Install Starling on Windows

We've started performance testing. While a big step in nearing completion of our alpha, we're unfortunately working on two new pieces of functionality. I'll detail later. For performance, we've implemented two new components to get memcache to work really well (Starling and Workling):

Starling: "Starling is a light-weight persistent queue server that speaks the MemCache protocol. It was built to drive Twitter's backend, and is in production across Twitter's cluster." - It was open sourced by the guy's at Twitter, so thanks Twitter.

Workling makes working with Starling easier: "easily do background work in rails, without commiting to a particular runner. comes with starling, bj and spawn runners"

But... I just wanted to post a note to other Rails developers who are trying to install Starling on Windows. The gem fails the install due to C compilation failures. While you could get a C compiler working on your box to make things like this easier, it's not that simple. I've been struggling with integrating a native C compiler with my Rails environment for a while. The Microsoft version would probably work better, but I don't have it. And I'm not paying for it.

Anyway, in order to install Starling, you need to manually install the last eventmachine version that has a windows compiled gem (that's what's failing in the gem starling install), which is version 0.12.0. Thanks Stackoverflow (here)

run this:
gem install eventmachine --version=0.12.0

Once that installs run this:
gem install starling

Voila - set to go.

Another cool project is: Rubyinstaller (here), which aims to take care of the install problems I experienced above. Hope that helps

UPDATE: You will most likely get this error when you try to startup: custom_require.rb:27:in `gem_original_require': no such file to load -- syslog (LoadError)

This has been fixed in version 0.9.9 but is not yet available as a gem. You can download the source and overwrite your existing files. The files you need to overwrite are server.rb and server_runner.rb. The paths' are in the downloaded tarball so you can easily see where to put them.

UPDATE to UPDATE: So it looks like I'll need Cygwin to successfully run this on my Windows box. Why? Because there's no fork() process that's native to Windows. Cygwin fudges one together. This is a bigger pain than I thought. I'll probably take Kenny's advice from his comment and grab myself a Mac. I never thought that would happen.

Ford, Detroit, and the Lions - The Link Between Football and Ford

Do you know what football team is 0-13 this year, on pace for going 0-for? Do you know what football team has had the worst record during the last decade? Or how about what football team gave its CEO, Matt Millen, a 5 year extension last year, even though they've owned the worst record in football? The Detroit Lions. Well, technically he was released this year. Or resigned. It's uncertain. But their performance hasn't improved.

What I find particularly enjoyable about their abysmal performance, isn't really about the team. It's about the ownership. See, they're owned by the Ford family. The very same family who has proven they can't run a car company. The performance trickles down from the top. It's the same theory as Reaganomics - just applied a bit differently.

So what's the Ford family doing wrong? Well, you can see some similarities between the two "companies". They are overpaying their employees to deliver a sub-par product. They've put people in who don't know a thing about their product (Millen had no experience in football operations). They aren't focused on giving their customers what they want. And, of course, they've built their products with parts that don't last. Henry Ford must be rolling around in his grave!

GM - You Gotta Be Kidding Me! Don't Drop the Saturn!

Dear GM,

Please, please, please don't do what you said you'd do. Don't keep running your company like you have been. It won't work. I promise.

Thank you,
A Frustrated US Consumer

It appears that GM is talking about cutting Saturn out of its plans. Yup, shutting down the one bright spot in their company. That's like cutting off your arm to save your finger. Except, you won't be saving your finger, because, well, it's still attached to your arm.

What does GM have with Saturn? It has a very loyal and passionate following (there are tons of Saturn enthusiast forums across the web). It has style... yes, cool cars. It has the potential of a money making product.

What doesn't it have? Profits. But that's not entirely Saturn's fault. They don't have a very large advertising budget and therefore people don't know a whole lot about what's out there. You've probably seen their recent car commercials, so maybe that's changing. And maybe they need to make some of their Saturn's in the US. Their Astra became uncompetitive here because of the dollar (it's made in Belgium). Since we're the largest auto market in the world, I find that surprising. And, they've sort of lost their way. They started making the 8 passenger Outlook SUV when their core market wasn't shopping for those. Saturn was started with the intention of keeping the product line low and delivering cost efficient, fuel efficient vehicles. An 8 passenger SUV doesn't fit the mold.

There's a lot that Saturn would need to do to succeed, but I have to say, I haven't even seen a cool car, like the Sky, come from a US automaker in quite a while. And if you think the PT Cruiser is cool, you're not welcome here anymore. While I admit that the Ford GT is sweet, any car that's $150K can be made cool, even by Ford.

Firefox Add-ons - TooManyTabs

On Thanksgiving (yes, this is a bit late), there was a great post on LifeHacker that discussed all things FireFox and the great add-ons/extensions (here) that can make your browser a pretty powerful tool. Sure, there are all the copy/paste, multiple tab, download helpers, memory managers, skin tweaks, document managers, and hundreds of other add-ons. And those are all great, but the one thing that consistently kills my user experience is having too many tabs open in my browser. It gobbles up memory like it's a job. And I always lose pages that I want to look at later, but not necessarily bookmark, because I'm constantly trying to conserve memory.

