Category: rubyonrails

Twitter Paranoia

My New Avatar

OK, aliens are invading my twitter feed

Or, after reaching 5000 tweets ranging in topics from Eurovision’07 to Neil Finn Revival Meetings, my postings are swallowed by the great twitter engine. Does Ms Gale have a restraining order out on me? More likely Paul Foster’s mobile phone cost centre owner in the UK.

Maybe it’s the lolcat speak that confuses some, forcing them to reach out to the Urban Dictionary for translation.

Is it the weird 3rd circle of hell that is Ruby on Rail’s ActiveRecord outer and inner joins with time’d out queries so as to unburden the backend? Or are telcos putting limits on the twitter +44 mobile SMS gateway in Australia?

Who knows. It’s the Bermuda Triangle of Twitter. Conspiracy Theories abound.

(Thanks to @cait for the inspiration on this post)

Moore’s Law and Compounding Interest

In deploying the small Ruby on Rails application on an old Dell 8200 running Debian-sarge, I decided to see how the application would perform under load.

Apache comes with a great little application meekly called ab. ab is a small command-line tool that slashdots your web application, and gives you a nice measure (in pages per second, amongst other things).

Measuring the performance of the Dell 8200 using the Mongrel web server vs. my Mac Book Pro running the same versions of all the stack of software (except, obviously the OS) – the speed difference is 16x. Now as these machines are about 4 years apart from each other in the Intel-world, 16 is exactly what you would expect: the performance doubles every year. Very wise prediction from 1970 that continues to drive this whole crazy industry.

What has this to do with Compounding interest? Exactly 22 years ago one of my kind, late great-uncles started a bank account for be with the grand deposit of AU$200. Which I’ve subsequently forgotten about.

Mum found the Deposit booklet somewhere, and sent it to me. Today that account is worth about $640. This is a compounded interest rate of 5.4%. In another 22 years it will be worth AU$2,023 at the same rate.

Now, if it had compounded at Moore’s Law over the last 22 years: the amount in the bank would be a grand $6,276,211,921,800.

Now I know why I work in IT, not finance!