WWYD? Survival

Using only items from the surroundings and your body, what would you do to create a sustainable and survivable environment for yourself?

Search Engine or Decision Engine?

It's Google versus Bing, with Yahoo as the control group.  Four simple search strings were entered into each engine. The total results returned in each search were recorded.

The strings were precisely...

• google sucks
• bing sucks
• microsoft sucks
• linux sucks

...the resulting search tallies were recorded,

	Google	Bing	Yahoo
Google sucks	3,380,000	15,300,000	15,800,000
Bing sucks	1,270,000	932,000	988,000
Microsoft sucks	837,000	6,970,000	7,490,000
Linux sucks	2,730,000	4,250,000	4,230,000

and charted...

Whilst not terribly scientific, the graph appears to show more 'opinion' in the disproportionate results than 'factual' data.  That's just my opinion...born out of boredom, and a need to make a decision on my own.

What is a reverb tank?

Technically, a reverb tank is an electronic apparatus that modifies the input signal to add reverberation to the output sound of an amplifier.  In my case it was a fault that caused the loss of a sale of said amplifier.  It was also the bit that clinched the deal later on.

I began advertising to sell the amp a few months ago; a beautiful oak cabinet, one-hundred watts of tube-driven power, a warm and natural sounding amp.  What I did not realize, simply due to lack of use, that the reverb effect had stopped working.

Finally, a buyer stepped forward, came to my home with guitar in hand, and plugged in.  I could tell he was quickly falling in love with the sound, and it does sound sweet.  Over-driving the tubes gave a growl that would make ZZ-Top smile, and the clean channel was crisp and clear.  The flanger sounded good too.  Then came the reverb...knob twisting, connector jiggling, footswitch clicking ensued; nothing.

The fellow looked visibly disappointed as he left, on his way to try another amp.  He bought the other amplifier and later wrote to me expressing regret over his purchase.  He still wanted my amp, but understandably for less money because of the missing reverb effect.  That is when I decided to take a leap of faith.

The next day I laid the amp on its side, took off the back cover, then carefully removed the head where the electronics are housed.  So far so good, things are going along without incident.  Six screws later and the top of the head was inverted to expose what I came to learn was the reverb tank.

Even though I build and repair computers, I felt like this might be over my head, until I examined the tank.  On one end was an RCA style plug, with a cable to the circuit board, connected at both ends.  There was a second similar cable laying on the circuit board, one end connected to the board.  The other male end was laying loose on top of the components.  Of course, the other end of the reverb tank had a second RCA female socket, empty.

With the connection restored, six screws secured the enclosure, and the head was returned to its place inside the cabinet.  The back cover was replaced and the amp powered up.  After a few minutes of waiting for it to warm up, the pleasure of owning a tube amp, a click of the footswitch produced a new sound not heard for a very long time.  Running the volume all the way up and rotating the reverb knob also made new sounds.  Reverb was back!

Emails flew back and forth, the first letting the buyer know that reverb had indeed been restored, the last word from him was he will sell the amp he bought in lieu of mine and will buy mine when he has the funds together to pay the full asking price.

What's the point of this tale?  It reminded me of things that the isolation and darkness of unemployment suppress; the motivation and ability to take a risk, to think out of the box, and step out of one's comfort zone to make something better.

Seattle Startup Companies, What Are They Running?

Take a list of companies, courtesy of Seattle 2.0, break it down to a list of URLs that looks like this:

...
http://www.zillow.com
http://www.Picnik.com
http://www.buddytv.com
http://www.Smilebox.com
http://failblog.org/
http://icanhascheezburger.com/
http://www.wetpaint.com
http://www.feedjit.com
http://www.questionpro.com/
...

feed that through a shell script that looks like this:

#!/bin/bash
while read line
do
wget http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=$line;
done < startup-index.txt

to get a few hundred files from Netcraft.com's "What's That Site Running?" page in the local directory.

Now the fun really begins, the filtering!  We want to see what each company is using to put their best face forward to the public.  It all starts at the server.  No server, no nothing.  Every one of the 'graph' files is an html-formatted page with lots of extraneous information.  This filter collects the list of ALL servers used, regardless of past or present.

grep -h "<span style=\"white-space: nowrap\">" graphs* | sort | uniq

and the result of that is:

F5 Big-IP
FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD/OpenBSD
Solaris 9/10
unknown
Windows Server 2003
Windows Server 2008

Now feed that through this script which narrows the search and we get our server numbers:

#!/bin/bash
while read line
do
echo "$line," `grep -h "$line.*<span" graph* | wc -l`
done < servers.txt

In this case (December 2009) we get the following:

F5 Big-IP, 21
FreeBSD, 8
Linux, 289
NetBSD/OpenBSD, 1
Solaris 9/10, 3
unknown, 11
Windows Server 2003, 71
Windows Server 2008, 22

On to web servers, using the same process, distill the list of web servers from the "graph" files with a filter like this:

grep -h ' was running ' graph* | sort | uniq > webservers.txt

which needs some editing and final refinement with

grep -h .* webservers.txt | sort | uniq > webservers

then we are ready to apply the script that will tally the numbers

#!/bin/bash
while read line
do
echo "$line," `grep -h "$line on" graph* | wc -l`
done < webservers

And the final score is:

Apache, 223
Apache-Coyote, 13
Google, 5
Jetty(6.1.5), 1
KWS, 1
lighttpd, 1
Microsoft-IIS, 103
Mongrel, 13
nginx, 51
Ning, 2
Resin, 1
Server, 2
SSWS, 3
Sun-ONE-Web-Server, 1
thin, 2
Thrivesmart, 1
unknown, 2
WWW, 2

Since the whole point of this exercise is to expose what really happens behind the curtain, the rivalry is obviously Microsoft against Open Source and everybody else.  The following charts are mashups from the results above.

Any questions?