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We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%.

Measure. Don't tune for speed until you've measured, and even then don't unless one part of the code overwhelms the rest.

We spend a lot of our time in the modern, web services-driven technology industry ignoring performance issues. What's the point of micro-optimizing a 3ms function call when each request spends 8 or 9 seconds inside the SQLAlchemy ORM? Well, sometimes it's nice to practice those optimizion skills anyway, and today I'm going to walk you through micro-optimizing a simple problem and we'll see just how much better we can do than a naive solution... even though we probably normally shouldn't.

Until recently, my job was to synthesize a deep understanding of operating systems, networking, system administration, and my company's application and to use that synthesis to fix our existing systems and design better ones. A lot of folks in the technology industry (particularly in the bubble of Greater San Francisco) use the word "DevOps" when putting out job postings for roughly those tasks, and I just wanted to briefly write about why this word is somewhere between inaccurate and offensive and why you shouldn't use it.

My fiancée persuaded me to go through my drawer of old electronics and I thought I'd post a picture of some of the (working) portable computers that we went through today:

Included:

• Apple Newton MessagePad 2100
• Apple iPhone 3G
• Nokia 770 (running Internet Tablet OS 2006)
• Sony Cliè PEG NX-80V
• Handspring Visor Edge
• HP TouchPad

Combined, they might have as much computing power as the iPhone 6 I recently acquired. Probably not, though. It certainly is interesting to look at what has and hasn't changed over the last 20 years.

Also poked at today (but not pictured)

• Toshiba Satellite U200-160
• Olympus PEN E-P1 m43 camera

If you're interested in any of this stuff, let me know.

Hello friends. As you may remember from a few years ago, I am an iPhone user. Like several million of you, I decided to upgrade to the iPhone 6 this year. I thought I'd share some really brief impressions:

• The 6 is gigantic. I have no idea how anyone is using the 6+. The photo above shows my 5s (which was already quite large) looking dwarfed by the 6. It still doesn't have anything on the iPad, though.
• The curved edges of the front really do feel a lot better for the forward/backward swipe gestures in iOS when compared to the flat screens of the iPhone 5s and the iPad.
• The screen is noticably better, particularly from extreme angles. Check out this shot of the two iphones and the iPad from a very low angle and in the dark; there's no contest about the contrast:

• The screen is also noticeably cooler; setting a white background on it next to my iPhone 5s or my rMBP makes the 5s look yellow, the rMBP look neutral, and the 6 look blue.
• iTunes is terrible. It took me at least two hours to get the iPhone up and running because when I plugged it in to restore from backup (thinking that a USB2 connection would be faster than restoring from "the cloud" over my Comcast internet connection), iTunes insisted on installing the versions of all my applications which it had backed up some time in 2013. So then I had to go download updates to 70+ applications over the WiFi anyway. Blech.
• This is more of an iOS 8 thing, but Swype is great. I remember having it on the Motorola Droid that we had to use for on-call at Yelp and liking it there, and it seems to have made the transition to iOS with aplomb.
• The camera does indeed focus faster. Otherwise, it seems identical to the iPhone 5S camera.
• I wish it didn't have a camera bump. I might get a case (which I never do) just to hide the camera bump. Maybe the new Karvt skins will be thick enough to be level with it?
• Scaled-up applications are really annoying. Jason Snell does a good job of explaining why in his iPhone 6/6+ Preview; the keyboard is the wrong size on scaled-up apps. And, of course, third-party keyboards are disabled in scaled-up apps. I am very eager for Tweetbot, Hipchat, and Google's apps to update.

That's it for now.

Sorry for going so long between posts; I have some posts with actually content (instead of just commercial blathering) in them queued up, and maybe I'll put one of those up soon.

Until then, ciao.

For a while, I've been using the Moves app for iOS. It's a little application that uses the accelerometer and GPS data from your phone to tell you where you've been and how many steps you've taken and so on and so forth. I've been using it in no small part because of their strong third-party privacy policy, which said:

We do not disclose an individual user’s data to third parties unless (1) you have given explicit consent to each such disclosure, (2) we are required to comply with a legal obligation or (3) if our business or assets, or parts of them, are acquired by a third party.

