Arlo Gilbert’s Blog

Rarely do I make a post simply to let readers know that I’m a fan of something, but there is a new new-to-me web site called mint.com that allows you to track your personal finances (investments, credit cards, bank accounts etc..etc..).

The way it works is that you enter your account information and passwords to each of your bank web site’s and their system automatically logs in and downloads all of your spending activity. The analysis is really very accurate and it automatically begins creating budgets for you. As well you enter your assets such as homes, cars and jewlery. The home’s you enter are automatically pulled up by appraised value from a web site called cyberhomes, and I found the accuracy to be good but the database to be missing a lot of homes. One of our homes for example pulled up with a $0.00 suggested value.

I’ve in the past played around with Yodlee.com and Yodlee has even made big gains in getting acceptance from the banking community to the point that several large national banks actually integrate Yodlee into their customer web portals, but the Yodlee interface is a bit clunky and poorly designed.

Mint.com on the other hand is a pleasure to use, the interface is intuitive and unlike Yodlee who’s primary model seems to be licensing their technology to banks, Mint.com makes money by saving you money. If they find that you have a credit card with a high APR they will recommend another credit card that offers you a better interest rate. Really a win/win situation… you save money on fees, they make money on the referral.

The only suggestion I have for Mint is really that they should add a similar auto-valuation for vehicles using a service such as edmunds or kbb.

I highly recommend it, http://www.mint.com

It goes without saying that as the founder of a variety of dot coms and angel investor in other tech companies that I am a hardcore techno-nerd. So when the Palm Pre came out, I had to have one.

iCall was approved as a Pre developer some time ago and without a hands-on experience with the device, we really couldn’t make an educated assessment about the platform.

As an iPhone developer, we have purchased something along the lines of 25 iPhones in the past two years to always make sure that every developer and tester has one of each physical revisions of the devices.

Blackberry has been seductive with their push e-mail and their plans for a killer-app store, so we now own a handful of blackberry bold’s as well.

All told I have something like 45 phone numbers not including my various office numbers, home numbers and iCall phone numbers.

So for three weeks I devoted myself to using only one device per week. Prior to using the device I spent a day or so acquainting myself with the features and setup of each device, so each week with one device was a fair full week of use of combined business and home use.

I thought that since I’ve never written a technology review but read them constantly and had a unique experience that it would be worth sharing.

The setup:

• 1 Blackberry Bold on AT&T
• 1 iPhone 3G on AT&T
• 1 Palm Pre on Sprint

I write on this blog in spurts and while indeed it is connected to my various corporate entities, I would just like to take a few moments to say a few things that have no connection to my companies.

“Smart” is not a degree. It does not matter if you went to the finest ivy league school on the planet, they can not make you “smart”, they can only make you “learned”.

As I have gotten older (tomorrow is my birthday, happy birthday me) what I have discovered is that nobody knows the answers. People make their best guesses and “smart” people tend to be right.

Take for example the Bernard Madoff scandle… thousands of “learned” people lost their entire fortunes through him. Millions of people lost significant money through him because they invested in funds of funds of funds of funds that had holdings with Madoff. The “smart” people said “something is not right here” and refused to invest.

If you thought you were smart and you got bamoozled by Madoff… I’m sorry but you were not as smart as you think you are.

If you define “smart” by IQ points then you might find it fascinating to know that on average people believe their IQ is much higher than 100. Unfortunately 100 is by definition the average. Everybody wants to be smart, few people are smart, and those people who are “smart” know it.

So back to what I know.

The crooks are generally the smart ones. There is more money in stealing than in making an honest living and your chances of getting caught are surprisingly small. Rob a bank, the odds are actually good that you will not get caught. Rob a train.. the odds were largely in your favor in the old west.

The world’s economy is set up predominantly so that wealthy people have the advantage, the economic vacuum favors them, but only if you follow the rules and laws that they influence. Sure there are the Google’s of the world, but they are rare.

From the Kennedy’s to the DuPonts, those who refuse to follow the laws of the economy that they are in are the ones who build great wealth for their bloodline. I just love this quote:

“Behind every great fortune there is a crime.”
Honore de Balzac
French realist novelist (1799 – 1850)

G’night.

