A while ago I blogged about a ray tracer which you can sort of use to benchmark your PC. See http://www.boyter.org/?component=content&option=permalink&id=735

Anyway I ordered a new server for searchco.de and thought I would benchmark it just to test it out. Here are the results.

bboyter@Ubuntu-1004-lucid-64-minimal:~$ time ./smallpt 100
Rendering (100 spp) 100.00%
real    0m28.923s
user    3m49.370s
sys     0m0.010s

This is running a Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-2600 CPU @ 3.40GHz so needless to say its pretty dammed quick.

Published on Tuesday 17th January 2012

Comments (1)

So sometime last year for fun I sent out the old resume and applied to a few jobs. Some looked interesting  but I wasn't really taking the thing very seriously. Anyway one that stands out when down like this.

Recruiter: "Hey you have Python on your resume, I think you would be perfect for this role, ill schedule an interview with them"

The position sounded fairly interesting, I believe it was something to do with a product for analyzing stocks or something so I agreed to do the interview. Dressed up, the usual. When I arrived (office just off Martin Place) I informed the receptionist and sat down to wait and read the untouched newspaper. The guys arrived (one 15 minutes late) asked a few simple questions such as "What is MVC" "How would you go about solving this problem". All seemed well and after an hour I left.

The next step naturally was to perform a test. This is where it all went a bit pear shaped. The test was something along the lines of,

"Use the Yahoo BOSS API to search for a keyword, then display the results with their Alexa score and Google PR. You should be able to sort the results on the search order, score and pr."

I have three things wrong with this test.

1. You have to pay for the Yahoo BOSS API now. I refuse to pay for a job I may not even get and I certainly am not handing over access to rack up bills on my Credit Card to a third party.
2. The Alexa score is obtained through an unpublished API which as far as I can tell you shouldn't be using.
3. Google does not publish the PR of any page and to reverse engineer it is against their terms of service. I am not going to get myself further blacklisted from Google.

I emailed back (to the recruiter who was not happy at this point) with something to the effect of the above, but mentioned I would do the first two but only if I use the Bing API which is free. At this point I was doing it just for the heck of it. Any company that won't keep its interview question up to date and is cool with potentially pissing off Google doesn't sound very smart to me, and I do not want to work for or with them.

So anyway they agreed and I coded it up, and all was JavaScript, AJAX, Django goodness. I removed my API keys, wrote a test file saying where you needed to add them again, with some sample instructions zipped it up and emailed.

Waited.

Waited.

After a rude amount of time they came back "Not happy with implementation. Did not work. Some bade code choices." In their own words they had some issues with the pokemon exceptions I added in (I had a comment to the effect of "I don't know all of the errors that can happen here, but all are bad so pokemon exception it is").

I was tempted to respond with my review.

Asked to perform unethical tasks in tests. Did not follow instructions on how to run test. Did not read comments. Lame.

Published on Friday 06th January 2012

Comments (3)

Well a quick update on why I was downloading countless gigabytes of code. The reason is http://searchco.de/ which is my side project. It now supports regex search over about 2 billion lines of code. With Google Code Search going away I figured there might be some space in the market and now its live.

Some examples searches are here, http://searchco.de/?q=/[cb]at/ http://searchco.de/?q=/atoi/%20ext:c

Im pretty happy with how it has turned out so far. I will continue to update the index over the next few weeks and generally improve it.

Published on Monday 19th December 2011

Comments (3)

So in a follow up to the Vegan thing (which I said I would do) I am still somewhat following the diet. I have pretty muched switched my diet around and eating less then 10% meat. Most of my meals consist of rice, pasta, vegetables and fruit these days. Feeling pretty healthy too which is rather nice. I still enjoy the occasional steak, but the lack of meat isn't really that big a deal to me. I think I can say I am neither a vegan or vegetarian, but have a mostly plant based diet.

The benefits have been pretty huge though. I am enjoying different foods now (I guess perhaps I was in a rut?) and branching out in my cooking. The other day following a pasta cooking class I made a really nice pasta which was asparagus cooked in a little olive oil, with pasta tossed through, cherry tomato's (salted with spring onion and a little extra virgin olive oil), and pesto. Delicious, cheap to make and one of the better pastas I have had (finally found a use for pesto). Other benefits include sleeping better at night (I guess because the stomach has less work to do?) and generally having more energy.

So anyway that's my health binge out of the way onto other matters. Have been downloading lots of Github/Google Code/BitBucket/codeplex/sourceforge projects. The reason will become clear over the next month or so, but suffice to say downloading 200 gig or so of code is a pain to manage.

Published on Monday 21st November 2011

Comments (4)

So contrary to popular belief, I actually do care about animals. The correct seasoning is a must (as is choice of mustard). That said a week or so ago I was watching the movie documentary "Knives Over Forks" and decided I would try going total vegan for a week or so. Cold turkey.

Initially it wasn't so bad actually. I had an excuse to eat Mangos (the NT ones in season are delicious) Apples and drink Mead (is booze allowed when you are vegan?) and all was well. In fact for the first 4 days there were no dramas.

The fifth day started well. I will admit I had a lot more energy (or felt like I did anyway) and was feeling generally healthy. However towards 5pm I got the worst stomach pains you can possibly imagine. Felt like my guts were processing a dozen pork chop bones. I was literally in tears in a ball on the floor from the pain which lasted 12-14 hours.

Apparently I was experiencing a "healing crisis" which sounds like new age hippy crap to me, but I guess the theory is sound, http://falconblanco.com/health/crisis.htm http://www.the-natural-path.com/healing-crisis.html but I am still in the skeptic area.

Anyway I am still alive, and still cutting back on meat and dairy and planning to ride this out another week or so and see what happens. The experience however to date has not been pleasant.

Published on Tuesday 20th September 2011

Comments (3)