All posts by Shawn

Tech Stuff, Toys

Google Is My Friend

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Yesterday, if someone asked me if I was friends with Google, I would have said, “Nah, we are just acquaintances… you know, “hi”, “bye” if we see each other at lunch or something.”

But today that all changed. Not only did Google send me a Christmas present (cool stuff too… 128MB USB drive, USB hub, wireless mouse, headphones with a mic, USB torch, and some other stuff), but it came in a package that clearly says, From your friends at Google.

Now that’s saying something… not only do I have *a* friend at Google, I have more than one. Damn I’m popular!

Weird Stuff

Paris Hilton and Matt Cutts In My Dreams

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I’ve been having bizarre dreams about people that I know who they are, but never met before. Last night I somehow got caught in the middle of Paris Hilton and some of her friends robbing a department store. Long story short is somehow I got sucked into being their getaway driver.

The night before I had a dream where I was at some SES show (which I’ve never actually been to one) and was talking to Matt Cutts and realized he was building a house directly next to mine and was somehow trying to convince me to install a backup data center for Google in my server room in the basement of the house. So I asked him, “Why don’t you put it in your house? You work for them.” and he replies, “Well electricity is expensive and you are going to have solar panels, so it would be free for you.”

If nothing else, Matt can unquestionably say that people dream about him now. 🙂

Server Admin

MySQL Memory Fragmentation

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Okay, I *thought* it wasn’t a problem (at the time), but it turns out, it just made it “less” of a problem.

After watching the server closely for a month or two I think I finally figured out what the hell is going on. mysqld is not really efficient with it’s memory (I finally figured it out with vmmap). To the point that I start getting 10,000+ different memory segments for mysqld after about 24 hours of use. On a server that has many gigs of unused/free memory (with MySQL only using about 200MB), that’s pretty sucky memory management if you ask me.

That explains why it gets slower and slower over time and also explains why pretty much removing the query cache (memory) made it less of a problem.

I opened a bug report with MySQL about it, so *hopefully* we can finally get it taken care of and I don’t have to restart the mysqld daemon every 24-48 hours.

Coding

Cross-Database JOIN With MySQL

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You ever wish you could have done something for years, only to realize one day you could have done it this whole time?

I have a couple tables that I was replicating across 3 or 4 MySQL databases because I didn’t think I could reference a table from database A while working with database B.

Today I accidentally tried to do a SELECT on a table from a database I wasn’t even working with and instead of getting an error, it worked. As long as the user you are connected to MySQL as has the proper privileges (duh), it works. You just prefix your table/column name with the database name.

For example:
[code=sql]SELECT database1.tablename.a_column,database2.another_table.another_column
FROM database1.tablename
LEFT JOIN database2.another_table ON(database1.tablename.some_id = database2.another_table.some_id)[/code]

You can do anything you can do with tables in the same database (INSERT SELECT, JOINS, sub-queries, etc.)

Wow, I’m an idiot… its probably been a feature since version 1.0 too. 🙂 Now if you could just do the same thing across different MySQL servers (something like ipaddress.database.table.field), that would be really handy.

Weird Stuff

Brass Knuckle Implants

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So apparently two readers of my blog got the same idea after reading this entry. How awesome would it be to get brass knuckle implants? And they are cheaper than breast implants, so it’s even better! Judging from some of their life decisions, these are obviously good women that would make good mommies.

Law

Elderly Drug Dealers

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Saw this on CNN today… apparently elderly people who are hard up for cash are selling their prescription medicine to addicts for quick cash.

Dottie, say it isn’t so!

Quote:
Dottie Neeley, 87, was fingerprinted, photographed and thrown in jail, imprisoned as much by the tubing from her oxygen tank as by the concrete and steel around her.

The woman — who spent two days in jail after her arrest last December — is among a growing number of Kentucky senior citizens charged in a crackdown on a crime authorities say is rampant in Appalachia: Elderly people are reselling their painkillers and other medications to addicts.

“When a person is on Social Security, drawing $500 a month, and they can sell their pain pills for $10 apiece, they’ll take half of them for themselves and sell the other half to pay their electric bills or buy groceries,” Floyd County jailer Roger Webb said.

