jlouis' Ramblings

Musings on tech, software, and other things

  • Why I use erlang.mk

    Here is our typical Erlang project. And note we are on a pretty slow Mac OSX filesystem and a 5400 RPM disk. Not the fastest in the world. If I run a rebar-compile from cold, we get the following a timing of 26 seconds. Doing the same with erlang.mk is 24 seconds. Note that erlang.mk only uses one thread, whereas rebar is parallelizing the build and is using all 4 cores in the machine.

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  • An Evil Postgres Bug

    So, I have this QLGlicko project. It consists of a web scraper which takes in duel matches played in the game of Quake Live—and stores them in a Postgres database. These duels are then analyzed and I run the Glicko 2 (see http://glicko.net/) ranking system on them to tell people who are currently the best player on a given map. The system works well, but I was tired of maintaining it on a Linux machine for several reasons.

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  • An Initial Post

    I tend to stir up things over on blogger, mostly writing the blog http://jlouisramblings.blogspot.com/ —but I am considering writing and using Medium instead to provide stuff, since the platform just seems nicer. My Ramblings are mostly-technical and they tend to contain a lot of code in them, but the way I tend to add new blog posts is somewhat indirect. I write the post itself in my trusty Acme editor—as markdown—and then I convert that into HTML which I then push in on top of Blogger.

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