BadCheese.com

A while ago, I had an idea about search. What if a search engine recorded the last hit that you went to off the search results page and used those urls as the most popular results from that page? The theory is that once you find what you're searching for, you stop searching for it, aka - you don't go back to the search engine anymore. So, the last link that you click on from the search page should be the one you wanted. If enough people click on the same link, that link should be the most popular and should be at the top of the page.

I wrote two greasemonkey plugins. One that allows a user to submit results to the study and one that queries the study database for results. They can be found here:

http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/31639
http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/64039

You'll need to be running firefox and install the greasemonkey plugin https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/748 first in order to install the above scripts. Once everything's installed, you're part of the project!

The author of jgit shows why C is so much faster than Java when comparing his version of jgit to the original C version.
http://marc.info/?l=git&m=124111702609723&w=2

This is my response to this blog entry: http://gibsonandlily.com/blogs/48

This is an open letter from us, that is, the system administrators, to you, management, users, and everybody that has to deal with us and our sometimes very bizarre behavior.

I'm 41 years old and I've been a linux/unix system administrator for about 11 years. Before that I was a unix programmer for about 5 years. One day when I was only a few years out of my C.S. degree, I shared an office with our solaris sysadmin. We became good friends and got along great, except for when I asked him to install something on a system for me, he'd give me this look that said to me, "Dude, we're great friends, why do you want to spoil that and have me do some work for you?". I never really understood that look. I figured that it was his job to support me and to do what I ask him to do. If I need something done to do my job, he should do it without any attitude and just let me know when it's done. We continued to be great friends throughout the company's existence and still contact him from time to time, but I could never get over or understand that look ... until now.

Many people treat me and my fellow system administrators as an angry god when they want us to do some work for them. They offer a peace offering and apologize 5-10 times for interrupting us and then explain the problem hoping that we won't get angry. Or perhaps they see the same look that I used to get from my friend when I asked him to do work.

Being a system administrator for 11 years taught me a few things. I now understand the sysadmin attitude. It's not that we're assholes. It's not that we are lazy and don't like to work. It's not that we hate or think less of a certain type of employee. It's very simple.

The cardinal rule: Don't make us do any unnecessary work

That's it. Keep that in mind and you'll never feel weird when approaching your local sysadmin and asking him/her to do something for you.

We used to serve up the images for http://pronto.com from a couple of linux machines running reiserfs 3.6 with 6x 750GB SATA harddrives in them. We began to run out of room and decided to go to a SAN. We got a good deal on a SUN 7410 SAN through our corporate deals (22TB, 14TB usable) and it had all kinds of great stuff in it so we said what the heck.

Now, the problem. Our storage platform holds 366M 5-8 kilobyte files. This is a LOT of little files. At the top directory, we have a 256 directories (00-FF) and under each of those, we have another 256 directories, so we have 65,536 directories total. This means that we have about 5000-6000 images in each directory.

This is where we start to notice differences. Reiserfs does an "ls" in a directory with 6000 files in it in about 3-5 seconds. The SUN SAN does it in about 1-2 minutes. Serious problems here.

Our only option is to add a third level of hashed directories. This will give us about 16.7M directories and will solve our performance problem, but to all of you people out there that think that ZFS is hot shit, I say to you, "It depends on your situation".