HabanerocouscousI think I'm going to have to do this at some point to force myself to think through how this works.
I decided to see how practical it would be to mine Bitcoin with pencil and paper. It turns out that the SHA-256 algorithm used for mining is pretty simple and can in fact be done by hand. Not surprisingly, the process is extremely slow compared to hardware mining and is entirely impractical. But performing the algorithm manually is a good way to understand exactly how it works.
Be sure to mind the rules if you want to use the dominoes table in the Jets' locker room. pic.twitter.com/Vy6G9Jc50v
— dom cosentino (@domcosentino) September 24, 2014
HabanerocouscousUnprecedented!
You might want to sit down for this. After hitting a triple last night, Angels outfielder Mike Trout chatted with Adrian Beltre, and touched the Rangers third baseman's head without him getting mad.
Apple’s live stream of the unveiling of the iPhone 6 and Watch was a disaster today right from the start, with many users like myself having problems trying to watch the event. While at first I assumed it must be a capacity issue pertaining to Akamai, a deeper look at the code on Apple’s page and some other elements from the event shows that decisions made by Apple pertaining to their website, and problems with how they setup storage on Amazon’s S3 service, contributed the biggest problems to the event.
Unlike the last live stream Apple did, this time around Apple decided to add some Javascript JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) code to the apple.com page which added an interactive element on the bottom showing tweets about the event. As a result, this was causing the page to make refresh calls every few milliseconds. By Apple making the decision to add the JSON JavaScript code, it made the apple.com website un-cachable. By contrast, Apple usually has Akamai caching the page for their live events but this time around there would have been no way for Akamai to have done that, which causes a huge impact on the performance when it comes to loading the page and the stream. And since Apple embeds their video directly in the web page, any performance problems in the page also impacts the video. Akamai didn’t return my call asking for more details, but looking at the code shows there was no way Akamai could have cached it. This is also one of the reasons why when I tried to load the Apple live event page on my iPad, it would make Safari quit. That’s a problem with the code on the page, not with the video.
Because of all the refresh calls from the JSON-related JavaScript code, it looks like it artificially forced the player to degrade the quality of the video, dropping it down to a lower bitrate, because it thought there were more requests for the stream than there was. As for the foreign language translation that we heard for the first 27 minutes of the event, that’s all on Apple as they do the encoding themselves for their events, from the location the event is at. Clearly someone on Apple’s side didn’t have the encoder setup right and their primary and backup streams were also way out of sync. So whatever Apple sent to Akamai’s CDN is what got delivered and in this case, the video was overlaid with a foreign language track. I also saw at least one instance where I believe that Apple’s encoder(s) were rebooted after the event had already started which probably also contributed to the “could not load movie” and “you don’t have permission to access” error messages.
Looking at the metadata from the event page, you could see that Apple was hosting content from the interactive element on the apple.com event page on Amazon’s S3 cloud storage service. From what I can tell, it looks like Apple setup the content in a single bucket on S3 with little to no cache hit ratio, with poor bucket configuration. Amazon didn’t reply to my request for more info, but it’s clear that Apple didn’t setup their S3 storage correctly, which caused huge performance issues when all the requests hit Amazon’s network in a single location.
As for Akamai’s involvement in the event, they were the only CDN Apple used. Traceroutes from all over the planet (thanks to all who sent them in to me) showed that Apple relied solely on Akamai for the delivery. Without Akamai being able to cache Apple’s webpage, the performance to the videos took a huge hit. If Akamai can’t cache the website at the edge, then all requests have to go back to a central location, which defeats the whole purpose of using Akamai or any other CDNs to begin with. All CDNs architecture is based on being able to cache content, which in this case, Akamai clearly was not able to do. The below chart from third-party web performance provider Cedexis shows Akamai’s availability dropping to 98.5% in Eastern Europe during the event, which isn’t surprising if no caching is being used.
The bottom line with this event is that the encoding, translation, JavaScript code, the video player, the call to S3 single storage location and the millisecond refreshes all didn’t work properly together and was the root cause of Apple’s failed attempt to make the live stream work without any problems. So while it would be easy to say it was a CDN capacity issue, which was my initial thought considering how many events are taking place today and this week, it does not appear that a lack of capacity played any part in the event not working properly. Apple simply didn’t provision and plan for the event properly.
