stillhq.com : Mikal, a geek from Canberra living in Silicon Valley

On Cars

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 21:38:00 PST

ISBN: 9781856131001
LibraryThing

Jeremy Clarkson isn't one of those people you can read hundreds of pages of at once. That's probably why he writes articles instead of books. This book is a collection of these articles, and it is an interesting and entertaining read. However, I couldn't read it front to back. Instead I read it over a series of take offs and landings during a trip, and that worked well. Apart from Jeremy's sense of humour, and the fact that he's mostly right, the other interesting aspect of this book is that you get to see his writing style develop over time. It helps explain how we ended up with Top Gear.

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Books read in October 2009

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 15:25:00 PST

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Blathering for Thursday, 05 November 2009

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 00:23:00 GMT

19:23: Mikal shared: Remember, dont skip out on the safety film!

Can anyone say "earthquake stabilization"?

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Blathering for Wednesday, 04 November 2009

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 23:54:00 GMT

18:54: Mikal shared: Knight on a shining bicycle: London mayor Boris Johnson rescues filmmaker from gang

I fully expect Kevin Rudd to come over and mow my lawn.

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Blathering for Tuesday, 03 November 2009

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 04:03:00 GMT

17:36: Mikal shared: Why do we have an IMG element? [dive into mark]

An interesting read. Those who ship win.

23:03: Mikal shared: Response to "TSA Takes Big Gulp over Britney"

Ice is a solid and therefore allowed is one of the most retarded things I have heard this year. Should we all just freeze our water bottles before flying?

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Python effective TLD library update

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 09:45:00 PST

The effective TLD library is now being used for a couple of projects of mine, but I've had some troubles with it being almost unusable slow. I ended up waking up this morning with the revelation that the problem is that I use regexps to match domain names, but the failure of a match occurs at the end of a string. That means that the FSA has to scan the entire string before it gets to decide that it isn't a match. That's expensive.

I ran some tests on tweaks to try and fix this. Without any changes, scanning 1,000 semi-random domain names took 6.941666 seconds. I then tweaked the implementation to reverse the strings it was scanning, and that halved the run time of the test to 3.212203 seconds. That's a big improvement, but still way too slow. The next thing I tried was then adding buckets of rules on top of those reverse matches.... In other words, the code now assumes that anything after the last dot is some for of TLD approximation, and only executes rules which also have that string after the last dot. This was a massive improvement, with 1,000 domains taking only 0.026120 seconds.

I've updated the code at http://www.stillhq.com/python/etld/etld.py.

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Blathering for Monday, 02 November 2009

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 07:34:00 GMT

02:34: Mikal shared: 3rd Annual Nigerian EMail Conference

Slightly racist, but still funny.

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Blathering for Friday, 30 October 2009

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 04:48:00 GMT

17:44: Mikal shared: Can being laid off really make you better off? - BusinessWeek.com- msnbc.com

Interesting article from Business Week. A recent study found that those laid off by Boeing were better off psychologically than those who remained with the company. This was mainly because of a combination of survivor guilt and continued stress about being in an insecure position.

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Blathering for Thursday, 29 October 2009

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 22:41:00 GMT

14:23: Mikal shared: Monitor bandwidth by pid | commandlinefu.com

Via Steve Walsh. This one looks useful.

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INVOL RER DUE TO OVERSOLD LX40

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 14:10:00 PST

I'm not sure where to start this story. I could tell you how I've been flying around the world on a business trip, or I could tell you what I think about Swiss Air business class. Instead I'm left thinking I should mention carbon. You see, I was sitting in first class on a Swiss Air flight to New York City yesterday, and I was surrounded by tree. Big centimeter thick panels of it are all over the place. When other airlines are doing things like using lighter foam for seat cushions or asking passengers to go potty before boarding to reduce the weight of their aircraft (and therefore carbon emissions), Swiss has chosen to find a forest and cut it down to put in their brand new plane. This forest will be flying around for a couple of decades I would think.

Sure, its only in first class (business class gets veneer), and I'm a bastard for being in first class at all. There's a story to that too though. I booked an ultra cheap around the world business ticket through Swiss Air. It was in fact cheaper than the same flights in economy with Qantas. This is despite the fact that two of the business class segments are in fact on Qantas. That's how I ended up in first class -- I was going between London Heathrow and San Francisco, but Swiss had oversold the Zurich to LA flight. So, I'm bumped to first class via NYC, which added about six hours to my total travel time yesterday.