//www.cnn.com/2005/LAW/12/12/elderly.dealers.ap/

Sports

Miami Dolphins

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I went to the game today and San Diego didn’t look so hot. They were beat (at home) by the Miami Dolphins (not exactly the best team). San Diego goes to Indianapolis next week to play the undefeated Colts next week in their home stadium. Joy. 🙂

Maybe loosing to the Dolphins will get them pissed off enough to kill the Colt’s dream of an undefeated season.

House Stuff

Color Rendering Of Front Elevation

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I have a color rendering of the front elevation of my house now (it’s required for the second phase of the design review by the HOA).

It was too big to fit in my scanner, so I pieced it together from two different scans. If you don’t like the line where the images were joined, too bad! 🙂

Notice the moat on the front (with a bridge to the front door).

Uncategorized

Making Money On A Bad Day

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Anyone can make money in the stock market when it’s a bull market and running up like crazy. The stock market is going to have good days and bad days… If you want to measure your (or your money managers’) success, don’t measure it based on what you made on a good day, instead check to see how little you lost on a bad day.

Those are my wise words of the day. hehe

Audio/Video

Apple’s “TiVo Killer”

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Look, I’m psychic (again)… “Hopefully that’s Front Row 2.0…” Funny 🙂

Quote:
“Apple’s Mac mini will be reborn as the digital hub centerpiece it was originally conceived to be, Think Secret sources have disclosed. The new Mac mini project, code-named Kaleidoscope, will feature an Intel processor and include both Front Row 2.0 and TiVo-like DVR functionality.”

Read the whole article over here.

Server Admin

What Google Analytics Is Missing

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Google Analytics lets you toggle between pie and bar chart, but it really seems logical to have a 3rd chart option that makes a line graph comparing the top 10 items from any report section. For example for web browsers you could see historically how the percentage of Firefox users goes up and Internet Explorer users goes down. This type of chart would be useful for virtually any existing report… Keyword Considerations, Browser Versions, Platform Versions, Referring Source, etc. WebTrends can generate multi-dimensional bar charts which yields the same results.

Basically it would be the “Data Over Time” chart that Google Analytics generates already, but for more than one item.

Here’s a couple examples to illustrate:

Travel, Weird Stuff

Wax Museum Of Drug Users

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A wax museum in Moscow, Russia is currently running an exhibition that highlights dangers of drug use.

This is what happens if you sniff glue, so don’t do it. 🙂

Drug addicts commonly get gangrene apparently… haha It seems that drug addicts also have crappy shoes. He probably got gangrene from walking around in sandals during a Russian winter.

You can find other disturbing funny images over here.

Uncategorized

Google and Apple

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Both Google and Apple stock are currently trading at their all-time highs. What’s even more impressive is they are both up 19% in the last 30 days. Not a bad gain for a month. Both stocks are well over 100% gain for the last year.

What do these two companies have in common? They both are innovators. Just when you think there is nothing else cool they could do, they do something amazing. Then all the competitors scramble to play catch up.

I own a decent amount of both companies, and I’m not going to be selling those shares anytime soon. In fact, I might buy more (even at their all time high). Although you could just not listen to me, and instead listen to the “experts” who were running to sell Apple 4 years ago…

Quote:
“Don’t buy Apple’s stock. And if you own it, sell it.”

If you would have invested $10,000 on the day he said that, it would be worth $86,675 today (roughly 4 years later), a 766% gain. I don’t know of many other stocks that have averaged an 85% compounded gain year after year for the last 4 years… do you?

It will be interesting to see if Google follows the same trend for 4 years after their IPO… After 15 months, they are averaging a 315% gain per year. 🙂 If they could sustain that for a total of 4 years, their stock price would be $25,212 per share (of course there would be some splits in there) 4 years after their 2004 IPO and not only make them the first trillion dollar company, they would be a 7.4 trillion dollar company. If any company could pull that off, it would be Google (although don’t bet it will be that quick), they certainly are going to be the first trillion dollar company at some point.

Sports

Dallas Cowboys Are Gay

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Dude… the Dallas Cowboys suck. Missed a 34 yard field goal that would have won the game. Instead it goes into overtime and they lose to the Denver Broncos. Which of course is really lame for any Charger’s fan.

