I’ve noticed that you can view entire movies on Youtube. Can you guess which genre?
I’ll list 5 genres.
sci-fi / fantasy
drama
comedy
historical fiction
film noir
I’ll let ya know my findings next week.
Post your responses here.
Category: TechBiz
Categories
What Is Work Productivity?
Just wanted to share this post on /. :
“In France, we often do work less than 40 hours a week. Less work also means better productivity. There surely is a “balancing point”, but if it exist, it is different for every person, and is not constant with the time.”
Believe it or not, there is actual research done on this–not that anyone ever pays attention to the results. If I recall correctly, it boils down to something like this:
– Productivity is low for the first 1-3 hours of a day as people get into the swing of things
– Daily productivity mostly goes up, but drops toward the end of the day (possibly because people are consciously “winding down”)
– Productivity per worker hour peaks somewhere around a 30-hour week.
– Total sustainable productivity per week peaks at around a 45-hour week.
– Around 50 hours and up, fatigue builds up over time until burnout kicks in. Sustained work weeks of 50 hours are likely to be getting less TOTAL WORK done than sustained 35-hour weeks.
– Work weeks of around 80 hours are sustainable for maybe a week or so before catastrophic loss of total productivity occurs
– Anything much more than 80 hours likely results in immediately LOWER productivity, as fatigued workers make mistakes that take more time to fix than the extra hours provide.
From this, one can conclude that European schedules are more likely to maximize individual productivity (more work per hour), while American schedules are more likely to maximize organizational productivity (more work per person). One can also conclude that any manager who demands sustained work weeks of 50 hours or more is incompetent and a fool; the management equivalent of the kind of programmer who creates so many bugs he provides a net negative productivity to the team.
In practice, actual work hours are lower than they appear; most salaried workers are prone to finding numerous ways to not work while at work, largely because in many office environments physical presence is seen as more important than actual productivity.
I suspect the best balancing point would be something like four 9-hour workdays per week. Longer days to minimize the productivity drain of mornings, but a shorter total work week to allow occasional bursts of extra effort without creating long-term burnout.
Categories
More People Should be Using Sparklines
| 5-Year | Close | High | Low | ||
| Cisco |  |
19.55 | 80.06 | 8.60 | |
| EMC |  |
13.05 | 101.05 | 3.83 | |
| Sun |  |
5.09 | 64.32 | 2.42 | |
| Oracle |  |
13.01 | 43.31 | 7.32 |
If stocks look this beautiful, just imagine how beautiful your web analytics data, or twitters would look like when you beautified it with sparklines.
Categories
XSS in Facebook’s groups?
Can anyone verify this rumor?
I’m told that altering a group’s name is a possible way to do XSS.
There’s an interesting article on how to build a viral facebook application at Inside Facebook. Articles that frequently update the newsfeed and minifeed, and make use of the invite feature in the API become viral facebook apps.
For some sample facebook application, check out my source code.
I decided to benchmark the code that builds out the partitioned and non-partitioned tables.
The results are very perplexing.
| table-type | insert | select |
|---|---|---|
| non-partitioned | 34% | 1.02% |
| code-partitioned | 26.98% | 96.87% |
| mysql-partitioned | 38.89% | 2.03% |
Code-partitions are fast on the inserts.
MySQL Partitions are fast on the reads.
This seems to suggest a complicated MySQL master-slave set up where you just have code partitions on the Master and MySQL partitions on the slave. It’s probably not worth the effort setting up, so I’ll just go with the MySQL partitions and work on finding ways to make the MySQL code work faster.
What do you folks think?
If you upgrade to MySQL 5.1 (which is still in beta), you will love the performance boost you get over the partitioning that you’re probably doing on the scripting side because of what Yahoo told you. I think improving the “front-end” is great and all, but if you look at the recent benchmarks below run on MySQL 5.1, you’ll see that Yahoo cannot escape the reality of backend speed.
At this week’s Web 2.0 Expo, Yahoo is telling folks to make things work faster on the front end. It’s a great sound-byte, but stupid advice.
