Running as Root

There are quite a few little cameos in The Incredible Hulk but the one I was happiest at having spotted was Rickson Gracie. Remember in Portuguese that 'R' sounds like an 'H', so it's pronounced "Hickson." Unfortunately they've listed him as an Akido instructor despite the fact that he's a bad ass in the family business of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. I know it doesn't sound like it, but that's a colossal fuck up in martial arts land. Besides that it's a fair movie but after all the rumors about heavy editing changing the nature of the film I'd really like to see what the original "Norton" version was like. Maybe 25 years from now we can have 8 versions of it like Blade Runner.

Yeah, I'm not doing so well at sticking to the new "publish once a week" experiment. I either need a new rule allowing overflow or need to be more willing to stockpile these crappy jokes.

While I'm going to try and publish once a week, I have a hard time sitting on finished comics. I just can't resist the temptation to do two this week.

Hey, we're so agile we're bordering on chaos.

I think I'm going to just start putting my infrequently updated comic directly onto the blog. This will allow my to jam my junk in more peoples' faces and allow people to comment on the comic without having to create a Bitstrips account. I'm also going to try and update the comic at least once a week. We'll see how that goes.

My latest bug adventure has to do with the fact that at work we're transitioning to MySQL from SQL Server, a move I fully support.

First some detail on the way our application works. When our applet client syncs with the server it copies the records locally and stores them in a local database which is not MySQL. When you modify a record in the client it gets persisted first to the local database. Anywhere from immediately to the nebulous "later", the client will sync again with the server. When this happens a summary list of the data you can see is sent to the client. This data includes when the record was last updated on the server. This time is compared with your local records and a sync occurs. Local records with a later modified date get sent to the server and remote records with a later modified date get pulled to the client.

I'm not wild about this setup, mainly because I don't trust the time on the client machine since it's well outside of my control. We're also using the client generated time on the server as the last modified time. I think at the very least we should use the server time (interestingly, this wouldn't solve this problem in this case). Slightly more ideally we should use an incrementing version field that will have the benefit of better detecting update conflicts. That aside, we found that when we moved our test systems to MySQL the client was sending way too many records up to the server. Everything in the client-side database appeared to be newer.

It turns out that MySQL truncates timestamps and dates to second granularity. Anything finer than a second (millisecond, microsecond, whatever) is simply dropped. In the client, we're using a database that supports milliseconds. What this means is that if you modify a record at 11:52:27.421 it gets stored with that timestamp locally. When it gets stored in MySQL it is marked as last modified at 11:52:27. Therefore, your local record is almost always newer by literally a fraction of a second. Cool, huh?

Luckily, there's already a bug report. Given that it was reported over 3 years ago, I'm confident it is very nearly fixed. I am still a bit amazed that a database so popular in the enterprise fails at this very basic level of functionality.

As always, there are workarounds to the problem ranging anywhere from storing sub-second values in a separate field and/or creating a user defined type.

I recently got the task of finding a hosted monitoring solution for our production web site. There are quite a few options out there, so I decided to find a source listing a few of the options out there and sign up for some trial accounts. Most all of these sites are horny for your contact information. I'm fine with being contacted by email, but I don't particularly want to fill in the mandatory phone number field. I don't need to spend my day jawing with some glad-handing sales monkey. I write code for a living. So, I usually just put a 555 number in there (lazy developers never validate that shit). That way they can only get a hold of me if all of this is actually a movie, cleverly disguised to look like reality.

Not just one but two of the sales morons at these companies decided that my 555 number must be a cry for help. I want to talk to them and have them give me the hard sell, I was just confused about my real phone number. Not a problem. They used directory assistance and the rest of my real contact information to look up my company, find out our main number, and call several times. You would think that these idiots would realize that they were only going to piss me off by doing that.

The ultimate irony of it is that the site I was going to recommend was one of the ones that pulled this stunt. Unfortunately for them I'm a petty, angry developer. I'll be doing everything within my power to make sure they are the last solution we seriously consider. Now that's some sales job!

