Category: Miscellanea

JVM performance over time

Out of curiosity, I decided to run some quick (and non-repeated, largely unscientific) benchmarks of a Gentoo (-march=native,etc etc) OpenJDK/IcedTea build vs. actual Sun/Oracle JVM builds. Interestingly, the Gentoo builds are slower. Unsurprisingly, the JVM gets noticeably faster across versions from 1.6->1.7->1.8

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A confusion of Churchills…

Apropos of nothing, but awesome in a “I didn’t know that” sort of way:
http://johnfinnemore.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/two-of-kind.html:

This is nice. In 1899, Winston Churchill was 25, an aspiring politician, and the author of a couple of books. He was not, however, the most famous Winston Churchill around. That was the now largely forgotten, but at the time best-selling, American novelist… Winston Churchill. Aware of this, the British Winston Churchill wrote to his namesake as follows:

The original blog post is worth reading for the brief correspondence between the two.

A nice homage to older porn parodies…

IO9 posted a nice homage to older porn parodies (back before they were just “This Ain’t (insert original film’s name here)” or “(insert original film’s name here): An XXX Parody.”

The Greatest Science Fiction Porn Movies of All Time: 1961-1991
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Moved

My blog (and personal web site, family web site, and some others I host) have moved to new hosting. Between caps from AT&T Uverse, and just wayyy too much persona data on my home server, I figured it was for the best. The down side is it’s no longer Gentoo, and not quite so bleeding edge. Plus a few bucks a month.

On the up side, I’ve got a lot more upstream bandwidth, and a much greater sense of security. Worth it!

Upgraded, not that anyone cares.

I’ve been doing most of my updating on Facebook. I’m hoping I can find a way to pull my updates down here, for non-Facebook people, or to push some of the updates up. Til then, not much is new.

OTOH, I did upgrade mysql to 5.5, and wordpress to 3.2. Woot, I think.

Spain, not Japan? Seriously?

Apparently There Is A Meat Vending Machine In Spain

Spain is a magical place. How do we know this? Because they apparently have a meat vending machine.

Said vending machine is located outside a 100-year-old butcher shop and allows customers to buy meat around the clock. The vending machine features meats, sausages, sandwiches and other goods on a seasonally rotating basis.

A letter I sent to the Chancellor of UCSC and the Chief of Campus Police.

I spent an hour stuck in UCSC local traffic trying to get to class, only to be forced to turn around by (expetive deleted) protesters while a campus PD officer stood and did nothing. Then spend another half hour stuck in traffic getting away from campus.
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Blogmeme, stolen from Gareth

What we have here is the top 106 books most often marked as “unread” by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well rounded. Bold the ones you’ve read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish.
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