two flights,…

three boarding passes, two bus rides, three passport stamps, two taxi rides, a shower, a flooded bathroom, a shave and one thoroughly authentically taiwanese (hah! seriously) lunch later, I have discovered that the two people I have come here to train do not yet speak sufficient english for me to explain the software development concepts I have come here to teach.

Sigh.

The good news: Other people can translate.

Now, to dick around on the web and later go shopping for a Chairman Mao poster for my dad.

Update: With some translating help, we can ascertain that they do in fact have sufficient skills to understand the concepts I am trying to teach. Hoorah.

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Freaking Out?

Not yet. But I’m officially leaving the country in less than 48 hours. Damn. Remind me, the next time I travel outside the US for the first time, to pick a location where I at least know a little of the local language.

Posted in random | 1 Comment

Trying to get to pianosa?

ssh meat.net no longer works, as you might have noticed, because I moved my blog to another machine. ssh catch22.org works for now, but you should probably use ssh pianosa.catch22.org.

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Oh look

I’ve moved to wordpress. This means all the permalinks changed. oh well. Welcome to the new world.

Posted in meta | 2 Comments

vector and ostream

Dave Dribin has a puzzler about being able to cout << vector << endl; at his web page. As I’ve been reading about this kind of stuff recently, I have a sample explanation and also, for fun, an explanation of why it’s impossible to do this correctly after the jump…
Continue reading

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Normalizing the Scoreboard, Part I

Right now, the scoreboard is simply a table: name, employer, start, end, reasonleft. The latter two can be null. the first three shouldn’t be.

On top of that, there’s a huge ass view definition that creates all the accessory fields. Score, tenure, milliroma, etc.

Now, the view is ok if a little unwieldy. But the input data kinda sucks. However, normalizing it would take four steps, and the last two suck.

The first is easy. Person table:
personid, first, last

new jobs table:
personid, employer, start, end, reason

The second is also easy and obvious:
new employer table:
companyid, companyname

new jobs table:
personid, companyid, start, end, reason

However.

This is where normalization gets complicated. rlh got laid off from Sun. However, she initially took a job for Cobalt. Change the Sun companyname to Sun/Cobalt? Nope, fluffy never worked for Cobalt.

Second problem:

spruance quit CCSO. He now works for CITES. jrr started working for CSO, then CCSO, now CITES. All the same org, name keeps changing.

Solution:

company table:
company_id, name, acquired_by_id, acquired_date

company_names table:
company_id, name, start_date, end_date

so now:

person->job->company->company_names
and company has to self-join to find acquirers.

This still doesn’t cover people like heather whose job was sold to another company that stephen works for but chris still works for the original. Sigh.

Posted in tech | 2 Comments

Greylisting

The mailserver where @meat.net gets mail recently implemented greylisting. As a result, my spamload has dropped dramatically. How much? So much that one of the other people who still uses his @meat.net address contacted me via IM today to wonder where his stripper spam had gone.

I ran some stats:

Date Local spam All spam
Jan 23 289 291
Jan 24 422 426
Jan 25 391 399
Jan 26 362 393
Jan 27 389 443
Jan 28 433 499
Jan 29 571 649
Jan 30 335 367
Jan 31 393 453
Feb 1 393 444
Feb 2 355 413
Feb 3 336 397
Feb 4 357 413
Feb 5 299 353
Feb 6 15 72
Feb 7 25 65

“all spam” includes spam that is forwarded from other accounts, and is this immune to greylisting… damnit. So there you have it. From 357 spam on friday (the last full day without greylisting) to 15 spam on sunday (the first full day with greylisting). Not bad. Too bad about that other junk coming in from other addresses.

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travel

It’s not quite one night in Bangkok, but I’ll be spending two weeks in Shenzhen, China in March.

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Dean For DNC

I’ve once again failed to endorse Howard Dean in timely fashion. However, I’m glad to see Howard is probably going to be DNC chair. I think Paul Waldmann basically sums it up for me:

The Democrats’ problem isn’t that Americans think they’re too liberal. The Democrats’ problem is that Americans think they don’t have the courage of their convictions, that they don’t stand for anything. Whatever else you think about him, you can say this about Howard Dean: he stands for something.

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Elections

Dear Iraq:

Congratulations on your elections. I hope they work out better over there than they have here.

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