Every so often I have a brief love affair with awk. Today I got curious about the file sizes beneath a directory. In particular I wanted to see the totals by file extension. I did a quick search but came up with nothing. I decided that even if there is something out there to do the job, it'd be a lot more fun to do it myself. Tada:

ls -Rl | \
grep ^- | \
awk \
'{ split($9,e,"."); \
exts[e[length(e)==1?2:length(e)]]+=$5 } \
END \
{ for (ext in exts) printf "%10d %s\n", exts[ext], ext }' | \
sort

Yeah, there's an ugly hack in there to deal with file names that either have no extension or multiple dots in their name.

As an added bonus, looking at the previous post on awk got me all pissed off about "smart quotes" in WordPress blogs and the problems they cause when copying and pasting code examples. So, out they go.

How's that for a catchy title? To recap recent events: I'm working on speeding up a Java applet, sloppy code in applet libraries try to load resources from the server which then 404, you can avoid this by setting the codebase_lookup property to false in the applet tag, and finally eliminating 23 megs of invisible data can help speed up downloading. Now that we're all caught up, let's turn to today's adventure: "deployment nightmares" OR "why the hell doesn't my test environment match production?"

Applet Won't Load

I finally got the applet to the "good enough for government work" level of load-time performance. Understand that I don't even work on any of the code in the applet, I'm just trying to optimize what's there and how it's delivered from the server. Today was the day we decided to quietly deploy to production.

The first sign of a problem was when the Apple guys came into the office. The applet wouldn't load for them in either Safari, Firefox 2, or Firefox 3. However, it worked fine on every server they tried except the production server. While trying to figure out what was going on it turned out that the issue had to do with all machines using JRE 1.5 regardless of OS or browser. They all worked against every server except production.

Differences Between Production and Test Environments

In production we have some sort of load balancer, Tomcat is behind IIS, and it's an external network. Nothing in our test environment has a load balancer in front of it, only one machine has IIS but works fine, and my external EC2 deployment is obviously off our network. I'm not sure why we don't mirror as much of this as possible in our test environment, but we don't.

Now back to the bug. Turning off the load balancer had no effect. Eventually, someone let their browser sit long enough to see that the applet did in fact load. It just took around 10 minutes. I finally noticed that the Java console would hang on different non-existent resources it tried to load from the server. I used cURL to retrieve the URL and had to wait 2 minutes until it returned an empty reply. Most non-existent resources timed out immediately. Only URLs that contained META-INF or WEB-INF would hang.

Various 3rd partly libraries were trying to load odd things from the server as I mentioned previously. A few of these load attempts point at the META-INF directory. This only happens under 1.5 because I used the codebase_lookup parameter in the tag. Tomcat, Apache in front of Tomcat, and our internal IIS server all return immediately. The first two serve a custom 404 page while the IIS server sends an immediate empty reply.

WEB-INF and META-INF Protection

Both WEB-INF and META-INF are directories that you probably shouldn't be exposing. In fact, in most versions of the Tomcat Connector the connector will automatically 403 or 404 when any resource from those directories is requested. In our case, we were running an older version of the connector that just happened to have a bug that caused requests to either directory to take 2 minutes to timeout. A quick upgrade and an IIS service bounce fixed everything.

So the debugging lessons for the day are: use something like ngrep to watch your traffic, your test environment should mirror your production environment, applets under 1.5 sucks, and check your version numbers on third party libraries (and consider upgrading).

Sadly, the Olympics are once again over, leaving me with Olympic cravings until the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics roll around. In a couple of years I can look back on this post and remember the high and low points of the greatest Olympics to date. I'm sure I've left out a lot from both lists.

Worst Moments

Here's a brief list of what I found to be the worst moments in the Olympics.

