Author Archives: Admin

Cancer Research, Blocking Cancer’s energy source, ATP, Lactic Acid, PEP, Pyruvate

September 18, 2010 12:03 pm ,

Please take this at face value, and do your own investigation, but this looked like promising research.

If you put together these articles you might draw some
interesting conclusions.

This is what I gleamed from putting together the above sources.
It seems from these articles that cancer uses a cell division
technique that can be interrupted with a build up of lactic acid.
Lactic acid is more easily cleared up or removed which high sugar, or
carbohydrate diets. ( seems like it’s good for runners, but not good
for cancer patients. )

It seems like cancer growth is at it’s worst when Lactic acid has not
built up in a while to inhibit/ reset the rogue energy cycle that
forms.

Lactic acid builds up in muscles that are being used, but is
transported through blood flow to the rest of the body.
Blood flow during intense exercise is restricted to non-vital organs,
which would make it hard for lactic acid to reach those organs.
Prolonging Lactic acid in the body might help fight cancer.

From what I have read, this seems to indicated that intense exercise (
causing a warmness or burning in your muscles ) and not carb-loading
before a workout, or immediately afterwards is an ideal strategy. It
may be that the rise in cancer in our society might be related to the
sharp decline in intense exercise.

End of story, no pain no gain, when it comes to exercise.
It looks like they are looking for a pill to replace the simple need
for us to work physically harder in our daily lives.

Posted in: Living, Thoughts , Tagged: , , , , ,

Re-thinking CSS, Can Javascript replace CSS or Simplify it?

August 14, 2010 5:12 pm ,
Today Javascript is everywhere.  When the web was born you might have a browser that could support it, but so many browsers do, that it’s almost as common as HTML.  I think it’s been nearly a decade since I have developed a page without any javascript on it.  We use Javascript for core site menues, for google analytics for so much on the site, that if your browser didn’t support Javascript well you might as well not even browse the web.  Even our phones support Javascript, and if that is not enough, 500 million people a month use sites like Facebook that use Javascript to load content dynamicaly like a desktop application.

So now that we have established that Javascript is everywhere you want to be, and just about everyone has it enabled, you probably can say that it’s at least as common as CSS.

One of the core problems with CSS is how static it is, and how hard it is to get consistaint results between browsers, where as with Javascript all browser support the core of Javascript extremely consitaintly.  Infact the largest difference between browsers is found in the DOM ( Document Object Model ) for which CSS must conform to.  However with Javascript frameworks have been built to extend Javascript just enough to even create consitiansy at the Document Object Model.

To this point, it might make sense to actually describe page layout via a proper Javascript framework that can describe page layout consistiantly across browsers.  If this could be accomplished, then, we as web designers might finally be free from multi browser design.  I now for my self that designing for IE5, or IE6 can eat 80% of your dev time.  What cool sites could you design if you were 2-5x more productive?

Now, I am not saying that CSS will go away, but I am saying that for a number of design choices, Javascript might be the tool of choice, as it’s functionality could grow with the framework rather than at the rate of consistian browser implementation.

Consider implementing rounded corners via javascript, in FF, Opera, and Chrome you could use a CSS property, however in IE, you could programaticly solve the problem.  Consider box model consitiancy between the browsers, the framework could addapt quickly.

What about getting more lateral?  CSS can do alot, but what if you wanted to present data in a parrallaxed plane? http://webdev.stephband.info/parallax.html These UX standards can be brought in easily with Javascript, and not CSS.

Maybe I am stating the obvious, but

Javascript is the new default design language on the web.

Posted in: HTML5

HTML5 Storage, localStorage, WebDatabase, indexedDB.

July 30, 2010 3:01 pm ,
For Babelfin, a browser plugin, I have been looking for ways to elegantly store data in the browser for each of the translations of a given word or short phrase.  The goal would be to use a data pattern that was easily portable to the two most popular extensible browsers – Chrome and Firefox.  I decided to start with Chrome durring startup weekend because it has a newer extension model and has simplified a lot of how extentions work.  Firefox still uses xul which is an odd combination of XML and Javascript, where as Chrome uses native HTML and Javascript with a few additional libraries to work with.

So for Babelfin, the goal would be to list a set of phrases that one would want to learn, or that the user might enter, and then the plugin would pre-fetch the translation and store it in the language that the user wants to learn.  If the phrase list is short, using a key-value store like localStorage would make sense, as almost every browser supports it, including IE8, and even though there are small differences, the data model and pattern would still work. However for anything other than the minimal product, a larger data set will be required for more advanced users.  And as a result it would be nice to have a query-able data set.

