Disclosure: I'm a BP shareholder.
I've been watching the Oil leak
since it started and I'm alarmed at what has happened; not because
I'm a shareholder but because of the damage caused. BP needs to pay
for the cleanup, I know this and it has cost me money in lost
capital, BP knows this and so does half the world so why are we
seeing ever increasing British bashing from the United States over
this event.
For instance: Barack Obama is on record for using the old name of BP, “British Petroleum”, why would he do this? I'm sure his advisers know when the name changed and the implications of using it even if he doesn't. Fox news are quick to say things like “BP, formerly known as British Petroleum”, why are they saying that? BP is BP and has not been calling itself British Petroleum for some time. The level of bashing is getting out of hand and the papers in the UK are seeing this as an outright attack on the British. The news this morning was about three things, the World Cup, David Cameroon in Afghanistan and the US bashing the British over the oil slick.
The facts are that BP is a multinational company and the US own a large chunk of it:
The rig that exploded was owned by an American company and it was American people operating it. Bashing the British achieves nothing and will only harm relationships between the two states. The UK and the US have been staunch allies for years and we've spent many more billions together than what it will take to clean up the mess in the Gulf of Mexico. My fear is that some cretins will be allowed to deflate what is a solid relationship that will take much longer to repair that the oil slick. John Napier, CEO of Royal and Sun Alliance has put it much better than me in the following letter.
Barack Obama and the US public are
right to ask BP to withhold the dividend until we know the extent of
what has been done. I know the implications of this for the pension
funds and other investors but hey, we bought BP shares, it's a bit
late to complain now. We took the risk so we'll pay the price, that's
how this stuff works and Barack Obama has a duty to
make sure that BP can pay for the damage. However, the anti British
rhetoric needs to stop because it achieves nothing and will only damage what is a fantastic relationship.
Oil sticks but grudges and ill feeling sticks much longer and will cost us all far more than the billions it takes to clean up the Gulf.
Darren Foreman was kind enough to point out an article detailing Gordon Browns Legacy on the BBC today:
On a serious note Gordon was the Chancellor of the exchequer that allowed Tony Blair to basically spend spend spend his way to popularity. He sold the gold reserves for a quarter of what they where worth a few years later. But, to top it all off he has managed to increase total tax as a percentage of GDP from 39.3% in 1997 to 42.4% in 2006, going to a higher level than Germany. So the nation is now within 8% of actually working for the governement. How sad is that. I will soon be an employee of the state who happens to go to work for less than 50% of what I actually earn. No matter how you butter it, Big (read Natzi or Communist) government is just around the corner. When a government needs 42% of it's national output to fund what it does the nation being run by that governement is in serious trouble.
I was reading John Stuart Mill's on Liberty and came across the following passage:
There is a class of persons (happily not quite so numerous as formerly) who think it enough if a person assents undoubtingly to what they think true, though he has no knowledge whatever of the grounds of the opinion, and could not make a tenable defense of it against the most superficial objections. Such persons, if they can once get their creed taught from authority, naturally think that no good, and some harm, comes of its being allowed to be questioned. Where their influence prevails, they make it nearly impossible for the received opinion to be rejected wisely and considerately, though it may still be rejected rashly and ignorantly; for to shut out discussion entirely is seldom possible, and when it once gets in, beliefs not grounded on conviction are apt to give way before the slightest semblance of an argument. Waving, however, this possibility—assuming that the true opinion abides in the mind, but abides as a prejudice, a belief independent of, and proof against, argument—this is not the way in which truth ought to be held by a rational being. This is not knowing the truth. Truth, thus held, is but one superstition the more, accidentally clinging to the words which enunciate a truth.
Have you ever heard Perl and PHP fans get stuck into each other, or Java vs C++, or Vim vs Emacs (there can be only one). It's crazy! Most of the noise is created by people who have no real understanding of the technology they are arguing against and some of them don't even understand the tech they are arguing for. Wikipedia has an entry on Editor Wars.
Basically Mr Mill is stating that if you are arguing against something with little real understanding about what that something is then your just another superstitious idiot.
I am rather please with this: I took the Political Compass Test and I got the following result.
If you are wondering what the above means the following diagram will give you an idea of where I stand compared to some famous characters.