Unfortunately, as you may know, Moves was acquired by Facebook last month, and I'm sorry to say that their stance on user privacy has not improved. Today, Moves updated their Privacy Policy, and it's not good stuff.

For better or worse¹, Moves (like many companies) does not post diffs when they change their privacy policy. So I'm doing it for you. I extracted the current privacy policy (as of 2014-05-05) and the previous one (edited 2013-09-17) from The Wayback Machine, then reformatted them as Markdown. You can view them at https://gist.github.com/Roguelazer/7e59bb615c3e5a38b036; the diff itself is at https://gist.github.com/Roguelazer/7e59bb615c3e5a38b036#file-september_versus_may-patch.

Important Disclaimer

I am not a lawyer. If you think you may be affected by the changes to this legal document, you should consult with your attorney. Please don't cite me in court or sue me over interpretation. This document does not consitute legal advice and is for entertainment and outrage purposes only.

Interpretation of Changes

The biggest change, to me, is the fact that Moves is now reserving the right to share all of your data with (roughly) anyone at any time. The relevant clause:

We may share information, including personally identifying information, with our Affiliates (companies that are part of our corporate groups of companies, including but not limited to Facebook) to help provide, understand, and improve our Services.

Also interesting to me is the following passage which was removed:²

We will not display or otherwise disclose information where individual users can be recognized. Furthermore, our developers need to occasionally review raw data and the results for recognized activities/routes/places to improve the system. They will only see the unique identifier number with the data.

As far as I can tell, Moves is being set up by Facebook to monetize, share, and potentially leak your personal movements, and to inherit up Facebook's famously-shoddy isolation of user PII.

Having read this document, I have removed the Moves application from my phone. If anyone is aware of any personal-awareness-movement-tracking apps which promise not to sell your location to the highest bidder, please let me know. And if you still have the Moves application on your phone, well, I hope you get a chance to take a look at the detailed changes to the Privacy Policy and make an informed decision.

I was installing MacTeX on my MacBook Pro today and had an amusing realization. First, some background: for those of you who don't know, TeX is a phenomenal family of typesetting programs originally written in 1978 by two of the giants of 20th Century computer science, Don Knuth and Guy Steele. Most people now use it in conjunction with a slightly more modern set of extensions called LaTeX released in 1981 or so. I used TeX/LaTeX to typeset several thousand pages of homework and other assignments in college.

Now, in early 2014, the download for the OS X distribution of TeX+LaTeX is 2.3GiB, and it actually occupies about 3.5GiB of disk space when installed. How does this compare to 1978? Well, one of the cheapest options for storage in 1978 was the DEC RK05, a gargantuan 2.5MiB cartridge disk drive, which cost $7,900 for the drive and $99 for each disk.

To store the installation of MacTeX-2013, we'd need 1,434 of these disks. This would cost $149,866 ($543,133 in 2014 dollars) and would form a cylinder 14" in diameter and 358' tall¹, which would weigh about 100,000 pounds². Based on some cursory googling, this seems like it'd be a stack of disk cartridges roughly as tall as a 25-story skyscraper and weighing about as much as 10 African bull elephants. Also, apparently the cartridges have embedded read/write head magnets and will erase one another if left in close proximity³, so that stack would be a terrible way to store your data.

I wonder what Knuth and Steele think of the fact that their little typesetting software would be the largest building in a good fraction of the cities in the world?

At least it's still cheaper than San Francisco real estate.

I use Alfred 2 a lot on OS X in order to get things done. It doesn't completely change how I use the operating system, but it comes close. However, one of my pet peeves about it has always been that the built-in calculator is pretty terrible (even with the "advanced" equals-sign calculator). I realized this morning that I could fix this, and, lo, the dc alfred workflow was born.

It just takes its input and runs it through the dc command-line utility, giving you a fully-programmable RPN calculator. It's not quite as great as PCalc, but it's just a ^-space away. If you have Alfred, you can just install the workflow and then use the script filter "dc" to run your math commands. Example:

Shortly after I upgraded to OS X 10.9.2, I was connecting to battle.net, and I got an SSL error. At the time, I didn't think anything of it (after all, sites have bad SSL certificates all the time). However, I noticed it again today when looking at the page for Reaper of Souls, and decided to look into it again. When I did, I found something very unusual: my system has a second copy of the DigiCert root CA certificate in the "login" keychain. For those of you who aren't familiar, OS X uses a hierarchy of binary key/password databases called "keychains" to store sensitive materials. Generally, Root CA certificates are only found in the Trusted Roots keychain; the "login" keychain (which is a per-user keychain writable without root privileges) is only used to store passwords and other application-level data.

