Today I went ahead and gave it a try anyway. 1000+ contestants was registered and the swim-start was designed to be “start when you want” as in: 50people gets sent of every 3minutes from 17(5pm). Time starts when you run for the water. 4 coworkers and I was signed up and lined up for start around 17.35 and went into the water 17.42. I knew my swim wasnt the good, so I tried to give people space to get into the water in front of me. Nevertheless did I end up in the middel of lots of people and enjoyed the strange feeling of being eaten alive and spit out the back. Very fun, and my crawl (switched to unilateral in 5seconds) was way better than I dared to hope. Direction was hard but fun as well. The swim route was from the beach in the Amager Strandpark Laguna and 200meters out around two bouys and back in.

Leaving the water after 400m

The water was just above 19degree. Neither of my coworkers or I owned a wetsuit so it was just speedo-style.

Somewhere on the swim route a person crossed right in front of me in a leisurely back crawl. What a sight!

The water was greenish but it didnt feel too cold. I didnt really have time to ponders such matters at that time anyway.

My swim took 10 minutes and 37seconds. almost 5minutes better than my estimate of 15minutes and it felt ok. My heart was racing and my shoulders could feel that I did actally put some effort into it.

From there I ran straight through the “changing zone”. Nude people werent allowed so if you wanted to change into something else after the swim you had to do it in a tent in the transition zone.

Already yesterday as I was mixing sportsdrink and preparing my bike helmet I decided that my speedos were fine for both biking and running so I ran straight through the chaning zone and on to my bike.

10meters from T2 – From Cph4184

My  bike is a normal city-bike so I had no dedicated bike-shoes and therefore spent the time in T1 tightening my running shoes before I headed out the to the bike course – 5m46s

The bike course was 4.5km down a road with a couple of turns and back again, repeated twice. I have never done any cycling races so this was very exiting for me. Lots of bikes on the road (due to the loop) and no official no-draft rules made for a very fun ride. I rode on as hard as I could while trying to steady my heart – still pounding from the swim. The road was filled with an extremely wide variety of bikes. All the way from granpa-bikes and even a bike with a loading case(christiania bike) and to high-tech disc-wheel time-trial bikes and aero-helmets and everything. Yet another sight.

My legs felt excellent and I love to ride my bicycle so I rode as hard as I dared. During the bike course I caught up to one of my coworkers and took him along on my wheel for a couple of kilometers before he fell behind in a turn. Just after that a “train” of three “real roadbikes” and a tt bike passed me. But not fast enough to frighten me off so I caught up with them. What a feeling: When I got into their slip-stream it felt like the dropped the speed but as soon as I went either side or in a turn the wind hit me hard. I followed along for a couple of kilometers but got cocky and decided to “take my turn” and pass all the way from the back and to the front. 10-30seconds and I was gasping for air again but it felt great and when they soon after overtook me again I was able to hang on to the back again for the last km before T2. The ride took in total 34m33seconds with an average speed of 31.2km/h. Pretty much what I was hoping for.

Leaving T2 going for 4km run

T2 included a pee-break but no change of clothes and took only 3min20sec. Then the run. During the week my right knee area had been bothering me – symptoms somewhat resembling IT-band syndrome which made me back off from any more runs and added lots of streching of the IT-band and icing when possible. Today I felt no problems and the run went fine. I was very glad that I actually had tried to go for a bike-ride and then immediately after go for a run. The feeling of the legs as bricks was recognizable and induced no stress as I was prepared The run was pretty uneventful, but felt somewhat more lonely than the bike-ride. Passed lots of people walking. I run all my runs in a run/walk protocol but had no watch with me. Took a single walk when I felt like it and stretched out my torso a bit to alleviate the side stich that appeared immediately when I started running.

20m12seconds and I passed the finish line. Total time was 1hour 14minutes and 25seconds and I was tired but felt elated and happy.

Drank lots of water and found my coworkers and went for a dip in the water to cool down a bit.

The team – from left: Jan, Mikkel, Daniel, Tue and me

All in all a great event and I was very happy to be able to complete my first triathlon ever! If I had to suggest some improvements I would request some way of getting the overall time somewhere in between as well as a couple of distance markers on the bike and run course.

