Archive for August, 2008
Thank God! Amazon persistent storage is here
Kevin Day, August 21st, 2008I just stayed up late last night working on backup scripts for my EC2 instances, so it was great to wake up this morning to see Amazon’s latest update. With Amazon’s Elastic Block Store (EBS), ECS users can now mount persistent volumes directly to the file system. That should translate into more sleep for me.
I don’t know how many I/O requests I make in a month though, and that seems to be how they’re charging for this service. I’ll have to test it out first before I do anything serious with it.
Firefox Caching Bug
Kevin Day, August 17th, 2008For a while I thought I had a bug with my Ajax fantasy football mock draft program, but it turns out the bug was in Firefox 3 instead.
The bug is that Firefox 3 doesn’t handle caching properly. If you don’t want it to cache a page you have to specify your headers in a specific order, otherwise it will cache it even if the headers correctly specify not to. More info here and here.
This affected me because I use a periodic Ajax GET request to the same url in a live draft application. I reply with no-cache headers so that the GET request polls the server every time. When Firefox 3 pulled the request from the cache instead, it would miss a lot of updates and made the application appear to freeze up.
To work around the bug, I’m just appending a timestamp to the end of every request. I feel that’s better than using FF3’s specific ordering of header info because I don’t want to have to worry that they may change their magical ordering. It’s not much work to get around the bug, but it was difficult to pinpoint in the first place.
In Business
Kevin Day, August 15th, 2008As of July 2nd, I am no longer employed by General Electric. Also, I am also no longer a mechanical engineer.
What have I been doing with myself?
I have been voraciously developing the best fantasy football software website on the internet.
Fantasy Football Calculator is now hosting 1,500 live mock drafts every day. I’ve also launched three new products within the past two months: the Lineup Calculator, Draft Calculator, and Draft Simulator.
To keep up with the high traffic volume during the NFL pre-season, I’ve had to scale the site from one server to four. That process wasn’t fun, but the site is now running smoothly even during peak hours.
I’ve also started a blog on that site, which is another reason I’ve been neglecting this one. I’m going to start posting here again because I do have non-fantasy football related thoughts now and then.
Colorstrology
Kevin Day, August 15th, 2008I’m working from Phoenix Coffee right now. I hadn’t been a believer in colorstrology before, but I flipped through the book while I was waiting for my dark roast.
The books says my birth color is lavender, which indicates that I possess the qualities:
Visionary, creative, builder
That’s good news. I’ve been doing a lot of those three lately, so I’m glad to have confirmation that I’m actually good at them.
