Actual snippets of a conversation I recently endured between my husband and our friend.
Also known as "Geek Talk"

The multi-threaded design?

Yeah it is a bad design. Back in the day, it was a great design. … For the developer, the thread per request model is tons simpler. You’d say, “I’m gonna go fetch a file” and it was very sequential.

The big advantage to an event-driven database driver is that what if for this web request you have to query two databases… It lowers your latency, so you can process your request more quickly and make it more scalable.

There’s obviously a cost for every thread you have. But obviously there’s the latency and the time.

But the non-blocking approach is more scalable.

Do you have one disk and you’re constrained by this seek time? Or do you have this array … ?

How much more scalability are you gonna get? We need to throw these application servers out the window.

But the client application developers, who are making the client side of the application, don’t have to…

If you’re talking about a client that’s sending a web request, then yeah, they don’t change anything.

How much performance difference is there doing essentially the same task?

The nice thing is that is should be fairly easy to do comparisions because I just have to write really simple Java applications… It’s like comparing the traditional model with the event-driven model.

I wonder with how many layers there are, is there any constraint with the type of performance you’re getting.

They’re not doing a lot of disk I/O if you’re doing repetitive queries. When the bottleneck disappears, how much performance can be gained? This model can get much more scalable web servers.

They have a web server that’s able to scale about four times better than Apache because it’s using this different approach. It can handle 15,000 web requests and keep the pipe as full as it can. They can fully saturate both gigabit cards.

If I have time, I’m gonna use the Linux-specific calls and build a framework around that.

It might be worthwhile to get an operating system with good support for asynchronous file transfer.

I’d be really interested to see how Oracle works under the hood because it does tons of asynchronous I/O stuff. How can there be 16,000 requests? [What the heck?]

How in the heck is it scheduling everything to fetch some stuff asynchronously and other stuff not asynchronously? It must have a pool that handles it all.

You get signal call back, so it basically gets interrupted.

Put it in the queue to get called.

If you want a whole bunch of different file channels, you can do that.

You’re calling Java from C?

Yeah. Java calls C and then C calls Java back.

“Here’s an early look at what the API is probably going to look like.”

That's interesting.

Strange Locations From My Youth #1

Strange Place #1

When I was seven years old, my family moved to Baden bei Wien (near Vienna), Austria for six months as part of a travel study program. My parents gave my older brother and me a pretty long leash. I remember walking into town with Mike to go to the Rosarium (a beautiful park with rose gardens and a lake), up into the mountains where two old castles were crumbling into ruins and all around the walking part of town.

But the strangest place I was drawn to in Baden was the old cemetery that was nestled at the foot of the mountains. I remember asking a man who was part of our group if he would go walk there with me one day. He kindly agreed, and I can now only imagine what surprise he must have felt at such an odd request.

The cemetery was unlike anything you’d find in my childhood town of Orem, Utah. The tombstones demanded respect at first glance. Their age and history humbled me and made me see my own life in a larger perspective. The names fascinated me the most, since they were so unlike what I was familiar with in the United States.

Postscript: I just found this website that really "took me back." Please go look at the gallery of pictures of this beautiful little corner of the world: http://www.baden-bei-wien.at/english.htm

Silly Things I Have Done :: Installment #1

Prologue: Okay, most of the “silly things” I will admit to will probably involve my friend Alysa. Alysa and I had all kinds of fun times together when we were in high school and college. We went through a lot together and stuck together through thick and thin. Life was so intense for us that we did crazy, fun, quirky things whenever we could. That helped us survive everything else.

One of my absolute favorite memories involved an old, discarded motherboard that Alysa had. We decided to have a little fun at the expense of the male population. We noticed that many men have this perception that women and technology can’t really mesh. Alysa’s dad happened to be an engineer and we both hung out with the computer geek crowd in high school. We both knew more about programming, electronics and geekdom than your average person. (We’ll cover our obsession with prime numbers and pi in a future installment.)

So we decided to take the motherboard to our university one day. We went to the computer science building at Brigham Young University and walked to a very busy hallway. Here we began our experiment. It went like this. We lifted up the motherboard to around eye level and then both got affixed really confused, dazed looks on our faces. We stood still and wondered how long we would have to wait.

Within seconds our first “victim” arrived.

“Hello, ladies. Do you need some help with that?” he asked in a very superior, helpful voice.

“Yeah, we like don’t get it and stuff,” we said dumbly. “Like, what’s this thing here?”

“Oh, that’s a capacitor,” he told us incorrectly.

“Oh!” we exclaimed with looks of relief on our faces. “Thank you!” We watched him walk away, with looks of admiring adoration on our faces until he left.

“That’s not a capacitor!” Alysa said disgustedly, as soon as he was out of sight. She then proceeded to explain his mistake to me. We repeated the process and before a few minutes had passed, we were actually surrounded by a crowd of young men, eager to help explain things to us.

After a little bit of effort, we got rid of the eager crowd (women + motherboard = sexy!) and decided to make our experiment mobile. We thought we’d see how people felt about us treating a motherboard with reckless abandon, so we stepped out into the rainstorm outside and walked along, looking at the motherboard as it got soaked and talking animatedly to each other as if there was no trouble.

At first, people just glanced at us with furrowed brows. Eventually, somebody was shocked enough to speak. He had almost walked past us when he noticed what we were holding. He stopped dead in his tracks and said, “Excuse me, ladies.” He was excessively polite, I should add. “Did you know that’s a computer motherboard?” he asked.

