End of the Semester
Whew! Another semester ends, and I am now halfway through my seminary education at Wartburg. No breather for me, though, as I’ve got a number of big projects and travel plans that are going to happen in the next several weeks. Websites – I’m currently working with a task force of members of our congregation [...]
The Value of Community, or Why I Love Perl
I’ve been asked a number of times recently why I chose to use Perl to develop SAGrader, my company’s flagship essay grading product. I’ll be the first to admit that Perl tends to permit bad (unreadable, unmaintainable, overly terse) code in more ways then, say, Java. I think that those problems are mitigated by keeping [...]
What people really think when I talk
My friend and co-worker Nate drew me a picture today with the Mouse Gestures extension for Firefox. He says that when I talk, this picture shows what it’s like for him. For what it’s worth, I don’t wear glasses anymore, and I don’t have a receding hair line – at least not yet. But who [...]
Heard in the office today
“I have a comment. In my code. That says ‘Uh oh.’ And I don’t know why.”
A new unit of measurement: the “DreamHost”
After experiencing load averages over 50 on two DreamHost servers, gummi and hyperion, I would like to define a new unit of measurement: the “DreamHost.” One DreamHost is defined as a server running with a one-minute load average of 8. Hence, my server has been running at between 6 and 7 DreamHosts today. But I’m [...]
Scientific proof that students procrastinate
This graph, from our new release of SAGrader at work, is proof positive that students wait until the last possible moment to complete their assignments. This is the average load on the server for an assignment that was due at 11:00pm on Sunday, December 3. And, happily, we weathered the onslaught with nary a hiccup!
Reliable InnoDB hot backups
There are number of blog posts out there that mention –lock-all-tables as a good option to backup MySQL tables with mysqldump – even InnoDB tables. Don’t do that! That option is for MyISAM tables that don’t do transactions. InnoDB has ooey-gooey transactional goodness that will take a consistant backup without locking all your tables and [...]