Twice google has tried to solve this problem, once with Google Gears, and again with Web SQL Database, which works in Chrome, Opera, and Safari, but does not work in Firefox, or IE.  Microsoft and Mozilla do not want to add SQL as a language to browser side logic, and I happen to agree.

The result is IndexedDB, a javascript data storage model in the front end, however,  IndexedDB is not quite CouchDB or MongoDB, but rather a javascript level abstraction of storage data.  Several Mozilla folks seem to think that CouchDB might be built on top of it, and so there is BrowserCouch which will try to do just that.  But, where is the BrowserMongo ( Maybe we can call it Mango, as a Norwegian, told me that Mongo means retard in Norwegian, oops. )

So in any case there is still a gap for Browser Side Storage that is query-able and indexed.  I suppose something could be built on top of localStorage, but it would be a hack until the browsers fully support it.

I am trying to find out how much work it would be to put a stub wrapper on top of Webkit’s Web SQL Database layer and have it look like IndexedDB since that seems to be what Google will support eventually, once they figure out how to thread it, but it would be nice to have something now. 😉

Posted in: Babelfin, HTML5 , Tagged: , , , , ,

Dinner Parties – Mad Scientist Edition

July 26, 2010 2:10 pm ,

If you have ever thrown a dinner party,  you might know how much work they are, but you also know how rewarding they are as a way to share time with friends, and to eat something good.

In San Francisco, I started a new weekly dinner party at my apartment in SoMa, and ever week we try to come up with a theme.  Sometimes that theme is easy to pull off and other times it’s a bit more of a hassle than it’s worth.

This week I have been trying to pull stuff together for a mad scientist theme, and in a town like SF you would think there are ton’s of lab supply stores.  However, google has failed to easily find me any.  Instead every biotech and chemtech startup seems to appear on the list rather than cool stores like ‘American Science and Surplus’ would back in milwaukee and chicago.

So for posterity sake I thought I would pass the ball forwards and document a few sites of interest to help prepare for the next ‘Mad Scientist Themed-Dinner party’.

Links of aspiration and inspiration

Online Stores for beakers, flasks, funnels, petri dishes and test-tubes

Some Geek Chic-ery

Posted in: Living, Personal, San Francisco , Tagged:

A few XPath links to make YQL and HTML scraping easier.

May 26, 2010 9:38 am ,

quick and basic
http://www.w3schools.com/XPath/xpath_syntax.asp

great resource for detailed string functions
http://oreilly.com/catalog/xmlnut/chapter/ch09.html

quick list of all of the functions in xpath
http://www.w3schools.com/xpath/xpath_functions.asp

great example of more sophisticated function selectors
http://www.eggheadcafe.com/articles/20030627d.asp

multiple attribute
http://www.coderanch.com/t/128329/XML/XPATH-selection-based-multiple-attribute

fun with concat
http://blogs.sun.com/rajeshthekkadath/entry/xpath_searching_for_a_text

http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2002/08/14/xpath_tips.html?page=3

Posted in: APIs, Code , Tagged: , , ,

Who could buy Palm?

April 12, 2010 9:30 am ,
a list of companies that could buy palm
  • Dell, Sony, HTC, etc.. — Have mobile devices, but this could give them an edge.
  • ASUS, Abit, etc…. —  All make hardware and could use a nice mobile platform.
  • Amazon, Barns and Noble — both make eReaders that could be decimated by the iPad, Palm’s Web OS could give them the engineering talent along side a great OS to create a new Mobile media device.
  • nVidia –  if nVidia had a platform like WebOS, they could ensure a rockstar platform for their mobile chips.
  • AMD –  I don’t think AMD has the cash to buy palm.
  • IBM –  Could be interesting, IBM has cash, and they don’t have a mobile plan.  This may be reason for IBM to go after a mobile leader.
  • Oracle –  Since Oracle has acquired Sun, MySQL, and …. OpenOffice by default.  It might be interesting to see what this Tech Giant could do in the Mobile Enterprise Space.
  • Google – Could buy Palm to strengthen it’s position against Apple, and could port Palm’s intellectual property to the Android OS.
  • Nintendo –  Hmmm, this could be interesting, as I think the companies would culturally work well together.
  • Microsoft –  Yeah, WM7 +++   MS could somehow make windows mobile better, or better arm it’s lawyers against Apple.  Can you imagine the MS Palm Courier?
Posted in: Technology

Large Binary Numbers in Javascript

March 21, 2010 2:49 pm ,

Have you ever wondered what the largest number is?  At one point it was a googolplex, but unless you write a custom class to deal with really large numbers, your dev environment will never count to a googolplex.

