November 2007 Archives

[Moozik: Siouxsie & The Banshees - Christine]

Republicans debate God, guns, gays....

The right wing, always focusing on the important letter of the alphabet.

[Moozik Cranes Tangled Up]

When setting up a listening socket, you pass an integer value to listen() indicating the number of incoming connections that can be queued. Often a handy way of doing that is to just say hey, just use whatever maximum value your OS will allow. The Socket module exports the constant SOMAXCONN to give you that very max value from the OS. In fact, instead of calling listen() ourselves, we can just pass the value in the constructor.

my $socket = IO::Socket::INET->new(
   LocalPort => 5000,
   Listen => SOMAXCONN,
   Proto => 'tcp',
   Reuse => 1
);

The problem is that SOMAXCONN on Solaris 9 always returns 5 regardless of the OS max value. Our value of SOMAXCONN:

perl -MSocket -e 'print Socket::SOMAXCONN()'
5

But our OS says:

/usr/sbin/ndd /dev/tcp tcp_conn_req_max_q
1024

So, the moral of this little blog post is that if you're writing a daemon to listen on a port for incoming connections and you're on Solaris, SOMAXCONN probably isn't the value you think it is. Not that I got bitten by this today or anything ;-)

[Moozik: Rammstein - Mein Teil (live)]

It's one of those good news, bad news things. The good news of course is that Editors are coming to the US next year. The bad news is that they're skipping Arizona :-(

Bugger.

Jan. 8th – Fort Lauderdale, FL – Culture Room
Jan. 9th – Saint Petersburg, FL – Jannus Landing
Jan. 10th – Lake Buena Vista, FL – House of Blues
Jan. 11th – Atlanta, GA – Roxy
Jan. 12th – Nashville, TN – Wildhorse
Jan. 14th – Norfolk, VA – The Norva
Jan. 15th – Washington, DC – 9:30 Club
Jan. 17th – New York – Terminal 5
Jan. 18th – Philadelphia, PA – Electric Factory
Jan. 19th – Boston, MA – Orpheum Theatre
Jan. 20th – Montreal, QC – Club Soda
Jan. 22nd – Toronto, ON – Koolhaus
Jan. 23rd – Columbus, OH – Newport Music Hall
Jan. 25th – Chicago, IL – Vic Theatre
Jan. 26th – Detroit, MI – Majestic Theatre
Jan. 27th – Milwaukee, WI – Pabst Theater
Jan. 29th – Madison, WI – Majestic Theatre
Jan. 30th – Minneapolis, MN – Fine Line Music Cafe
Feb. 1st – Denver, CO – Ogden Theatre
Feb. 4th – Seattle, WA – Showbox At The Market
Feb. 5th – Vancouver, BC – Commodore Ballroom
Feb. 6th – Portland, OR – Roseland Theater
Feb. 8th – San Francisco, CA – Warfield Theatre
Feb. 9th – Los Angeles, CA – The Wiltern
Feb. 10th – Anaheim, CA – House of Blues
Feb. 13th – San Diego, CA – House of Blues
Feb. 14th – Las Vegas, NV – House of Blues

[Moozik: Indochine - L'aventurier]

Poker is not a sport. Calling it World Series of Poker still doesn't make it a sport. It's a game. I know you're seriously considering showing World Series of Monopoly next, but please don't. Can we just stick to, you know, sport? That's all I ask.

[Moozik: Siouxsie & The Banshees - Clockface]

I was in my local EBgames at the weekend and happened to spy Super Mario Galaxy on their demo Wii. I was quite pleased for two reasons, I've been a fan of pretty much every Mario game since Donkey Kong and have been itching to try the Wii out. So here was my chance.

To be honest, when I first heard about the Wii I was completely skeptical about the Wii controllers. The nunchuck and Wii remote appeared to be a monumental pain in the arse. This is probably the main reason why the Wii is the first Nintendo console that I haven't snapped up since my SNES days.

I was pleasantly surprised by how easy it was to get used to the controllers. Sure there was about 20 seconds of confusion while I figured out which piece did what but after that, it just felt natural. The only thing I had difficulty with was aiming with the remote. I suppose a quick 15 minute play wasn't enough to teach myself how to aim and to be honest I sucked at it. 15 minutes also wasn't anywhere near enough time to form a decent opinion of the new Mario game. It felt very familiar but I must admit I wasn't overly blown away with the supposed "next gen" graphics. I know the Wii is nothing more than a suped-up Gamecube but even so, I suppose I expected a little better.

So, is a Wii purchase in my future? Hard to say. I'm also a huge Ratchet and Clank fan and the review of the new game has me itching to buy a PS3. So owning a 360, PS3, and a Wii seems a little extreme ;-) Time will ultimately tell I suppose.

[Moozik Curve - Coming Up Roses]

More than I realized in fact.

The number of people leaving Britain to live abroad reached a record high of 400,000 last year, an increase of 41,000 on 2005, according to figures published by the Office of National Statistics yesterday.

The statistics show that 207,000 were British citizens, with most going to Australia, New Zealand, France, Spain or the United States. The rest of the 400,000 were non-British and had been in the UK for more than one year.

