Before I forget this, here's a simple Vim command to strip XML or HTML tags from a buffer. The expression is non-greedy and catches tags that span multiple lines.

:%s/<\_.\{-1,\}>//g

After reading Zed Shaw's uncompromising Programmers Need To Learn Statistics Or I Will Kill Them All I felt suitably chided and decided to serve my pennance by kicking some stuff around with ab and R. This is probably the kind of thing that Shaw was decrying, my statistical skills are terrible, but here's what I did.

Gather some data

First I wanted to gather some data about my server, so I used ab to benchmark the server several times, making 1,000 requests each time using either 5, 10 or 20 threads. I know this falling straight into the power of ten pitfall. I haven't read the working out the power of my test chapter of the R tutorial (although I have read Joseph Tal's Reading Between The Numbers so I shouldn't be able to hide for too long).

This command sets ab going and writes raw data about the requests to a tab-separated file. See man ab for more info.

ab -n 1000 -c 10 -g journal-n1000-c10.tsv http://aftnn.org/journal/

To remove confounding elements, I guess I should do some or all of the following:

• Run the test from many different servers around the world to eliminate network and CPU power variations.
• Run the same test at random times of the day to eliminate variation caused by the daily cycle of traffic to the site.
• Instead of carpet bombing the server with 1,000 requests, I should introduce a random-length wait period between each request, this would (I assume) more accurately model real world traffic, as well as sneaking around any basic cache mechanism in play.

Plot the data with R

This couldn't be simpler. The following R commands create a histogram of my request data.

perfdata <- read.delim("~/journal-n1000-c10.tsv")
hist(perfdata$ttime)

And bingo, R displays this:

An abberation no doubt, Zed, but there you go.

I used Google's new Custom Search Engine tool to create a Django-specific search engine. This prioritises results from know Django sites, like the main site, the blogs of contributors and... this one! :-)

Djangoogle.

If you have any suggestions for sites to include, mail me.

Rich and I went to see Kraftwerk at I ♥ Techno this weekend. It was awesome. They had the robots, the glowing grid suits, the german accents, everything. The most impressive thing about their show¹ I think is the quality of the visuals. They have such a clear brand it's not even true. Each song has a visual theme, often using lyrics displayed in huge pixelated text (by huge I mean like six inches a pixel). I thought it was cool. If you know it and like it too I recommend buying the Minimum Maximum box set for some lovely 12" photographs of their shows.

Tonight I was inspired by their set, I created a minimal track in Live. Nothing great, but I just bashed it out, which was fun. Then I wrote a sketch in Processing which draws and animates regular polygons. This was also a lot of fun. I was moderately successful with both projects in a short space of time because I've invested quite a bit of time thinking about basic music and computer graphics in the past. I have never reached great heights in either field, but I can knock out something basic quite easily now.

The music will need more forming (intro, bridge, etc) before it's suitable to upload, but the sketch is pretty much done. I'll try to put it up sometime tomorrow.

1. As opposed to the music, which is obviously awesome, greatest band ever and I don't say that lightly.

Just bought a new Nokia N73. It's not even activated yet and I'm sure it will be great when it is, but the hands free that it ships with is rubbish.

Ever since phones started having ambitions to be music players, their hands free kits have become dual-earpiece. This extra feature has a nasty side effect. They tangle instantly and forever more. Mine's done it already. I actually just want to use it for making calls. So I picked up a traditional single-earpiece kind on eBay for all of a quid.

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Last updated at 11:32, Wednesday June 18th, 2008. All times are shown in 24-hour clock format and are BST.

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