Apart from that it was fantastic! Thanks to my wife for the support and photo-duty!

• They really like to drink milk! I denmark we drink milk, but here it is offered for all meals, both at CWI and my hostel
• For some reason it is easier to get powder milk in your coffee than fresh milk. The mind boggles
• They like their “fietsen” here. Bicycles almost as many as I see in copenhagen. I’ve seen a fair amount of normal city-bikes with aero-gear. Most of the bikes are “granma-bikes”
• It is true: Coffee-shops exist and you can walk in and buy hash
• They are really really really looking forward to the football World Cup in South Africa.
• They are very proud of their orange colors. Football celebrations and elsewhere
• Some of the houseboats looks really nice
• June 9 was electionday for parliment. Very quiet. No posters, no marches, no demonstrations. Very quiet.

Biomolecular computers and computation

Biomolecular computers or “biocomputers” is an area that have been research the last 20 years. At first much hype and hope was attached that this would provide some kind of break through to overcome the limitations of normal silica-based chip computers as we know and use today – your average PC and every microchip controlled device around. This is the same hope that surrounds quantum computers – a new approach for doing currently very long computations, for example integer factorization of large prime products within feasible time. The jury is still out on the possibility of biomolecular computing to deliver on that hope/potential. Other research have also shown “niche” interest in the area of “DNA Doctor” usage of biocomputers where a “biocomputer” is implemented to interact directly with the cells in for example humans.

A biomolecular computer can be seen as a computer that  ”.…use systems of biologically derived molecules, such as DNA and proteins, to perform computational calculations involving storing, retrieving, and processing data.“(From wikipedia). Why is this interesting?

First of all: Why not? Tinkering, and playing around with things is interesting IMHO: By drawing the parallel between a biocomputer and a (human) brain you can say that it is a way to learn about ways nature works.

Second of all, a biocomputer will have different properties compared to conventional computers. Some of the first explored ideas was to use DNA interactions to solve very computational hard problems (NP-complete, traveling salesman like problems, Adleman 1994). This is interesting because it is possible to have millions and millions of molecules in lab-tube and thereby allowing for massively parallel computations – compared to a conventional computer which might have 4 (or at least not millions of) cores for parallel computations.

The Blob programming model

When I contacted my supervisor about writing a project this winter I was introduced to “the blob programming model”. At that time it was mostly an article in progress. Just now it has been accepted for the CS2Bio workshop as “Programming in Biomolecular computation” in Amsterdam, June 10, 2010.

The authors, Neil Jones in particular, read lots of the articles around biomolecular computation, turing universality of the models, and formal algebras for describing molecular interactions (Like Kappa calculus and Biochemical Ground Form) but his background as a computer scientist found something missing: Where are the programs?

Lots of interesting computational properties was proven but as a programmer there is no way to write a program as we know it.

Based on that “hole” a machine language was developed and described in the article which might theoretically could be used on a biocomputer. The models was dubbed “The blob programming model” and the article can be found at http://blobvis.appspot.com/blob

My Project – Visualizations of Blob programs

Based on this article I defined a project for doing a literature review of biocomputing literature as well as visualization theory applicable to visualization of blob programs. Normal progrogramming visualizations exists and have been used for many years, but in this case there was a special angle attached to the visualizations. The blob model has a potential physical analog as it might be possible to create a “biomolecular computer” that can execute the instructions and as the instructions is formed to be somewhat like an abstract molecule or similar a visualization of the blob instruction set could/should reveal interesting properties of blob programs with regards to their physical presence.

A program in the BlobVis tool

At http://blobvis.appspot.com my report is available for download as well as the BlobVis visualization tool I developed. From there you can play around with a few simple “Blob Programs”, for example a “list append’” program and see a video of a program executing in BlobVis. As I focused on physical properties the tool uses a physical based algorithm for layouting the blob programs(Via prefuse) which allows you to drag around programs and data in a way that looks like it is immersed in water or similar. That gives an interesting effect and is fun to watch.