I've had an article sitting in Draft status since June 2013 about the Pebble smartwatch which I bought during their Kickstarter campaign. The article essentially said that the Pebble has awesome features, but feels like a toy and scuffs if you look at it askance. I was planning on going into detail about how apps like httpebble and smartwatch+ feel immensely hackish.

Well, as of today, I'm confident reporting that Pebble has resolved all of these issues with the Pebble Steel and Pebble OS 2.0.

As I alluded in my last post, I've had a fair bit of extra time on my hands for the last couple of weeks. That's because I've been quite ill. This post is the exciting story of what I've been sick with.

Starting in the evening of Friday, 2014-01-10, I had body aches and a fever. Now, at first, I didn't even know if anything was wrong — I'd slept poorly the night before, and maybe I was just feeling poorly because E was going back to school. Unfortunately, when I woke up on Saturday, 2014-01-11, the fever was worse, so I stayed in bed all day. I did't feel too terrible (I went to the grocery store and did my regular errands on Sunday, and even went to work on Monday), but I knew I was sick. I just hoped it was a cold or something else minor that would go away by itself. Unfortunately, on Tuesday, the fever was high enough that I knew I wouldn't be productive, so I had to stay out of work. Wednesday continued the high fever and brought intermittent sore throat (only on the left side, though, which was weird), which was enough for me to decide to go to the doctor.

Of course, like so many irresponsible young people in my age cohort, I didn't actually have a doctor. So I decided to sign up with One Medical Group, which is a pretty cool concept. For a nominal yearly fee, you get not only a doctor, but the ability to make same-day appointments to see any doctor in their network. A $15 copay and the ability to be seen by a GP-type doctor definitely beats having to go to the ER for minor illnesses, right? So, Wednesday night, I took an Uber out to Pac Heights and met with Dr. Ciccarone. He looked at me, looked at my throat, and told me that my left tonsil looked like a textbook picture of strep throat. Then he did a RADT, which was negative for strep. Hm. I guess he had some kind of hunch, because he poked me on both sides of my belly and asked me which one hurt more. Apparently, I answered the side that my spleen is on, and a sensitive spleen is diagnostically relevant for things that aren't strep throat. He still took a full strep culture, though. Then he told me to keep taking ibuprofen and report to the phlebotomist the next day to get blood drawn.

The next day (Thursday), I woke up feeling even more miserable (temperature hovering around 102°F / 39°C), took some more ibuprofen, and went to a different One Medical Group office to get my blood taken... which was quite painless.

¹

Friday, a different doctor called me to tell me that the blood tests were positive for Epstein-Barr Virus, which causes a disease known as mono. Symptoms of mono include fever, sore throat, and fatigue. And, as a virus, there's next to nothing you can do about it except wait it out. So, over the weekend, I waited it out, while the fever and sore throat got worse. By Monday, I couldn't swallow solid food at all, and even liquids were challenging.

²

Fast forward to Tuesday, 2014-01-21. I got another message from the doctor — apparently, the throat culture that Dr. Ciccarone had done last Wednesday came back for "β-hemolytic Streptococcus, not group A isolated", which is apparently a somewhat uncommon variant of strep, the symptoms of which include fever, sore throat, and fatigue.

Yep. I got both mono and strep. Which probably helps explain why I've been so miserable lately. The doctor prescribed Cefuroxime to wipe out the strep, and continuing rest for the mono.

Finally, after a frankly miserable two weeks in total, the fever finally broke on Friday, 2014-01-24, just in time for my coworkers to send me a care package containing delicious Wise Sons challah.

As of this posting, I have no idea how long it'll take for the rest of my symptoms to go away, but I'm just glad that the fever's gone and the sore throat has eased up enough that I can start eating actual food again and contemplate doing actual work.