If you upgrade to MySQL 5.1 and use its built-in table partitioning, I’m betting that you’ll see a speed boost in selects of up 300%.
Are you ready to Benchmark? I’m assuming that you’ve done a PHP / MySQL install before.
Part I: Installation of MySQL 5.1
- Download the beta version of MySQL 5.1
- Back up your mysql database.
- DO NOT RUN mysql_upgrade. As of this blog posting, it does not work. You wil lock yourself out of your database and go through a painful rebuild process.
- Install MySQL 5.1 fresh as a new install. If you’re me and want to use partitioning this means: ./configure –prefix=/usr/local/mysql –with-ssl –with-partition ; make ; make install
- Restore the backed up mysql database.
- Get your database up and running again.
Part II: Get benchmarking scripts up and running
- I used PHP 5, and PHP Pear’s Benchmark package.
- Download the Partition Benchmarks scripts.
- 3 types of tables are benchmarked: partitioned by software (i.e. Yahoo’s way and how a lot of folks did it before MySQL 5.1), partitioned by MySQL, and not partitioned at all. The script is called build_tables.php . It works on the command line like this: php build_tables.php 10000 5, where 10000 is the number of total rows you’re expecting, and 5 is the number of table partitions.
- After the tables are built you can now test a select using the testDao.php script by typing: php testDao.php
The results I got on a 1 Ghz PowerPC G4 running Mac OS X 10.4.9 are interesting.
First I built a 5 partitioned tables spanning 10000 rows:
shell> php build_tables.php 10000 5
Then I ran the tests on the 3 partition types: software, mysql, and non-partitioned:
shell> php testDao.php
Elapsed time between Start and Test_Code_Partition: 0.059307 Elapsed time between Test_Code_Partition and DB_Partition: 0.005882 Elapsed time between DB_Partition and No_Partition: 0.003694 ------------------------------------------------------------------ marker time index ex time perct ------------------------------------------------------------------ Start 1176964205.32067900 - 0.00% ------------------------------------------------------------------ Test_Code_Partition 1176964205.37998600 0.059307 85.83% ------------------------------------------------------------------ DB_Partition 1176964205.38586800 0.005882 8.51% ------------------------------------------------------------------ No_Partition 1176964205.38956200 0.003694 5.35% ------------------------------------------------------------------ Stop 1176964205.38978100 0.000219 0.32% ------------------------------------------------------------------ total - 0.069102 100.00% ------------------------------------------------------------------
The non-partitioned set up ran the fastest — but that’s no surprise b/c the number of rows aren’t large enough to take advantage of partitioning.
Built-in Partitioning came in 2nd.
PHP partitioning, or software partitioning came a distant 3rd.
So what are you waiting for????
If you need that urgent speed boost in your database-driven web application, get MySQL 5.1 now.
Categories
Youtube Lies
Do a search for your favorite tag in youtube. If it’s Britney Spears, then youtube will tell you that they’ve got 19,400 plus videos on Britney. I got to the 1000th Britney Spear video by skipping all 999 of them on this search result page.
What happens when you try to go to the 1001st video?
You get the error below:
Guess what? Youtube’s not alone. Flickr does it too. Can anyone guess their limit?
My answer to this question is, “No.” You are not interacting with people. You are interacting with their simulacra…
Who did you hang out with the most this week? Honestly, it was my co-worker from India. I sat across from him and went over how the XML interface worked for shipping and receiving computer hardware.
Yet, the very people I look forward to hanging out with the most are the ones whose simulacra I am most acquainted with.
Shouldn’t I be hanging out with my co-worker who has more reality than the images that flit across my screen?
I’ve done so much on the Internet, that I explain life (the real) in terms of technology (the unreal). For a lot of techies, this is the case. Are you a techie and bothered by this?
Categories
A Real Life Truman Show: Justin.tv
If you liked The Truman Show, then you’ll like Justin.tv, a real life version of the movie.
If you could watch anyone’s life 24/7, whose life would it be?