It looks like I’ve gotten all the way around the currently published articles with this list:

Jeff Atwood was is not very happy with the default “incredibly pessimistic out of the box” setup of databases in his “Deadlocked!” post.  Along the same lines, the H-store people published an article[1]:

The End of an Architectural Era (It’s Time for a Complete Rewrite).

They claim that the time is up for “legacy systems” like the model used by current RDMBS’ like MySQL and SQL Server. The assumption of the H-base people that reasonates with Jeff Atwood – I believe – is:

Every effort should be made to eliminate the cost of traditional dynamic locking for concurrency control, which will also be a bottleneck.

I don’t know if it is something Jeff Atwood is aware of, and I don’t know if that is a sign that a traditional RDBMS is maybe not what he wants, but it is worth think about – IMHO.

Dette er hvordan sagerne ser ud fra min del af internettet

Først dukkede sagen om eof.dk op[1] som skabte lidt røre. Et domæne registeret for flere år siden, men uden website blev dømt som “ikke i brug” og givet til et firma som valgte at skifte til et navn som kan forkortes til eof.dk. Min personlige store kæphest med den sag er at for det første foregår det bagvendt. Firmaet skifter navn og passer pludsligt til forkortelsen EOF.dk, selvom domænet var taget og i brug. For det andet synes jeg at den tekniske baggrund der ligger til grund bliver fuldstændig forfladiget og hele den sammensatte netværksstack som ip og dns dækker over bliver lavet om til: “Det vi kan se i vores internet explorer 6.0″. Hvis domænet kun bliver brugt til mail, så bruger man det jo ikke! Argumenterne for sådan en prioritering fremføres bl.a. i ddu.dk sagen:

I diskussionen om den retlige regulering af internet-domænenavne sætter man undertiden lighedstegn mellem internet-domænenavne og hjemmesider. Det ligger da også klart, at nogle af de mest værdifulde anvendelsesformer for internet-domænenavne netop er som kommunikation via hjemmesider. Internetdomænenavne kan dog også anvendes til andre formål, f.eks. e-post og FTP-service. En sådan anvendelse kan også have en betydelig nytteværdi, men da e-post ofte sendes mellem parter, der kender hinanden, medens kommunikation til og fra hjemmesider ofte sker mellem parter, der ikke kender hinanden (og som derfor har behov for at kunne huske det relevante kontaktpunkt), har en sådan anvendelse ofte en mindre økonomisk værdi.

Tjaeh tjoeh.  Jeg synes man glemmer dimension omkring at folk kunne hurtigt blive afhængige af at beholde deres emailadresser for eksempel.

Derfra gik der et par måneder indtil Peter Makholm tørt bemærkede: “…IMHO orango.dk, roklub.dk, and ddu.dk looks interesting.” baseret på hans gennemkig af de nyeste sager fra Domæne Klagenævnet. Og så gik det pludseligt vildt for sig.

Det hele drejer sig om at at firma – orango.nu, stiftet i foråret 2009 – ønsker sig domænet orango.dk. En privat person har ejet domænet i 9år og har altid brugt “orango” som sit nick online. Domænet bruges til email og som startside af ham personligt.

Peter Larsen er meget lidt tilfreds med sagen og poster harmdirrende på sin blog og turen starter. Herfra går det via twitter og comon:

Virksomheder har forret til danske domæner. Det lader til at være essensen af endnu en dansk domæneklage-sag.(common)

og der dukker en lang række blogposts op i kølvandet:

• Danish Dispute Policies Allow Reverse Hijacks?
• Orango “kaprer” domæne fra privat dansker
• Domæneindehaver mister domæne efter 9 år
• Ejeren af domænet orango.dk skal overdrage det til orango.nu
• .dk domæner kan tages fra dig
• Hvor meget er et domæne værd?
• Orango stjæler privat domænenavn (og  på kommunikationsforum)
• Orango
• Orango.nu / Orango.dk sagen
• Må man beholde sit eget domænenavn?

