Collin Grady

Fuck AppNexus

Seriously. They’re a shitty ad network that triggers popups, alert messages, and forced redirects on mobile devices. Disgusting practices. If you’re getting redirected from ads on adnxs.com, that’s them.

Global hotkeys for media players (including Pandora)

Step 1: Get Hoekey

Step 2: Put the following in the config file:

[Media Players]
; Previous
^~Z=Msg|iTunes|793|0|786432
=Msg|WMPlayerApp|793|0|786432
=Msg|WMP Skin Host|793|0|786432
=Msg|Winamp v1.x|273|40044
=Msg|ApolloRuntimeContentWindow|256|37|917504
=Msg|ApolloRuntimeContentWindow|257|37|917504

; Pandora - Thumb Down
~34=Msg|ApolloRuntimeContentWindow|256|109|917504
=Msg|ApolloRuntimeContentWindow|257|109|917504


Step 3: There is no step three 😀

A Simple Math Problem

So recently a meme has been running around regarding a relatively simple math problem that confuses people due to a lot of mistaken teaching and mistaken remembering out there. 🙂

Further harming the issue is so-called “learning” sites like Purplemath which have incorrect information on them, and refuse to change in spite of the mistake being contrary to all basic rules of math, and not agreeing with the answers that Google and Wolfram Alpha generate.

Even more, some older graphing calculators are incorrectly programmed, and generate an answer of 1, which many proponents of the 1 answer take as proof that they’re right, even though far more advanced tools as linked above say otherwise. (Not to mention, yet again, the basic rules of mathematics)

The recent problem in question is the following: 6/2(1+2), or 6÷2(1+2), depending on your symbol choice.

The correct answer is 9. Not 1, not 7, not anything else anyone comes up with when they make mistakes.

There are several sources of confusion with this problem – some teachers taught the order of operations incorrectly, while some students simply remember it wrong. Others try to distribute the 2 inside the parentheses, thinking back to algebra, while others assume that implied multiplication is somehow stronger than regular multiplication¹.

I was taught PEMDAS, which stands for Parentheses, Exponents, Multiplication & Division, Addition & Subtraction. However, some have taught or remember it as Multiplication and THEN Division, and Addition THEN Subtraction, which is wrong. You do the M/D and A/S left to right, whichever comes first.

Wrong way:

6/2(1+2)
6/2*3
6/6
1

The distributing crowd is actually similar to the previous error as well. They try to distribute, but they take only the 2, instead of the entire 6/2, or resulting 3.

Wrong way:

6/2(1+2)
6/(2+4)
6/6
1

The final group start off fine, doing the parentheses first, but then leave it as 2(3), which is the same as 2*3, and assume that somehow makes it stronger, when in fact they are identical.

Wrong way:

6/2(1+2)
6/2(3)
6/6
1

If you fix all these issues, you get only one possible answer, 9.

Right way:

6/2(1+2)
6/2*(1+2) Remember, implied multiplication is still just multiplication!
6/2*3
3*3
9

If you distribute correctly, you can do this:

6/2(1+2)
3(1+2)
3*1 + 3*2
3 + 6
9

No matter how you do it, if you actually follow the rules correctly, you get 9.

Random related images that have come up during discussions of this:

http://i.imgur.com/qiK3V.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/STMJT.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/zrxGL.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/Xvf6s.jpg

I’m beginning to hate nLayer

Update: spoke too soon, they finally got back to me, so maybe it will go somewhere 🙂

Update the 2nd: now that they finally got to my ticket, they seem to have taken care of it very quickly; the issue has not happened since they tweaked something last night! 🙂

For the past few weeks I’ve been having constant disconnects between me and a server I’m often connected to. (Up to 20 disconnects a day, often grouped together, getting very annoying)

My debugging leads me to believe it’s an issue with some of nLayer’s routers, but so far their support department has completely ignored my messages…
Continue Reading I’m beginning to hate nLayer…

Suggestion for those posting job ads

Note: This was written several months ago, and I am no longer looking for work 🙂

As someone who has been digging through a lot of job listings, I have a suggestion for those writing them:

Please, stop posting what you don’t want, and limit it to what you do.

I’ve been looking mostly for telecommute jobs, but when I search for telecommute along with other keywords, I find posting after posting saying “NO TELECOMMUTE” or similar – you’re only going to attract people looking for that keyword by posting it 🙂

If they just left it at “ON-SITE ONLY” it would not show up in a search for telecommute positions 🙂

mod_python versus mod_wsgi

So at work recently, we started looking at switching our django setups from mod_python to mod_wsgi, as we kept having memory and cpu use issues with mod_python, and mod_wsgi was supposed to be far better with performance.

Well, it’s only been a day so far, but the results have been very promising. Our memory usage was cut in half, and load bottomed out.

Edit: this is daemon mode with threads=1

Initial testing showed more drastic improvements, so for anyone else testing, take initial results with a grain of salt 🙂

With that said, here are the actual results:

Just after switching:

A day after switching:

Too early to be absolutely sure that everything is working well, but it’s all looking good so far 🙂