For http://loc.is I am reworking a geohash encoding algorithm today, and I wanted to see what Javascript could handle.  Strongly typed languages like Java have known upper limits, but languages like javascript are a bit more mysterious, so the only way to know is to find out.  I wrote this function to test it, and I ran it in the firebug console on a random webpage ( firebug won’t work unless the DOM is ready ).

for( i = 0 ; i < 500 ; i++){
    var value = Math.pow(2,i) +1;
    console.log (   i + "n" +
    value + "n" +  
    value.toString(2));
}

The output finally looks like this, and reveals that 2^52 is the largest number you can add 1 to and still represent it as an integer. Any larger and javascript will just use it as a float, and you will not have a sufficient number of bits to represent it.  I wonder if this is the same in all browser/ os combination pairs?

51
2251799813685249
1000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001

52
4503599627370497
10000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001

53
9007199254740992
100000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000

54
18014398509481984
1000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000

So in this circumstance, javascript seems to have 54 bits of integer accuracy, a few short of a LONG 64 bit int, or IEEE 80 bit notation.


Test it yourself, and let me know.
Posted in: Code, locis, Projects , Tagged: ,

New jEdit Syntax Edit Modes for Perl+HTML & XML+CDATA + HTML

March 5, 2010 4:12 pm ,

I love my syntax highlighting in jEdit, and why shouldn’t I?  Good Syntax Highlighting helps you catch code errors early.  So about 2 years ago, I created a custom jEdit “Edit Mode” so that HTML buried in your XML CDATA tags would be Syntax Highlighted.  Here is the original post on Google Groups ( http://groups.google.com/group/opensocial-api/browse_thread/thread/12e250246ab64054/343c858695e8eb12 ).

Here is the custom Edit Mode for XML->CDATA->HTML c-xml.xml

It uses a simple trick to identify the CDATA with HTML with a special CDATA tag like the one below

<![CDATA[ <!--HTML-->
   <html>
       <!-- friendly neighborhood web page -->
   </html>
]]>

The perl version is here perl-html.xml

So for the perl version i use the structure of Perl’s HEREDOCS and use the following java capable regex

<<p{Space}*(['"])([p{Space}p{Alnum}]*)1;?s*<!--.*HTML.*-->

Which will HTML Syntax highlight any perl HEREDOC as HTML if it has <!– HTML –> in it so the following should syntax highlight.  There is however, one bug.  If your HEREDOC is not well formed, meaning you have an unclosed tag css object, or  javascript call, then the syntax highlighting gets stuck.  Maybe I will figure out how to make this work for non well-formed HTML.  any ideas?

<<< EOT <!-- HTML -->
    <html>
        <!-- friendly neighborhood web page -->
    </html>
EOT
Posted in: Code, Projects

Life changes you, things learned.

February 28, 2010 3:45 pm ,

It’s almost been 2 years since i moved to california and its been a rough adventurous ride, and I don’t regret a moment of it. However, when I look back it’s odd to see just how different I am today.

Since sundays are for reflection, here are a few bullet points.

