alex.moskalyuk

There’s a new report from Consumer Reports on best and worst vacuum cleaners. Their choices for upright vacuum cleaners:

Consumer Reports found that the Kenmore (Sears) Progressive 35922, $350, which is quiet and excellent on carpets, the Kenmore (Sears) Progressive 36932, $350, which is a bagless option, and the Eureka Boss Smart Vac 4870, $150, which is inexpensive and impressive on bare floors, are the best choices.

Due to Netflix outage this week I was thinking about getting their Vudu appliance for instant on-demand streaming to a TV set. But then, it seems that those appliances are just interim products, till we move to something better, sort of like CD-ROMs.

The better in this case is wireless HDMI. Since Netflix already supports streaming part of their catalogue to your PC, it’s just the matter of time till you can get that stream in high-def, and then plug in a wireless HDMI adapter to stream it directly to the television, bypassing a settop box entirely.

A limited selection of wireless HDMI products on the market is pretty pricey nowadays compared to a box from Vudu sold through Netflix. A set of extenders from Gefen is currently $700. Belkin Flyware HDMI transmitter is also $700. Hopefully the pricing would follow the DVD player timeline close enough.

I am reading Starbucked by Taylor Clark, and the book is quite enjoyable, both as a look inside the coffee industry, and as a business case study of Starbucks. Clark dedicates an entire chapter to fair trade coffee practices, that I wasn’t too familiar with, but as anybody else, assumed it was a Good Thing. Fair trade coffee practices, controlled by a non-profit TransFair USA, pay farmers participating in the program $1.26 a pound for regular coffee, and $1.31 for certified organic. Under the fair trade label it’s resold to you at $12-15 a pound, making the retailer quite a winner in this transaction (originally fair trade was supposed to eliminate the middleman, and thereby lower the final cost of coffee).

When the price of coffee beans can occasionally go under 40c, this seems like a good deal, if you’re a coffee farmer, so what’s the catch?

1. Fair trade contracts are binding, and requiring the coffee bean farmers to commit to $1.26-$1.31 even if market surges (as it does when there’s a cold summer in Brazil). Ok, this is a bit hypothetical, but coffee markets have been known to swing wildly nevertheless. In 2006 Starbucks (the largest seller of fair trade coffee in the US) has actually paid its non-fair-trade growers an average of $1.42 per pound. Oops.
2. TransFair requires that each coffee farm participating in the program be coop-owned and employ no outside seasonal labor. This rules out private farms, family-owned farms, and corporation-owned farms. A family of coffee bean growers starts out a farm, hires seasonal labor to pick the beans, and wants to sell it as fair trade coffee? TransFair doesn’t let those capitalist pigs get anywhere near the application form.
3. Roasters admit that fair trade coffee is of inferior quality. While the rest of the coffee farms have to compete in lower-priced open market, they frequently do it by quality of their product. When a fair trade farm is guaranteed $1.26-$1.31 a pound, the economic rationales start to take over, and growers always try to cut their costs to enjoy higher profit margins.
4. TransFair requires every participant in the fair trade program - retailer or coffee grower - to sign a release form promising never to criticize the program in public.

Over at igvita.com there’s a good guide to running MySQL backups and migrations. It explains the terminology and then dives into tools, such as mysqldump, mysqlhotcopy, mysqlsnapshot, ibbackup, as well as backing up with cp, scp and nc Unix commands.

Greg Linden posted another short excerpt on working on Findory - a personalized news search engine that he designed and built. Personalization pretty frequently defies your caching strategies, as delivering a new page for each user is very likely to deliver a pretty low cache hit rate. However, generating the page on the fly has to be fast, especially if it’s the first page the user sees. How does Findory deal with that? By offloading front page generation to offline batch process that pre-computes the data to be shown to the user, which is then fed into a MySQL table:

The way Findory does this is that it pre-computes as much of the expensive personalization as it can. Much of the task of matching interests to content is moved to an offline batch process. The online task of personalization, the part while the user is waiting, is reduced to a few thousand data lookups. Even a few thousand database accesses could be prohibitive given the time constraints. However, much of the content and pre-computed data is effectively read-only data. Findory replicates the read-only data out to its webservers, making these thousands of lookups lightning fast local accesses. Read-write data, such as each reader’s history on Findory, is in MySQL. MyISAM works well for this task since the data is not critical and speed is more important than transaction support.