Reply to: test please delete

[NickFitz]

Tonight’s major motion picture premiere was The People vs. Larry Flynt (1996) in which a pornographer demonstrates how ridiculous the Constitution of the United States of America is successfully defends his right to free speech. Fair play on the Jerry Falwell defamation case

And then a rewatch of 300 (2006) because it’s always fun to see somebody who believes they’re an invincible god-king get punched in the gob <- I reckon the Spartans would have smoked like fish if they’d had the opportunity

Finally, a further episode of Hijack in which German tube trains show a remarkable ability to keep on truckin’ despite any and all explosions in their undercarriage

Goodnight all

[NickFitz]

Tea has been a ribeye steak with fried onions and chips

This was accompanied by E1 of Estonia, a documentary series about the ferry that sank in the Baltic in the 1990s. This is on HBO Max, which has just launched in the UK. I already have their blockbuster stuff like The Wire and The Sopranos, as well as many of the big films they offer. So I thought I’d try to confuse their algorithms by starting my use of the service with a series in which almost everybody is speaking Swedish, Finnish, or Estonian. Maybe it’ll start recommending loads of obscure Nordic programming instead of bothering me with mainstream stuff

The import worked OK once I’d added the index to the source DB, taking the same amount of time as without my customisations of the code. I need to go through checking obscure stuff, and there’s one aspect of it I think needs adjusting, but that’s the last really big part of the import process mainly or wholly working as desired

[NickFitz]

It was a soggy walk to the garage to pick up my car. That light misty rain that doesn't feel like much but all of a sudden you're wet.

The job looks good but I'll take a closer look in drier and sunnier weather (should we get any). More importantly, the car is shiny clean.

[NickFitz]

This afternoon has been largely spent on the new forum stuff, in which I eventually discovered I was falling foul of a decision I made about five years ago

I’ve had to do a lot of work on the import of posts to ensure it goes smoothly, taking into account stuff relating to the work I did for the vB5 migration back then. I was pretty sure it was good to go, so I cleaned down the database and started a new import. All the previous steps went smoothly and it started importing posts… and it seemed incredibly slow

I left it running for an hour to give it a chance, but by the end of that I did a quick calculation and concluded that it would take it around forty days to import them all! Clearly, something was wrong

So I tried single-stepping through the top level function, and it turned out one function call was taking a few seconds to run. All that function does is run a SQL query and return the results, and this was one of the bits I’d had to modify; but I didn’t think I’d done anything too drastic

But it was using a table I’d added to the vB5 database back in the day and, on further investigation, I realised that one of the columns it was using in there didn’t have an index set! This column was only retrieved as one of the columns in a SELECT by the stuff I added to vB5, whereas in the importer, it’s used in the WHERE part of the query. So this meant the DB was having to scan this table, which contains millions of rows, repeatedly. That was the decision I made back then - I added indexes for the columns the vB5 code made use of, but didn’t bother for the one that’s now suddenly important

In addition, the way the importers work in the new stuff is that they’ll set a time limit for processing a chunk of data, apparently so they can output a progress message even if running on very slow shared hosting and so on, and pick up where they left off if they didn’t complete that chunk - but they fetch a new chunk with the current starting position from the DB. So it was going and getting 500 rows of data, which took several seconds because of the missing index, then processing the first row - after which it found it was over its time limit! This meant it was processing one row at a time, and taking loads more time for each one than it should have taken it to process 500 rows

I added an index for that column, and now it’s running along at a cracking pace

[ladymuck]

It was a soggy walk to the garage to pick up my car. That light misty rain that doesn't feel like much but all of a sudden you're wet.

The job looks good but I'll take a closer look in drier and sunnier weather (should we get any). More importantly, the car is shiny clean.

[xoggoth]

Very low this morning after grotty night's sleep but went for a local walk round a Rudolf Steiner sort of new age community place, really nice, then stopped for latte at local cafe where there were a couple of people I know. Feeling much better mood now.

PS Just read a news article about an exploding lemonade bottle causing over £1500 worth of damage in a kitchen. Gordoneo Bennuto!
PPS Its DT, behind a paywall, so no linky.

[NickFitz]

Lunch has been the rest of the cold roast chicken thighs, as they Needed to be Eaten™. However, for a bit of variety, I gave them a light dusting of Sweet & Smoky BBQ Seasoning and heated them up in the air fryer. They turned out very nicely; I’ll do that again

[NickFitz]

Morning denizens <- it was when I started typing this

Fairly busy start to the day once I’d arisen, so much so that I forgot to greet you all!

