All the sites that I’ve moved to this EC2 instance are noticably faster, and Checksum Arcanius is no exception: page generation times seem to be about 10x faster (based on WordPress’s self-reported times at the bottom of the page), and the page load just feels much faster overall.

This is my first foray back into AWS since I played around with it during my Amazon internship in 2008. The experience has been incredibly positive. Amazon deserves tons of credit for what they’ve done with AWS.

Today while driving home from a holiday party, I was listening to NPR’s Marketplace Money by KQED. One of the pieces was talking about how lower income people are more giving than higher income people. My immediate question was, “by what measure?” Fortunately, the commentator was good enough to share that information — lower income people are more giving when measured as a percentage of their disposable income given away.

Well, that certainly adds some texture, I thought. I found this graphic (in this article) which shows a similar trend (this graphic is before tax income though, so the numbers are skewed a little more towards the poor):

What I personally notice about this is that each quintile actually gives more as a total amount than the previous quintile.

Indeed, another way to talk about this same data is that high earners (top 20% of income) give nearly half of all money donated each year, which sounds a lot different but is a true statement about the same data.

However, the NPR piece didn’t stop there. They next talked about a study where participants were given $10 and the opportunity to give away any amount of the $10 to another, anonymous, participant. I was npt able to quickly find supporting documents, but the claim was that lower income people gave away an average of $7, keeping $3 for themselves, while higher income people gave away an average of $3, keeping $7 for themselves. The interpretation again was that poor people are more generous and more likely to donate money than rich people.

Again, I thought about it a little differently. This effect shown is correlation and not causation, so the given interpretation is an example of the most classic mistake of statistics. Perhaps, I wonder, are people who are less giving naturally more likely to have high incomes? In other words, does causation go the other way? How would this hypothesis even be tested? And what are the confounding factors?

I try to listen to the news carefully and question everything I hear. In addition to the news just being wrong — in several cases where I’ve known more than what’s presented in a newstory, I’ve seen large omissions and fabrications — there are always alternate explanations and interpretations than the one assumed by the presentation. Despite trying, I still often find myself believing, on a whole, the news as presented by the media I consume.

First off, the movie was pretty bad. I would not recommend watching this for the movie itself. It dragged on with superfluous content that didn’t advance the stories or characters and seemed primarily designed to justify turning the book into three movies. The best part of the movie,  by far, you can see without even going the the theater — it was released as a trailer, below:

Save yourself the money and just watch that a few times unless you’re really interested in the latest movie technology.

Despite being a failure as a compelling telling of a story, the movie was a success in one way: it was a technological tour de force. What intrigued me the most about the billing was the high frame rate (HFR), a doubling of the normal 24 frames per second of traditional cinema to 48 frames per second. I was watching for it and the result is very good: the many big camera pans over lush landscapes appeared much smoother and much nicer visually. I’ve always been distracted by the jerkiness of 24 frame per second movies during panning. I hope this or an even higher frame rate becomes the new norm.

Again, the technology really shined in the sound arena as well. Apart from being considerably too loud — which I blame the theater for, not the movie — the sound system was still the best I’ve encountered. At one point, in a cave full of snoring dwarves, we all thought we heard someone directly to our right start snoring (Jonathan even turned to see if it was me!). Alas, it was just a better-than-average sound localization. Listening more carefully, I definitely could localize sounds to specific places in the theater much better than I recall being possible normally.

The 3D with the circularly polarized glasses was excellent as usual.

Too bad the movie sucked.

Full disclosure: Christine is my girlfriend!

PROMPT_COMMAND='echo -ne "\033k$(basename $PWD)\033\\"'

PROMPT_COMMAND gets run every time bash displays a prompt, and those particular escape characters do the magic.

To avoid crap outside of screen, I did this:

case ${TERM} in
screen)
export PROMPT_COMMAND='echo -ne "\033k$(basename $PWD)\033\\"'
;;
esac

Which is more general than it needs to be, but maybe I’ll expand it in the future.