• Taiwan – It's complete bullshit that Taiwan had to participate under a different name (Chinese Taipei), couldn't use their own flag and instead competed under the "Taiwanese Olympic Flag", and would not be allowed to play their national anthem in the event of winning a gold medal (which they didn't).
• Brazilian Soccer – In one of the early games against an over-matched opponent, one of the Brazilian soccer players scored a goal. Right after the ball rolled out of the goal another Brazilian player kicked the living shit out of the ball, sending it into the back of the net again. What a dick move.
• Underage Chinese Gymnasts – Screw innocent until proven guilty. Those female Chinese gymnasts are too young to compete. You can make the argument that the rule itself should be removed (I disagree), but until then it is a rule. I think the Chinese government is involved in falsifying documents in order to allow them to compete. I honestly hope the truth comes out and the Chinese are stripped of the team gold as well as the affected individual medals.
• Gymnastics Judging – An Olympics cannot seem to happen without there being several incidents of questionable judging in a gymnastic event. The worst this time was probably the women's vault finals and the women's uneven parallel bar finals. The vault was a blatant overscore for a vault with many faults, not the least of which was the attempted landing. The uneven bars was a low score that led to a poorly understood tie breaker. I'd prefer to see the days where athletes had to share medal positions in the event of a tie.
• Women's Softball at an End – Unless something happens, this is the last Olympics for Women's Softball. Ironically, the dominance of the American women is cited as the reason for dropping the event (as well as an incorrect association with baseball). It's ironic because the U.S. women failed to win the gold medal this time, losing to Japan (a team they beat in the semi-finals). It's not our fault that other countries oppress their women (more than we do). Are we advocating canceling any event in which a country is dominant? Kiss diving good-bye (China won 7 out of the total 8 diving gold medals available and only one Chinese diver failed to earn a medal of any color). But diving is nothing compared to women's table tennis. 35 or the 86 women competing in table tennis in Beijing were born, raised, and trained in China and for all of table tennis the figure is 55 out of 155. They're so dominant that no one else has any hope of winning unless they import a Chinese player. Cancel it!
• Fernando Gonzalez's Lack of Sportsmanship – Although the outcome of the match may not have been changed, James Blake's ball hit Fernando Gonzalez's racket and Gonzalez knew it in my opinion. He's just too much of a gutless pussy to admit it.
• Women's Fencing is Unwatchable – Despite the fact that the U.S. women swept the medals in individual sabre, I can't watch that crap. It looks like a school yard slap fight with tent poles. But, what makes it completely unwatchable is the banshee-like scream the competitors let out at the end of every point.
• Olympic Boxing Needs an Overhaul – Besides the looming controversy about attempted scoring manipulation by one or more countries, the scoring system and its execution are deeply flawed. The scoring in the Paddy Barnes versus Zou Shiming fight was outrageous. Body shots are never scored. The current score is readily available to each corner. This encourages late fight running by the leader who is assured a win if he can just stay out of scoring range. One of the things I have always liked about boxing is that it's one of the few sports in which you don't even know the score. Oh, and the rounds are too short. The rules of amateur boxing cheapen an already declining sport.
• Lisa Leslie Wearing All Her Medals from Past Olympics – Sure, she's very accomplished being the only athlete to win team gold in 4 Olympics, but wearing all your past medals to the current medal ceremony was tacky.
• Olympic Racewalking – The fact that NBC showed Olympic Racewalking not once but twice in late night coverage instead of showing other events with more mass appeal is moronic. Archery didn't appear once in televised coverage. Even though racewalking has been an official event since the 1908 Olympics, the "sport" is ridiculous. It should be dropped from the roster. At the very least, show something better than an hour and twenty minutes of hip wiggling mall walkers.
• Microsoft Ruined Online Coverage of the Olympics – I couldn't/wouldn't view any of the online coverage (which sucked anyway because there was no audio commentary) because, inexplicably, someone cut a deal with Microsoft so that viewing required Silverlight. As much as I appreciate someone trying to cram their, arguably beta, technology down my throat I would have liked a more widely adopted, relatively platform independent, working browser-based video playback option. Is something suddenly wrong with Flash? Way to drastically cut your online viewership numbers. I hope whatever check Microsoft cut for them was a big one.

Best Moments

There were so many great moments. Here are some that really stuck out for me.

