work as if you live in the early days of a better nation
Yep, I’m 14000 days old today (how old are you?). It’s supposedly the length of a biblical generation.
Many people suggested ways I should celebrate (most involving ingestion of various ethanol-based solutions). It turns out that a company I’m working with is taking me out to the Leafs game tonight. There may well be ethanol.
Flying back from Denmark over the UK the other day, I hoped to see at least some wind farms. In a highly unscientific study, I peered out the window from approximately Nottingham to Iona. You know how many wind turbines I saw? Four. You know how many were working? One. Hardly something that’s taking over the landscape.
And strangely, the one I saw working, at Chelker Reservoir, I used to drive past quite often on my way to Skipton. I’ve never seen more than a couple of those old WEG 300kW two-bladers running. I was frankly amazed there were any of them left. Even from 10000m, you could make out the herky-jerky rotation.
When I was testing BlackBerry typed-alike words (dactonyms?) I found that sqlite was averaging about 1 insert per second. This is by no means good.
It turns out that, under Perl, sqlite auto-commits after every write. This slows things down terribly. Here’s how to fix this:
When opening the database handle, turn AutoCommit off:
my $dbh =
DBI->connect( “dbi:SQLite:bberry2.sqlite”, “”, “”, { AutoCommit => 0 } )
or die “$!”;
Then, only commit occasionally — say every thousand writes:
while ( … ) {
…$id++;
$dbh->commit unless ( $id % 1000 );
…}
$dbh->commit;
It works out about 1000 times quicker this way.
Yup, 13000 days old today, according to my mildly-amazing 1000 Day Birthday Calculator. I don’t know where I got the idea for this, but it was back in my undergrad days, certainly before I hit my 10000s.
As there aren’t any birthday cards for these celebrations yet, I’ll just have to make my own. Happy Birthday To Me! Just don’t call me leooo …
Jings, 12418 days old today.
Through the wonders of gift exchange (where geographically diverse families agree to spend an amount on each other, then buy something for that value; saves mailing stuff) I got a used but gorgeous Zero 2000 camera, all teak and brass, from my sister and my parents. I took this with it:
(image links to a larger version at photosig.com).
And now, to a birthday breakfast …