Horses are terrible people

I’ve been on last.fm for a few years, since it was called audioscrobbler. I’ve enjoyed seeing what musical listening trends I have and like the whole concept. I was pointed to LastGraph today, a service that goes and gets your last.fm data for a given range and makes a very cool graph of it. Here’s an example for December 2006-March 2007 for me:

Click for a larger view

Here’s a link to my entire Last.fm history, which I found interesting to check out. Do you have as last.fm account that you actively use? If so, drop your graph in the comments!

Check out my photography prints for sale at deviantart.com. All proceeds go to my Canon 40D fund!

Last night I was inspired by the crisp, clear night and the tree next to my home so I broke out my camera and dusted off the cobwebs. The results are what I think are some neat pictures:

Click for the Set

After using PL/Proxy in production for a bit and working on some scaling and partitioning projects, I’ve come up with a few observations:

• The PL/PgSQL based configuration is flexible enough to not be considered a hack, but the lack of real in depth documentation leaves one to discover why on their own.
• If you have an environment, like mine, where you’re constantly expanding, building out new infrastructure and have the potential to add new pgBouncer servers on your DB tier for PL/Proxy, Do not use the CONNECT methodology. Instead invest the time to write your configuration functions and use the CLUSTER, RUN ON method instead.
• Plan for more time in debugging PL/PgSQL functions. While generally it’s just replacing the body and language in your functions, it does take more organization and testing to make sure your new PL/PgSQL functions and PL/Proxy counterparts work flawlessly in production.
• Single database machine development environments shouldn’t prevent you from testing PL/Proxy functionality. Setup pgBouncer and various databases to mimic your production environment. We’ve skipped this step in development and paid the price during rollout.
• Even with Marko’s suggestions we’ve yet to find a good way to handle the client_encoding issue. Unfortunately what this means is as we scale, we’re still stuck in SQL_ASCII land and the job to convert to UTF-8 just gets bigger and bigger. Note my dirty hack of using a wrapper function kicks out log messages that normal PLProxy based functions do not, which clutter up our Postgres logs.
• It’s solid. PL/Proxy is still everything I thought it was when I rolled it out and I’ve been very happy with the reliability and scaling it buys me.

I’m looking forward to Marko’s next release of PLProxy which I'm guessing will hit sometime in December. If I read his notes right, it may address my client_encoding issue.

Should I be concerned that the company that I use to ensure deliverability and that our emails don't end up in spam folders shows up in my spam folder?

After upgrading to Leopard by doing clean reinstalls on all of my boxes, I wanted to get Parallels back up and running. To my surprise, the Parallels installer doesn’t seem to want to install Parallels. At about 2% of the installation it freezes up. In discussing this with a friend, a suggestion of VMWare Fusion was made and I decide to give it a try. VMWare Fusion installed great, and seems to start ok, but alas, when I went to go convert my Parallels disk image, I found that there was no native functionality in VMWare Fusion to do this.

After some brief googling, I found that VMWare has a Parallels converter application. I merrily went on my way to download it, realizing I’d probably have to reactivate windows and such. It was when I got to the download page that it struck me. The VMWare application to convert one OS X based virtualization image format to their own... was windows based. Yup, to convert a Parallels image to VMWare Fusion image, you have to run a windows based conversion tool. Now I ask you: if you’re looking to steal users away from a competing product, doesn’t it make sense to make the tools which make it possible to do so, in the native operating system your competing product runs in?