Updated Thursday Sept. 9th: From talking to transit providers & looking at DeepField data, Apple’s live video stream did 6-8Tbps at peak. World Cup peak on Akamai was 6.8Tbps. So the idea that this was a capacity issue isn’t accurate and the event didn’t generate some of the numbers I see people saying, like “hundreds of millions” watching the stream.
Updated Thursday Sept. 9th: While some in the comments section want to argue with me that problems with the Apple.com webpage didn’t impact the video, here is another post from someone who explains, in much better detail than me, many of the problems Apple had with their website, that contributed to the live stream issues. See: Learning from Apple’s livestream perf fiasco
This happened during Saturday's game between Arkansas State and Miami. I know nothing else about why it happened or who is responsible for it happening, but I feel it's better that way. Let's not worry about details, and instead just enjoy this GIF, courtesy of our friends at Vice Sports.
The insanely convoluted Cones of Dunshire game from NBC's Parks and Recreation will land on store shelves, courtesy of Mayfair Games.
HabanerocouscousI'm still not sure how he gets such elevation on the ball with a backheel...
Wanna see something crazy? Behold AC Milan's Jérémy Ménez score the most impressive goal you'll ever see from less than a yard out. Video below:
HabanerocouscousRelevant to a discussion at bowling last night
It started off as a celebrated, gorgeous mutation in an Iowa orchard, spread across the land, and was then selectively bred to look redder, bruise less, and ripen on the truck -- all at the cost of flavor and texture.
Read the rest
Managing the opening coin toss of a football game's pretty simple: if you win, defer. If you lose, take the ball. Texas somehow screwed this up tonight, and UCLA will get the ball to start both halves.
I don't want a job as a Russell's viper milker.
Kotaku's Brian Ashcraft reports on the new all black burger at Burger King Japan, a sandwich with black buns, black sauce, and black cheese darker than a black hole (seriously, the cheese is extremely black.) It looks kind of gross—but I really want to try it. How is this black cheese so dark, you ask?
MARYLAND, LOOK WHAT YOU STARTED. GO TO YOUR ROOM.
Yesterday, as part of the announcement that they'd renewed their contract with Under Armour to be Weird East Coast Oregon, Maryland unveiled these beauties of uniforms for their upcoming game against West Virginia:
In tribute to the 200-year anniversary of Francis Scott Key's penning "The Defence of Fort McHenry", the poem that would become The Star-Spangled Banner, they're splashing the lyrics across the helmets of the reigning Military Bowl runner-up.
It doesn't stop there, though. Through inside sources at Under Armour, Nike and Adidas, we've obtained leaks of future lyrical helmets across the Football Bowl Subdivision. Let's take a look!
Honoring the proudest Pitt tradition outside of Birmingham.
To be worn in the first home game on The U-Boat, no doubt.
Awww, come on, guys, you can still make the Rose Bo- oh... right... uh... you want some ice cream or something
Parental guidance encouraged, but I'd say that about Big Ten West football anyways.
It's actually a removable decal, in case you happen to root for other teams as well.
Ahh, they received the official SB Nation Style Guide. Thanks for listening, guys!
Not sure this one's not real.
Darude's song also originated as a Francis Scott Key poem, if I recall correctly.
Well, there you have it, everybody! That's all of th- wait, I'm being told there's one more? I didn't think so, but sure, let's take a look...
Oh come on that's just mean, guys.
Every other college football team can go ahead and stop trying to be the most American, because the University of Maryland has unveiled a new set of helmets and uniforms that are pure America.
Habanerocouscous7% seems insane
A 1987 wind-tunnel trial established that leg-shaving was basically useless, used a miniature leg-model with hair glued to it for its control; when the experiment was re-run this year with a human leg, the savings were a whopping seven percent.
Read the rest
Maurice Jones-Drew was fortunate enough to kick his own fumble back to quarterback Derek Carr. He definitely knew what he was doing. No fumble luck here. Seriously though, impressive awareness by Carr to watch the play and reel in the ball.
Slate's done the dirty work here, identifying the 30 most common fantasy football team names, as well as the most popular by NFL team.