It’s back to grey here and there’s been some drizzly showers, though they’re expected to have ended now. Currently 11°C which supposedly “feels like” 5°, though I didn’t think that when I was out. The expected high is 12°, and the barometers are down to 1004/1012mB

I had to go to the bank before doing the shopping, hence rushing around trying to get myself organised earlier in the face of this huge disruption to my normal routine. Late last year, Eon sent me an unexplained cheque for forty-odd quid - well, it had something like fifteen years of records of my bills at the old place included, so it must have been something to do with a recalculation of all that, but I wasn’t going to bother ploughing through it all and there was no further explanation given. As usual, the cheque was the wrong shape for the mobile banking app to be able to handle it, so it’s been sitting around ever since. But it’s approaching the six month mark when it would, apparently, expire, so I finally remembered to head to the bank and pay it in at one of the machines there

I managed to get one of the three parking spaces round the corner from the bank by the park, beneath the windows of my old flat from last Millennium, so I was able to squeeze a vague sense of nostalgia in while I was there

With that done, it was time to head off to Big Sainsbury’s. The only reason I was going there rather than Not-as-Big was because Big has (I was assuming) a wider range of Easter eggs; our family get-together this year will be on Good Friday, a week today, so this was my last chance to get them as part of my normal routine.

For many years we didn’t bother with Easter eggs, but for some reason the tradition was revived a few years ago. I always splash out on fairly fancy and expensive ones (Toblerone this year, which are £12 a pop even with the Nectar Price™ discount) and end up receiving small, cheap ones in return - Smarties or whatever. But it’s the thought that counts

Anyway, the eggs filled a large part of the trolley, which was good as it discouraged me from buying too much stuff I didn’t really need

Next: lunch

[xoggoth]

Just had another scam call from somebody claiming to be a police officer calling about a person in custody with my surname. Wasn't anybody I knew, suprised they didn't get hold of a real relative's name, may have been a bit more convincing.

[ladymuck]

Morning all

Overcast and dull. Currently 11 degrees and that's the high for the day. It might rain. Barometer down to 1019 mBar.

Sunrise 05:48; Sunset 18:26 GMT

Having attended an 'all hands' call this morning, the "let's do things in siloes" change is coming from the top. Gotta love it when the organ grinder completely misses the point of a cross-functional change programme. Smile and invoice.

[DoctorStrangelove]

Morning.

Friday.

Wet.

Drizzly (vertical rather than the more usual horizontal).

Grey.

Sunless.

Dark.

Dank.

Dreary.

Misty.

Chilly in here at 13.8 deg, 13 in the kitchen, 12 in the leanto.

1015 mBar, 29.97 in Hg, 761.3 Torr, 14.72 psi, (down from 1018 last night), 64% RH (Lidl electric).

Meanwhile on the 22nd of March 2020 eek popped in, AndyGarbs got a pali, and Brillo popped in a lot.

Lunch: brunch. Entertainment: someone waffling on about "mystery". Noon o'clock news.

Wanly sunny.

Walk (unabbreviated, towpath) walked in the wan sunshine/grey gloom, occasional spot of rain.

Freecell score: 70%, running average: 84%.

Tea: chill con carne. Nice enough. Entertainment: PM. <click>.

Taggart S9 E1,2,3. "Death Benefits".

[WTFH]

Morning all
Overcast out, but currently dry. I’ve taken the day off. Might go shed shopping.

[NickFitz]

Things have taken a turn for the worse in Death’s End

I’ve got to go to Big Sainsbury’s tomorrow, so I suppose I’d better get to sleep

Goodnight all

[NickFitz]

For tea, lamb burger and fries

I’d forgotten I was watching the Netflix documentary about the Brazilian air crash! But there it was, halfway through the second episode (of three), so I finished watching that

[NickFitz]

Lunch has been a couple of cold roast chicken thighs

It’s been quite a frustrating morning. It’s Tech Debt Day, and one of the automated updates for our thing was to Black, the Python formatting tool. Unfortunately, they’ve introduced a change to one aspect of its formatting, and it conflicts with another tool we have for tidying up imports, isort. The end result was that Black would want to “fix" over a hundred files, and isort would then want to change them back again. After much digging, it turned out that Black has very few configuration options, so the only viable solution is to let it do its thing

To add insult to injury, I found a GitHub discussion about this specific change in which the Black developers say that it was a case of doing it one way or the other, and none of them had any strong opinions so they just picked that one! So it’s not as if there’s any reasoned argument for the change, it’s literally the luck of the draw

Anyway, back to the fray now, as we’re due to collaborate on trying to break some new thing before releasing it…