Monday, February 18, 2008

[trip] Rome Day 7

- Nice driver who loves Brunello DeMontecino
- If you like women, you'll like wine
- Finally had cappucino and cornetto
- Evil woman at the exchange at airport who stole 50 EUR from us

Wednesday, February 13, 2008

[trip] Rome Day 6

- St Peter's Basilica
- "Must wait until the moon hit the obelisk"
- La Danesina Hosteria
- A page full of "Typical Roman Dish"
- Veal (is lamb) with lemon sauce
- 12 boxes of Ferrero Duplo
- Great views from top of Monument to Vittorio Emanuele II
- Jewish Ghetto
- Chinese pop music education: MV
- google.com.tw trick: FY
- Grappa Bastarda

Tuesday, February 12, 2008

[trip] Rome Day 5

- Tuesday 2008 Feb 12
- Pantheon
- Lunch at
- Eggplant parmasen, Punch (Neon) Mandarin, Ciocollato Caldo, Croquetts, Artichoke, Fried Calzone, Cauliflower + Ham Pizza
- Despar
- See-Fan dinner
- In & Out

[trip] Rome Day 4

- Monday 2008 Feb 11
- St Peter's square
- The marching band the rode on horses, and the little dog mascot
- Coloseo
- Santa Scala
- The dude that kept winning money at the slot machine
- Risotto e Mare, Lagsana, Spaghetti alla Cabonara
- Laterno
- Moonstruck

[trip] Rome Day 3

- Sunday 2008 Feb 10
- Porta Portese Flee Market
- Cinqe Luna bakery. Tiramisu cake
- Wrote a keyword counter for work

Saturday, February 09, 2008

[trip] Rome Day 2

- Saturday 2008 Feb 09
- Campo de Fiori Market
- The old lady in the cheese truck
- "Madam would you like to taste this vinegar sauce?", "Oh can I taste the cracker?", "Sure have a whole bag!" We ended up buying the vineger sauce
- "Cane Parking"
- Trevi Fountain
- San Crispino and the cognac flavored gelato
- Capuchin Crypts at Santa Maria della Concezione
- Mom: I got really hot in there
- Bao bao: My fingers were tingling
- Me: Very discreetly took a perfect shot of the reaper
- The Spanish Steps and the crazy crowded Via Condotti
- Curry
- My Fair Lady

Friday, February 08, 2008

[trip] Rome Day 1

- Friday 2007 Feb 08
- Porridge and pork-sung for breakfast. Yum.
- Vatican Museum - Great audio guide
- Er guys. Let's not spend forever in the Egyptian section ...
- The dozen rooms of modern art that no one even stops to look at
- Sneaking pictures in the sistine chapel
- Lunch at Dal Tuscano. Table 29.
- The fish brocolli soup is a bit fishy. Let's pour some red wine in it?!
- Pappardelle with wild boar - taste like ground beef?
- Spaghetti Amatriciana. Home-made spaghetti with basil and tomatoe sauce.
- Crazy snappy old lady at the Mercado della Piazza dell'Unita -- You don't want to buy the entire string of tomatoes? Give me back those cauliflowers!
- Weekly concert at Sant'Agnese. OMG. Featuring Brahm's Horn Trio Op 40. The only classical CD that in my infitite replay collection.
- OMG. I got second row in the center! Beautiful, gorgeous viola playing.
- Dinner at the aparment - Mom-smuggled-in-from-thailand pork bone soup base cube with noodles, with eggs tomatoes and broccoli. Yum.