"Are you tired of reading food diaries from people who go to too many restaurants?" Patricia Lockwood wrote us when she sent in this week's Grub Street Diet. "Let's try one from someone who isn't even ALLOWED in a restaurant." Lockwood, the Kansas-based "poet laureate of Twitter," writer behind "Rape Joke," and author of the the book Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals, continued on: "Have you ever noticed how in English, when someone is crazy, it's always in a food way? They're crackers, or they're nuts, or they're a fruitcake, or they're off their crocker (Betty). Well. I just thought I would bring that to your attention, as I spread before you the banquet of this 'bananas' food diary."
Friday, August 22
NO BREAKFAST. Breakfast is a fool's meal and I would rather be poisoned than eat a single bite of breakfast. Everything about it is baby food except for the vulgar American meats, which seem to have been carved straight off Paul Bunyan's own ass. Eggs are just a shape, and toast is the reason the British no longer rule the world: too cozy and complacent. I do drink a coffee, though. I'm not going to pretend the Enlightenment didn't happen.
12 p.m.: I drink another coffee. Actually I drink three more coffees. Am I supposed to be talking about all the coffee I'm drinking? That would take up too much space, I fear. Assume I drink so much coffee that sometimes I pretend that it's gas and I'm a little diesel truck that needs to get all the way across the country with my with my load.
2 p.m.: I sit in my backyard eating a chicken sandwich and sighing tragically after every bite. The sandwich is as cold as the universe. Here's the thing. I don't need to be rich, I just need to make enough money so that I can sometimes eat at one of those places that makes your sandwich hot for you. I don't know why but it seems so hard to make your sandwich hot at home, even though it should be easy.
8:30 p.m.: I make it a habit to eat whatever's in the books I'm reading. This means chowder for Moby-Dick, mixed grill for The Corrections, mushrooms and sour cream for Speak, Memory, and a hamburger with french fries for Ramona Quimby, Age 8. It means that whenever I read Redwall I go out into the yard and eat flowers. (Be careful with this. There are daturas in my yard, and if I accidentally eat one of these I am told I will experience a "vision quest" in the manner of Ayla from the Clan of the Cave Bear books.) Right now I'm reading the new Murakami, which means I eat pasta while listening to classical music and thinking about cats and wondering what it would be like to live down in a well. I bet I would love it.
12 a.m.: Oh no, it's PMS. You know what this means: I have to eat an entire jar of capers one by one with a shrimp fork, at Midnight.
Saturday, August 23
2 p.m.: Fine, I'll submit myself to the indignity of breakfast. I'll eat a
a yogurt. What IS yogurt? Is the yogurt having sex, in my mouth, as I eat it? Is it some sort of dairy orgy? Maybe that's why the women in the commercials always make such sensual faces as they slide the spoon of demon-curd in and out of their mouths. The yogurt claims to be Greek, but I don't know why. Perhaps a centaur drizzled honey over it with his tail? That would be Greek as hell.
7 p.m.: LISTEN. I'm writing a BOOK. I don't have TIME for MEALS, and why haven't we reached a JETSONS POINT YET, where everything we need is in CAPSULES. I WANT TO DI — oh. My husband Jason arrives home at the crucial psychological moment, rushes into my study, and drops a giant slice of fruit tart in my mouth before either of us can say a word. My death is averted ... for now.
9:30 p.m.: I consider myself to be Crunchpunk, which means that if I don’t hear my food crunching, I starve. I haven't crunched anything all day, so in order to keep myself mentally and physically hearty I eat approximately one hundred potato chips.
11 p.m.: I sip a mug of kratom tea, which is a legal vitamin that makes music sound better to people. It also makes you very hungry. Under its influence, I wolf an enormous turkey sandwich while listening to Brain Salad Surgery and become one with the glittering cosmos. My mouth glistens with a galaxy of mayonnaise. Turkey is ... a dinosaur, I think, disoriented, and fall asleep dreaming of myself flying a pturkeydactyl so close to the sun that it becomes perfectly roasted and embraces me with a pair of enormous brown drumsticks. Food is truly a miracle.
Sunday, August 24
11:30 a.m.: A handful of Craisins, the clit of fruit.
3 p.m.: I watch Tampopo while eating ramen. (Yes, I DO eat ramen every day, because I am a student of life.) What is going on with that one scene where the guy puts a live prawn on a woman's bare stomach and lets it wiggle around until she climaxes? How do I figure out how to do that at home?
5:30 p.m.: Time for a Purse Surprise. Purse Surprise is where you open up your purse and just eat anything that's accumulated in it over the past few weeks. I get lucky this time — five beef sticks (???), three oranges, a box of mints, two coffee truffles, and a pill that could honestly be anything.