Being bumped wasn't all bad. I've never been in first class before, and it was very nice. I might have chocolate poisoning of some form. I also got to "experience" American Airlines business class from New York to LA, in a plane which is possibly older than me. In fact, its entirely possible this plane predates flight. The seat pitch was nice, except that my chair kept involuntarily reclining. I didn't mind too much, as I hadn't slept in about 24 hours at that point, so I nodded off. Before I nodded off, I was also forced to decide that it was in fact the chick from Gilmore Girls (the one who plays Lorelai) two rows in front of me. She dropped her bag at one point in the airport, and I am excited to report that she watched a DVD during the flight. Citizen journalism at its finest.

I wouldn't normally mention the actress in the front of the plane, especially after TechCrunch taught me that no one gives a crap about what's happening to me (or in fact you) in real time. However, this being a stream of consciousness blog post written at 8am in LA airport while killing time for yet another flight, I think I am justified. Oh, and I also don't care if you give a crap.

I have more to complain about. Take for example the Swiss Air business class flight that I've just taken from Narita near Tokyo to Heathrow, via Zurich. Its clear why the ticket was cheap. Swiss business class simply isn't up to the standard of Qantas'. The seats don't lie flat (when you try to sleep you slide down to the end of the footrest in a little mound), the on demand entertainment system works, but appears to have some sort of image resizing error (everything is pixelated), and the cabin service is terribly slow. Lunch has just taken about two hours to serve. It took two hours in first class as well, but that's because they were trying to shove five courses into me.

The cabin fit out on that business class flight was the same standard as Qantas had before they went to their new lie flat configuration. To put that in perspective, that conversion was done at least ten years ago. I think the standard of the equipment being used might also explain why only half of the seats are taken in business class, where Qantas would be running at capacity. This was clearly one of the older Swiss aircraft, but even the brand new one with the forest in it had a business class which wasn't up to the same standard as Qantas.

I can't complain too much though -- it still beats the pants of Qantas economy, and the flight did give me a chance to discover what I believe might be the most boring television program ever made. Its called "Swiss Railway Journeys", and I heartily don't recommend it. Unless you deeply care about the age of each wheel on the train.

One last thing. While the Swiss Air staff were all much older than I am used to on other airlines, I think that's because of the vagaries of the youth of today. Each of these staff could speak four languages fluently, and would begin the conversation when you first boarded with a little protocol handshake where they said hello in all four languages and waited to see which one you replied in. Once they had you figured out, they would use the correct language from then on. Modern youth are too busy twittering to learn one language, let alone every language ever used. Oh, and if you know four words of German, don't use them at the start of a Swiss flight. You'll be stuck for the rest of the journey conveying your desires through interpretive dance.

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Triplanetary

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 05:22:00 PST

ISBN: 0425053830
LibraryThing

This is the first book in the EE Doc Smith Lensman series, a series which sweeps from pre-modern Atlantis all the way well into the future. Its pretty old, so some of the science is dangerously dated, but that's not its biggest flaw. This book suffers from uncontrolled hyperbole, which I guess isn't that unexpected for a space opera. I guess it was also more common at the time, before science fiction started taking itself seriously. The plot is also a little hard to believe, with both sides at one point murdering entire cities. They then of course forgive each other because "its logical".

However, I have an emotional attachment to this book, because it is the one which interested me in reading as a young child. Despite its flaws in both science and plot, it is still an ok book. I enjoyed reading it, and it was entertaining.

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Blathering for Wednesday, 28 October 2009

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 03:51:00 GMT

14:26: Mikal shared: Official Google Mobile Blog: Announcing Google Maps Navigation for Android 2.0

Horrible product name. Cool product. Free turn by turn GPS directions for Android.

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Python effective TLD library

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 06:42:00 PST

I had a need recently for a library which would take a host name and return the domain-specific portion of the name, and the effective TLD being used. "Effective TLD" is a term coined by the Mozilla project for something which acts like a TLD. For example, .com is a TLD and has domains allocated under it. However, .au is a TLD with no domains under it. The effective TLDs for the .au domain are things like .com.au and .edu.au. Whilst there are libraries for other languages, I couldn't find anything for python.

