When looking at potential hosts for my Rails web apps I took into consideration price, speed/memory, reliability and flexibility. I basically wanted something cheap, reliable and fast. I've been an amateur sysadmin before (and at my first dotcom job was technically a pro sysadmin), so I wasn't scared of getting into the unix command line. Thus support wasn't important. Similarly for a small project, bandwidth, email accounts and credit-card billing systems would not be used. I wanted more than a hobbyist's hosting site (even if that is exactly what I am), but not costly, professional hosting.
My first thoughts were my domain name register, GoDaddy, or the host of this blog, pair. I know a number of people have issues with GoDaddy, but I've always found them fine for buying domain names and I can just ignore their constant upselling. However, I wasn't sure about their Rails hosting and a search only found bad stories (eg. here, here and here). I've also been happy with the service Pair have provided with this blog and associated static website. I didn't find much online about their Rails hosting and decided it would in any case be best to use different providers for this blog and my Rails apps.
Next I took a look at some webpages specifically listing Rails web hosts, such as on the Rails wiki. Among the massive listing there, special mention is made of Joyent and EngineYard on a couple of occasions. Certainly, these two companies seem to be held in very high esteem in the Rails community and host many well known Rails sites. However, they are both quite expensive - aiming for the high-end market. Too expensive for my goals or really anyone without funding. They are more aspirational - it would be nice to one day need the services of such a hosting firm.
I also found a couple of lists at rubyonrailswebhost and Zen and the Art of Programming. They rate Dreamhost and Site5 highly and both hosts matched my needs: dirt cheap (under $10/month) and with decent reliability according to reviews. Before signing up I sent Antonio Cangiano at Zen and the Art of Programming (a decent Rails blog I now subscribe to) an email asking if he had any updated advice since his blog on hosting was nearly 2 years old. Antonio suggested a new name, Slicehost. Slicehost use a virtualisation system so that it appears to the hosted application that it has a whole server to itself (albeit a fairly small server). This means that someone else's app can't hog resources slowing down your app. With memory intensive Rails apps this is very useful. They also have full command line access - you basically start with a clean build and can install/configure it how you like. While any "point and click" users would find it daunting, this really appealed to me. They provide a number of useful getting started articles, including some Rails ones, so I was sold. They are more expensive than other hosts at $20/month for a 256MB, but I have been very happy with their service over the last 6 months.
]]>The answer is, I read the forecasts at roughly midday in each of the locations. That is, every hour I read the forecasts for the locations where it is roughly midday. This is done by approximating the various timezones using the location's longitude. This isn't exact - it doesn't account for daylight savings or places like China, which is all one timezone despite being wide enough to be split into many. Generally it is accurate to within a couple of hours - fine for the purpose. The code is below.
time_band = -Time.now.gmtime.hour + 12 locs = Location.find_by_sql ["select * from locations where longitude >= ? and longitude < ?", (time_band-1)*15, time_band*15]
I have put the system up here. It is still at an early state, it may change or be shutdown. At the moment it displays only last month's historical weather forecasts.
]]><div> with a class into the selection item with style='display:none'. Thus the text in the div will not be displayed in the dropdown, but the text is there. Put the text to show when an item is selected into the hidden div. In the file to create the list of selection items I had the following:
<% return unless @queues %>
<% items = @queues.map { |entry| content_tag("li",
"<div class='wq_display' style='display:none'>#{entry.name}</div><div class='wq_full'>#{entry.name_and_owner}</div>") } %>
<%= content_tag("ul", items) %>
:select in the fourth argument. The value of the :select is the class name of the div to use for displaying. So I used the below and voila, the wq_full div is displayed in the dropdown and the wq_display div is displayed in the text box when selected!
Queue <%= text_field_with_auto_complete :add, :queue,
{:size => 20, :maxlength => 40 },
{:url => formatted_workqueues_path(:js), :method => :get, :param_name => 'search', :select => 'wq_display'} %>
<% return unless @queues %>
<% items = @queues.map { |entry| content_tag("li",
"<div class='wq_display' style='display:none'>#{entry.name}</div><div class='wq_full'>#{entry.name_and_owner}</div><div class='wq_id' style='display:none'>#{entry.id}</div>") } %>
<%= content_tag("ul", items) %>
:after_update_element to provide a javascript function that runs after an item is selected. Here it sets the value of a hidden input field to the text inside the new div.