The Dallas Cowboys are BASTARDS!

Sports

Terrell Owens Done For Year

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The arbitrator in the Terrell Owens saga ruled against Owens, forcing him to sit out the rest of the reason. The Eagles could trade him at this point, but they won’t… which means Owens gets to do nothing until March or so when they will put him on waivers.

He’s a prick, but he’s a damn good receiver. Since he isn’t making any money right now and can’t play NFL football until next year, maybe he would like to play some flag football for me. I’m willing to pitch in $1,000 to have him play on my team. 🙂

Science

Mixing Matter and Antimatter

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Some dudes at UC Riverside think they may have created molecules that meld matter with antimatter…

Allen Mills of the University of California, Riverside, and his colleagues say they have seen telltale signs of positronium molecules, made from two positronium atoms1.

Positronium is an other-worldly mimic of hydrogen. In a hydrogen atom, a negatively charged electron moves around a proton, which has a positive charge. The electrical force of attraction between the two subatomic particles holds them together.

In positronium, hydrogen’s proton is replaced by a positron, which is the antimatter partner of an electron. A positron has the same positive charge as a proton, but has the same mass as an electron, which is just 1/1,836 that of a proton. So positronium is an extremely light ‘atom’.

Not terribly useful at this point since it existed for a fraction of a second and then self-destructed. Still interesting nonetheless.

Sports

Chargers Beat Down Bills

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Uhm, it was a straight up ass-kicking this afternoon. The Chargers were up 35-10 at halftime and finished the game 48-10. Those are the good games. The ones that are over in the first quarter. 🙂 Charger’s kickoff coverage looked pretty crappy (Bills were pretty much starting on the 50 every possession), but other than that, everything looked good.

The only bad news is Antonio Gates hurt his foot… so hopefully he is better by next week.

House Stuff

I DON’T Have 3 Swimming Pools

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After I made this post about maybe having three pools (technically), I took my building/site plans to the San Diego Department of Planning and Land Use this afternoon to just ask them what they thought.

It turns out I’m exempt from the normal pool fence guidelines because my parcel is more than 3 acres. Not only that I found out that the lagoon and moat wouldn’t count as a pool because a pool is specifically defined as “a structure intended for swimming or recreational bathing”. Which is pretty stupid if you ask me, because you could make a 20′ deep “lagoon”, which a 1 year old child could still drown in… but you wouldn’t have to fence it, because it’s not DESIGNED for swimming.

Oh well… at least I don’t have to have dreams about this problem anymore.

Coding

Track AdSense Clicks With Google Analytics

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It would be cool if Google automatically tracked AdSense clicks into Google Analytics… But until they do, here’s a little bit of JavaScript code you can use to do it. You can then setup an AdSense click as a “goal” within the Analytics interface.

[code=javascript][/code]
This only works with Internet Explorer because of some limitations/bug with Mozilla. I’m too lazy to code a complicated workaround for other browsers (which would involve running JavaScript code whenever the mouse moves which seems really inefficient to me). Hopefully Mozilla will fix the bug (although it’s been pending for 2 1/2 years now).

Basically it will log an AdSense click as a pageview to a non-existent page (//www.digitalpoint.com/AdSenseClick in my case).

Update

I made a version of the code that will work with AdSense and/or Yahoo Publisher Network. You can find it over here.

Tech Stuff, Toys

My Computer Is Here!

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Yay! My new computer is here (finally) after about a month of waiting. I’ve had the 30″ monitor that goes with it for more than two weeks, so now I can actually USE it for the first time.

Thankfully Apple has a migration utility built in that will just move all my stuff (users, applications, home folder, etc.) to the new machine, so that’s a one-click task. 🙂

Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee………..

Update

Man, there is really something to be said about having a resolution of 2,560 x 1,600. You sure can fit a lot of stuff on the screen (my old monitor was a 22″ LCD).

Server Admin

Google Broke Up With Me

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It seems Google has broken up with me. Not only did they not do it in person, they didn’t call or even bother to email me to let me know they have moved on from our relationship. This blog (not all of digitalpoint.com, only this blog) has some sort of weird partial ban from the Google index. I noticed it after seeing this thread, but was reminded about it again from this thread in my forum.