I have administered and pushed MySQL to it’s limits for years, many boxes have fully melted under the load I hit them with, but today I’ve been absolutely blown away by this little used, not so well known configuration switch that DOUBLED the speed of every read and write.

It is important to note that this particular configuration switch skip-grant-tables completely disables all authentication that MySQL does so you should ONLY run this if your database is local and skip-networking is also included in the config, and this is not being implemented in a multi-user environment. If you implement this in a multi-user environment you will be allowing all users of the system to have full administrative control of MySQL, if you use it in a networked environment you will be allowing everybody who can access the MySQL port to administer the MySQL server.

The tremendous upside of this option is that when you disable grant tables, you effectively eliminate several queries that run before EVERY SINGLE connection you make, it’s not that it makes the server faster, it just stops MySQL from using it’s own internal myisam queries… I would have assumed that MySQL had been coded to keep the grant data in some sort of linked list, in fact when I tested this it was purely accidental because I was performance tuning a new box and had a little time on my hands to disable and enable every single option in our my.cnf file just to discover how each option impacted the benchmark tool I was playing with.

The only performance caveat I will add, is that this really will only improve performance in environments where you are handling many quick "connect/query/disconnect" scenarios, meaning that if you are running something like wordpress where every page load connects, does 300 queries, and then disconnects, the performance gain would be negligible.

With those warnings/thoughts, here are my performance tests… reads and writes both performed approximately the same:

WIth standard grant tables in place and only one user (root) in the grant tables:

mysqlslap –user=root –auto-generate-sql –iterations=3 -S /var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock –auto-generate-sql-load-type=read -e myisam –concurrency=3000

Benchmark

        Running for engine myisam

        Average number of seconds to run all queries: 1.224 seconds

        Minimum number of seconds to run all queries: 1.168 seconds

        Maximum number of seconds to run all queries: 1.286 seconds

        Number of clients running queries: 3000

With skip-grant-tables enabled in my.cnf:

mysqlslap –user=root –auto-generate-sql –iterations=3 -S /var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock –auto-generate-sql-load-type=read -e myisam –concurrency=3000

Benchmark

        Running for engine myisam

        Average number of seconds to run all queries: 0.682 seconds

        Minimum number of seconds to run all queries: 0.668 seconds

        Maximum number of seconds to run all queries: 0.703 seconds

        Number of clients running queries: 3000

A bone to the dog is not charity. Charity is the bone shared with the dog, when you are just as hungry as the dog. 

-Jack London

Recently I have been engaged in working with a charitable organization… this organization provides a superior education to our children at a very reasonable cost but convincing people to give money has been an arduous task.

I think that many people feel that Charity is giving a few dollars to make themselves feel good, but real charity in my opinion is giving so much that you have to either sacrifice something or you have to worry and hope that more money will come your way in the future.

I’m often skeptical of the word “karma” but sometimes, just sometimes things come back on you two-fold and make you say “whoa”.

In the past 6 months the following events surrounding charity have happened to me:

1. I donated a sizable amount of money to a charity, put in time and served on a few comittees. At the same time I was purchasing a new house. The new house was substantially more expensive and left me carrying two mortgages… two VERY BIG mortgages.Literally the day that we closed on our new home purchase, a random family out of the blue contacted us about our existing house (our existing house was not on the market). They had been looking for a home for over a year, drove by our house, fell in love with it and absolutely “had to have it”.

   We paid no brokers and walked away from what could have been a burdensome financial obligation. An amazingly random turn of events. 3 weeks later we closed on our old home at 10% over what we had paid for it only a year prior. In this market, many people would call that a f**king miracle!
    

2. I agreed to donate $200,000  to the same charity… the following morning an extremely wealthy individual whom I had never met or corresponded with contacted me and offered me $300,000 for something that had cost me only a few dollars (a domain name) several years ago.Not only is the donation tax deductible, but the profits on the name are long term capital gains on intangible property which means we get to take advantage of the 15% tax rate on those profits.

   I am not foolish and have received many offers on this particular domain, so I took it. Truly an unbelievable turn of events.

I’ve learned that money is a lousy way of keeping score. 

-Anonymous

Til later…
-Arlo