As an owner of shares in both Merck and Glaxosmithkline the
following is very depressing reading.
Patent Nonsense (Henry Mintzberg)
Surely any rewards system should be encouraging cures to diseases not relief of symptoms. The appendix of the article is very depressing, are they truly this corrupt. I wonder if any of these people actually go to prison for their actions. The Limited Company ancourages people to take risks they would not otherwise take in case of financial failure etc but surely when they start blurring the lines, especially when its peoples lives on the line, there must be some rule of law.
In 2008 Merck, Glaxo and Pfizer had a combined turnover of over $100 billion, a fine of a few million is like shooting an elephant with a pop gun, mild irritation but little cause for concern. The elephant continues on its merry way and soon forgets the sting on its ass. If you check out the first page of first page of Pfizers 2008 Annual Summary, they have a cute kid on the first page but do they give a damn about that kid or any other or is shareholder value the main driver. I know the company answer would of course being wrapped up in cotton wool and they would wax lyrical about how important people are but then why all the apparent corruption, the government fines. They cannot wash their hands of setting the wrong rewards system or crap managment, and I don’t mean crap management ie they got caught.
One of the reasons I bought shares in Merck was the story in Tom Collins Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies
about them helping with River Blindness, that’s a company I want to own a stake in. Don’t get me wrong their financials are also a factor but every company has a social responsibility and Merck’s actions in the River Blindess case was good evidence to me that they take that responsibility seriously.
Pfizer talk about putting trust back on the agenda in their 2008 report but then they all talk about Corporate Responsibility but is this just lip service ie we were naughty and we are cleaning up shop but really nothing changes. Do any of them realise that Corporate Responsibility is missing a word, “Social”, it should be Corporate Social Responsibility. I personally hope that the big pharmaceuticals stop talking about Corporate Responsibility and start living it. There are few other companies that can have a bigger impact on our total well being than the big pharmaceuticals and if we let them get away with this sort of nonsense we will continues to have countries with an average lifespan under 50 for years to come.
Glaxo 2008 Annual Report
Merck 2008 Annual Report
If you get the following error:
An error occurred during provisioning.
Cannot connect to keystore.
JKS
You need to check what version of java you're running. I'm running Debian and hat gij installed and this is no use for eclipse. I tried the following:
apt-get install openjdk-6-jdk
update-java-alternatives -s java-6-openjdk
but this failed miserably. I ended up downloading and installing a new java bundle from Sun and removing every debian package related to Java.
Optimization appeals to us geeks. I am sure there is some psychological reason for this, If you happen to know what the reason is then drop me a line. I promise not about to witter on about The Fallacy of Premature Optimization either. Optimization is important but far too many of us get caught up in pointless arguments about performance. The following article deals specifically with the faster webserver, in particular serving static pages. There's a ton of articles on Apache vs Apache2 vs lightttpd vs thttpd vs mongrel vs nginx vs litespeed vs whatever-httpd. The vast majority of these articles cater for people not adverse to a bit of mental wanking. These people have a perceived problem ie performance. They want to get an extra few percent from their machine. Off they go on their merry way Googling for a performance comparison chart that will show them some stats. These people are the unadulterated speed freaks of the computing world. A lot of them understand their... affliction, but quite a few don't.
In some organizations performance is critical ie Yahoo, Google, Wikipedia, livejournal, BBC, Dozens of Universities, Any bank, etc.... I am missing hundreds here. For some it's competitive advantage ie Google. For these organizations performance is talked about all the time. It's brought up in meetings, at the bar, over lunch, out jogging and in their dreams. It has a direct affect on the bottom line.
Here are some idle thoughts that may help the more pragmatic developers out there.
A fairly common question asked is. "What hardware do we need to sustain "N" requests per second"? Assume a static page is 25KB. If we also assume that we have an eCPM of $1.00 (and this is a small amount) we can put "N" in perspective......
