Better Off Not Knowing
The internet is going to spoil my appreciation of reality based movies.
Chariots of Fire is a favorite of mine. Many were surprised when it won the Best Picture Oscar, but it was the best movie I saw that year (yes, better than Raiders of the Lost Ark).
I love the opening words:
Let us praise famous men and our fathers that begat us. All these men were honoured in their generations and were a glory in their days. We are here today to give thanks for the life of Harold Abrahams. To honour the legend. Now there are just two of us – young Aubrey Montague and myself – who can close our eyes and remember those few young men with hope in our hearts and wings on our heels.
And the transition to the score of Vangelis.
I can grudgingly accept the transfer of Aubrey Montague from Oxford to Cambridge (and thus from college rival to teammate) to support the use of Montague’s historical letters to his mother to bridge between scenes.
But it gave me pause to read on Wikipedia that Abrahams converted to Catholicism (since removed). It might be true. Or it might be false. But the doubt in my mind is not going away anytime soon.
I was better off not knowing doubting.
BeanShell Timer in JMeter
I was stress testing an application with JMeter when I discovered that the bottleneck was in the application setup rather than the actual application logic. My first reaction was to use a ramp to spread each thread's application setup over time with a throughput controller as a starting gate once all the threads had been properly initialized. But the throughput controller wasn't working for me, so I tried a BeanShell Timer instead.
My plan was to use a variable length delay for each delay. If the application setup was roughly constant for each thread, then I could let all the threads enter the application logic at roughly the same time. I was unable to find an good example of a BeanShell Timer using both arguments and environment variables, so I decided to document mine.
The number of threads and the startup ramp duration were established as User Defined Variables, allowing them to control the Thread Group and to be accessed by my BeanShell Timer via a vars.get(parameter-name). The thread loop counter was passed into the Timer as an argument, accessed via bsh.args[].
Getting the proper delay was easy once I determined how to access the number of threads, ramp duration and thread loop counter.
Take the JMeter BeanShell Timer Test Script for a test ride.
count = Integer.parseInt(vars.get("ThreadCount"));
ramp = Float.parseFloat(vars.get("RampPeriod"));
num = Integer.parseInt(bsh.args[0]);
Integer sleep = 500 + 1000 * (count - num) * ramp / count;
log.info( "Sleep for " + sleep.toString() + " milli-seconds" );
return sleep;
ZonalMarking
If you’re following the World Cup, then you need to follow ZonalMarking. I look forward to the match analysis after each game. The tactical analysis may appear a bit deep, but it is quite approachable.
Drawing the Lines
I just noticed that LinkedIn allows you to tie your twitter status and your LinkedIn status together. And I gave it about 15 seconds thought before concluding that I wasn’t going to take that step.
Here’s where I draw the lines for social media:
- Blog: Take the First Step
- My public face, what should be the first search result on my name. Sometimes professional, sometimes personal, always me.
- Twitter: ideoplex
- More personal than my blog, it's the private me out and about in public. As private as hiding in the crowd allows.
- Pure professional (albeit a bit neglected right now).
- Primarily personal.
- Foursquare
- As personal as is practical.
America's Cup Returns
All I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by, …
John Masefield
I am not a sailor. But I have always found the time to follow the America’s Cup Defense. It was a lot more difficult this time. No trials to select a challenger. No coverage on ESPN. I ended up following the Cup via the New York Times.
And now I’m watching a rerun of the deciding race via the 33rd America’s Cup web site.
Blog Roll Updates
It doesn’t seem quite right that I have a higher page rank than Code Monkeyism. I’ve added it to the Blog Roll to send some Google Juice Stephan’s way.
I’ve also added Smalltalk with James Robertson.