Political donations and effectiveness

So,

I had an interesting thought a few minutes ago regarding an email. This email was requesting a donation towards a given candidate to essentially help throw more advertising up.

So, my question is - just how much benefit do these ads get? I'm sure there is a way to calculate a return on investment somehow right?

Besides that, I think at this point in the elections damn-near everyone knows who they are going to vote for. So really, these donations and ads are for the people who don't yet know who they want to vote for on a given spot. The cost/benefit just seems ... kinda crazy.

Our politicians are spending a large fortune to get/stay in office - OUR money that is. ( our meaning any donations, not public funds of course - that would be illegal :-> )

Something I've griped about for some time while I'm at it. We need term limits on ( all of ) our federal and state positions. No more career politicians - people should jump in to politics for a while and then get on with the rest of their life.

Slow TimeMachine backups on osx lion

So, approx 2 months ago I upgraded my laptop to lion. My backups became noticeably slower - they were slow has hell before but in 10.7 they were just unbelievable. Think system lagging to the point of unusable - that slow or worse.

I did find a good solution: Disable spotlight services.

sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist

Considering I never use spotlight to find anything, its just wasted cpu cycles anyway.

My backups now take a small fraction of the time they used to take - few minutes at a time unless I pulled down something big ( think os patches or something )

My laptop ( 2008 macbook pro ) is now usable though I think I'm going to need to replace the fans and am considering replacing the hard drive since its about 5 years old already. Hmmm, ssd? http://www.amazon.com/Samsung-830-MZ-7PC512N-Internal-Laptop/dp/B005T3GPXO/ref=wl_it_dp_o_npd?ie=UTF8&coliid=I2K5BO82B7593V&colid=1HSSX1GJ9ZT27 or maybe one of the intel drives but I'm thinking of just saving the $400 or so.

64-bit goodness?

so I've been doing load testing with emprix eload/oracle application testing suite. among the many issues I've had with it: running out of heap on the. controller and agent process

starting in version 9, they switched from a fairly light install ) about 400 meg ) to a rather hefty 1.5gb download. they used to run jboss 4 ( which was old at the time anyway but! ) and was 100% windows based. also was only 32-bit

starting in 9.2 they posted some support for 64-bit. I've regularly had oom issues on both the controller and the agent. because its 32-bit I'm restricted to 2gb heap which is a shame. their support tech tells me "well, you clearly need more heap - upgrade the hosts to 64-bit windows and that should fix your problem

I ran the upgrade, 64-bit 2008R2. guess what, installed 9.3 ( latest as of today ) and it's ..... 32-bit. great ;) opened a ticket 24 hours ago and guess what - no response yet ;) I'm so shocked!

alternative to jpackage for java alternatives on rhel/centos

I find this much easier :->

cd /usr/java/default/bin
slaves=""
for bin in $(ls)
do
if [ $bin != "java" ];
then
slaves="$slaves --slave /usr/bin/$bin $bin /usr/java/default/bin/$bin"
fi
done
sudo alternatives --install /usr/bin/java java /usr/java/default/bin/java 2 $slaves
sudo alternatives --set java /usr/java/default/bin/java

$ java -version
java version "1.6.0_29"
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0_29-b11)
Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 20.4-b02, mixed mode)

I have always found the jpackage rpms and various dependencies just annoying...

Java, Oracle and Hadoop

Was reading the summary of a /. article ( http://developers.slashdot.org/story/11/09/30/1855204/oracle-proud-self-reliant-increasingly-isolated )and it got be wondering again - what is the fate of Hadoop and the JDK.

Kind of wonder what it would take for a new implementation of hadoop ( or similar implementation ) but in a different language. What if Oracle were to basically reach a point where there was the public domain Java that goes basically stagnant and a commercial version for-pay suddenly exploding the cost of your cluster beyond servers and some switches.

Sure there are some other frameworks ( MongoDB, Cassandra, probably many others ) but in the same idea as the marriage of HDFS and the map/reduce framework itself.

Would OpenJDK even be an option? I've not tried using it for anything. Then again, I just administer hadoop clusters I don't program for them ;)

speculative execution

Running some benchmarks of hadoop using teragen/terasort. One of the recommendations I was given was to disable speculative execution. Noticed something rather strange when I forced it to disabled in the config.

Runtime with speculative execution: 18.5 minutes
Runtime without speculative execution: 1 hour

Seems that 2-3 map tasks are taking longer than the rest.

Question now is: why. Each map task is responsible for generating the same % of data - why would speculative execution make the job run quicker. Does this point to hardware differences ( if so, the slow tasks are on different machines - I have not noticed a pattern yet ), configuration problems elsewhere, or just random bad luck.

it is bottled!

Now a few weeks settling for carbonation.

2 full cases plus 3 bottles, not a bad yield.

The final gravity is 1.020 so it did not ferment off much more. Thats good, that just means the fermentable sugars are pretty much all digested. Its a little sweet but not too bad. Very smooth, a little oaky ( go fig! ) and you can really tell the difference with the Glenlivet. I think this recipe is done - probably will not change it.

Need to archive off a few bottles plus keep from giving away too much of this one. Speak up now for forever hold your peace!