Bookmarking is great, I'll give it that. But how many times have you bookmarked stuff never to look for it again? Probably quite often. And since my memory likes to escape me from time to time, I like to have visual queues. Alas, here comes TooManyTabs. This is my favorite extension - and it's well worth it. Extensions are free for those who've never used them.

TooManyTabs (here). I'll leave the description to them:

TooManyTabs allows you to store up to over 50 tabs in multiple extra rows in your browser by a simple click. It saves your browser's space and memory as idle tabs are put aside. The extra rows also help to better prioritize and visualize your tabs.

It's awesome!

GetAFreelancer Sucks! oDesk Doesn't Suck!

I know you've been missing my "... Sucks" postings, so here you go. I decided to try two outsourcing services to get a side project done for our website. The big firm, oDesk, I've actually done some work for as a service provider. I wrote up some economic analysis of the G7. I think my macro professor, Andy Rose, would be proud. oDesk is a site with great usability and great design. It provides the ability for extensive project management and easy communication - along with a strong feedback model. Definitely best of breed. Then there's GetAFreelancer.com on the other end of the spectrum. I should have been skeptical, but it's been around for a while and there are tons of people who have successfully used the service, so I figured, why not give it a try? Their design is terrible and their feedback system leaves a lot to be desired.

I posted the job in both places and awaited the responses. I had quite a few in a short amount of time. There was quite a big price differential between the two. This was a small project, and GetAFreelancer sourced me some offers at almost half the price. I figured there wasn't much to lose using the service since you don't pay until your job is complete. Though you do have to deposit money on their site (through Paypal or several other ways)

The candidate on GetAFreelancer was incredibly responsive, answering emails several times a day for days on end. So I chose him and began the project. Well, it's now been 3 weeks and I haven't heard a peep from him since he won the job. He doesn't respond to emails and has pretty much disappeared.

I tried to reopen the project to get other talent, but the hoops you had to jump through were enough to make me leave. You had to send emails back and forth to support, which extended the project constantly. Part of my issue was getting this done quickly, which wasn't possible.

After finally getting my project reopened, the service charge wasn't refunded. And while they were responsive, I had to jump through hoops to get that taken care of. Long story short, I closed the project and went to oDesk. But... it wasn't over. My deposit (the amount I had to put in my account) is still sitting with them. And to withdraw it takes two weeks, in addition to a service fee. So they take money from you up front when you hire someone and then they take money from you when you withdraw money. And I didn't even use them. I hate schemes like this. Now, in fairness, many people probably have great experiences. I just wouldn't use them again. I'm using oDesk now and am very happy with the project. The developer rules. And I still can't leave negative feedback for the guy on GetAFreelancer! COME ON!

The Cool Thing About an MBA

I went down to Google yesterday to participate in an information session for Haas. It was somewhere in the middle of the question and answer session where I spoke about how great it was to be an alumni of Cal and how it really opens doors for you everywhere you go. In addition to all of the great people who have helped us out with Vyoo so far, last week was yet another case of this in action.

I sent a few email to some math professors at Berkeley. I wanted someone to take a look at what we were doing with our algorithm and to help us design a more efficient approach to running this algorithm in real time. The calculations get pretty computationally intensive and grow more so quite dramatically as new users are added.

Professor John Strain met with me last Thursday. His specialties are: Applied mathematics, Numerical analysis, Fast algorithms, and Materials science. It was the numerical analysis and fast algorithms that really interested me. But anyway, he was a Math professor at Berkeley so I knew he was brilliant. Just spending time with people like Professor Strain is rewarding in itself.

He ended sitting down with me for quite a while, looking over what we were doing, explaining the intricacies of the calculations, and presenting me with a solution to how we could improve the speed of what we were doing. While I had read a bit about what he was showing me in advance, I had a difficult time understanding. He walked me through it, showing great patience. I can imagine how difficult it must be to have to walk someone through something you can see so clearly. But alas, I got it... and what he showed me made great sense. I've always had a passion for math. It's one of those cool properties that guide a great deal of life on this earth.

In any event, he was a great teacher and an excellent person and seems truly interested in our approach. We ended up chatting for quite a while about all sorts of interesting things: travel, linguistics, Asia, recommendations... definitely a cool meeting.

World AIDS Day 2008

Today is World AIDS Day. Doesn't it seem like every other day is a day that represents a cause? It does to me.

I'm happy that people are taking a look at AIDS again. It seems like the disease has slipped under our collective radar. I remember being petrified, constantly thinking about contracting HIV when I was younger. I think there is this misguided assumption that it's a disease that only affects certain people, but that's not entirely true. Sure, there is a disproportionate number of black people who have contracted HIV in this country. More than half of the just over 1M people who have it. And sure it affects the homosexual community more than the heterosexual community. But that sure as hell doesn't mean you can't get it. I can't tell you how many of my friends have unprotected sex. It's really mind boggling.

You can read more about World AIDS Day 2008 here: http://www.worldaidscampaign.org/static/en/