I therefore wrote one. Its very simple, and not optimal. For example, I could do most of the processing with a single regexp if python supported more than 100 match groups in a regexp, but it doesn't. I'm sure I'll end up revisiting this code sometime in the future. Additionally, the code ended up being much easier to write than I expected, mainly because the Mozilla project has gone to the trouble of building a list of rules to determine the effective TLD of a host name. This is awesome, because it saved me heaps and heaps of work.

The code is at http://www.stillhq.com/python/etld/etld.py if you're interested.

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Blathering for Sunday, 25 October 2009

Sat, 24 Oct 2009 23:09:00 GMT

17:03: Mikal shared: NSFW: Weezer, plane crashes and everything else thats worrying about the real-time web

A good commentary on the real time web.

17:20: Mikal shared: MCLD blog: MythBuntu/MythTV: A week of tweaks

Someone using MythNetTV comments that there is no documentation. I think he's looking for http://www.mythtvbook.com/wiki/Using_MythTV_as_a_Video_Aggregator

17:34: Mikal shared: Students in tears over HSC 'nightmare' - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

Oh the poor babies. When they're big kids are they going to stop and cry when they experience a situation they haven't before? Are they going to refuse to do things at work just because they're new?

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Blathering for Saturday, 24 October 2009

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 12:38:00 GMT

06:36: Mikal shared: "I Will Break Your Fucking Camera"

I wonder who the tenant at 555 California is? Who wants to be guarded by badly trained thugs?

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Blathering for Friday, 23 October 2009

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 00:35:00 GMT

08:24: Mikal shared: Economy flyers' fantasy realised: a bed for $150

I love this idea. I would totally pay $150 (about 10% of the cost of a SYD -> SFO return ticket) to have a bed like surface. Air NZ has been offering to guarantee an empty seat next to you for a while, but the bed idea takes it to the next level.

08:26: Mikal shared: College Student Needs Personal Assistant To Help Him Be College Student [Employment]

I don't see why this is particularly news worthy -- people have had PAs for ages.

18:43: Mikal shared: Consumer Reporter Keeps Buying Things That Catch Fire [Dangerous]

Hmmm. I have two of these. It might be time to put them in the bin.

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Blathering for Thursday, 22 October 2009

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 17:41:00 GMT

09:27: Mikal shared: Coordinated motorcycle performance video from the 1950s

This is cool. I wonder if US cops could so something similar with tasers?

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Blathering for Wednesday, 21 October 2009

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 19:02:00 GMT

13:02: Mikal shared: Thank you for giving me the opportunity to explain this to you

An interesting note about what happens when the free content community clashes with traditional publishing.

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Nerilka's Story

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 13:05:00 PST

ISBN: 0345339495
Del Rey (1987), Mass Market Paperback, 208 pages
LibraryThing

This book takes place over almost exactly the same period as Moreta. However, its not a rehash of those events, as it is written from a different person's perspective. There are enough points where the two story lines meet for the books to make sense as a pair, and I'd recommend reading them back to back. This book is an incredibly fast read (I knocked it over in a few hours on a flight), and its a bit more positive than Moreta, which has a pretty sad ending. However, this book isn't the happiest book ever written either. I've seen commentary that says this book is mostly about how unattractive Nerilka is physically. I dispute that though -- the book is about how the human spirit is more important than breeding or good looks, and how Nerilka's efforts to do the right thing in a time of crisis have a lasting impact. I enjoyed this book.

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Moreta: Dragonlady of Pern

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 13:01:00 PST

ISBN: 034529873X
Del Rey (1984), Mass Market Paperback, 384 pages
LibraryThing

Moreta is a book about a pandemic, and its hard to make those fun... If you've bothered to find out anything about the book in advance (or read the preceding Pern books, where it is referred to), you know that its not going to be a fun ride. On the other hand, the book is an interesting read, and its educational to find out how much knowledge has been lost in the Pern universe between Moreta and Lessa. For example, its clear in Moreta that everyone knows they moved from the Southern continent, whereas that is much less clear in the books set in Lessa's time. Its hard to say that a book about thousands of people dying is enjoyable. However, the story is a gripping one, and I'm glad I read it.

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