Queue <%= text_field_with_auto_complete :add, :queue,
{:size => 20, :maxlength => 40 },
{:url => formatted_workqueues_path(:js), :method => :get, :param_name => 'search', :select => 'wq_display',
:after_update_element => "function(element,val) {
var nodes = val.select('.wq_id') || [];
if(nodes.length>0)
$('wq_id').value = Element.collectTextNodes(nodes[0], 'wq_id');
} "} %>
<input id="wq_id" name="add[wq_id]" type="hidden" value=""/>
You could also go further and update other parts of the page or have other fields, but you should get the idea for now.
After the home games I thought I'd try online poker for real money (opposed to the online "play" money with which I learnt the game). So I put US$50 on Pokerstars. Pokerstars also invited me to a beginner's tournament, which seemed to be a ploy to get some more money into newbies' hands - I won US$32. Thus I started with US$82 and that is my baseline. I decided to focus on one type of game and chose micro stakes heads-up Hold'em sit'n'go tournaments. That is, there are two players, each puts in US$2.20 for a set number of chips and play until one person has all the chips. The winner gets US$4 and the site US$0.40 in fees - the loser gets nothing. There are always a couple of these games going so you can play whenever you want. It would take a long time to go broke and with a single opponent I could learn the basics in the simplest environment possible.
At first I started winning. I think I won my first 3 games straight. I started dreaming of becoming a poker pro. Then I starting losing, dropping to around the US$60 mark after nearly 20 games. I started paying more attention to the game and writing down results - 5/10, then 7/10, then 8/10, lastly a loss to reach the 50 game mark. In total I have won 25, lost 25. Thus, due to fees I have US$72 - US$10 down on where I started. I think in the right circumstances I can beat this level of the game. In the final eleven games I played noticeably worse than my opponent three times (I lost one and won two - lucky). Winning 7 out of 10 seems a reasonable goal. Which at about 2.5 hours per 10 games equates to roughly £1/hour (hence the title).
There is however one small problem. I have a tendency to tilt. Tilt is a great concept in poker, it is when for whatever reason you are not playing rationally and letting your emotions influence your decisions. This can be getting bored; overbetting back at someone who is annoying; or a vast range of other suboptimal play. I certainly think that my poker maths skills have a great deal of room for improvement, but that doesn't seem to matter too much at my level. My opponents have a lot to learn too. What seems to separate us, in my limited experience, is temperament. Over the last 30 games or so I focussed mainly on ensuring I was in an appropriate frame of mind before starting (patient, relaxed, time to play and a desire to win) and stopping if I felt this slipping. That lead to the improvement.
So what now? I have started reading a book on poker theory, so hopefully my game will slowly improve. Other than that I aim to control my tendency to tilt. I'll play another 50 games (which will take a couple of months) and aim to win 70%, which would mean I break US$100. If I can manage this and I think I'm playing well, I'll consider going up a level or trying a different game.
]]>The observation feed is a little different to what one might hope. It is a point in time observation (updated at least twice a day according to the BBC website). However, there seems to be no guarantee of when these updates will occur. Thus, this feed is often out of date and not representative of that day's weather. The observation feeds also seem far more fragile. The data is often marked as N/A. For most purposes I find the forecast feed to be more useful than the observations. The current day's weather is the first day of the forecast.
A forecast feed has the standard rss xml tags, with one<item> per day's forecast, starting with the current day and going forward 3 or 5 days. Also, the <image> tag for the channel contains the url of an image depicting the current day's weather. Other than that, most of the interesting data is in the <item>'s. Below is an example of a verbatim <item> tag for London (take a look at a feed for the other tags):<item> <title>Sunday: light showers, Max Temp: 12°C (54°F), Min Temp: 6°C (43°F)</title> <link>http://www.bbc.co.uk/weather/5day.shtml?world=0008</link> <description>Max Temp: 12°C (54°F), Min Temp: 6°C (43°F), Wind Direction: SSW, Wind Speed: 29mph, Visibility: poor, Pressure: 1011mb, Humidity: 52%, UV risk: low, Pollution: moderate, Sunrise: 07:07GMT, Sunset: 16:21GMT</description> <guid isPermaLink="false">tag:feeds.bbc.co.uk,(none):/weather/5day/world/0008-1</guid> <pubDate>Sun, 9 Nov 2008 08:10:04 +0000</pubDate> <geo:lat>51.52</geo:lat> <geo:long>-0.10</geo:long> </item>
If you need to do something other than just display the weather forecast, you will need to parse the <title> or <description> tags. I don't personally recommend this as the data is unstructured and liable to change. In particular I have found:
Given that disclaimer, the regular expressions below (in Ruby regex format) worked for my task and may be a starting point for you when parsing:
<title> uses the format /([\w -\/]+): ([\w -]+|N\/A|NA|\(none\)), Max Temp: (.*)/m<description> has the format /Max Temp: ([-\d\.]+|N\/A|NA|\(none\))(\w+) \((.+)\), Min Temp: ([-\d\.]+|N\/A|NA|\(none\))(\w+) \((.+)\), Wind Direction: ([\w -\/\(\)]+), Wind Speed: ([\d\.]*|N\/A|NA|\(none\))mph, Visibility: ([\w -\/]+), Pressure: ([\d\.]+|N\/A|NA|\(none\))m([bB]), Humidity: ([\d\.]+|N\/A|NA|\(none\))(.*)/mOne other thing to remember when accessing the BBC weather feeds is that there appears to be an undocumented throttling feature. If you make too many requests, for a short period of time your requests will be rejected. From experimentation, making one request every 3 seconds will not breach the limit and you won't be rejected. However, making a request every 2 seconds will result in being blocked for a couple of minutes after 1000 or so requests. I suggest using the slowest request rate you can accept.
