The MOG Gazette (July 2nd, 2007)

-THE MOG-GAZETTE - What's up at MOG- What's hot on MOG- Mogger of the week- Word of MOG- MOG tip of the week- MOG under the hood-What's up at MOGSpecial MOG Report:Our intrepid Mogger on the go, John Madden, had the incredible opportunity to see REM perform new material live in Dublin. Read his review and watch live footage of the show here: http://mog.com/John_Madden/blog_post/91406Come hang out in the MOG Chat Room!http://mog.com/chatHead on over to our new chatroom. Get to know your fellow Moggers in real time. This room is what y'all make of it.-What's Hot on MOGNews of the week:Find out how to add entire concert videos to your posts,.http://mog.com/Kate_S/blog_post/89868The Verve are reuniting!http://mog.com/Charley_Rogulewski/blog_post/89324Oh dear, so are the Spice Girls.http://mog.com/Parker_Reynolds/blog_post/90254Amy Winehouse, why you gotta hurt yourself?http://mog.com/Sureshot/blog_post/89924Prince releasing new album free in UK via the newspaper!http://mog.com/Charley_Rogulewski/blog_post/90744New Cat Power, Bright Eyes and M. Ward songs.http://mog.com/Michael_Goldberg/blog_post/90274Need to catch up on the muddy mess that was Glastonbury?http://mog.com/Mackenzie_P/blog_post/88938Videos of the week:Kanye West has a new video out, starring Cassie.http://mog.com/MrFrost/blog_post/89846Serge gives us a backstage pass to the Ottawa International Jazz Fest:http://mog.com/Serge/blog_post/88848Magdalenus has incredible live footage of a recent Panda Bear show:http://mog.com/magdalenus/blog_post/88264Jules shares a ton of videos of everyone from Oasis to the Kaiser Chiefs covering songs from Sgt. Pepper.http://mog.com/Jules09/blog_post/88222-Mogger of the WeekSay hello to lucyintheskies! (http://mog.com/lucyintheskies). Lucy found MOG through fellow Mogger (and former Mogger of the Week) Bree (http://mog.com/dangerpilot). In addition to her often-updated MOG page, Lucy also runs a blog on being a post-modern mother, called Momcore, writes occasional music reviews for Treblezine and works in advertising.Lucy says: "my mother was a groupie for The Doors prior to her 18th birthday, and prior to somewhat settling down to have me. I'm known to say music is my oxygen and lyrics are my language, all the time. And consider my addiction to be constantly "music drunk". I have three kids of my own who are innundated with music 24/7, and already have their own eclectic tastes."Lucy's favorite album of all time is actually two: 'Blue' by Joni Mitchell and 'Up the Bracket' by The Libertines. Her favorite song of all time? 'Famous Blue Raincoat' by Leonard Cohen. An avid concert-goer, Lucy's top concert experience was seeing Bryan Ferry. The last show she went to was by Bright Eyes, and soon she will be rockin' out in the crowd at The Ditty Bops.Some of her favorite artists discovered through MOG are the Ambulance Ltd., The Fratellis, Sophie Ellis-Bextor, Johnossi, Zeitgeist, and The Youth Group.Lucy's MOG page (http://mog.com/lucyintheskies) is full of beautiful art and poetic musings, so be sure to stop by and say hello!-Word of MOGTh Format is giving away their new album for free!Bwentman: "Good for Format fans who want to own the album, but just haven’t gotten around to paying for it. Or, people who’ve never heard of the Format who appreciate pop rock and all the catchiness that comes along with it. Or people who’ve had the album for a while…didn’t purchase..and would like a legitimate way to own it….heh."http://mog.com/Bwentman/blog_post/90180Beck does Nick Drake:SatisfiedMind614: "How much do i love Beck? He is the only man on the planet who can get away with covering Gram Parsons and Nick Drake OR rocking you with two turntables and a microphone…how can you not love him?"http://mog.com/SatisfiedMind614/blog_post/89794Why isn't Pearl Jam that popular or relevant anymore?drewfonts: "Here’s a few reasons I came up with:1. Stylistically, their sound has matured. Mellowed with age, like a fine scotch. While they still come out with the occasional balls-out rocker, the energy from the younger years is fading from their records and, presumably, from their live shows as well.2. Grunge music is deceased, and even MTV mostly frowns on post-grunge (when’s the last time you saw a Puddle of Mudd video?). In terms of marketability, it seems like no one wants even the suggestion of grunge around anymore."http://mog.com/drewfonts/blog_post/88940Kickin' it old school with some love for cassettes:ErinHanson: "I love those bits before and after songs, where you accidentally record the DJ… years later they prove to be more interesting than the music itself. I have a DJ announcing the lineup of Lolapalooza ‘94, the height of the grunge area, which was supposed to be headlined by Nirvana. I have the first announcement on Vancouver’s main rock radio station, CFOX , that Kurt Cobain has shot himself."http://mog.com/ErinHanson/blog_post/88828Paris Hilton's sweet escape:The Time Machine: "So it looks like Paris Hilton will be let out of jail this week which gives us very little time on the radio to continue playing “Paris’ Sweet Escape” by Melanie Fontana. She sat down with a DJ over a week ago, recorded it and VOILA – it’s been our most played song the past week. So sue us…we play a lot of novelty records."http://mog.com/The_Time_Machine/blog_post/88698The Music Snob's Manifesto:Zaorish: "Here is my belief about music. It is a frivolous belief (because in reality all music is enjoyable to some degree and so tastes ultimately don’t matter), but since a blog purely about