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1,400,000,000 in Unix time

Today at 16:53:20 GMT, it’ll be 1,400,000,000 in Unix time.

Computers are fast!

So instead I used perf, which is a totally magical performance measurement tool for Linux. I needed to upgrade my kernel first, which was a bit nervewracking. But I did it! And it was beautiful. There are colours, and we got it to annotate the assembly code with performance statistics. Here’s what I ran to do it:
$ perf record ./bytesum_intrinsics The\ Newsroom\ S01E04.mp4
$ perf annotate --no-source
And here’s the result:

The movdqa instructions have to do with accessing memory, and it spends 32% of its time on those instructions. So I think that means that it spends 32% of its time accessing RAM, and the other 68% of its time doing calculations. Super neat!

Cyprus Attorney General’s office to buy 600,000 EUR server

Cyprus Updates point out:

According to an article in today’s issue of Phileleftheros newspaper, the Attorney General’s office is planning to purchase a server which will cost more than 600,000 euro in order to analyse the thousands of documents relating to economic scandals. The purchase was proposed by a British expert on the field in order the “strengthen the investigation”.

Always according to the article, the ‘electronic brain’ will store 150000 documents sorted and coded for each suspect for quick retrieval. As any owner of a mid range laptop today will tell you 150000 files are nothing by today’s computer technology and could probably even be analysed by any decent smartphone.

The whole article sounds as if it came out of a late 1960′s newspaper. Even though it made it to the front page we still hope this it was a farce or result of journalistic error.

PHPNG Dramatic Speedup Features Coming in PHP 6 Release

Some highlights:

The plot to kill Apache mod_php SAPI
Type hinting for everything (function arguments, function return values, and variables)
Asynchronous programming (using the new await keyword)
Production ready standalone web server
Multi-thread safe