The unstructured nature of the weather data (ie, the various individual pieces of data are not available in their own tags and have to be extracted from the description text) and somewhat hidden nature of the location IDs (without a discovery service I could find) suggest these feeds are only designed to be used for display. Next time I'll try the Yahoo or Weather.com APIs and see if they are any different.
]]>The talk was by Yuuguu on how to run a company when all employees telecommute. Apparently, the FOWA conference is the first time all the Yuuguu employees have met at the same time. Most of the talk was fairly bland and many in the audience were head down on their laptops or iPhones. However, there were a few interesting points. Yuuguu people don't work if they meet in person, they consider the time too important to waste on work and they bond instead. Also, every Friday they get together online for virtual "beers".
There were a couple dozen companies with booths. A few big names like Microsoft, Sun and Myspace were there, but most were firms I had never heard mentioned before. This caused some awkward experiences, as their names normally give no hint as to their business areas. I would squint at their posters trying to work out what they did (which often didn't help much either). Meanwhile some marketing person would creep up on me, start talking and give me their Moo mini business card (these were literally everywhere). I left the conference knowing what every exhibiting business did, but only about half of them were marginally relevant to me.
The Microsoft booth was by far the best. Among the computers they had a couple of Xboxs and a Surface box - the Xboxs were empty while it was hard to see the Surface through the crowd. Rightly so, it was an impressive machine. All that made me want to code rather than talk and I left after an hour, skipping the Diggnation filming - I saw it last year. Anyway if want you can see the FOWA talks here.
]]>Next I checked the financial maths. At the time of writing, the Hillary Clinton to be President contract has a bid of 1.6 with 633 US$10 contracts and an ask of 1.7 with 450 US$10 contracts (with good depth after the top). Thus if it is certain that Hillary will not win, you would sell at the bid price (ie sell Hillary to win contracts at 1.6). You would then immediately earn US$0.16 per contract and if Hillary lost that would be the end. If she won then you would owe US$9.84 per contract on November 6th (the date the contract matures). It would be the reverse if you thought Hillary would win, then you buy contracts, paying US$0.17/contract (the ask price) and getting paid US$9.84 when she won (or nothing if she didn't). So far so good.
At this point Intrade are making no money themselves, so I went looking for the fee structure. Buying and selling fees change depending on various circumstances, but in this example they are US$0.03/contract. Also there is a US$0.10 fee for holding a contract to expiry. It is possible that you could trade out of the contract before expiry and thus pay US$0.03 rather than US$0.10, but this requires the market to move your way. The worst case is thus US$0.13 of profit will disappear in fees. Now selling the Hillary for President contract makes US$0.03. Not nearly as good as before, but still probably much greater then the chance she will win. I have made a simplification here; it is possible for sellers to reinvest their initial gain if it exceeds the cost of the contract. However this is unlikely to make much difference due to the small size of the profit compared to the investment required. After the cost of the initial trade you would be able to sell 1 extra contract in a reinvestment for every 75.7 you initially sold.
