There’s been much ado of late about Google’s acquisition of YouTube. Many are referring to YouTube now as GooTube, and it’s clear from some videos on YouTube that some folk are pretty nervous about the acquisition, fearing that the video service will become a pay-to-play service or that Google will find some other way to ruin YouTube. My own attention lately has been directed largely to the preparation of my home for sale, and as part of those preparations, I’ve purchased a product, pictured here, that may be of interest to those worried by this new business partnership. I present to you “Goo Gone,” which in my experience is better at killing ants than it is at anything else. Apply to GooTube and rub vigorously. Results may vary.

I’ve wiled away the last few months of my work life doing statistics. For example, I try as best as I can to figure out how many people have clicked to our download page, how many initiated a download, how many downloads successfully finished, and how many people are actually using the browser. It’s a lot trickier to figure this stuff out than you’d think, though I won’t bore you with the details.

I plan to bore you with different details. As you begin to collect more and more data, providing live statistics becomes challenging. Say you’ve got a database table with a few million rows of data in it, and somebody wants to pull a query from that database for a given date range and get a report that requires a lot of calculations. Suddenly, you not only have a query that has to comb through a lot of data, but once you’ve finally got all the data, you have to iterate over it to perform calculations. In our case, a couple of months ago, we found that we had enough data being churned that an overview report was taking 20 seconds or so to run. I spent a lot of time tweaking indices and optimizing queries, and I managed to save a lot of time, but I knew that as our data grew, the reports would bog down again. The solution, I figured, lay in caching data for speedy retrieval.

I picked up Cal Henderson’s Building Scalable Web Sites the other night hoping to learn something about “The Flickr Way” of building scalable web sites. I’m about halfway through and have mixed feelings so far about its usefulness for my purposes, but I couldn’t help feeling a little thrill when I encountered a reference to Flock on page 142. This portion of the book gives a brief explanation of the http request/response life cycle, and Cal happened to be using Flock while generating his example request (which returns a 404, if you’re interested, though the example suggests otherwise ).

I wrote the other night about my frustration with comments in Wordpress. The anti-spam tools that come with the software are great for squashing spam, but I still occasionally go through periods during which I get a bunch of emails asking me to log in and moderate spam, and that irritates me. Most of these moderation requests are for spam on old posts. So I decided to write a Wordpress plugin that would auto-disable comments and pings on old posts. This allows me to keep comments open for those who read my stuff and would like to comment within a reasonable timeframe but keeps me from having to go back and manually run mysql queries by hand (or, worse yet, manually edit old posts) to turn off comments on individual posts. (The Wordpress options for commenting affect only future posts.)

From a late-night IRC conversation with a Flock staffer and a Flock community member. It’s sort of a running joke that, a Southerner, I partake of all the bad habits and am characterized by all the provincialisms generally associated with the South.

daryl: (sorry, it’s late here and I’m working on a blog post entitled “My complex relationship with meat,” so it’s fitting that I should be in a weird mindframe
yosh: mmmmmmmeat
daryl: yosh, I’m occasionally eating meat again
daryl: we ran out of vegetables in Tennessee
daryl: except for tobacco, that is, and it tastes really bad
yosh: well, TN really didn’t have that many
yosh: daryl: tobacco can be good with the right sauce
daryl: like a durian sauce?
yosh: durian-natto sauce
daryl: heh
daryl: actually, I’m mainly eating meat b/c my newly pregnant wife craves it and I’m tired of cooking two meals a night
yosh: heh
[redacted]: daryl: you actually eat tabacco?
daryl: [redacted], it’s a staple in Tennessee
daryl: that and buggering cows
daryl: (no, I don’t eat tobacco)
daryl: (though I am married to my sister, who is also my grandmother and my third cousin six times removed; and my father)
yosh: daryl is his own grandpa
daryl: and grandma
daryl: I’m also my own sandwich
daryl: (my other grandpa having mated with a tobacco plant, that is)
[redacted]: daryl: good (you don’t eat tobacco)
daryl: opium, now that’s a different story

From a late-night IRC conversation with a Flock staffer and a Flock community member. It’s sort of a running joke that, a Southerner, I partake of all the bad habits and am characterized by all the provincialisms generally associated with the South.

daryl: (sorry, it’s late here and I’m working on a blog post entitled “My complex relationship with meat,” so it’s fitting that I should be in a weird mindframe
yosh: mmmmmmmeat
daryl: yosh, I’m occasionally eating meat again
daryl: we ran out of vegetables in Tennessee
daryl: except for tobacco, that is, and it tastes really bad
yosh: well, TN really didn’t have that many
yosh: daryl: tobacco can be good with the right sauce
daryl: like a durian sauce?
yosh: durian-natto sauce
daryl: heh
daryl: actually, I’m mainly eating meat b/c my newly pregnant wife craves it and I’m tired of cooking two meals a night
yosh: heh
[redacted]: daryl: you actually eat tabacco?
daryl: [redacted], it’s a staple in Tennessee
daryl: that and buggering cows
daryl: (no, I don’t eat tobacco)
daryl: (though I am married to my sister, who is also my grandmother and my third cousin six times removed; and my father)
yosh: daryl is his own grandpa
daryl: and grandma
daryl: I’m also my own sandwich
daryl: (my other grandpa having mated with a tobacco plant, that is)
[redacted]: daryl: good (you don’t eat tobacco)
daryl: opium, now that’s a different story

Tonight, I attended the blogger meetup that Mike organized. Counting Mike’s brother and girlfriend (both of whom were mostly absent but were warm bodies in occasional attendance, so I’ll count them provisionally), there were eight of us, all tied to Mike through past or current jobs or the aforementioned relationships. One guy was an apparently random acquaintance of Mike’s who since connecting with him has gotten a job at Mike’s place of work through no help from Mike (more or less at random, that is). Weird. Anyway, so we had a pretty decent crowd for a first meetup, though I hope that for future meetings, we can expand our network a bit and bring in some new folk. (Which let me say is a strange thing for me to hope because I’m generally pretty reclusive and not interested in adding more people to the list of those I feel obligated to remember or communicate with. Let’s keep that our little secret.)

A couple of weeks ago, I was in the driver’s seat for a Flock meetup here in Knoxville. My pal Mike has since begun organizing a Knoxville bloggers meetup to discuss blog tools more generally. Details (straight from Mike’s blog):

When: Wednesday, August 23rd 7:00pm
Where: Mike’s Place (directions when you RSVP)
What: Knoxville’s local bloggers get together to talk about tools and services that help bloggers.
Who: Anyone who has a blog, wants a blog, or wants to learn about blogs.
Why: We don’t need a why!