
I solved the embedded Chrome OS ad equation and won a Cr-48 - tonyskn
http://www.sylvainzimmer.com/2010/12/10/first-to-decode-the-chrome-os-video-equation-won-a-cr-48/
======
pavs
Now its time to figure out how to set up a server that can handle few thousand
viewers.

Cache:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.sylvainzimmer.com/2010/12/10/first-
to-decode-the-chrome-os-video-equation-won-a-cr-48/&hl=en&strip=1)

~~~
jlongster
I still really don't understand what's so hard about a couple thousand views.
I've had a couple posts hit the front page (even #1 on HN and #5 on
prog.reddit), and my server was fine. I use Apache to serve the resources and
Clojure to handle web requests. Nothing fancy.

~~~
cd34
Wordpress without caching on a VPS that is probably not configured well. w3tc
or wp-super-cache would probably fix his issues. Installing it while the site
is hammered.... will be fun. Perhaps as challenging as solving the easter egg.

~~~
patio11
Any out-of-the-box Apache setup on, e.g., Ubuntu _will_ , with absolute
certainty, appear to crash if you subject it to several thousand pageviews in
a short amount of time. KeepAlive is on by default, and that essentially
amounts to turning any group of five or more interested people who share a 3
second window into denial of service attack.

This used to drive me freaking bonkers -- I was installing caching plugins,
offloading static resources to other domains, tweaking the number of worker
processes, etc etc. Nothing worked, and my blog regularly crashed almost every
time it hit an audience larger than HN's. Turned off KeepAlive, bam, no
problems since.

~~~
jackowayed
How hard would it be for them to make it degrade by default? ie. Use KeepAlive
until it starts having heavy load, and then disable it when the load becomes a
problem.

~~~
cd34
ab with 500 concurrent, no keepalives: Requests per second: 13428.16 [#/sec]
(mean)

ab with 500 concurrent, keepalives: Requests per second: 14403.98 [#/sec]
(mean)

Keepalives allow the browser to maintain a socket between the browser and
server and request multiple objects. So, rather than having to do a
connect/teardown for each object, you remove that overhead. Some versions of
Apache in conjunction with php and mysql_pconnect had issues in the past that
might explain the OP's issues with keepalives, but, it has piqued my
curiosity. In general, keepalives should reduce communication handling and
allow more throughput.

------
codeglomeration
From the screenshot of the secret page: "Also, we can only give you a Chrome
notebook if you live in the United States and ... "

I find it such a shame that these types of conditions are so popular for most
contests / easter eggs, etc.

Are the legal issue regarding this that complex?

I'm assuming Google is not really that cheap regarding postage costs, since
we're also only talking about 1 notebook here.

Also interested how it all worked out for Jamendo, since (from what I see)
they're based in Luxembourg.

~~~
chris24
It appears to be an issue with wireless regulations.

~~~
jonhendry
I doubt it. It applies to most giveaways of any kind (free posters, free
calendars, etc). They usually only accept entrants from one country or
equivalent legal entity. I expect it's because of variation in contest-related
laws between countries, tax laws, etc.

~~~
crocowhile
Yes, in some countries if you advertise a public contest you first have to
register it and vet it with your government, who then make sure everything is
done fairly. That is something google simply cannot afford to do.

I am sure they will find a way to reward jamendo somehow. They'll invite the
guys for a formal visit and give them business cards in the shape of netbooks,
at the very least.

------
sylvinus
hi guys. I'm Sylvain who solved the thing, thanks for relaying the info here!
:)

The blog indeed crashed, it's on a very small VM with a remote filesystem and
even with a WP cache plugin.. not so much luck, even with apache stopped.

However our company blog has a proper sysadmin ;-) So after I setup a redirect
there no more issues... until we get on slashdot maybe ? :)

Cheers!

~~~
nategraves
From the screenshot of the form you got after solving the equation, it looks
like you need to have a U.S. address to receive the Cr-48, and it would
appears poor you're located in Paris/Luxembourg. You need someone to forward
it on to you? ;)

~~~
sylvinus
yes that's also a funny side of the story. As I was going trough the border on
tethering, with barely any cellphone reception, I was trying to fill out the
"one-time" form without any U.S. address in mind ;-) Luckily I have a cousin
in Houston so gave him a quick call to get his address and I submitted the
form as soon as I got my data link back up :)

generally speaking, it's extremely frustrating for an european startup to see
these regular U.S. only launches from Google. (come to mind Google Voice,
ebookstore, google music, and now Cr-48...) But well, small price to pay to
enjoy living in Paris most of the time :)

~~~
jlees
As a European working at Google (and there are plenty of us), I feel your
pain. However, although so many things are easy to scale internationally,
products with licensing and regulations are not in that category. We do work
actively on making this less and less the case, though.

