but not really surprising, I guess...
I had no idea it was that bad!
I was checking out a review of new Xeon hardware, which was using MySQL 4, MySQL 5 and PostgreSQL 8.2 beta. The test is mostly realistic, consisting of PHP pages doing queries, taken from their own website, with an exception, that the dataset is restrained to something like 2 gigabytes, so that it doesn't hit the disks too much (this can make it either unrealistic, or is a strategy to stay sane).
The article mostly talks about the hardware, but the results put MySQL in, uh, a "bad light". MySQL 4.1.20, going from a one single-core processor to two dual-core processors (that's between twice to four times the horsepower), goes 56% faster. MySQL 5.0.20a goes 40% faster. PostgreSQL 8.2-dev (okay, dev, whatever, have you looked at MySQL recently?) puts in a 224% increase in performance, meaning that it actually gets the "slightly more than three times as fast" you'd expect from having "between two and four times the horsepower".
They also show graphs of how they behave dealing with concurrent requests, where you see MySQL peak at about 520 requests per second, then goes down as the number of concurrent requests. PostgreSQL, on the other hand, slowly goes up to about 640 requests per second, then pretty much stays there, being clearly limited by the hardware to that level, a textbook example of nice scaling. At a concurrency of 100, PostgreSQL pulls in nearly twice as many requests per second than MySQL.
So much for MySQL being "the fast one" (PostgreSQL was traditionally the "safe and correct one", which was already nothing to sneeze at, as long as it managed to be "fast enough").
Syndicated 2006-12-04 10:54:17 (Updated 2006-12-04 10:54:43) from Pierre Phaneuf
A sign of the times
As apenwarr is demonstrating, it seems linuxcentrism is the new vaxocentrism.
I find it especially ironic that he sees BSD as an "imitation Linux" when, historically speaking, it's the other way around. I won't argue that it's where it's at nowadays, but sometimes, the old fart knows a trick or two, still.
Syndicated 2006-12-02 14:47:48 (Updated 2006-12-02 14:57:33) from Pierre Phaneuf
On being a (crappy) Mac zealot
caffeinemonkey said, a long time ago, a few things about Mac OS X...Syndicated 2006-12-02 13:17:14 (Updated 2006-12-02 16:49:02) from Pierre Phaneuf
Choo Choo!
Booked some tickets on the TGV for Christmas, to visit some of azrhey's family. I'm looking forward to finally trying this out!
I'm pondering ideas for projects, and I think I've got one or two things that could be promising, so this is rather encouraging. I'm still having more questions than answers, of course, but everything in its time...
Change is the only constant
Philip Van Hoof (also known as my evil twin, not so long ago, thought his Tinymail API was frozen, but ended up having to change it anyway.Syndicated 2006-11-29 21:22:14 (Updated 2006-11-29 21:28:05) from Pierre Phaneuf
"Now I have to kill you."
For some reason, I'm often in the position that Dilbert finds himself there. It's not out of sheer genius (HAHAHA! yeah, right) or anything like that, it's just a question that people don't seem to tilt their heads quite enough (except dcoombs, he's got that down to an art!).
Syndicated 2006-11-28 10:59:34 (Updated 2006-11-28 13:12:08) from Pierre Phaneuf
Plotting and Scheming
Ouch, that was a bad week. So, of course, I didn't write.
There was this moment, at some point, where the root causes of my annoyances here were coming together before my eyes, and I could see that they weren't specific to particular companies or individuals, but a product of the whole system, and that, therefore, there was precious little chance of avoiding it. They're not intrinsically negative things, but similarly to apenwarr, I like small and responsive, rather than big and stable.
In France (and most of Europe in general, it would seem), things are optimized for stability, from the top-down. They have a strong, controlling state, unified almost all the way down, with cities having a little control (not much), and the bulk of decisions emanating from the center. Have you ever wondered how such enterprisey things as the WS-Deathstar ever see any use? As far as making money and keeping things the way they were, they are doing a marvelous job, actually, but when it comes to things like "making a difference" or "doing something I could give a flying fuck about", well, it's rather less than stellar. For example, do you know Bull? No? Never heard of them? It's the premier European IT supplier, something a bit like IBM, but for Europe. They have such giant customers such as Dassault Aviation, EDF, Total, Boehringer Ingelheim, La Poste, SNECMA, France Telecom, T-Com and the SNCF. What, you've never heard of most of these either? I can assure you, they're all gigantic, half of them are or have been nationalized at some point, and the system will roll on forward whether you know about them or not! I do think there is change coming, but the timeframe is in the decade, I would say. I'm not that patient!
At first, I didn't know what to do anymore, and that left me very sad. This being a systemic issue means that finding another job wouldn't do it. Starting my own company wouldn't really do it either, as I'd have this system to deal with (and more pressingly, would quickly have serious problems with hiring).
That last thought kind of surprised me, though, in another way. Previously, I didn't want to start a company. I didn't want to do management, didn't want to deal with the business end of things, and I was rather afraid of the risks. I just wanted to program. But in the last few years, I did management (and actually enjoyed it, I reluctantly have to admit), I got interested in business, probably from hanging out with apenwarr, even if it wasn't to his scale. And ironically, this project of moving to Europe had me face my fear of risks, where I didn't know where I'd work, where I'd live, how I'd get to stay in the country and other such things. So, oddly enough, I'm now considering doing something I can't do here, but only because I have come here!
Now, I'm not just packing up just yet! I still want to travel around Europe some, and I can do a good amount of the early work on just about any potential idea for a startup from here. So I'll be doing that.
For the shorter term, there's a trip to see some of azrhey's family for Christmas, and possibly a short trip to Barcelona for the New Year, getting pick-pocketed and all, as the tradition requires. And I've discussed some idea of going to Copenhagen to see skjalm, which would be very nice.
I also met two hot girls on the train, Hungarian and Italian. See, it's not all that bad around here, hehe!
Syndicated 2006-11-27 16:53:42 (Updated 2006-11-27 16:56:49) from Pierre Phaneuf
Finally!
In what's otherwise pretty bleary times, I finally have confirmation that my car has been sold! Only have to cancel the insurance and such...
New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.
Keep up with the latest Advogato features by reading the Advogato status blog.
If you're a C programmer with some spare time, take a look at the mod_virgule project page and help us with one of the tasks on the ToDo list!