With looks of shock, we looked down at the motherboard as if we’d never noticed it until that moment and said, “It is?”

“Yes,” he said with concern. “It’s not supposed to get wet.”

“Oh,” we said, with our faces clearly happily. “Thanks for telling us! We appreciate your help!” And walked away. The man watched us with surprise until we were out of view.

It was pointless. It was random. And it was just a touch sassy. Good times.

Mediocre Tribute to Harvard & Yale

Mediocre might perhaps be a generous assessment of the following poem. Maybe someday I'll get bored enough to invest more time and make it "clever." Here it is...

Started Calvin Hill when I was only three
Twenty years later I was swingin’ Calhoun’s tree
Old Eli Yale looked down on me with pride
That was back before I took my two-hour ride

I left home for five years and now I can’t get back
Ma won’t look on someone who went down that track
At the last annual game, my folks kept seein’ red
‘Cause I went to Boston and got a Ph.D. there instead

I used to eat at Pepe’s though some believe in Sal’s
Just got a ticket on Wooster Street from some of Pepe’s pals
No bones about my secret and the skulls are kinda mad
I’d go on and tell you more if this poem weren’t so bad

Happy Holidays... Atchoooo!

Here is how Thanksgiving works for myself, my husband (Joshua) and our three kids: Thomas & Elijah (9-month-old twins) and Joseph (3 years old).

Thanksgiving Eve: Thomas spent almost the entire day whimpering and acting pathetic. He was obviously getting sick, but it just seemed to be a stuffy nose so I ignored it until around 7:00 p.m. when I realized that he had been hardly coherent and/or awake for any portion of the day. At this point, taking his fever into consideration, we rushed him to the after-hours pediatrician (our neighbor, luckily, was on call that evening) who looked him over and found that he also had a very sore throat (of the non-strep variety) but nothing wrong that could be helped by antibiotics or medicine. Diagnosis: give the baby pain reliever and patiently wait it out.

Thanksgiving Day: After a very difficult night with Thomas (who didn't want to sleep unless being held), we had a groggy morning and noted that Elijah was following his one-minute-older brother's example by coming down with the same thing (...inevitable, I'm sure). Joseph, of course, also had the cold but to a much smaller extent. We buckled all three sick children and two sick parents into the car to try to put on a happy face for Josh's relatives but the festivities were cut a bit short when Elijah vomited forcefully all over me after dinner. While this was highly entertaining for those around me, I decided it was time to leave to go get a change of clothing. After a change of clothing, we dropped by to see my relatives who were, luckily for the five of us, mostly on their way out. Elijah decided to make the most of the day by repeating his earlier performance and vomiting all over his Grandma's carpet. We ended the excitement by looking all over Orem to find a store open so we could buy some "Pedialyte" to try to rehydrate the boys who were quickly becoming weaker and more dehydrated. After a long, rather unfestive day, we all went home to try to get some rest.

Day After Thanksgiving: 95% of the day was spent holding Elijah and Thomas closely while they coughed and sneezed in our faces, wiped their noses on our shirts and whimpered mercilessly. The house got dirtier and dirtier and the babies got more and more dehydrated...

Day After the Day After: After boasting the evening before that this illness didn't seem to be affecting me as badly as it affected the twins, I woke up with a raging headache and wondering who had dropped the ton of bricks on me. I spent a good portion of the day in bed, holding Thomas, and trying to sleep while Josh tried to tidy up the house for some distant relatives (who we had never met before) who needed a place to stay for three weeks.....

Day Before Today: Call us faithless if you must, but church was not even an option for me on a day like this. I spent a lot of time either in the bathtub or shower, trying to find a way to breathe again. Josh spent the entire morning cleaning the house for our guests who were delayed by the bad weather. They arrived in the afternoon and we were relieved to see that their faces were not similar to any of the ones we had seen on "Most Wanted" posters. We started to feel better in the evening when we were invited over to see my mom and siblings, who were willing to risk the cold germs to give us a break by holding the babies for us.

Today: Back to the pediatrician who found that both of the twins were suffering from ear infections. We decided to add insult to injury by giving them flu shots and then force-feeding them a liquid antibiotic. At least their fevers are down, they look a little more hydrated and they're actually starting to perk up and crawl around on their own again. So things are looking up for now. Tempers are slowly improving, I no longer wish I could rip my head off altogether because of congestion and headaches, and the twins will soon have healthy ears again. Of course, about three hours ago, Joseph started grabbing his stomach and saying, "Mommy, mommy my side hurts... my side hurts... hold me, Mommy..." so you never know....

Strangely enough, these few days of illness have been precious to me despite the obvious trials. I’ve had a chance to sit back, relax and enjoy my children without distractions. I’ve rediscovered how precious an infant can be while he is snuggling in my arms. A few days ago, Thomas was awakened from a nap while I was holding him and he looked up and looked around the room at the people sitting around, then got a concerned look on his face. He looked up and saw me holding him, briefly smiled, relaxed and fell back asleep. At moments like that, I realize that family is what matters is the most.

And that is what the holidays are really all about. Thank heaven for little boys and thank heaven for little colds.

Thought #1

There are some days during which the terms "awake" and "happy" cannot peacefully coincide.

Husbandism #1

My husband on barbecues:

"Nothing says 'friendship' like roasting a dead animal."

Testing, testing, one two three...

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