Derudover er der flere nyhedssites som tager sagen op:

• 180grader: Orango skifter hænder med statens hjælp
• CRN: Domæneejer mister navnet efter 9 år
• Leder fra 180grader: Venstrefløjsekstremisme er gjort til lov om webdomæner
• Newz: Mister domæne efter 9 år til nystiftet firma

Dette afføder en del reaktioner i debatfora og som kommentarer til ovenstående blogposts og nyhedsposts. For mig virker det som om de fleste kanaliserer deres vrede direkte mod orango.nu firmaet selvom flere påpeger at firmaet som sådan kun er et symptom på en syg lov/klagebehandling:

Gammelmand @orango enig de er nogle svin. Men husk nu det var difo og domæneklagenævnet og domæneloven der gjorde det muligt. Ændre domænelov nu!!!!

Gammelmand #orango #orangogate hvorfor sidder forbrugerrådet som tavse medlemmer i difo. Ny domæne lov nu! Nyt domæneklagenævn nu!!!

(Fra twitter: http://twitter.com/#search?q=orango)

Denne vrede udmønter sig mange steder. Trustpilot anmeldelser med bundkarakterer, facebook kommentarer osv. Orango.nu forsøger at forsvare sig ved at fjerne/slette alle disse ting, men når det først er derude er det svært at slippe af med:

Conduct Reputation Management 101. Slet ikke kritiske indlæg – svar på dem i stedet (via facebook)

jonasjuhler Mit råd til @orango: Find et nyt navn – og undskyld! Man kan ikke tie en sag ihjel på nettet! #orangogate (via twitter)

jpenti Kan #orangogate mon overbevise @orango om at man ikke kan gemme sig på internettet? Slet bare løs på Facebook men samtalen fortsætter. (Via twitter)

runehven @conduct_dk Orango har måske slået væggen fra – men folk kan stadig uploade “fan”-billeder – http://bit.ly/6qGW7a#Orango #orangogate (via twitter)

Samtidigt skydes der gang i flere tiltag:

• §20 spørgsmå fra SFl til Videnskabsministeren.
  • “pbinderup Mail sendt til IT ordfører for SF omkring #orango#orangogate” (via twitter)
  • http://www.ft.dk/dokumenter/tingdok.aspx?/samling/20091/almdel/UVT/spm/39/index.htm
  • og i nyhederne: newz, crn,180grader
• Online underskriftsindsamling.
• Facebook grupper
  • orango.dk skal forsat ejes af Peter Veileborg
  • Orango – Firmaet der stjæler dit domæne.

Modvinden er så strid at DR Update tager imod tippet om sagen og laver et indslag: http://www.dr.dk/NETTV/Update/?video={cc7e58df-fbcb-41ee-85ed-ea674dd41e4f}

Sidste nyt er artikel med råd fra kommunikationsekspert om at orango.nu bør skifte navn og sige undskyld(via  Comon) sammen med forsøg på at få kommentarer fra Orango.nu på sagen.

Samtidigt har Peter Veileborg  - nuværende ejer af Orango.dk – afsløret at der bliver en retsag: http://www.orangotilbage.dk/ hviket diverse nyhedssites også rapporterer:

• Comon: “Orango skal for retten”
• 180grader: Orango.dk ejer kræver sit domæne tilbage
• Version2: Mistede orango.dk-domæne – nu går han rettens vej
• CRN: Orango.dk skal for retten
• Newz: Orango.dk afgørelse bliver anket

Stay tuned!

http://new.czar.dk/?p=510 – Peter Larsen (Larsen data, gratisdns og formand for DKRegistrar brancheforening)
http://new.czar.dk/?p=521 – || -
http://www.piratpartiet.dk/node/277
http://www.version2.dk/artikel/12516-god-skik-skal-diskuteres – Peter Makholm, version2 blogger
http://www.version2.dk/artikel/12124-klagenaevn-konfiskerer-html-fri-domaener – Artikel fra version2 der sætter sagen i spotlight.
http://www.business.dk/tech-mobil/principiel-domaenesag-kan-ende-i-retten – Skal EOF sagen i retten?

6 weeks before this I went to the physiotherapist – again. Third time, overloaded knees – Patellar tendinitis. First problem, april 2007, second time march 2008.

