Joe Auricchio

So now I’m in Palo Alto. (But that’s another post). Guess what supercar I was in front of last night, on Arastradero toward Central Expwy.

Go on, guess.

A Carrera GT.

Life gets stranger and stranger.

dc- And the girls there were lame.
dw- Really lame.
j- How lame?
dc- Imagine the least interesting girl you can think of. Now multiply her by five.
dw- And they were in a pack. Not like a pack of wolves. Like a pack of gum.

I’ve had a Dreamhost account for just over a year. I was lucky to catch one of their one-day promos, so I got a deeply discounted rate for the first year. But now the second year is starting, so they sent me a brief email to let me know that it was time to pay them. I signed in to the account control panel and checked my billing info. It said I owed them $114 or so for 2008-9. So I poked around the billing section a little more, and I saw an option to change the contract length. The longer the contract, the cheaper it is, to the tune of $1/mo less per additional year. So I switched my plan to three years, since I’m content with DH so far. To my surprise, I now owe them $0. In 2011 I’ll have to pay them $286, but for now my account is clear. That’s right, I asked for more service and they are giving it to me without being paid. Interesting. That’s not usually how business works.

My only guess is that their business model is predicated on a sufficient percentage of customers’ bills coming due each month; given that certain revenue, it doesn’t matter when any given customer actually pays. They have virtually zero marginal cost per customer and virtually zero recurring cost per customer-month. Their capital is servers and disk arrays, which are divided among a few hundred customers per cluster; they build a new cluster every month or so (week?), to accommodate incoming customers, but once a cluster is built it costs almost nothing to maintain. Power, cooling, salaries, office supplies, rent, and fiber connectivity are amortized over all their thousands of customers. So, as long as some bills come due every month, they’ll make salaries and rent. It doesn’t particularly matter when any single customer pays. They probably can’t even make good use of a surplus… it just goes into the bank account until it’s time to build the next cluster.

I work in downtown La Jolla, right opposite the Ferrari/Maserati dealership. AMGs, M-series, and Porsche Ses are everyday sights. Jaguars are like Toyotas. I’m tired of seeing expensive cars. But sometimes there’s something a bit more interesting than usual…

One day on the way to work I saw someone picked up in front of a particularly large house by a chauffeured Maybach. In the words of James L. (wherever you are), “Must be nice…”

A few weeks ago I saw a Ford GT in downtown La Jolla. Really, with gas prices up to $5/gallon, you’re driving one of these? You and Jeremy Clarkson both.

The US Open is in town this week, at Torrey Pines. It’s practically across the street from campus. There are a lot more interesting cars here this week—somehow the AMGs and M-series are even more abundant than usual. I found this BMW Z4 with the German plate “BMW Z4″ nestled behind CVS. An odd place to park what I assume is BMW’s touring show car. As I drove out of the parking lot, I saw a brand new SL63 AMG and a DB9 Vantage.

I don’t say any of this out of envy, merely commentary. I don’t particularly want any of these cars.¹ In fact, I still haven’t figured out what kind of car is right for me. Fast or a smooth ride? Four-door? Hatchback? FWD, RWD? Manual or auto? Low-slung or tall and roomy? I have only the vaguest of preferences.

For now I drive my dad’s trusty old Volvo S70 T5. I say “old” because the car is well on its way to 200,000 miles, but she’s only ten years old, and she looks and feels like a young girl of only 60K.² It’s zippy enough that I can have fun on late night jaunts to campus or wherever; but it’s a Volvo, so it’s comfortable enough that I don’t really mind the six-hour nonstop service from SAN to SBP for holidays and vacations. Plus it has five cylinders, which is just neat. It’s my car and I love it.

Then again, with gas going up and up, these may be the last days of the automobile. Maybe I was born in the wrong decade? Ah well. Bring on the public transit and high-speed rail.

It’s time for me to start contributing back to this Blogosphere thing. I should also get some practice in technical writing and commentary, and the kinds of critical thinking they encourage. Finally, I should do something to show anyone who finds this site what I’m like professionally, not just personally.

To that end, I’ve written the first in what I hope is a long series of articles on computer architecture, my area of focus and primary interest. In the inaugural entry, I respond to Jon Stokes’s recent article on the Intel Atom and opine on the ramifications of newfound x86 compatibility in embedded systems (to wit: who cares?)

To avoid annoying all the folks who know me in real life but aren’t as nerdy, or just don’t want to scroll through pages of essays, I’ve kept the architecture section off the main blog section, but added appropriate links to it. For the lazy: architecture category index, feed.

This is probably only interesting to the folks who’ve taken at least one CAT course…

Danny: “Joe, are you ticklish?”
Me: “NO! F— off!”

I promptly get tickled by six people for a cool minute.

Rushi: “That was probably the worst response possible.”
somebody: “There is no really good response.”
Danny: “Yes: ‘I have diarrhea.’”

One of these is not like the others…

No, these are not the ingredients of a wicked new cocktail. We just needed Drano too.

Extract the revision histories of the classes Rushi and I collaborated on out of his school repo, compress them, pipe them over the network onto my laptop, and uncompress. I was on the verge of adding the svnadmin load that would pull it into my repo, but I got lazy.

RSi:/home/svn$ svnadmin dump school | svndumpfilter --drop-empty-revs --renumber-revs include /CSE131A /CSE131B /CSE120 | gzip | ssh jauricchio@128.54.57.118 gunzip \> rushidump

Yeah yeah, DVCS, hg and git and whatever, I know…

Why are some programming languages more popular than others? If Java is so lame and (Haskell, Obj-C, Erlang, Smalltalk, whatever) is so great, why is one of them the most used language and nobody’s heard of the other?

Tamir Khason has the answer: Computer Languages and Facial Hair.

Via … somebody. Forgot who. Maybe it was Sam Larbi?