We recently had problems with the disk used to store 4BSD system bug reports, and have lost approximately one year’s worth. We would very much appreciate the resubmission of any bug reports sent to us since January of 1991.
— Keith Bostic, 2/18/92Miss Australia goes to Japan!
Add a few pounds of rhinestones, some nice feathers, six clashing styles of accessories, and maybe some nice bunny ears and an asymmetrical hairstyle, and she might even qualify as a Hello!Project trainee. The colors are still a bit drab, and it doesn’t do nearly enough damage to her figure, but idol fashion is definitely getting international attention. (via powerline)
The Miss Universe designers are still amateurs, though; as I said before, “if she can still fake a smile, you didn’t use enough hot-glue!”.
The continuing adventures of Smoky, Quirky, Psycho, and Bambi
Melon Kinenbi managed to go out with a decent bang, with two final albums and a concert DVD, and three of the four members quickly started off on new careers. Quirky re-signed with Up-Front, Psycho picked up some decent acting jobs, and Bambi signed with a new record company and is working with a vocal coach.
All Smoky said was that she was retiring from show business, but now the news is out: marriage.
[Update: Psycho has a new single as well, currently available for cellphone streaming in Japan. Title is “Kill my caddy”, so she’s keeping the WTF alive and well]
"Hottest Year Ever!"
The current weather in Palo Alto, CA, as reported by The Weather Channel:
This seems to be about as accurate as the data used to claim that 2010 is the “hottest year on record”, recently announced with breathless excitement by teams of increasingly-desperate climatologers.
Context Matters, Part 2
“Congratulations. You’ve moved your unit.”
Using MongoDB
Suppose you had a big XML file in an odd, complicated structure (such as JMdict_e, a Japanese-English dictionary), and you wanted to load it into a database for searching and editing. You could faithfully replicate the XML schema in a relational database, with carefully-chosen foreign keys and precisely-specified joins, and you might end up with something like this.
Go ahead, look at it. I’ll wait. Seriously, it deserves a look. All praise to Stuart for making it actually work, but damn.
…
Done? Okay, now let’s slurp the whole thing into MongoDB:
Life with MongoDB
Before I ramble, let me sum up my feelings about MongoDB:
Good: easy to install, easy to start using, easy to dump a metric crapload of loosely-structured data into, easy to write basic queries and indexes, rapid high-quality (free!) support from the core development team, phenomenal cosmic power.
Bad: hard to install some drivers (Perl in particular pulls in an amazing number of poorly-specified dependencies), hard to get a metric crapload of data back out quickly, hard to write advanced queries and indexes, easy to reach “here there be dragons” territory outside the scope of documentation and guarantees and available tools, easy to lock up a server process for minutes or hours with simple operations, easy to lose everything unless you replicate to at least one other machine that has independent power, eats RAM like you wouldn’t believe.
It is, if you like, the Perl of databases, immensely powerful and versatile, but extremely dangerous in the hands of amateurs. And, like early releases of Perl, it is a rapidly-moving target that grows new functionality every time you turn your back on it.
The past few weeks have been a heady mix of excitement, frustration, satisfaction, and annoyance, as my first large-scale use of MongoDB has moved from simple prototype, to initial production version, through major bugs and poorly-documented limitations (often “already fixed in next release”), to what I hope is finally “stuff I can just leave running and go work on other projects again”.
CNET, Slashdot, and Gizmodo fell for it, so it must be true!
Some guy bought some off-the-shelf parts and attached a Canon SLR lens to an iPhone, and without even releasing sample photos from his “iPhone DSLR prototype”, suckered several major sites into giving him traffic. The “tech bloggers” and most of the commenters are excited about the “potential” of this “cool idea”, going so far as to say that even if the initial results are low-quality, surely someone can refine it.
Optically speaking, this is precisely as cool as taping a 50-cent magnifying glass to your camera, just a lot more expensive and clumsy. It’s like putting on a pair of reading glasses: put a prime lens in front of another prime lens, and you get something that can only focus on nearby objects, with some amount of magnification.
Here, watch me turn my Blackberry into a large format view camera, with full movements!
Mystery Object
Something I found on Google Earth:
Usually, if none of the informational layers in GE has something, you can find a nearby picture in the Panoramio layer that will give you a clue, but there’s nothing nearby. A Street View camera on a nearby highway caught it, though, so I knew what sort of thing it had to be.
Not that I really had to work that hard. Opening the area in Google Maps revealed a clear label on a nearby building, for anyone who can read Japanese…