~~~
sylvinus
yes, indeed. I can imagine carrier or licensing deals being complex... that's
why I said we were just frustrated, not angered against Google :)

Cool that you work on the Chrome team. Can you share more insider info with us
about this story and its makeof ? ;-) thanks!

------
Soupy
The equation - <http://img545.imageshack.us/i/chromeequation.jpg/>

~~~
riobard
Some symbols are hard to see, but I hope it is right.

LaTeX'ed version: <http://yfrog.com/gyegnp>

~~~
jonovos
Yes, this is what I saw. HOWEVER, when you run he numbers, you can NOT get the
same values that Google represents. The value for "C" is WRONG! It should be
8338041. This changes everything. ===> <http://goo.gl/fpJsJ>

------
jacquesm
From the article:

> most people I know including myself couldn’t live without Chromium/V8
> anymore.

Is this a common sentiment ?

~~~
simonsarris
I can relate, though maybe he is being a tad sensationalist.

I expect (say) my bookmarks to be synced between all my computers. I'm sure
plugins do this on other browsers, though.

The biggest reason I don't consider Opera or FF for daily use anymore: Non-
chrome browsers drive me crazy due to the way they close tabs. It is very
stressful compared to mouse-closing tabs in Chrome and its "smart
positioning."

~~~
LordLandon
I've been leaning back towards firefox recently due to how chrome handles
large number of tabs: poorly. It'll squeeze them down to the point that they
wont even show the favicon, making finding an open page annoying - compared to
firefox, which has a minimum tab length, and scrolls the tab bar if it grows
too large to fit.

The rest might be a personal prefference, but I rarely use the mouse to close
tabs anyway, ctrl+w is faster, and I can hit that as many times as I want
without moving the cursor anywhere. I also preffer the / and ' shortcuts
firefox has.

~~~
brown9-2
Just curious, but if you have that many tabs open why not split them into
different windows?

~~~
LordLandon
If it's split into windows, not only do I have to hover over every tab to find
the one that I want, but also repeat the process for every open window.

The alternative is sorting the tabs somehow, but that's more maintance than a
middle click.

------
kilovoltaire
24 occurrences of ";-)" — true happiness!

------
daok
I dont get that : "we realized “900.91″ did actually reference the goo.gl url
shortener"

I do not see how he did that?

~~~
thenduks
Just tilt your head a bit :)

    
    
        9 -> g
        0 -> o
        1 -> l

~~~
daok
oh thank you! haven't realise that!

------
mcav
Kudos. Too bad that special page didn't also include a job interview offer.

------
flawawa2
Well, now please make Jamendo a joy to use...

~~~
sylvinus
true... we're not happy with the current state of the jamendo.com website.
2010 was mostly focused on getting close to breakeven thanks to jamendo.pro
(which we did). We also did a management buyout from our former VCs, laid of a
lot of staff, so all in all, we're just happy to still be there, growing, and
hiring again :)

Now we have several ongoing usability projects, we released a HTML5 player a
few weeks ago (replacing the old Flash crap) and are now working on layout and
stability improvements on the main pages. It will definitely make Jamendo a
complete joy to use again, if we can just spare some time from breaking Google
easter eggs ;-)

cheers!

~~~
sraquo
While you're fixing UI please consider fixing Jamendo PRO search interface.
Your database seems to have more information than you allow to filter by (I
really need to filter by tags, e.g. I want something fast, dark and
agressive). I spent days trying to find music for my game on multiple websites
and I can definitely say that pretty much everyone's music search sucks. If
you make yours awesome, you'll definitely stand out.

~~~
sylvinus
yes, good catch. we can improve the interface but also one of our main
problems is the reliability of the current tag data, which is too low. We're
considering a process with mechanical turk to fix it.

Anybody here with experience with mturk and this kind of metadata tasks ?

~~~
flawawa2
Just finally let us Jamendo users tag the music. Maybe weigh it less than the
artists' own tags.

------
jonovos
________________Uh-oh. No you didn't. The value for "C" is INCORRECT. == >
<http://goo.gl/fpJsJ> _________________

------
xaverius
Google Chrome blog has a post about this. Congrats to the Jamendo guys.
<http://chrome.blogspot.com/2010/12/x-g-chrom-3.html>

~~~
jonovos
Google's blog should be read carefully. There are errors in this. ==>
<http://goo.gl/fpJsJ>

------
johnrdavisjr
I can only view the cached version. Looks like he needs a mirror.

~~~
loire280
Or he needs to implement caching on his Wordpress site.

Almost every day there's a popular blog post that misses a large portion of
its audience because the author wasn't caching. You'd think that more authors
would plan for a traffic spike from aggregators, since that's sort of the holy
grail of blogging.

~~~
chaosmachine
It's hard to plan for a problem you've never had before. Most people expect
it's just going to work.

~~~
johnrdavisjr
Or that their host can handle the stress.