7 p.m.: All I eat for dinner is the internet. It tastes awful.
AFTER MIDNIGHT: GREMLIN TIME. I Google the words "can you be addicted to Snapple Mango Madness" and come upon a bunch of pregnant women talking about the new sinister hold that Snapple has on them. If it turned out I were pregnant and the only symptom I had was that I was suddenly addicted to Snapple and I wanted to drink ten a day until a pure tropical baby fell out of me, this would be the best ad campaign Snapple ever had. I better get started. I drink a Snapple Mango Madness.
Monday, August 25
My husband has long dreamed of opening up a restaurant called "Jason's Gross" where he only serves things that sound good to him, such as pizza with pepperoni and strawberries and "mashed potato sundaes," which I don't have the heart to even inquire about. Today I tell him I will eat anything he makes. He rubs his hands together with glee and begins to write out a menu.
Throughout the course of the day he serves me:
Raw Banana in Elegant Slices
Futuristic Protein Bar That Resembles an Astronaut BM
Pretzels with Ketchup ("No One Ever Tries It, But It's Good")
Quinoa Mound with Pubic Sprouts (Erotic Meal)
Brava, I tell him, dabbing my lips with a linen napkin. Jason is, indeed, gross. Not wanting to hurt his feelings, I sneak into the kitchen at midnight and eat like an entire rotisserie chicken.
Tuesday, August 26
This diary would be a waste if I didn't get drunk at least once with my mom. We head out to an Italian restaurant in Kansas City called Bella Napoli and order artichoke and smoked-mozzarella pizzas and a bottle of white wine. Jason isn't drinking wine right now because he is "healthy," so my mom and I have the bottle all to ourselves. This is good until she drinks a second glass and decides to tell us the story of a man who just died in a tragic cliff-diving accident. "He was so fun-loving
and it ultimately killed him," she says. The pizza falls out of my mouth. My fork clatters to the table. We exit the restaurant with tears in our eyes.
To cheer us all up, I force us to go to the local Baskin-Robbins and order Daiquiri Ices. I haven't eaten one of these since high school, and it tastes MUCH more synthetic than I remember. Jason's face, as he samples it, recalls one of those YouTube videos of a baby eating a lemon for the first time. He shudders. His expression passes through stages of betrayal, disgust, anger at God. "It tastes like going down on a My Little Pony," he says finally.
"Does this contain corn syrup?!" my mother shrieks. "Because that makes me misbehave!" And sure enough, before we know it, she has hurled her cone into the trash, raced out of the Baskin-Robbins, and jumped into her car. She's freaking out on corn, flooring it through every yellow light she passes, and telling us a story about how her father once ate 30 ears of corn in a cornfield and then threw up. "IT'S WHY I CAN'T TOLERATE CORN!" she yells at the top of her lungs. Soon enough it becomes clear where we're going: to the Cheesecake Factory, the locus of her existence, to get some iced tea.
The Cheesecake Factory is terrifying for several reasons. First, because it implies the existence of a Willy Wonka running around in the bowels of the restaurant. This is big. He's wearing a giant hat in the shape of a genital lily, he's juggling balls of fried mac 'n' cheese, he's experimenting with hideous new Skinnylicious concoctions and he's taking bad children on canal rides.
Second, because why not call it what it is: Vagina Hallucinations in Byzantium. I'm somehow hungry again, so I eat — it grieves me to report — a plate of desecrated chicken tendys that have been breaded with crushed pretzels. Why? Who had this idea? No one knows, but far off in the distance, I am sure I can hear Willy Wonka laughing.
Read more posts by Sierra Tishgart
Filed Under: the grub street diet, baskin robbins, kansas city, patricia lockwood, the cheesecake factory
@sportspickle Newest Madden is so realistic, it has manning face. #manningface pic.twitter.com/Rg7srIE4TI
— Jesse Nelson (@JesseDNelson) August 27, 2014
HabanerocouscousThe write-up is a tad hyperbolic for my taste, but still, pretty cool gif.
Sometimes it's easy to forget that racing F1 cars is pretty much insanity. The ridiculous speeds, the punishing G-forces and not to mention the beasts of a machine they call cars. But when you look at a F1 car under thermal vision, you'll never forget how scary it is: they're driving fire breathing monsters.
