I’m happy to report that I’ve successfully imported all posts and comments from this blog into a new system. While I’m still unsure as to when that’s going to go live, I hope it’s soon – I’m sick of this blog. I mean just look at it! Ugly as hell. And so fucking common.
Anyway, looking forward to rm -rf’ing wordpress once and for all. Tally-ho!
Off topic but not really worthy of another post is a small annoyance I have with people talking about randomness in UUIDs. I often hear this quote bandied about as some sort of “proof” that UUID collisions will never occur:
1 trillion UUIDs would have to be created every nanosecond for 10 billion years to exhaust the number of UUIDs
This is a useless factoid which, while sounding superficially impressive, has no relevance to actual use of UUIDs. For starters – there’s no central authority tracking UUID use. Even in internal projects there’s usually nothing tracking their use. Most projects that I’m aware of have none, zero, zip duplicate protection or even detection. Not that this is a big problem, as this example a little further down the same Wikipedia page explains:
[..] after generating 1 billion UUIDs every second for the next 100 years, the probability of creating just one duplicate would be about 50%
Now admittedly that’s still a pretty unlikely event. Assuming you have a decent generator, you shouldn’t lose any sleep that your UUIDs are colliding .. or ever will in your lifetime. But 1 billion a second for 100 years is a lot less that 1 trillion a nanosecond for 10 billion years. Don’t just wave away about 15 orders of magnitude just to make a point.
April 9th, 2008 at 3:39 am
Congrats on the import. Looking forward to seeing the new blog!