To tide me over after the end of the World Cup and before the start of the new domestic football seasons, I’ve been spending some time trying to put together teams of international legends of the game for my foosball table (which currently lives in the Whitespace office). The table is a Garlando with a 2-5-3 formation. I put a further restriction for my team selections by only picking one player per country.
“It is found that anything that can go wrong at sea generally does go wrong sooner or later”
- Alfred Holt, 1877 (Murphy’s Law)
The Deep Water Horizon disaster is undoubtably a catastrophic occurance. At the risk of sounding unpopular, it is also possibly a great opportunity. The first blowout of somewhere around 50,000 American offshore wells should force people – and governments – to have a long hard look at their priorities and energy usage.
For all of the bluster and ill-feeling directed toward BP, the USA has to face up to it’s massive reliance on oil. The upper estimate on the scale of the spill is 100,000 barrels of oil per day. The demand for oil in the USA in 2009 was just under 13,000 barrels of oil. Per minute. All that oil has to come from somewhere and attempting to reduce imports leaves only one option available.
The other day in the office we noticed that one of our servers was performing a little sluggishly. We rolled up our sleeves, fired up a terminal window and prepared to take a look under the hood.
There were a lot of database jobs backing up in the process list and this confused me – our connections are implemented as singleton classes and I was pretty sure that all of the queries had been examined with some EXPLAIN ANALYZE attention.
After some head-scratching I came up with this command line script that will list the five most CPU intensive SQL queries for the current user in the process list:
ps aux --sort=pcpu | grep "postgres: $USER" | tail -5 | awk '{ print $2 }' | xargs -I{} psql -c 'select procpid, current_query, query_start, backend_start from pg_stat_activity where procpid = {}'
I ventured out on my bike over the weekend for the first time in ages. Nothing too strenuous – a short climb on the road to the canal and an eventual 16km loop back home.
There is a well-established hierarchy on the road: truck drivers hate cars, car drivers hate cyclists and cyclists hate pedestrians. It works the other way along the chain too. Where does this stem from? Sheer embittered experience.
Within 50 meters of leaving the flat, two pedestrians started to cross the road – against the suggestion from the signal – and walked right in front of me. I gave them a good shout and they thankfully managed to jump back before I ploughed into them. Further along my way on up to the canal a woman behind the wheel of a BMW blithely ignored the protocol of giving way to your right at a roundabout and pulled straight out. Thankfully my brakes were up to the task asked of them.
It has been quite a while since I last rode along the Union canal towpath and in the meantime some helpful soul has erected signs asking cyclists to slow down to a near walking pace. These signs have now been officially replaced by British Waterways. Apparently I’m one of the few cyclists who sound their bell when approaching pedestrians. Of course, this makes absolutely no bloody difference if those walking in front of me are listening to their iPods at full volume1.
Everyone, for the love of Pete, please, please bloody well pay attention to those around you and obey the rules – no matter what your mode of transportation.
1 I’m thinking of strapping one of these to my top tube to replace my bell.
That’s the World Cup over with for another four years. The past month has seen some sublime moments of football1 intermingled with the ridiculous and I don’t think that the higher echelons of the game will ever be the same again.
I had an feeling before the matches started that FIFA’s obstinate stance on introducing more technology into the game would become untenable. Their argument that the game should be the same at all levels just doesn’t wash. For a start, the game as played at the top level is already very different from the games played in Sunday league matches around the world. No club tennis player – or umpire – expects to have Hawkeye adjudicating during their rallies.
This isn’t just a bitter England fan speaking after Frank Lampard’s non-goal so I’m not about to argue that the outcome would have been different – England’s capitulation was nothing short of embarrassing.
The goal scored by Tevez despite being blatantly offside (actually replayed on the big screen inside the stadium) and De Jong’s appalling challenge / assault in the final are just two further examples of where video replay would have been beneficial but maybe officiating these kinds of infringements can wait for augmentation until goal line technology has bedded in and proved to be a success – which it undoubtedly will be. Extra linesmen referees assistants on the goal line have been tried and been shown to be ineffectual.