When I bought it two years ago, the purchase price and other miscellaneous items came to $3300 and I have spent about $2000 in repair and maintenance (including nice new tires) over that time. I have also spent $3600 on gas in that same period.

The monthly operating expenses are $150/month for gas and $80/month for maintenance, so about $240/month give or take. If I sell it, the capital outlay would have been $1300, or about $650/year or 50/month, which is equivalent to a nice low car payment.

If I don’t sell it and can keep it passing emissions tests, I’m sure I could drive the car for another 8 years at which point it will be worth nothing, so capex becomes $330/year or $25/month, basically negligible. I’d expect the repair bills to average lower if I’m not replacing tires all the time, but to remain about the same if emissions continue to give me trouble and are repairable.

Decision time: sell the car now or try to get it to pass the smog? I’m pretty happy with the car otherwise, and I have one free retest I can do before I have to make a final decision.

My goals in rough order of priority are:
1/ maximize convenience
2/ minimize cost
3/ screw the system

I’m thinking about buying some of this stuff and driving around a bunch tonight and going for the re-test tomorrow. If I still fail, I sell the thing to the dude tomorrow. If I pass, I have another two years before I have to make the decision again.

Better ideas?

that night, after arriving in Seattle, I received an invite to go watch The Avengers with Facebook Seattle. It turns out they hadhad this movie night planned for a while, and I happened to show up just in time. Pretty convenient!

So, I had the chance to watch the Avengers with some coworkers and meet some more FB Seattlites. Unlike the rest of the internet, I did not think the movie was all that good — I’d rate it equivalent to the Transformers series — but the action was ongoing and the one-liners were fun.

After the movie, I hung out with Bobby and a few other Seattle FBers at the downtown Taphouse Grill. It was a great time. Thanks to all involved!

The upshot of this is that even though I don’t think Ron Paul would win against Obama either, he is actually the one candidate that has a legitimate chance because he will split liberals who actually care about things like liberty and freedom from oppression by their very own police state.

So, republicans have a choice this primary season: concede early by choosing current front-runner Mitt Romney, or make things interesting by choosing the one candidate who can take Obama to task on things that both matter and people care about: Ron Paul.

Republicans are the party of stupid, so I don’t expect them to figure this out in sufficient numbers to effect change. So, Mitt Romney Will loose badly in November. That will leave us with another term for Obama, who will begin to show true big-government colors as he searches for a legacy in his second term. So basically, not a lot of fun for people who care about individual or economic liberty for a few years.

Nevertheless, the United States will remain on balance the most free country in the world. It’s a race to the bottom and we’re losing!

Far off in a future northern Alaska, I was visiting a city that was incredibly unique. The founders of this city had built a three-kilometer tall weather control tower that kept the weather at the city center perpetually nice. The further away from the city center, the more the weather turned back into a wintery wasteland, with huge snowdrifts and constant storms.

The tower was in a state of disrepair, but not many people seemed to notice or care. The thing was enormous, stretching up into the heavens  from below, maybe an acre in area.

I took part in a number of adventures while visiting this city — most of them are pretty foggy now though. One involved snowmobile rides out in the badlands, another was infiltrating the tower. I don’t remember making it to the top.

The direct, visible tax rate I’m paying — including federal and state taxes — is about 33.4%.

By any honest measurement, this is far below what I am actually causing to make its way into the government’s coffers. First, my Social Security tax and Medicare taxes are matched by Facebook — 6.2% and 1.45%. I never see this money in my “income”, but Facebook views it as a cost to employing me, so this is exactly equivalent to me paying all of these taxes as a slightly elevated pay rate.

Then there is the VPDI, “voluntarily paid disability insurance”, which, like most government schemes, isn’t really voluntary at all. I can choose to participate in my company’s plan, or I can pay the state — my choice! I of course chose to not pay the state, but essentially this is also a tax (since I wouldn’t carry disability insurance otherwise), albeit one that I get a service out of (of course, some people would claim this of all my paid taxes).