[Moozik: Curve - I Speak Your Every Word]

Following me out of the store into the car park while still hassling me not only means you're getting $0.00 commission, you've successfully managed to ensure I never ever come back to your store. And yes, you deserved every word of the mouthful I gave you.

[Moozik: The Birthday Massacre - Looking Glass (live)]

Jeff Minter's latest project is a XBOX360 port of Gridrunner++. I can't wait to try it out as I've been a fan of anything Minter does since my Commodore 64 days. He has a recent update on his blog.

But I think things are going well, GR+++ on the ox360 is certainly turning into something that I can say from my own subjective frame of reference seems to be becoming very fun to play. It's taken quite a lot of changes to make it good within that context given the nature of the original GR++ upon which it was based. That was mouse-controlled (and a lot of the game hinged on the precision of that control method) and vertically oriented, now it's widescreen and controlled by two analog sticks. A lot of old stuff has been chucked out and new play mechanics to suit the new controller and environment introduced. My biggest worry was that the difference between the two setups would be so big that there would be no coherent way to evolve one into the other.

Oooh, controlled by two analog sticks. Much nicer.

[Moozik: The Mission - Naked and Savage]

You can never really guarantee the order in which your results will return to you unless you use an order by clause. Nothing earth shattering there. Except that in versions prior to 10.2, Oracle was quite happy to let you get away with just a group by. 10.2 changed all that as a new sorting algorithm was introduced.

Oracle introduced a new sorting algorithm (sometimes known as the Version 2 sort, which is how it is labelled in the 10032 trace) in 10.2.

The previous algorithm was effectively building an in-memory index on the incoming data using a balanced binary tree and seeking to the right (i.e. optimised towards data that appeared in the correct order and keeping such data in the order of appearance - hence the apparent sorting of rowids in our example in 9i).

The CPU and memory overheads for this algorithm are a bit fierce for large sorts, so the new algorithm does something completely different (possibly based on a variant of the heapsort, though it isn’t actually a heapsort) which is more efficient on memory and CPU. It has the side-effect though, of re-ordering incoming rows even when the data is not arriving out of order.

Not that I'd been lazy and just had group by's you understand. Ahem.

[Moozik: The Mission - Stay With Me]

They are. They bloody well are. Not convinced? Well Camelot pulled a scratch card in the UK because it's too confusing.

A LOTTERY scratchcard has been withdrawn from sale by Camelot - because players couldn't understand it.

The Cool Cash game - launched on Monday - was taken out of shops yesterday after some players failed to grasp whether or not they had won.

To qualify for a prize, users had to scratch away a window to reveal a temperature lower than the figure displayed on each card. As the game had a winter theme, the temperature was usually below freezing.

But the concept of comparing negative numbers proved too difficult for some Camelot received dozens of complaints on the first day from players who could not understand how, for example, -5 is higher than -6.

Tina Farrell, from Levenshulme, called Camelot after failing to win with several cards.

The 23-year-old, who said she had left school without a maths GCSE, said: "On one of my cards it said I had to find temperatures lower than -8. The numbers I uncovered were -6 and -7 so I thought I had won, and so did the woman in the shop. But when she scanned the card the machine said I hadn't.

"I phoned Camelot and they fobbed me off with some story that -6 is higher - not lower - than -8 but I'm not having it.

We're doomed.

[Moozik: Skinny Puppy - The Choke]

Fox has added some posters for the upcoming Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. I love everything to do with Terminator and can't wait until January to watch. Well, that is if the writers strike doesn't kill it.

[Moozik: The Birthday Massacre - Horror Show]

It's November 18th. Why are you advertising Christmas stuff to me? Did I mention it's only November 18th?

Mind you, you're not alone. Home Depot had Christmas trees and other Christmas tomfoolery set up in the store last month.

I swear it starts earlier every year. And I swear I say that every year.

[Moozik: Skinny Puppy - Pedafly]

I watched Sicko this weekend. After watching it I was completely caught in two minds about it. On the one hand I thought it was a really good documentary. On the other hand, it made me really quite angry. Angry that America has let its health care system come to this.

Having grown up in England, the concept of potentially having to pay for going to the hospital was really hard to get my head around. I still don't get why people are ok with this. Sure on the NHS you may have to wait to get that operation. But at least you'll get it. It won't be denied by an accountant. You won't be taken to a hospital in an ambulance only to find out later that because you didn't have that "pre-approved", you'll get a bill for the ambulance ride.

I used to work with a lady whose son was involved in a near-fatal car crash. It was literally a life or death situation and they used a helicopter to rush him to hospital. You guessed it. The helicopter was not covered. A bill for goodness knows how many thousands of dollars arrived in her mail box shortly thereafter. When it's a life or death situation, you can't sit there thinking wait, maybe this isn't covered, maybe they should try and make it through the rush hour traffic instead. Just boggles my mind.

[Moozik: Skinny Puppy - Ugli]

Tonight, three things that I like. Used/listened-to/drank today.