The Uruguayan Suarez’s handball in the final seconds of the quarter-final which was ultimately responsible for Ghana’s exit was spotted and punished. I’m not saying that he was right to cheat in this way but I don’t think I’d like anyone who wouldn’t be prepared to do the same on my team. Unfortunately he didn’t show any dignity in his celebrations after Uruguay won on spot kicks and sentiment turned against him even more. FIFA need to introduce the concept of a penalty goal to combat this.
A simple addition to the game in attempt to stop encroachment at free kicks is temporary pitch markings which only necessitate the referee to carry a can of spray paint with him.
Another rule I’d like to see introduced is the banning of defenders shepherding the ball out of play – any player employing this practice anywhere else on the pitch would be pulled up for obstruction. I’d make it illegal to shield the ball unless the player has touched it and is in control.
60 years ago, squad numbers2 didn’t exist and substitutes weren’t heard of in the English League. Rule changes – both cosmetic and game-related – sometimes help move the game forward and sometimes the experiments just don’t work (Golden / Silver goal) but doing nothing about the failings in the game is not an option. What do you think needs to be done to make the game better?
1 Football being a game played with a ball, controlled by the feet. I’m not talking about Handegg here.
2 Interesting sidenote: since squad number were introduced in 1954, the Netherlands are the first team to line up 1-11 in a World Cup final.
There’s been a whole lot of anger about the reception issues on the new iPhone 4 lately and I can’t help but be reminded of the old joke about the man who goes to see his doctor:
Man: Doctor, it hurt’s when I do this!
Doctor: Well don’t do that then!
Seriously, if holding the phone a certain way does affect performance then I don’t see it being a huge problem to be asked to hold the phone in a slightly different way – and a solution that, frankly, I’d hope most intelligent people could work out for themselves. Others disagree that this is a satisfactory suggestion.
Apple are not the kind of company that releases a product without a lot of thought being put into it (cf. Microsoft Kin). If there was a serious issue then the product would be held back while the situation was fully resolved, as has happened before.
The issue apparently stems from an FCC regulation about the amount of radiation that should be directed at your head.
Next week will all but certainly see the introduction of the fourth generation of Apple’s iPhone. There has been an uncharecteristic spate of leaks that have pointed us towards the upcoming new features of the new product, the main one being a forward-facing camera.
I’m not sure about elsewhere in the world but video calling was the big thing that carriers hoped would justify the massive investments they paid in license fees for the nascent 3G technology a decade ago1. There was just one problem: hardly anybody wanted to make those video calls.
If there is one company that can (and does) change attitudes by implementing things differently – and usually a whole lot better – than everybody else it’s Apple. Maybe the bigger screen will help, maybe the famous Steve Jobs reality distortion field will come into play or maybe iChat integration will be the game changer.
1 As an aside, don’t old BBC News website items look really strange? Every iteration seems to upset users but they’ve all been invariably for the better.
I was reading the Observer UK Factfile at the weekend and something struck me as a little weird. Apparently in 2009 we exported £12.4bn in petrol and imported £14.5bn of the same commodity.
Nobody yet has been able to explain to me why this happens instead of just using what we would normally export and importing £2.1bn.
I’m a little disappointed at how seemingly everything is being marketed as belonging to a zero-sum situation at the moment.
The main example of this mantra at the moment is the flawed argument that HTML5 will kill flash. Nonsense. There is a situation for either one.
Replacing the single-use (albeit massively entrenched) scenario of video does not sound the death knell for Flash.
Now that the clocks have changed again most people are assuming that it’s summer and we should all be wearing shorts and sunglasses. Realistically, this heralds springtime more than anything else and rain – even snow – shouldn’t come as much of a surprise to anyone.
That said, I have entered the “summer Nev” phase and shaved off my beard.
I think that the beard had served its purpose over the winter months and I was in distinct danger of becoming almost fashionable.
