Month: May 2018

Magnasanti: The Largest and Most Terrifying SimCity

Here is an interesting story for all the fans of SimCity and similar games, as well as for anyone who still thinks that computer games are a useless time waste.  I’d like to see you try doing something even remotely close to this:

This story reminds me of all the time I spent playing Transport Tycoon Deluxe and OpenTTD.  The game is fun and I learned a lot about transportation.  But no matter how hard I tried, I never came close to the real pros (there are many actual professionals from the transportation industry playing the game and trying things out).  Have a look at this monster train station, for example (found in this forum thread):

Just stop and think for a moment.  How much do you really know about transportation? Trucks, buses, trains, ships, airplanes and helicopters?  Roads, maintenance, history and technology change?  Road planning, bridges, tunnels, semaphores, roundabouts, ports, loading stations, warehouse? I can go on …

These games teach you a great deal about the complex world around you.

Creating a 1.3 Million vCPU Grid on AWS using EC2 Spot Instances and TIBCO GridServer

This Amazon AWS blog post provides a great insight into the benefits of the cloud computing in general and Amazon AWS in particular.  The whole thing is well worth the read, but here are a few of my favorite bits.

The scale:

The grid grew to 61,299 Spot Instances (1.3 million vCPUs drawn from 34 instance types spanning 3 generations of EC2 hardware) as planned, with just 1,937 instances reclaimed and automatically replaced during the run, and cost $30,000 per hour to run, at an average hourly cost of $0.078 per vCPU. If the same instances had been used in On-Demand form, the hourly cost to run the grid would have been approximately $93,000.

The size of the Amazon AWS customers:

1.3 million vCPUs (5x the size of the largest on-premises grid)

The evolution of computing power over the last few years:

To give you a sense of the compute power, we computed that this grid would have taken the #1 position on the TOP 500 supercomputer list in November 2007 by a considerable margin, and the #2 position in June 2008. Today, it would occupy position #360 on the list.

Now, just for fun, exercise the idea of building something like this in house…

Windows Notepad Finally Supports Unix, Mac OS Line Endings

This Slashdot story links to this blog post by Microsoft.  33 years later, one of the most annoying issues with the Notepad text editor is resolved:

Starting with the current Windows 10 Insider build, Notepad will support Unix/Linux line endings (LF), Macintosh line endings (CR), and Windows Line endings (CRLF) as usual. New files created within Notepad will use Windows line ending (CRLF) by default, but it will now be possible to view, edit, and print existing files, correctly maintaining the file’s current line ending format.

They shouldn’t have invented their own line ending in the first place.  But it’s great to see that they finally acknowledge the existence of the rest of the world.

PhpMetrics – static analysis tool for PHP

PhpMetrics is yet another tool in the ever growing list of the static code analyzers for PHP.  Compared to the rest, I think this one is the easiest to install and run.  And it produces the most eye candy reports ever.  The generated report is in the HTML format, with fancy charts and graphs, and makes it really easy to spot and fix the issues.