Googlebot (not Mediapartners) still spiders this blog at the rate of 400-500 pages per day, but the spidered pages never make it to the Google search index. It makes me wonder if Google is looking for something specific to be “fixed” and not finding whatever it’s looking for.

Here’s what makes me think it has a partial ban…

I only have supplemental results in the Google index:
//www.google.com/search?q=inurl:www.shawnhogan.com/

The supplemental results show snippets from January 23, 2005 and before, yet sometimes the cache shows more up to date content (sometimes not though):
//www.google.com/search?q=cache:www.shawnhogan.com/

No pages from 2005 are in the index (yet they are spidered daily).

This page has no PageRank (last I looked it was PageRank 6 in December, 2004).

I’ve contacted Google a couple times about it… usually I don’t get a response, but a couple times I got a generic response telling me to read their webmaster guidelines (which I have). Since they tell me to read their guidelines, I’m taking that as some sort of affirmation that I am banned. I know it wouldn’t be good for Google as a whole to give specific reasons about why a site/blog is banned, but in my case I honestly don’t have the faintest idea of what it could possibly be. So it makes whatever “it” is impossible to correct. The best guess I can come up with (which obviously isn’t the case, I’m just making a point that I have no idea) is that I switched from Blogger to WordPress for this blog.

Maybe I’m just getting old. Google has found someone prettier that they like better now that I turned 30. 🙁

Oh well… at least I have the fond memories of when we were in love and frolicked through the fields. 🙂

Update

It looks like my mom might have the same problem:
//www.google.com/search?q=inurl:www.digitalpoint.com/~robinq/

Maybe it’s anything within digitalpoint.com with a tilde in the URL {shrug}

Coding

Roadway Speeds In Google Local/Maps

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I really don’t get why Google hasn’t added live traffic data for major cities yet. The information is out there and freely available for anyone to use. It only took me a few minutes of digging around to realtime traffic data for all of California, so why can’t Google find/use it? For example, Caltrans breaks down the data by district… San Diego is included in District 11:

Labels (descriptions, freeway, direction, etc.)
Current Highway Speeds (cross referenced by ID to the Labels file)

Would be nice if they gave you the longitude/latitude of each location, but hey… assign some intern to look them all up. 🙂

So let’s see if I could stick the data on Google Maps myself (via API)… I’m fairly lazy, and would rather programatically do something that would otherwise require manual labor (looking up longitude/latitude for a zillion points). Thankfully, I remembered that I looked at Yahoo Maps Beta a few weeks ago, and saw it had live traffic data that was overlayed on the map graphic (which means they probably are making a separate HTTP request for just the traffic data). Sure enough… a packet sniffer reveals this URL for getting traffic data for San Diego:

XML Feed

Okay, that’s not bad, but doesn’t include longitude and latitude. Instead it appears the speed data is relative to the current view of the Yahoo map you are looking at. Hmmm… rather than decode their little proprietary system, let’s see what sfmt is. With some luck, it’s “speed format”. Sure enough… change it to sfmt=0, and you get longitude/latitude of the points! 🙂 So now we have a nice XML feed with longitude and latitude:

XML Feed

Once you have that data, it takes 2 minutes to make a Google Map with the data…

Traffic In San Diego

Of course it doesn’t really answer my original question… why doesn’t Google already have this data on Google Local/Maps? If I worked at Google, this would be my 2nd “20% time project” (this was the other one).

House Stuff

I Have 3 Swimming Pools

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The pool fence for my house has been the only part about it I don’t like. It’s stressing me out so much that I’ve been dreaming about it. I don’t like it because it ends up cutting my backyard in half and dividing it (there’s also some other weirdness that I won’t bother getting into).

So anyway… I’ve been trying to figure out a good excuse to wrap the fence completely around the property just so I don’t have to see it in my backyard, and today I just realized something that complicates it even more. Technically I have three pools. The actual pool, the lagoon in the middle of the golf course and the moat in the front of the house are going to be considered pools as far as the county is concerned (so they are going to have to be fenced in so the neighbor’s kids don’t wander over and drown themselves). So now I may not have any choice but to fence the whole property…

At least I won’t have a fence splitting my backyard.