CmdrTaco's Journal: Code Refreshes, I, Robot, MacHack/ADHOC

The code refresh went as well as could be expected... which is to say that there was some twists, turns, and a whole lotta bad aftermath, but that's par for the course. Under the hood things are all working properly. We had a couple of quick bugs that are now fixed. A few more minor bugs are waiting to be swatted. We also temporarily disabled a couple of user functions... nobody noticed some of them, which means we can probably purge some stuff if it helps make the site faster. User customization is great fun, but anything an end user can customize means one less thing that we can effectively cache. The main problem now is performance. Index especially is substantially slower following the refresh. Of course, since 60% of our index page views are anonymous, static HTML, this is only affecting a third of our users, but the effects are noticable. Jamie has been performing herculean efforts of real time optimization to get the kinks worked out.

I, Robot suprised me. On the 'Will Smith Summer Blockbuster Meter' I went into I, Robot expecting something somewhere between Independance Day (Bad) and Wild Wild West (Rancid). Instead I got something more on par with Men In Black (Pretty Good). The special effects are really quite excellent. While the plot is a bit cheesy and some of the dialog is incredibly lame, I was never bored. I roled my eyes a few times, but I also laughed. The audience I saw it with even gasped a few times when some of the more clever things occured. Actual audience response like that is tremendously rare these days. I'm not sure if people are just getting more cynical or movies are getting worse. I won't get into the Book vs Movie thing 'cuz I've never read the Asimov stuff that the movie was 'Suggested By'.

Lastly, if you're in Dearborn, I'm gonna speak friday afternoon at ADHOC (formerly MacHack). I don't have any agenda, so it'd be swell if people showed up so I'd have something to talk about. I wonder about the show. It seems to be in a serious state of flux... I went to the last 2 MacHack's and was really impressed. This really is a small-scale show with a real heart. People doing their thing for the love of it. They legitimately care about the "Yutes", who are respected as little geeks in training. It was a surprisingly cool experience, especially to jaded 'ole me. Hopefully that same spirit is retained this year... of course I won't have time to see since my visit will be just a few hours long.