Friday, April 16, 2010

Robin Hood, Robin Hood, Riding Through the Glen...

I so can't wait to see this movie:



And, is it my imagination or does Russell Crowe get more gorgeous as each day passes or what?

23 comments:

  1. Ooo, that looks good! The movie does too. ;p

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  2. Yeah, but the old Radio guy looks better.

    Doesn't he?

    ;-)

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  3. It's definitely not your imagination, Fay :-)

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  4. Testing...to see if the Blooger Grue is still eating anything I post.

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  5. Ah, I see...it'll wait until I post a couple paragraphs before disappearing it like some Argentine hit squad.

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  6. Ari, I've encountered a couple different kinds of grue:

    - I've posted stuff, had it disappear, and then re-appear many hours later. What happened is that Blogger claimed my post was successful, but then subsequently it (and other posts) were "rolled back" and it was as if they never happened. And then they were restored.

    I took this to be a failover of a Google "BigTable" row from one Google File System (GFS) cell to another, possibly at a different datacenter. From my reading of the papers, and some Google developer blog posts, these things happen. I may not have all the technical details completely right, but I think the general sense applies.

    Since you are familiar with SQL, I'm guessing you know what ACID stands for - the Google data back end isn't really ACID; it allows for (hopefully temporary) inconsistency. The tradeoff is that it can scale many orders of magnitude greater than a traditional database.

    The other kind of grue I've run into is when Blogger rejects your post with a blathering screen of pseudo-apology and a big fat error code. If you get this, and you didn't save your comment, you're screwed, you lost the post.

    I have once gotten this repeatedly and consistently for a post - which I'd fortunately saved - I had to break the post up into two pieces, which then both went OK.

    Weird.

    In any case, if/when I get around to writing a comment system, I'll try to include "autosave" on comment posts, which other Google apps (like GMail, and Docs) have.

    BTW it would be awesome if you helped me with the schema design for the comment posting system. I know you can...

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  7. Lewy...I'll get back to you on helping out, right now two-three things come to mind: (1) It's been almost 5 years since I've had to deal with curent reditions of Oracle and SQL, although it appears I may get a very fast (and painful) refresher course soon, because I've suggested my old office request the "ownerhsip" of my databases there be transferred back to them from the Project & Programs Management office I assigned it to upon retirement....due to the skills of a contract employee there at the time, now gone. And (2) I am buried at present with(re-) analyzing equipment utilization data as result of some really outragous conclusions made by the office who did this, with my support, prior to my retirement...e.g., my old office will be blamed for the errors or the facts, which ever proves true....it is critical over the next week to 10 days to get a handle on it....and it is about as much fun as a root canal to do. And (3) the mess in #2 is why I requested they execute #1 and let me quietly monitor it in timely fashion (via FTP download, not live access...security issues with the latter becaue I am not "official" anymore)....but it's harder to do now since IT work is now contraced to an NGO...e.g., Lockheed-Martin in a cluster bunch that is hard to fathom entirely. Before I worked directly with local and global server administrators.

    Okay, now that I have made my patently self serving excuses, I will help where and when I can for the immediate future...more later maybe. You know how to reach me, as does Lady Red and Florrie.

    The reason I was invovled with any of the above at all is that I was a "odd duck" in the "Fed" environment, private sector experience, mostly with construciton, engineering and equipment, with skilled trades thrown in for kicks, plus familiarity with GAAP and Fiscal Law, plus self taught in most of the computing discipines...out of sheer necessity or sheer terror, take your pick. My knowledge remains focused upon applications more than server management and OS issues.

    My philosophy for any application use is that it neds to be "intuitive"...e.g., that use of it should be teachable in an hour for most generic uses. I can tell from what you've done so far that we share that ideal...but sometimes easy to "think:" and hard to execute.

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  8. Ah hah! I copied the above long arsed comment to Metapad, as back up, before posting in case the grue ate it...the Grue was watching and it posted fine.

    The Grue is nothing if not tricky!! :-))

    Psst: you are not paranoid if people or things really are out to getcha!

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  9. "Ceiling Grue" is always watching you.

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  10. Dang!! Grue got me again...on a one sentence comment, no less.

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  11. ...and sur' nuff, soon as I mention it, it relents! Dang thing acts like an ex-wife.

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  12. ...and sur' nuff, soon as I mention it, it relents! Dang thing acts like an ex-wife.

    LMAO!

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  13. plus self taught in most of the computing discipines...out of sheer necessity or sheer terror, take your pick.

    Excellent. While I have a couple of EE degrees, most of my computer stuff is self taught as well.

    Necessity and Terror are excellent tutors. Would look nice in a Latin motto for a University.

    The Google datastore isn't a full relational model; it's something new. New is always fun. That said, SQL knowledge will help (and it's been 10 years since I've done any).

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  14. An avatar for that "University" we gonna create?

    img:"http://i31.photobucket.com/albums/c373/opher1/dumb-dumber.jpg"

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  15. Lewy:

    Necesse quod Formidonis es praeclarus doceo.

    Glad to help.

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  16. Matt - awesome. Now we just attribute it to Cicero or Marcus Aurelius.

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  17. Shouldn't that be Loulius X1V?

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  18. More like Ewylay AttorzKay ;*P

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