Once every three seconds, that’s the magic number. Some more interesting information: I pointed a Doubleclick click counter at a super-simple web service I wrote, running on a web server I rent, and I ran a test that follows the DLCK redirect. Here are the results:

I ran 300 clicks at 4s per click, then 500 clicks at 2s per click. As you can see, almost all of the first 300 clicks made it to the web service, but only around 380/500 2s per click clicks made it.

One of the projects I’m on seeks to proxy web beacons. Basically, I have a WSGI app that serves a 1x1 px gif, and then triggers a Celery app that goes out and actually “clicks” on the intended web beacon. During preliminary load testing with a Doubleclick beacon (actually a Doubleclick link counter), we discovered that requesting that beacon 1000 times in 5 minutes (one request ever 1/3 second) only reported around 30 “clicks.

It bothered me that the spices in the kitchen were out of order. So, I sorted them using my favorite sorting algorithm, Mergesort. My cats helped.

I started with an un-ordered list of spices.

Then I started to divide the list up into smaller lists. Panther helped. 31 elements became 15 and 16. Then 7, 8, 8, 8. Then 3, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4. Then 1 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2

In this post, I started making box fan beef jerky. If you can’t remember where I was when I left off, go take a peek. Okay, so. The meat sat in the marinade overnight, and come morning I loaded it onto a 20" by 20" HVAC filter, courtesy of The Home Depot.

The cats were very interested.

I assembled the filters and strapped them to the fan.

The boffins over at Microsoft added a handy method to .Net 4.5: Webutility.UrlEncode. Unfortunately for those of us who don’t have Visual Studio 2012, we can’t use it! How then can we properly encode strings for use in URLs? (What do I mean? Let’s say I want to pass a URL inside another URL as an argument. So, for example, I want to pass http://www.bar.com/?a=b&c=d as a query string variable to foo.