So how does Intrade ensure people pay up if the contract goes against them? There must be some rules about posting margin on your trades in case they go bad. This would only apply to the sellers as they get money upfront and only have to pay their losses - buyers pay upfront and get paid if they win. It was a little hard to find but Intrade's margin rule is "cover your worst case future potential losses". That is if you sell Hillary for President contracts at US$0.16 you get US$0.16/contract, but you also have to post US$9.84/contract as margin. This money is held in escrow and as far as I can tell, earns no interest. This is equivalent to putting US$9.84 in a bank and getting US$0.03 in interest an absolute return on your money of 0.3049% (absolute return = 0.03/9.84). However, the money will only be held until the end of the contract - at the moment that is 26 days for Hillary. This makes for an equivalent annual interest rate of 4.37% (annual return = (1+absolute return)^(365/days to expiry) -1 ). A bit better and it gets better still closer to expiry. If the same trade is made next Saturday then the return is 5.7%, the week after that it's 9.7% (there is a complete table here).
So over short time periods the relative return is good (assuming the prices stay available). So to get a good overall return you would need to keep rolling over your winnings into other dumb bets near maturity. While there are quite a few other unlikely contracts for the US elections (for example, Biden to be dropped as VP candidate), the Intrade markets seem to become more sane after November 4th. There are still some that are possibilities: hurricane contracts closing at the beginning of December; various contracts maturing at the end of the year (Europe to host the 2016 Olympics?); and, the Oscars bets in February. There are financial markets contracts closing every day, but these could be risky (especially given the current volatility). I think trying to roll over profits into other contracts would be like picking up pennies in front of bulldozers, and like LTCM the temptation would be to veer into less certain contracts to maintain return.
An alternative would be to keep money in a bank account and just quickly trasfer it quickly in and out of Intrade - surgical strikes if you will. Moving money in and out of Intrade does not seem easy enough to justify this. Money can be deposited by credit card or bank transfer without fee. However, taking money out is harder. You can either have a cheque mailed (!) to you or a bank transfer for a US$20 or US$30 fee.
I don't think there is dumb money on Intrade, just stuck money. Due to the lack of interest on accounts and margin together with the transactional costs of doing a trade or moving money mean that the Intrade market breaks down at the extremes and becomes unrealistic.
]]>So how is it going? Well the Beta testing suggests that the functionality is nearly good enough, but that it is still not user-friendly. I'm not sure what to do. While I knew some parts of the system were difficult to understand, I had a plan for them. However, there are problems with areas I thought were fine. As the blog says, it is a hard problem and I haven't seen it done well. More thought is required, and advice is welcome.
]]>There were four quick talks. ConnectiveLogic demonstrated their product to easily create concurrent programs without writing any concurent code - interesting, but I'd have to have a play before saying more. Fuzzwich showed their online product to easily create simple flash animations. It looked fun and having tried it out since I can say it definitely works as advertised - give it a try. Mary (can't remember the rest of her name) spoke about her music recommendation project, The Perceptron. Finally, a guy presented his idea for a startup, then asked if anyone was interested in joining him and applying to Y Combinator. I was tempted, but thought it would be hard to commit to a company with someone I didn't know at all. Also, I'm more invested in Queuesaurus and would need a good offer to move right now.
After the talks we decamped to the local pub. I spoke to a couple of the Fuzzwich people for a while. They moved from San Francisico to London to be near their customers. We discussed how to pay employers (not so little they aren't committed but not too much, they also said an options "cliff" was standard - that is if you are sacked within the "cliff" period, usually a year, then your options are cancelled). We also spoke about motivation and starting a company, their advice was "do it!" They seem like nice people. Later I spoke to a person who had an idea for a startup; but not the technical knowhow to implement it. This seems like a common problem, there seemed to be a few such people around. My last conversation was with a guy I met at the Pitch event. He said that the company that pitched had since shutdown - we talked a bit about founder commitment and how important it is. He didn't seem discouraged at all; he is now interviewing other startups founders to see if they suit him (definitely the right way round!).
I certainly left with the impression that there is still a great deal of activity in the London startup scene, even as the financial IT world significantly slows.
]]>So, what next? Well, I have a massive feature todo list for Queuesaurus (soon to be transcribed to the web version of Queuesaurus in a valiant attempt at dogfooding ) and no doubt bugs will be discovered (if you find a bug or have a feature request, add it to the "Queuesaurus Issues" queue). However, that is not a proper answer to the question, I could keep improving Queuesaurus nearly forever. Instead I need to know how far to pursue this or whether to move onto other things.
During the last few months I have had numerous other project ideas, some that could be a business and others that are little more than side distractions. So far, only one has been pursued beyond thought (I'll blog about that later). A few times it has passed my mind to start something new.