  • • living in milwaukee i felt very connected to the community, i knew so many people by name that everywhere i went was like an episode of cheers.
  • • i used to drink and eat a lot more, today i eat 2/3rds to 1/2 as much food. it’s so warm in california you really don’t need much.
  • • winter seems like someplace you visit, rather than live through.
  • • i used to feel tech deprived, now it’s easily accessible and to some degree less exotic
  • • i understand better how some ideas are good ones and others are a waste of time
  • • i now know i own too much stuff, too much ownership is a burden; you end up consuming more resources just keeping it and not appreciating it.
  • • women like geeks and entrepreneurs here, i feel sexy here
  • • hackathons used to be parties, now they seem like work
  • • i miss bucketworks, but….. have found noisebridge, and techshop, but don’t go enough.
  • • owning cars seem silly, but i still love my 350z, but now i don’t have a venue to enjoy it. i may just sell it and rent a sports car for a day, even at 500 dollars every few months, it’s cheaper, than paying for insurance and parking.
  • • in milwaukee, geeks were most easily found at goth industrial clubs, but out here, they are everywhere.
  • • you live in a city, not in an apartment, neighborhoods are probably more important than your home.
  • • being able to bike everywhere RULES.
  • • public transit is better than no transit, but it still sucks, its a tragedy of the commons.
  • • some graffiti is good, some is bad.
  • • political parties are not relevant.
  • • some people are so angry about somethings, that they will never listen about other things
  • • what its like to have a lot of friends that are female, what it’s like to have a female room mate; the secret is it’s really not that different, except your guy friends probably are more likely to drink your beer and watch the same tav shows.
  • • on average women think about sex way more than I would have thought 2 years ago.
  • • women may think differently, but they think about the same things. ( ok, maybe not all of the same things, or maybe just not at the same level of detail )
  • • the goal of any good conversation is to derive respect of and for someone regardless of weather you agree, find enjoyment in their fellowship, however not all people are respectable, and so don’t spend your time with them
  • • no matter how much you may want others to be independent and self capable, some people just want to follow, or lead. people may not be built for an egalitarian maximum.
  • • any good piece of art, creates a deeper connection between people. it should make good conversation easy. ( see above )
Posted in: Living, Personal, Thoughts

Improving PHPBB2 and MySQL performance

February 19, 2010 1:31 pm ,

For the last few days I have been trying to track down why Unity’s PHPBB 2 Forum (http://forum.unity3d.com) was so slow. Page rendering times were taking between 2 and 10 seconds and for me this was just unacceptable.

A proper website should be able to render a majority of the page in less than 250ms, and delivering most of the content in less than 50ms is ideal. Sites like Amazon, Yahoo, and Google have studied the effects of response time vs. features, and have found that response time is often times more important. Greg Linden pulls together a few sources on the topic in his blog.

So, 10 seconds was just unacceptable, and I was bound to find a solution. I started with the low hanging fruit, and installed PHP’s APC cache which is an OpCode Cache that stores compiled versions of the PHP code to reuse on the next request. There is evidence out there to suggest that not only do opcode caches reduce CPU requirements, but they also reduce your memory load. I saw a few sites that claim about a 3-4x performance increase on the CPU and about a 25% reduction in memory usage.

The next step, as the forums were still slow, was to start looking into our MySQL usage. Did the server have enough memory, were the MySQL caches and buffers large enough, or were searches and queries getting pruned to make room for more queries? After using MySQL’s GUI tools through an SSH Tunnel I was able to see that the server had 64MB of query cache, and only 90% of it was being used, so the caches were good.

Next was to look for slow queries, however a slow query or two would be hard to fix considering PHPBB was building the queries as part of the application and should have been tested in advance. If a slow query was the problem, it probably was not part of the application design, but rather an indication of something else that was going wrong. We did notice a few slow queries, but nothing ridiculous. However, what we did notice was that a number of queries were running slow because other ones where holding a lock for a long period. Hmmm?

Next we started looking at the problem from a system level using apps like ‘top’, ‘dstat’, ‘mytop’, etc… From here we found that disk IO was over working. Hmmm… but why?

I later found out that we were serving large files in our forum, however it did not seem like our forum was being used as a hot linking service, and I would suspect that PHPBB has some defense from that, but going forwards this is a concern of mine.

I finally found a post on the web talking about MySQL CPU spikes, and it was related to a corrupted table index. http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=232008

After reading the forum for a bit, I thought, well there seems to be a few low risk commands I can run to look into our table integrity. Here is the full command list http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/mysqlcheck.html

First I ran:

mysqlcheck -A -F -u [username] –p

This reported several table closed improperly errors, and took about 2-6 mins to run without taking down the forums.

Next I ran:

mysqlcheck -A -q -r -u [username] –p

This is basically the fastest repair option, and would only fix minor corruption. It took about 5-10 min to run.

The result was that our MySQL usage dropped from 100-300% to 3-6% and page response times being about 200-500ms. I have a few other things I would like to try, from using our CDN with the forums to DB optimizations, to other server upgrades.

Over the weekend, I think I am going to run:

mysqlcheck --all-databases  --optimize -u [username] –p

Which should be more thorough, but might take an hour. This will defrag the table and resolve some indexing errors.

Posted in: Code