• Opening Ceremony – Despite a terrible accident during rehearsals and other inevitable controversies, it was easily the best opening ceremony in history. The whole thing was amazing. The 897 human powered movable type blocks routine was jaw-dropping.
• Women's Soccer U.S. versus Norway – Two early misplays by the U.S. led to two goals for Norway within the first four minutes of the game. They were the only goals scored in the game, but I enjoyed the fact that nothing is certain. The heavily favored U.S. team screwed up and Norway beautifully capitalized on it. Good stuff.
• Michael Phelps – Some people grew tired of it, but I never did. I watched every heat, every race. I thought the men's 4×100 freestyle relay was the most exciting Olympic moment I had ever seen. That is until I saw the men's 100m butterfly a couple of nights later. For me those are the two most amazing races in Olympic history, swimming or otherwise. I wish they would stretch out the swimming competitions to allow swimmers the possibility of competing in even more events. As it stands, the required turnaround time between heats and events makes it next to impossible even though a swimmer may be a competitive threat in numerous events. This picture of Phelps with a mustache is another favorite of mine.
• Mark Spitz – It's related to Phelps, but I think it deserves a separate mention. The interview Spitz gave with Phelps on NBC was very satisfying. Spitz was incredibly gracious and well spoken. It's very refreshing to see someone whose amazing record has fallen be so incredibly respectful of the next guy, especially after hearing so many cry babies claiming they were better in their time. Let someone else sing your praises. Spitz did it right.
• Dara Torres – She's a great story in general (competing at that level at 41 years old is awe inspiring), but I was even more impressed when she worked to delay the start of a qualifying heat so the Swedish swimmer could finish changing out of her ripped suit. Nice sportsmanship. I wish she had won a gold, but she was still amazing to watch.
• Usain Bolt – Dominance in sports is sometimes extremely entertaining. Watching Usain Bolt prematurely celebrate in the 100m dash and still set a world record was awesome. I don't fault him for showboating. He's young (he turned 22 during the games) and is at the top of his sport. At least he got serious in the 200m when he again broke the world record with a head wind. It was also good to see him and Asafa Powell dancing in the finish area after again breaking a world record in the 4x100m relay. It's too bad the Americans are such butterfingers at baton passing (both the women and men were disqualified in the heats for dropped batons), but they honestly didn't stand a chance anyway.
• Volleyball – All of the volleyball was outstanding. Men's and women's beach and indoor were extremely entertaining to watch. Lloyd Ball and Logan Tom emerged as two of my favorite players for the indoor men's and women's teams respectively. It's a terrible shame that the men's indoor team had to labor under such tragedy.
• India vs Spain Men's Table Tennis Singles – The Sharath Kamal Achanta (India) versus Alfredo Carneros (Spain) match happened in round 1 and wasn't for a medal. What made the match interesting is that the two train together and had the misfortune of meeting in the first round. The two were as friendly as possible given the circumstances, giving each other plenty of time, warning one another when their play surface or paddle became damp with sweat, and apologizing profusely for net or edge balls. At the end of the match it was even hard to tell that Achanta had won because he refused to celebrate in front of his training partner whose Olympics had just ended.

Thoughts on the "China Problem"

China's fucked up, there's no doubt about it. No one likes their human rights abuses, the number of people forced from their homes to make the Olympics happen, their record on the environment, their totalitarian government, and a plethora of other problems and issues the country faces. Should we have boycotted the Olympics? I don't think so. Once they were given the Olympics it wouldn't be fair the the athletes to support a boycott. You could make the argument that they shouldn't have been given the Olympics in the first place, but I would still have to disagree. Even though every success economic or otherwise only makes the current government look better I think that cutting off China from the world isn't the answer. They've proven their ability and willingness to remain isolationists for centuries. I like to think engaging them culturally and economically can help open them up and hopefully turn many of their current problems around. If it happens it'll happen slowly. Only time will tell, but I don't think boycotting the Olympics would make the difference.

Looking Ahead to Vancouver

The next big Olympics will be in Vancouver in 2010. I'm hoping there's no talk of a boycott because of Canada's well documented maple syrup abuses. I'm giddy with excitement that those winter games will kickoff on February 12th, 2010. That means it's only a year and a half away rather than a full two years. Plus, since they're in North America, I'm toying with the idea of attending. Unfortunately, that would mean giving up my 24×7 television coverage. Would being there live make up for the loss? I'll have to think about it.