The original aims of Queuesaurus were to, at a minimum, keep working until I had something usable and learn about setting up a web business. I think I can just claim to have achieved the first goal, but not the second. There is still a great deal to learn beyond the technical side. I'm not going to leave my consulting contract just yet, nor am I ready to advertise or properly release it, but I think it's worth giving Queuesaurus a bit of time to see how it goes. After that, who knows. I also think I should head out to the occasional local tech event and get the word out. The more people who try out Queuesaurus, the better it will become and I'll get a better idea of its potential.
]]>The James Andrews School Of Golf
I signed up for a 3 day residential training course with The James Andrews School Of Golf as a holiday. I greatly enjoyed the break. Although I can't claim to be a good golfer at the moment, I can say that I am a better golfer as a result of the course as I saw my swing improve over the 3 days (considering I consistently missed the ball entirely at the start). Indeed most of the course focussed on the swing. The general format was swing practice, putting/pitching practice, and then the swing again before lunch and having the afternoon to ourselves. Nice course, good teacher, highly recommended (although the food could have been better considering the cost). I certainly left feeling prepared to tackle a proper course.
World Of Golf
Unfortunately it took a while before I managed to get myself onto a proper golf course, so in the interim I kept up my driving skills with a couple of visits to World Of Golf, a local driving range. I never had to queue for a bay, itis £7 for 100 balls and you can hire clubs, not much more to say. I still go regularly.
Hobbs Cross Golf Course
My first proper game of golf was at Hobbs Cross in Essex. It seemed like a friendly course, geared towards beginners. There was a 9-hole par-3 and another more normal 9-hole. For the record I was 57-over for the full 18. There was a driving range, but the café was closed - take your own food just in case. A good course and I'll go back eventually (it's a good distance away from where I live).
Beckenham Place Park Golf Course
Beckenham Place Park is probably the nearest course to my current abode. It is a cheap public course (£50 for 2 and club hire), and is a bit harder than Hobbs Cross. Aside from the golf, I was not greatly impressed: the hire clubs seemed poor to me; the café was disappointing (salad in sandwiches is apparently not often requested); there were many groups of kids wandering around and the toilets were closed. On the golf side, quite a few of the holes are uphill which causes me some problems. I'm in no rush to return.
City Golf
I was given a voucher for a complimentary session at City Golf, where you play golf inside, hitting your balls towards a video screen. While this was ok for driving practice, nothing else played as I would expect it. Putting was hopeless and so was trying to get out of the rough - there was just no feel. Although it was free to me, the costs seemed quite high. I doubt I am their target market. I can't imagine I'll be going back anytime soon.
]]>In the first game, I had the best of the early exchanges and built a decent lead. Then came a hand where I had K5o; as the small blind I 3-bet and Ury called. The flop came K54o, Ury made a small bet, I went all-in and Ury called. I was confident when he turned over K9, but when the 9 came on the river I went from a bit ahead to way behind. I brought myself back to par over the next 4 hands, with 3 all-in semi-bluffs (ace high or a Q-high flush draw after the flop). Ury called me on one, my A3 caught trip 3s. The game went on as Ury slowly lost ground with poor initial hands until forced in by the rising blinds on 10-8s (he said that was the best starting hand he had since my run of semi-bluffs), but beaten by my A2o with a pair of 2s. In all we played an hour and a half with only 4 showdowns.
The main game started in a similar manner to the heads-up games; big bets winning the pot without showdowns. At this point I seemed to get a reputation as a bluffer judging by the table banter. So to answer Ury's question after pushing him off a pot with an all spade 9,10,J flop - I had Q7, and open-ended straight draw with an overcard, not a complete bluff. Ann was then so sure I was bluffing when there was a possible straight on the board, she went all-in against me with the comment "I know what you are pretending to have." Ann then became the first rebuy in our home games. The action came quickly after that. Ann busted Ury and he bought in again right on the time limit. Amanda lost a couple of big hands and was forced to go all-in. Ury and I joined the pot, which I started betting big after the flop with an overcard, open-ended straight and flush draw. Ury "ummed and ahhed", complaining that we should do just enough to bust Amanda, but finally called. Sensing weakness, I continued to bet big and Ury agonised over the call. Then I went all-in and Ury took an age to call, but finally won with two-pair against my pair of kings. I was crippled with barely a big blind, and I was the big blind! Without looking at my cards I went all-in 4 times in a row. Then it was just Ann and Ury to finish. They seemed to get a little bored and soon were all-in. Ury won on the better starting hand.
Again this was a lot of fun. I thought the small group may be a problem, but it worked out very well. Also, changing the format of the games is something worth trying again.
]]>