CAN I BE OF ASSISTANCE?
Shut it!

Muppetrolled

Yeah, content will return any day week month now.  Meantime, this!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:48 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Pixy's Actually Useful Tip Of The Day

MySQL will automatically convert integer values into strings when needed.

Mostly.

When you are supplying an index key, it will do the conversion, and actually work, but the query analyzer won't recognise it and won't use the index.  Even if you use a FORCE INDEX clause.

Yay for subtle but deadly behaviours.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:36 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Pixy's Tip Of The Day

If you create something twice, the second time you may find it is already there.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:52 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Twisted Genius

Is still genius.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:54 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Chi's Sweet Home

Ebichu for three-year-olds.

Update: Linky.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:10 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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I Can Has Annex M

My ISP - iiNet - just announced (as of April 1) that they are now supporting ADSL2 Annex M, which increases the upstream bandwidth from 1Mbps to 3.5Mbps.  (Well, up to 3.5Mbps, depending on your distance from the exchange and overall line quality, but I'm pretty close to the exchange and have good S/N and attenuation levels.)

To do that, I first needed to upgrade to a business plan, which cost an extra $eek per month.  Before, the only worthwhile extra I got with the business plan was a static IP, which I desperately needed but which wasn't worth $eek per month.  Now I get a static IP and much faster uploads (plus less useful stuff like priority support), so I jumped on it.

Twice.  Maybe three times.  I tried to used the online plan changer thingy, but it refused to work, so I left it for another day.  Only today I got an email billing me the extra business plan fees, and when I looked, there it was, a little tick box for enabling Annex M.

First I have to swap the modem.  My old DG834v2 doesn't support Annex M, but my new DG834Gv4 does.  Only they're on the wrong lines, respectively.  Once that's done, though, whoosh.

Update: Weird.  I swapped the modems around, and ended up with two perfectly functional connections, instead of the expected zero.  This probably means I'll get hit by a bus tomorrow.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:53 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Spring Is Sprung



Currently downloading episode 1 of ToLOVERU, Kure-nai, Itazura na Kiss, Bus Gamer, and Kanokon.  (NSFW once you click on a link, or even if you just leave the page open for a while.)

Eagerly awaiting Kyouran Kazoku Nikki, which begins its run on next Saturday.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:55 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Time Trials

I've been doing some benchmarking of Minx 1.2a5 (the latest alpha) against 1.1.1 (the current live version) before I commit to code-freeze and a very short beta.  After a little tweaking, the scores look like this:

374kb generated in CPU 0.4, elapsed 0.4216 seconds.
113 queries taking 0.1052 seconds, 645 records returned.
Powered by Minx 1.2a5.

374kb generated in CPU 0.4, elapsed 0.4102 seconds.
110 queries taking 0.0707 seconds, 633 records returned.
Powered by Minx 1.1.1-aoi.

I was getting very worried an hour ago because the times for the 1.2 code were coming out 60% slower than 1.  That would have sent me back to do a couple more weeks of profiling and performance tweaks.

Then I remembered that I'd turned off the JIT compiler to do a code coverage analysis.  Turned that back on, and got the results you see here.

We've lost about 11 milliseconds overall in this benchmark, of which
35 ms went to database queries.  Which means that excluding database queries, it's actually faster.

On the database side of things, well, I'm now pulling in one or two additional joins on the most common queries to provide the necessary data for cross-site and multi-site functionality and the expanded comment (and related item) listings.  The query time shown in the stats includes not just the database time, but also the processing of the data into native structures on the application side.  That accounts for about a 25% increase in query processing time; where the other 25% went I'm not quite sure yet.

But the bottom line is that despite a whole raft of new features, Minx 1.2 is within a couple of percent of the speed of 1.1.  And if I can just find one more performance tweak...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:04 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Do Not Taunt Happy Fun Can

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:26 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Setting Fire To A Crowded Theatre

Firefox 3.0 beta 5 is out.
Firebug 1.1 beta is out too.
And they work together.

Also, they'ved fixed the "awful bar".  The autocomplete function in Firefox 3 had been extensively rewritten to make it ugly and stupid.  Oldbar fixes the ugly; beta 5 fixes the stupid.

That does it for me; I have a new favourite browser.  Now if they could just put at least some of the new options in the options panel, which has barely changed since version 1.  And have each tab run in a separate thread - though the huge performance improvements in the new version make this less urgent than it was.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:46 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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