This time I tried another physiotherapist, recommended to me and a specialist in sports injuries and elite sports. I am and was not elite in sports in any way but the feeling of going to a place where the focus was on sustainable continuous training and not on “patching until workable again” was fantastic!

The main focus point was: Your lungs and heart can get in great shape in a matter of weeks, where your tendons and cartilage needs months and your bones needs many months or years. You are currently at zero or below, start working your way up, but don’t expect that marathon within the next 2-5 years.

Today, one year later I ran 8km in 44 minutes. In a pure quantity view there is a long way from the 40+kms a week, with a weekend run for 22km in march 2007 and all the way down to 8km’s now, but I’m very proud that I have been able to stick to the plan – slow progress and continuous effort. Nothing is fixed, and I can always feel the edge of soreness, and I don’t believe that I will ever be able to get completely rid of the tender knees.

But today is a great day never the less!

After reading David’s post i have installed:

So there you go.

As a sidenote I can reveal that the new “Update automatically” for plugins rocks!

This is true also for IT systems, where logging is a very used way for observing running code.

From Jeff Atwoods Coding Horror blog about a problem during the beta of stackoverflow.com:

We spent days troubleshooting these deadlocks by .. wait for it .. adding more logging! Which naturally made the problem worse and even harder to figure out. 

[link: The problem with logging]

This illustrates my point exactly. 99% of the time logging affect the system in a neglible way. But you have to keep in mind that it actually could affect the “experiment”. In this case the performance or the behavior of your program.

My job is “Production Support” in the ITIL way. IE. ensuring quality of running services with  Incident Management and Problem Management. That means that for anything not related to normal operations we often need the logs. 

Also in these days of powerful IDEs and remote debugging is that much logging really nescisary?

[link: Stackoverflow: Code to logging ratio]

Yes it is! We are supporting an ESB developed and customized during the last 3-5years and attaching a debugger isn’t really an option. 

So we are basically totally dependent on good logging for troubleshooting.

We have been dealing with a problem relating to big batches of large messages and the 2GB limit of our JVM’s. We started by initiating a project to throw some dedicated hardware after the code handing these large messages so it wouldnt affect the rest of the “stuff” running on the same application server. But unfortunately hardware acquirement and machine setup can be a slow process, and worst of all: It’s out of our hands!

So our current guru took a quick look at the code and started grabbing for some low hanging fruit:

Before ifDebugEnabled

After using if debugEnabled

 It turns out that developer had used the same politic as mentioned in the stackoverflow post:

<…
DEBUG Level

• Any parameters passed into the method

…>
 

The parameter in this case was 1-2MB xml-data which was logged like this:

LOG.debug("Entering part 2.1 of method MyMethod with msg: "+msg.toXml());

In production only INFO and above is logged so the debug message was discarded. But the concat of 2MB data was still performed several times per message (10-12 as far as I recall). So the difference between the above to memory graphs is:

if (LOG.isDebugEnabled()){
    LOG.debug("Entering part 2.1 of method MyMethod with msg: "+msg.toXml());
}

(as also mentioned here: http://wordstoday.wordpress.com/2007/11/26/log4j-why-use-isdebugenabled-in-your-code/)

This should buy us some time before we can isolate this process on it’s own hardware/jvm.

The guru is currently looking into writing a xpath expression for PMD run over our giant codebase. Could be fun to see what it’ll dig up

Actually I dont really care if it’s unit tests, integration tests or any other kind of test, I just see unit tests every day as part of my work. The part I like is that it’s such an integrated part of the code.

When I do a code review, it’s not always possible to just load in the code as a project into my eclipse and run findbugs, pmd, checkstyle and eclemma.

In these cases I go straight to the included testcases to see what is being tested.  I always have the (maybe naive?) faith that by looking at the test I at least get a view of the “main” function of the code parts and that way I can start to dig through the code. This has helped me likewise  when trying to reuse some old code. The unit test showed me very easily how to initalize the functionality, what I need to supply, and what needed to be  present (the mocked out parts). 

So shame on you who don’t write unit tests! (or other kinds of directly included tests).