Rants and Revelations

Ok, I’ve been thinking blogs are a pain in the ass because you have to keep checking everybody’s blogs to see if they updated it recently. And then today I discovered RSS feeds. Actually, I’d heard a little about them in the past but never paid any attention to them. I kept wondering what this “Syndicate this site (XML)” link was on my own blog. And I wondered about Simon’s BBC News app and how it worked.

It suddenly all came together, and I discovered that there are RSS readers that you can use to subscribe to a number of blogs and news sites, and it will tell you when they’re updated. Sweeeet.

I googled for an application. NetNewsWireLite is the first one I found that was free for OS X. It seems ok, although I’d like the option to poll the sites more frequently than once every 30 minutes.

I’ll have to find one for Linux as well, so I don’t have to spend all day at work hitting refresh on Slashdot, Linux Today and The Register.

At work, we had an operation that was taking too damn long. Looked at the code, looked at the query it was generating, and it was pretty horrible, but I don’t see any way to avoid doing it. Then used the SQL “explain” on the query. Hmmm, it’s doing a sequential scan on two different tables. Hmm… Put an index on one column on one of the tables. Suddenly it’s only doing a lookup on one table. Ran downstairs to the big 30-plex test machine. Did the test once. Took 1:31. Added the index. Ran the test again. Took 0:08.

I’m a fucking genius.