[trip] Rome Day 0

- Wed/Thur 2008 Feb 06/07
- Writing production band aid sql script at 4am before leaving
- Who thought of the "An agent will call your name to tag your bag" queue system at AA?
- Chicago snow storm = Flight status cancelled
- Rebooked through London = 8+ hours added to trip time
- Travel power adaptor on plane = Productive trip
- Back in Heathrow and lesson learned from last trip
- Too tired to think clearly and getting ripped off right out of rome airport
- Our apartment is so *huge*! But why is there toilet seat in one of the bathrooms? And enough candle the craft things on the shelve to start a 99-cent store
- The trick bathroom mirror that doubles as bathroom window
- How the heck does this washer work?
- The neighbor ringing our doorbell to ask us to take down stuff from the dryer line
- Dinner at L'Orso' 80
- Wow those two people must have not eaten for days. Look at the table full of antipasti.
- Hey look! Now we have the same table-full of antipasti! - Prosciutto, Salami, Roasted red pepper, marinated mushrooms, brocolli with capers, beans, mozzarella balls, celery with pecorino, olives, meatballs, tiramisu, cream cake, bottle of red wine
- Sis' story aboujavascript:void(0)
Publish Postt almost getting things stolen in Milan
- Late night walk through Campo de Fiori and Trastevere
- Book and CD on chinese and japanese patterns!

Wednesday, February 06, 2008

[log] Done with McDonald's Fries

I am done with McDonald's fries.

I used to have McD fries all the time, and then all of a sudden it started to make me feel sick in the stomach. And for a long while I haven't had McD fries.

Today I found myself stuck in a snowstorm in Chicago airport, and under this time of duress, I just really craved some fries.

And now I feel sick. I guess at least I proved that their product is nationally consistent. Good quality control.

My arteries and doctors will sure be happy to know that I have forever sworn off McD fries.

**This statment has no effect on fries by other dining establishments

Sunday, February 03, 2008

[code] Replay web server log

An excuse to play with Ruby while doing something that we can use at work for scalability and performance tesing.

Input -- Web server request log:
2008-01-01 08:36:01 100.0.0.0 - HTTP 200.0.0.0 80 GET /foo.htm - 200 100 1000 1 HTTP/1.1 Mozilla/4.0
2008-01-01 08:36:05 100.0.0.0 - HTTP 201.0.0.0 80 GET /bar.htm - 200 200 2000 1 HTTP/1.1 Mozilla/4.0


Output -- Result log:
Timestamp|ElapsedTime|RespCode|PageSize|Path
2008-31-01 04:23:47|0.703|200|1000|http://www.acme.com/foo.htm
2008-31-01 04:23:49|0.093|200|2000|http://www.acme.com/bar.htm


Ruby program:
require 'net/http'
require 'uri'

# Wandy 2008 January
# Test utility that reads the log and then play it back by making the
# same http requests as in the log file with the same time delay

# Configuration
Domain = 'http://www.acme.com/'
PlayBackFile = 'PlayLog.txt'
ResultDetailsFile = 'PlayLogResult.txt'
PlayBackSpeed = 2 # Set to 3 for three times as fast. etc

# Init Variables and Result File
tLastTime = nil; nSleepTime = nil
open(ResultDetailsFile, 'w') do |f|
f << "Timestamp|ElapsedTime|RespCode|PageSize|Path\n"
f.flush
end

# Read Page
def getURL(sURL)
thCall = Thread.new {
tStart = Time.now
sPage = Net::HTTP.get_response(URI.parse(sURL))
nDiff = Time.now - tStart

open(ResultDetailsFile, 'a') do |f|
f << "#{tStart.strftime("%Y-%d-%m %H:%M:%S")}|#{nDiff.to_s}|#{sPage.code}|#{sPage.body.size.to_s}|#{sURL}\n"
f.flush
end
}
end

# Main Program
File.read(PlayBackFile).each do | sLine |
sLogLine = sLine[/80 GET .* - .../]

if not sLogLine.nil?
tTime = Time.parse(sLine[0,19])
sPath = sLogLine[8,sLogLine.length-14]

if not tLastTime.nil? then
nSleepTime = (tTime-tLastTime)/PlayBackSpeed
sleep(nSleepTime)
end
getURL(Domain + sPath)
tLastTime = tTime
end
# Wait for all the threads to finish before quitting the main thread
# Though I can't seem to get multiple threads to run in parallel,
# so the use of thread is pointless until I figur out how to fix that
Thread.list.each {|t| if t != Thread.main then t.join end}
end