- 1 rps == 2,592,000 rpm == $2592 per month
- 10 rps == 25,920,000 rpm == $25,920 pm
- 50 == 129,600,000 rpm == $129,600 pm
- 100 == 259,200,000 rpm == $259,200 pm
- 500 == 1,296,000,000 rpm == $1.296 million per month
500 pages per second is nearly 1.3 Billion Pages per month. This is an awful lot of pages and $1.3 million dollars is certainly an awful lot of money. On hearing 500rps as a requirement a common reaction is to jump too Google and start looking for a suitable configuration. It would be far simpler and more enlightening to do a few calculations and a small test to see where we stand.
For instance:
500 * 25KB requests per second == (500*25*1024*8)b/ps == 104Mb/s
This is a serious requirement. A 100Mb dedicated line is not cheap and would be likely to set you back several thousand dollars per month but hey we are making $1.3 Million per month, who cares!
- Dell 2850
- RAM: 2GB
- model name: Intel(R) Xeon(TM) CPU 2.80GHz
- cpu family: 15
- 6 10K SCSI disks (2 mirrored, 4 in raid 10)
So, is it possible for this single machine to serve 500rps? Yes! It could, if we had enough bandwidth! The following results were taken from a base install Debian machine. I did not tune apache2 in any way whatsoever. This was done on a 100Mb Ethernet network.
debian:~# ab -n 10000 -c 50 http://farty.com/
This is ApacheBench, Version 2.0.40-dev
Completed 1000 requests
.........
Finished 10000 requests
Server Software: Apache/2.2.3
Server Hostname: farty.com
Server Port: 80
Document Path: /
Document Length: 25000 bytes
Concurrency Level: 50
Time taken for tests: 21.877168 seconds
Complete requests: 10000
Failed requests: 0
Total transferred: 252929056 bytes
HTML transferred: 250243696 bytes
Requests per second: 457.10 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 109.386 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 2.188 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate: 11290.35 [Kbytes/sec] received
I know ab is not the best tool to be running benchmarks and that requesting a single file is different thatn random files etc but I am not trying to be precise.
So, a cheap machine can saturate a 100Mbit line. Yes, Easily. At no point during the tests did the server go over 0.5 load. I also ran a more long running test and the results were the same. It hardly broke a sweat and this is running an unmodified, untweaked pre-forking Apache2 server.
So whats the conclusion, is benchmarking Apache2 vs lighttpd pointless? I would say that 99% of the time, yes. If you ever have the problem were you need to be serving the amount of pages where the difference between Apache2 and lighttpd makes a big difference then you are likely able to afford more hardware or staff but I wouldn't be choosing lighttpd over Apache2 unless I really have to.
Heres a quote from a 20000 concurrent connection apache setup
So the next time you hear someone discussing how fast their httpd server is at serving static content ask yourself if they are just jerking off or do they know what they are talking about.... HEAnet's National Mirror Server for Ireland. Currently mirroring over 50,000 projects ..... It regularly sustains over 20,000 concurrent connections on a single Apache instance and has served as many as 27,000 with about 3.5 Terabytes of content per day. The front-end system is a Dell 2650, with 2 2.4 Ghz Xeon processors, 12Gb of memory and the usual 2 system disks and 15k RPM SCSI disks, running Debian GNU/Linux and Apache 2.x.
My definition of Mental Wanking reads like a medical affliction.
- Main Entry:
- men·tal mas·tur·ba·tion
For those looking for individual definitions of the word I took the following from Websters.
- Main Entry:
- mas·tur·ba·tion
And the following entry for Mental:
- Main Entry:
- 1men·tal
I have no idea when or why this started happening for me but I started getting Unrouteable address appearing for any external address.
I'm a huge fan of Debian but there are some things that really piss me off. One is the way they have completely screwed the exim4 configuration. Exim4, if you are not an administrator or mail guru is not the simplest thing in the world to configure, it's config file is fairly involved and you can do anything in it. Add DEBCONF variables to this and you have a complete nightmare configuration.I spent two days tracking this error down to the following:
DCconfig_internet=1
That was all I had to add to /etc/exim4/exim4.conf.template
Why this changed I have no idea. The setting I am using in /etc/exim4/update-exim4.conf.conf is
dc_eximconfig_configtype='internet'
I really cannot make head nor tail out of this at all. I sometimes wish I had started learning Postfix instead of Exim but part of me thinks that it's not Exim but rather the way it has been packaged up thats compicated.
