David J. Sokol

Hooray, Hacked!

Hooray, my tumblr with a super-easy dictionary word password was hacked. I’ve actually put on weight in the past two weeks due to beer and wedding food!

2011 Chick-fil-A Statistics

There have been 118 days since 1/1/2011. In those 118 days, I’ve visited a Chik-fil-A 44 times, spending a total of $218.63. The average visit costs $4.97. Assuming I only went once a day (which isn’t true), 37% of my days alive in 2011 have included a stop to Chick-fil-A.

Now I’ve found out they’re testing sweet potato fries; this does not bode well. (via @_mason_)

Spring Cleaning - Useless Cables/Electronics

After working with computers for 15+ years, I’ve gotten a large collection of now-useless parts I’ve been hoarding. Today I’m cleansing my storage bins. These are the things I’ll no longer be saving.

• IDE Cables
• PCI Soundcards/Network Adapters
• Serial Cables
• Parallel Port/Printer Cables
• 1x CD-ROM Drives
• 4GB Tapes
• Cell-phones from 3+ years ago
• Phone Cable/RJ-11 connectors
• Fire-wire anything
• Non-optical mice
• USB Hubs
• Anything related to my TI-83+
• Drivers for a 10BaseT network adapters

Coincidentally, if you want any of the above, let me know before tomorrow.

Keyboards with these keys should be cleansed from the Earth.

The specially crafted keyboard I use for writing. (Hooray, made in Paint.NET!)

Morning Playlist

Trying to get to work on time is a hassle. I stumble out of bed in a haze barely awake to the shower where I struggle not to fall asleep. I’ve tried multiple alarm clocks, cold showers, coffee and nothing has worked. Then I bought a alarm clock/dock for my Zune and put it in the restroom, so I can get amped up for the workday while getting ready. It is amazing. I’ve reduced my average time in from tardy 14 minutes to early 11 minutes in one moment. Though the numbers might change as the sample size grows larger. Morning playlists must contain music to get you moving. I also have the additional requirement of not being bass heavy (as I live in an apartment complex). This is my 2nd iteration of my morning playlist, which contains 30 minutes of music max. If the playlist runs out I know I’m about to be late, so the adrenaline kicks in.

1. Raise Up (All Cities Remix) - Petey Pablo
2. Bounce - MSTRKRFT
3. Ante Up - M.O.P.
4. Daddy Fat Sax - Big Boi
5. Who Dat - Young Jeezy
6. As I Come Back - Busta Rhymes
7. In My Car - Wiz Khalifa (might get removed soon)
8. Hell Of A Life - Kanye West (might get removed soon)

Performance Testing is Hard

Our customers started complaining that one of our sites was slow. We attempted to verify on our own QA setup, then again on their production setup, and we couldn’t replicate. It turned out to be a browser-dependent performance problem, and further that, the same browser would behave radically different if compatibility mode was enabled.

Since we were an intranet application, compatibility mode was automatically forced on by default. Two weeks of research, one setting flip, instantly happier customers. Magic happens.

Performance profiling used to be very hard: it could be hardware or software dependent, or possibly bandwidth; now it’s gotten just downright impossible due to the wide disparities of JavaScript execution speed in the different browsers. As if making it render the same wasn’t hard enough.

Making Things Faster Tips

• Any 3rd party framework generates a mass of JavaScript to do cool things. This JavaScript will run slow in IE7. It will continue to run slow in IE8 unless you enable standards mode, which is disabled by default for intranet applications.
• Chrome and IE use XmlHttpRequests differently; IE seems to load in parallel, Chrome does not. This impacts debugging performance.
• ViewState isn’t a huge bitch on intranet applications. But it kills mobile, especially on upload. Use the new ASP.NET 4.0 features to disable that crap if you don’t need it.
• Look up Cache Busting. It helps amazingly to test cold-startup of web applications.
• Cold starts can be very rare. Don’t optimize the initial startup time if the application restarts very infrequently.
• Always check your logs to see what the actual load is. Just because a customer says it’s slow doesn’t mean the sites being hammered. LogParser is the best tool for handling IIS logs, hands down.

Super Meat Boy

For Xbox Live Arcade, Steam, and probably other mediums. This is, by far, the most frustrating game I’ve ever kept playing. Each level bumps up my blood pressure a few points. Every chapter greases my controller more than a large Pepperoni Lovers Stuffed Crust pizza. Boss fights provide Ninja Gaiden II level rage, the only game that ever caused me to throw a controller.

I can’t stop playing it. The feeling of clearing a level you spent the last 1.5 hours on in 35 seconds (true story) is just too good. I can only take small doses of it now, after an all-day play-a-thon Sunday, but every ten minutes of game time is awesome.

A++, would rage this way again. (Thanks to @imjameshall/@_mason_ for the recommendation.)

Stats Roundup 2010

Well, 2010 is over. I started with a spreadsheet with one row, now I’ve got 366. (One row for headers.) Lets break it down, hammer style.

Travel

I traveled via plane 9 of 12 months this year. I visited the following cities:

• 4x Bermuda
• 2x Buffalo
• 1x Denver
• 1x San Diego
• 1x Savannah
• 1x Athens
• 1x Orlando

This also marked my first time traveling out of the country, to Bermuda. I spent about 3 weeks working there this year, and it’s really expensive. I cannot recommend it to anyone, unless you’re traveling there on a cruise.

Drinking

Drinking was at an all time high. I accomplished my goal of drinking for 365 days straight on August 10th, 2010; this taught me that I have stupid goals. I drank a total of 12,494 ounces of beer. This corresponds to about 1,040 12oz beers or 2.9 beers per day. On the liquor (or quicker) side of things, I had 1,370 ounces of mixed drinks and 118 shots. My liver has started up an online petition against me, but it won’t matter because online petitions don’t change shit. There are some drinking moment’s I’d like to highlight:

• ComicCon 2010 - I actually lost track of my alcohol intake during ComicCon and for a few weeks after. When you drink that much, you forget how to make spreadsheets.
• Mellow Mushroom (Emory) - We go for Trivia every week and I average between 1 to 3 pitchers. Dirt cheap pitchers will do that.
• Cinco De Mayo - 7 shots of Tequila on top of 1 pitcher of Bud Light. That’s how we do.

It should also be noted that the figures quoted are not exact. Drinking in excess blurs the memory to the point where recording anything other than “lots” would be pointless. There were 9 or 10 such days last year.

Health

My number of yearly pushups incrased 27%, from 2,643 to 3,374. Everything else went down. A measly 1,800 crunches, 30.3 miles run/walked, and 33 p90x workouts. This probably explains why my average weight went from 185 to 192.

Professionalism/Code

I was later than usual, from 6 minutes late to 10 minutes late. I directly attribute this to my shrinking job satisfaction, and you can see a significant increase in year-end tardiness. I’ve been writing more custom code, with 627 github commits on my primary project and about 50 commits on other projects. I used four different source code control systems in 2010: VSS, TFS2008, TFS2010, and Git. Git is by far the winner.

Next Year

One goal: Create. We’ll see how that manifests itself.

Science is a verb now!