music is also a little frivolous, I feel I must begin with it.It is the obligation of every music lover to dig through all the mountains of what is popular, and find what is outstanding."http://mog.com/Zaorish/blog_post/88204Ladies of the Canyon: A Joni Mitchell trip:deedee: "But Joni was a lady of the canyon, and wore gorgeous hippie clothes, and had affairs with all those songwriter boys (“my old man,” “I would be his lady all my life,” etc.). Very romantic stuff. Imagine heated discussions about who was better: Carole or Joni. We Bronx girls were so rough."http://mog.com/deedee/blog_post/89176Someone's got a musical crush:iodapril: "I’d now like to present The Ultimate Sean Hayes MOG Post. The end all be all to this talented man. To his rabid fan base (like me) and those that have not yet experienced his deceptively simple, lilting and beautiful songcraft, may you now download and appreciate. Download and absorb. Download and share someone that is not nearly as widely recognized as a singer/songwriter for the times."http://mog.com/iodapril/blog_post/90536Is searching for music in thrift stores and bargain bins worth the effort?The_Boy_Flood: "I also wondered if the stuff in there was second hand for a good reason. There is after all a lot of bad music out there. I love visiting second hand shops for cool clothes and retro stuff, but could never really take my musical world in there. So convert me people, what was your ultimate second hand purchase, and include on-line stuff as well if you want."http://mog.com/The_Boy_Flood/blog_post/89966-MOG tip of the week-Add MOG to your Myspace, blog or website!Did you know that you can add everything from MOG widgets to the MOG mp3 player to your Myspace page, blog or website? It's easy:To add MOG widgets like "Last songs played" and "Top songs this week" go to your MOG page and click the "add MOG to Facebook and blogs" button.To add the MOG mp3 player, click the "share" button on the post containing the song you want to share and choose "embed mp3".-MOG under the hoodwith Lucas CarlsonIn our discussion of distributing web requests to different servers via the analogy of a translation company, we ended up last week with a question. To recap, the analogy compares application serving computers to translation offices and instances of the application as translators. Further, a manager (reverse proxy) sat in front of the offices distributing tasks to each office. Last week we realized that to increase efficiency of our translators, we could put a manager in each office in order to buffer requests. That way, any individual bottleneck could not hold up the queue from being processed. For distributing web requests, I created a reverse proxy called drproxy to do exactly this.These types of systems can be found over and over again in the real world. Just this weekend I was in line to order a polish dog from Costco. There was a single line with two servers processing the line. I watched as a father couldn't get decisions from each of his three children, yet the other server's booth moved along smoothly and brought me closer and closer to the polish dog. You can find similar lines at Nordstrom Rack, Fry's Electronics, any restaurant, and many other locations.One system that works like the less efficient "round-robin" method described a few weeks ago are lines found in grocery stores. You get in a line praying that the people in front of you don't like to write checks or count out change because if they take their time, they hold you up. How many times did you choose what looked like the fastest checkout line only to watch people go through other lines faster due to one price-check on isle five? Some grocery stores have started implementing self-checkout systems. I find that whenever given the choice, I tend to go directly to the self-checkout because it is always faster. One of the reasons it is faster is because there is a single line for four checkout machines. You could get one person counting change, one person doing a price-check and still have two machines checking people out smoothly. It is amazing that grocery stores have not realized this and implemented better line processing.The question I posed at the end of last week was whether there was an even more efficient way to distribute requests. I propose that there is. Here is why: just as any individual translator might get a backed up queue of requests, translation offices could become overwhelmed. Based on pure probability, one office might build up a queue of 100 requests while another might sit there queue-less. There are a few ways to tackle this problem, but whichever way you choose to handle it, you must know the size of the queues in each office at any given time. Given this knowledge, you could choose to only hand requests to the least busy of the offices. I am not a big fan of this approach because it seems like you could imagine situations where large groups of documents go to the same office in a row and I like to distribute requests randomly to prevent buildups and attacks on the system. The way that I implemented drproxy to distribute requests was by randomly picking any off! ice, except for the busiest office. If one office builds up a backup of requests and the others have no requests, no new requests will be sent to the busy office until it frees up. This load balancing system works very effectively.I hate to do this to you again, but can you think of any other major bottlenecks in our system? I can. That's all until next week. Keep on moggin' - Kate http://mog.com/kate