Paul’s Journal

Today in Econmics class we were being lectured on Total Profit(TP), Average Costs(AC), Marginal Costs(MC), and Marginal Revenue(MR).

He gave an example, and said that at quanity 6, you would have the highest total profit.



However, using simple math (no really, just multiplication and subtraction), you can see that at quanity 5 you have a higher total profit.

So, the professor was wrong in his example, hey it happens, we are all humans. I raised my hand, and asked if at Q = 5, would you have a higher total profit. I didn’t use a confronting tone, and I didn’t even say he was wrong. Instead of investigating my answer, he told the entire class that I was wrong, and to please not continue since it would mislead the class. I decided to not make a scene, and talk to him after class. Several other people mumbled how I was right… sigh.


Talking to him after the class, he would say ‘I see how you got there’, but not that I was right. Oh well. No reeason to make enemies of all my professors.


So here is the point, one of the most important attributes I like to see in people, is the power to admit when you were wrong. Tony Blair admits he was wrong about Iraq having WMDs, but my economics professor cannot admit he was wrong in a simple example. Heck, last week I started a thread on dev@httpd suggesting that we have an End Of Life Policy for httpd-2.0.x. It quickly became apparent that no one else agreed with me. No reason to create a flamewar when I was wrong, and I admit that the idea in retrospec does not mesh well with Apache’s paradign.

It takes a real man to admit when they are wrong.

For future reference, always remember that APR Bucket Brigades are not NULL terminated.


mod_highlight has had a bug for a couple months now where it would append random binary data to a highlighted file. I narrowed it down to something inside the ::ParseChunk function, but it took a week of blanking out at this 10 line function to see this mistake. D`oh.

For the first time in my recent memory, the httpd development branch would not compile! It turned out to be some old functions were not exported properly, and this caused undefined symbols on some platforms. Is a broken build a sign of progress for a project that has been idle? Is this the starting of a new life?


On the httpd frontpage there is now a link to the 2.1/2.2 Documentation. The next step is get a 2.1-alpha release on there. Hopefully that will get done this week, since PCRE 5.0 has been merged in.


I also knocked off an old bug in APR where it was trying to do runtime detection of sendfile support on FreeBSD. r106850

• APR: Added support for apr_os_uuid_get() on Linux and FreeBSD. Linux has a uuid_generate as part of libuuid. FreeBSD has uuid_create as part of it’s libC, and of course, they both have completely different schematics. I first got to know the different interfaces when I ported the Plasma Servers to FreeBSD, since we use GUIDs in several places. r106214.





• APR: Committed a first swing at support for Solaris 10’s ‘Event Completion Framework’. Their interface is a little weird. You must add a file descriptor back into the Set after any event is done with it. KQueue and EPoll on the other hand leave the file descriptor in the Set until you explicitly remove it. On a personal level, I prefer the KQueue and EPoll type interface, but the Solaris 10 one works, just with more system calls. r106156.





• HTTPD: The Event MPM. This patch has been in various incarnations since mid-July. I actually did most of the coding in August on a road trip to Seattle for a Mariners Game. The patch came in at over 160k, mostly because large portions of the code where copied from the Worker MPM. r105919.

It was a busy week!

I was using my mastery of SQL to delete Spam comments, and I deleted all comments since may. Opps.

My prediction was wrong.


Shazbot!

In other news, Montana passed a ban on Gay Marriage, and at the same time passed a law allowing medical marijuana.

Kerry wins the popular vote (53%), however many states are extremely close, and it is all protested in court. We will not know who will be the next president until december.