February 2009 Archives

Last year I started this by stating I wanted to write a system, put it up online and create a startup around it. Well, 2 out of 3 isn't bad. I'd still like to create a product business, but I'm fairly happy I got Queuesaurus up and running. I partially attribute this result to publishing the goal So I thought I'd write a new list.

Achievable goals (I hope to manage most of these):

• Improve Ruby skills to general professional standard (at present I know it just well enough to do what I want), particularly:
  • Gemify BBC weather component and put it on github
  • Continue working on Queuesaurus issue list (now kept on queuesaurus - viva dogfooding!)
  • Start next web project
• Learn Scala to point of being able to rewrite one of my old abandoned libraries in it
• Learn Blender to point of being able to recreate simple ancient historical architectural scenes (no need for animation or people)
• Decrease net ownership of physical goods
• Blog at an average rate of at least 4 times a month
• Run 5km in 25 minutes

Stretch goals (I'm unlikely to manage any of these without significantly more spare time):

• Get the weather app to a standard where I would be happy to open source it (no one would use it, but it could show what I can do)
• learn Blender and gaming libraries enough to create simplistic graphical MMOs
• Restart abandoned libraries (graph data type, yafal, music library analyser)
• Play poker profitably
• Make enough money from non-consulting activities to cover costs

I have completed another 50 online HU poker SnGs. At least I am consistent - I won 26, the same as the last 50. Again, despite winning more games than I lose, I have less money than when I started due to fees (27.5 games is the breakeven point). Also like the previous 50s, I experienced great runs. I won 14 of the first 18 games. Which of course means that I won only 12 of the last 32. Urrrgh. I have read that the variance in HU SnGs is higher than other kinds of poker, but results like that still really knock your confidence. Worst of all I kept some stats and discovered the average game runs around 15 minutes. That quickly adds up and is preventing me doing other things.

I've decided to take this poker thing a little less seriously. I'm not going to quit, but neither am I going to keep track of results and actively try to play more. I still have some money in my online account, and will play with that if I feel like it. However, I don't think I have the time to continue playing at a rate high enough to get much better right now. Just standing still for a while will be good enough. I'm not yet sure what I will do if I run my account down to 0. So for the foreseeable future there will be no more online poker updates.

A few years ago I had the idea of creating a fairly standard online spaceship combat game (like EVE). The difference to other such games being that the players would not control their ships directly, but instead through code they submitted to the game - a more complicated and extended Robocode or CoreWar. At the time I stopped because I couldn't work out a way of preventing Denial of service attacks in the submitted code. I had hoped to use Java as it had an extensive security model, but I found there was no way of stopping untrusted code from starting too many threads or allocating too much memory.

Fast forward many years, and I thought I'd check out if the situation has improved. A search on Google returned all the same webpages I read 9 years ago - there hasn't been much movement in the area. The Javadocs suggested that the thread issue had been fixed, but no word about memory. I checked Robocode and it seems to just ignore the memory allocation problem. This is because it is not fixed!

WTF! Sun has gone on about the Java Security Model for some time now. Touting the safety of its sandbox. However, if untrusted code can crash the system it is broken - nothing more to say. I don't care about the rest. This has been a known issue for years.

Anyway, rant over. On a more positive side, I used StackOverflow for the first time in researching this issue and it is quite cool. My question is here. The answer states that there is a movement to fix the memory DoS attack, but that it is still in the requirements stage and probably will not be part of Java7.

I run a couple of Rails websites (queuesaurus & past weather forecasts), both on a small 256MB virtual host at Slicehost. As such I don't have a great deal of computing resources available to support two resouce hogging apps. If you have visited either of those sites, you will know that the first page view can take seemingly ages, but that after that it speeds up. As I use Phusion Passenger to serve the apps through Apache, I investigated some of the config options and how they affected performance.