• Oracle's SQL Developer is really quite nice. If only MySQL's Query Browser was as functional.

• Skinny Puppy's Mythmaker is good. One of those albums that's still growing on me though and I wonder if I'll end up liking it more than The Greater Wrong Of The Right?

• Those small bottles of Shamrock Farms chocolate milk. What can I say? I'm 8 years old.

[Moozik: Girls Under Glass - Frozen]

If you're anything like me, you've been less than enamored with season 2 of Heroes. The past two episodes have started to have a little spark though and last night, finally, we got to see what happened to Peter and Nathan after the season 1 finale. Every week I found myself saying "ok, I understand that Maya kills people and can't help it, can we move on and put the focus back on the characters we care about?". Last night, it was as though the writers could hear me ;-)

Speaking of which, the whole writers strike has prompted NBC to cut the season a little short. Last night after the episode ended we were greeted with a "only three episodes left..." announcement and then I read today that they're considering season 2 a wash and the episode on Dec 3 will serve as the season finale.

Yet while Heroes has finally found some dramatic traction, this second volume is pretty much a wash. The Dec. 3 episode has been retooled to function as a potential season finale — a move inspired by the writers' strike and a desire to give the show ''a clean slate'' when it goes back into production for Volume 3. At that point, Kring wants to craft a rebooted Heroes that can attract new fans and win back those who've tuned out: ''The message is that we've heard the complaints — and we're doing something about it.''

[Moozik: Mind.In.A.Box - What Used To Be]

Another day, another utterly ridiculous premise from the Bush administration. I know I shouldn't really be surprised. Today's gem comes from Donald Kerr.

Donald Kerr, a top intelligence official with the US government, says that citizens need to change their definition of privacy to match the government's definition, the AP reports.

Really, go read that and let me know if your blood doesn't boil just a little. Nicole's take on it, as always, is far more eloquent so go read that as well.

If you’re willing to live in a police state in order to feel safer, you’re an idiot. Pure and simple. People run a far greater risk of dying in a car wreck or having a heart attack, but I don’t see anyone running around advocating we ban cars or let the government drive our cars for us, or jailing overweight people or bakery owners.

The Guinness 10m pound advertisement.

[Moozik: The Cure - Wendy Time]

At this point, I'm happy with every win we can put under our belt.

Spurs got their Uefa Cup campaign back on track with a comfortable win over Hapoel Tel Aviv in their Group G tie.

The woeful Israelis could have taken a shock lead when Bebars Natcho dragged wide, before Spurs took control.

Steed Malbranque got away down the left to cross for Robbie Keane to volley in, before the winger chipped over a centre for Dimitar Berbatov to head home.

[Moozik: The Cure - Open]

Greg Knauss has a theory about what it’s like to be a manager and what it’s like to be a developer and which role suits a particular individual best. For the most part I agree with everything he wrote.

Jumping between projects — context switching — is a great way to burn a programmer out, because the cost of unloading one project from his head only to load up another one is enormously high. The idea of switching between two projects in a day, much less ten, is not only exhausting, but depressing.

Except for that part. For me, the idea of switching between two projects in a day or multiple projects in a week is a great way to prevent burnout. Not only that, if I'm a little stuck on the best way to attack a problem, I find working on something else gives my brain a rest. When I go back to the other project I often have a "of course, duh" moment.

[Moozik: Japan - Taking Islands In Africa]

Oracle has some bizarre and very misleading error messages sometimes. Take today's gem:

ORA-12162: TNS:net service name is incorrectly specified

Something wrong with the tnsnames.ora file right? Nope. What that error is trying to tell me is that I don't have an ORACLE_SID environment variable set. Obviously ;-)

[Moozik: Hocico - Wounds]

Oh to be in England early next year. The man, the legend, Gary Numan will be touring Tubeway Army's Replicas album.

Following on from 2006's highly successful 'Classic Album' Telekon Tour, the Replicas Tour will only feature songs from the 1979 Replicas album and the singles released from it, including the B-Sides. Gary's conventional tours are live sets made up predominantly, although not exclusively, of songs from more recent releases, such as the highly acclaimed Pure and Jagged albums. However, Gary has become increasingly aware over recent years that a significant number of fans, both old and new, would also love to hear a bigger selection, and greater variety, of the earlier material, as well as the newer songs. These 'Classic Album' tours are Gary's way of trying to meet that demand.

For many newer fans these albums had been and gone before they were even born and so these tours give them a chance to hear many of the songs live for the first time. For those fans that have been supporting Gary since the very beginning it is a chance to hear songs live that they may not have heard for several decades, if at all. These 'Classic Album' tours are not planned to be repeated so, if you want to see and hear the entire Replicas album live, this is your chance.

[Moozik: Nitzer Ebb - Getting Closer]

Feeling a little sluggish? Not quite woken up yet? Not enough caffeine? Gather round, for Uncle Kevin will give you his handy remedy.

I heartily recommend playing the following as loud as you possibly can - stop just short of blood flowing from your ears.

Killing Joke - Walking With Gods
Nitzer Ebb - Getting Closer

You're welcome.