Author Archives: mboynes

Arrested Development Easter Eggs on Netflix

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Netflix introduced some brilliant easter eggs for Arrested Development fans in preparation of Season 4. Here’s what I’ve found:

  • Homeless Dad
  • Love, Indubitably
  • Blue handprints on searches that involve the word “blue”
  • Bananas instead of stars on Arrested Development rating in instant queue (props to Scott Nellé for pointing this one out)
  • Les Cousins Dangereux
  • Girls with Low Self Esteem
  • Girls with Low Self Esteem: Newport Beach
  • Families with Low Self Esteem
  • Scandalmakers
  • Franklin Comes Alive
  • Boyfights
  • World’s Worst Drivers
  • Caged Wisdom
  • El Amor Prohibido
  • Mock Trial with J. Reinhold
  • Ready, Aim, … Marry Me!
  • Wrench

This is an impressive list, nice work Netflix! I probably enjoyed seeing El Amor Prohibido the most, they reached deep for that one. I know I watch too much AD, and as a result, here is a list of titles I was greedily disappointed were absent:

  • New Warden
  • The Ocean Walker
  • Mr. Bananagrabber
  • Use Your Allusion
  • A Thoroughly Polite Dustup
  • Boys Will Be Boys: Boyfights 2
  • A Boyfights Cookout
  • Backseat Boyfights: The Trip To Uncle Jack’s 70th
  • Los Mas Buscados de Mexico

WordCamp Providence 2012 Presentation

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Thanks to everyone who attended my talk at WordCamp Providence! Here is a screencast which mirrors my presentation as well as some notes and links:

Screencast

Notes/Links

 LAMP Stack on CentOS for WordPress:

yum update
yum install httpd httpd-devel
/etc/init.d/httpd start
yum install mysql mysql-server mysql-devel
/etc/init.d/mysqld start
mysql
> UPDATE mysql.user SET Password=PASSWORD('################') WHERE user='root';
> CREATE DATABASE wordcamp;
> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON wordcamp.* TO wcuser@"localhost" IDENTIFIED BY '##########';
> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
> exit
yum install php php-mysql php-common php-gd php-mbstring php-devel php-xml
/etc/init.d/httpd restart
yum install git mod_ssl
/sbin/chkconfig httpd on
/sbin/chkconfig mysqld on
iptables -I INPUT -p tcp --dport 80 -j ACCEPT
iptables -I INPUT -p tcp --dport 443 -j ACCEPT
/etc/init.d/httpd reload

Install WordPress in the current directory:

curl http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz | tar -xz && mv wordpress/* . && rm -rf wordpress

Useful Links (mentioned in the screencast or presentation):

Plugins Referenced:

UPDATE:

I put together a ref-based deployment script to accompany this talk. Check it out on GitHub.

My Singing Dog

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My dog Boomer, a 4-year-old Australian Shepherd, has a funny parlor trick: he sings happy birthday. One day, when we were singing it for someone’s birthday, he just started singing along. It’s the darnedest thing, and he only does it with Happy Birthday. Pretty quirky. Anyway, here he is singing to one of my best friends for his 30th birthday.

Fun with probability

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This graph shows the probability that there is...

Photo credit: Wikipedia

At Union Street Media, we have a support ticketing system that uses ticket IDs of the form ABC-123456. That gives a total range of 17,576,000,000 possible ticket values, roughly (I’m sure they removed some dirty words from the three-letter combo). Today, we had a ticket ID collision (where a new ticket has the same ID as an old one) and I thought, “wow, what are the odds of that happening?” Well, it struck a chord in me so I decided I’d figure out exactly what the odds were!

Essentially, this is the birthday problem on a much bigger scale. We have about 26,000 tickets in our system. Here’s the math:

\left ( \frac{17576000000 - 1}{17576000000} \right )^{26000\times (26000-1)/2} \approx 0.019

The result? At 26,000 tickets, there’s about 2% chance of a collision. Those odds may be low, but they are considerably higher than I was expecting!

The take-away here is that as a software developer, you need to know that you can’t depend on variability to prevent collision. Kayako should have been checking to see if a ticket ID exists in the database before assigning it to a new ticket*. I’m sure there are people using their software who have many more tickets in their system than we do. At 157,000 tickets, there’s a greater chance of having a collision than not having a collision.

*To be fair, we’re using an old version of Kayako’s software. I would expect that they’ve since fixed this bug.

Update: Here’s a great article about the birthday paradox in the NY Times