When these are taken into account, my income is taxed at more like a 38.1% rate.

And then, I buy things. I bought a car and paid sales tax on that. Every time I go to the store, I pay sales tax there. Where I live in Palo Alto, the sales tax rate is 9.25%. That’s right, everything I buy, I give another almost 10% to the government. Taking into account the approximate sales tax I paid, using some rough but not unreasonable estimates I made using data from my Mint.com records (I used reasonable assumptions, such as all gas, dining, and entertainment was purchased in state; shopping was half online; travel was mostly reimbursed and not counted, etc), my tax rate goes up to 39.6%.

We’re at nearly 40%, and that’s just the stuff that’s easy to figure out. I pay more for my housing because of property taxes. I pay all sorts of government taxes when I travel (occasionally they are enumerated and they often add 40% to the base rate).  I’m sure there’s a lot I’m missing too. How much do all of these things add to my total tax burden? I figure it’s almost impossible to tell. And that’s not unintentional.

I have a friend who recently calculated his income tax rate, and it came to about 1/8th of mine because he and his wife (one of whom is currently collecting unemployment benefits) are paying two mortgages. Viewing the unemployment payments as a reverse tax, their effective tax rate is well below 0%.

So the guy who made all the “right” decisions — studying hard and busting my butt to be worth a decent income; working through school to avoid student loans; not buying a house circa 2006 because I did the numbers and decided I couldn’t afford it; saving on my own for retirement — now pays at least 40% of his income to taxes, while others who bought the house, financed the car, and take the revolving door job — get net reimbursed with that money.

God bless America.

This is a post that will be updated a few times before I’m done, but here goes the first few:

• Do at least one triathlon this year
• Play tennis every week
• Count my blessings but never be satisfied

A quick hack was the find the library and set LD_LIBRARY_PATH to override the normal include paths. However, this didn’t work for automated scripts run from cron without some wrapper to set up the environment, and it felt very hacky anyway. What I wanted to do is find where the system was looking for the library that it couldn’t find so I could put the library in the right place (or at least set up a symlink).

Today, I decided to figure it out, and through some searching I came across this treasure trove that exactly explained the problem and the solution.  Basically, the issue is that linux binaries (including libraries) have an rpath where they look for their shared objects. Setting LD_LIBRARY_PATH overrides this, but as I said, it’s a hack. To figure out the rpath, simply run:

readelf -d <path/to/binary> | grep RPATH

You can run this on any executable or library, so even if a library includes another library, you can just follow the path down until you find where the system is looking for the missing library and fix the problem.

Looking back at what I’ve already done — from hacking on MySQL to presenting at a conference to a packed house; from taking ownership of core modules to helping decide the direction of Facebook’s infrastructure; from pushing code to 300 then 400 and now over 500 million active users to debugging site issues at an unprecedented scale… every experience has helped me grow as a person and an engineer.

Facebook surrounded me with some of the brightest people in the world to work on some of the most interesting technical challenges anywhere, while providing the support to make it possible and the autonomy to make it my own. I could not have asked for a better job.

Here’s looking forward to what I’ll be able to accomplish in my next year.

I promptly downloaded the paper, and as I suspected it was way out of my ability to comprehend without looking things up every few seconds at least, so if I really want to dive into the proof, I’d have to devote a lot more time to it, and if I really want to understand it I will have to devote years of study to complexity theory — assuming I’m smart enough to even get there. Nevertheless, if you want to take a look at the paper, but don’t want to download it from the login-required Scribd link that everyone seems to be sharing, you can grab it here.

• Distance: 66 miles / 106 km
• Time: 4:50:51
• Average Speed: 13.6 mph / 21.9 kph
• Max speed: 39.2 mph / 63.0
• Cumulative ascent: 3820 ft / 1164 m