

WebSockets, Erlang and shattered glass - wulczer
http://blog.ducksboard.com/2012/03/websockets-erlang-and-shattered-glass/

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adamjernst
Wow, the vehicle theft rate is almost 5 times higher in SF than NY:

[http://newyork.areaconnect.com/crime/compare.htm?c1=san+fran...](http://newyork.areaconnect.com/crime/compare.htm?c1=san+francisco&s1=CA&c2=new+york&s2=NY)

Of course this was burglary or theft, not vehicle theft. But I wonder what
makes for such an extreme difference.

~~~
stellar678
Hypothesis: Much lower car-ownership rate in NYC.

Sub-hypothesis: Less cars per-capita in NYC might mean the average car is more
expensive and thus has stronger anti-theft features.

Edit: Climate could play a part too. I've never boosted a car, but I imagine
it's more appealing in a balmy 60 degrees than sub-freezing.

~~~
wulczer
> Edit: Climate could play a part too. I've never boosted a car, but I imagine
> it's more appealing in a balmy 60 degrees than sub-freezing.

It was raining cats and dogs that night, terrible weather for someone
conducting their trade outdoors.

Not sure if people who break into vehicles care much about the weather, though
:)

~~~
sophacles
There is also a strong counter-argument to thieves preferring bad weather.
Basically, it goes: when you are a thief, you want to do your trade with as
few witnesses as possible, and to obscure any visibility of your actions to
the witnesses there are. So, if you are thieving outside, you want it to be at
a time when others want to be inside, and/or can't see you. Largely this means
at night. Better if the weather is gross, so people are less likely to go out.
Better still if they can't hear you over the rain. (If you are robbing
suburban homes, you want to do it in the afternoon, after lunch, when most
people are gone at work, and before the kids get out of school. For this
example, the crime statistics I've seen, and anecdotes from cops back up the
theory).

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endianswap
While we're on the topic of scalability, what did you learn (if anything) from
the Guild Wars 2 beta signup incident? For those of you who are unaware, which
is probably nearly all of you, ArenaNet opened up registration for the beta of
Guild Wars 2, and internally we were using Ducksboard to track the signups in
realtime, but when we got close to 1 million registrations we decided to make
a public Ducksboard page, which apparently took down some servers until the
Ducksboard people were able to presumably scale things up.

~~~
wulczer
We (hope we) did learn.

First of all, pay closer attention to the usage patterns. We saw increased
activity for a few days before the beta signup, but never investigated in
depth. We only learned that something's up when the heavy traffic started and
monitoring alarms went off.

Second, get the scaling-up procedure more automated, we had everything
planned, but it took too much time to get the extra infrastructure ready.
Pressure and precise operation don't work well together.

Third, we uncovered a previously unknown memory leak in one of the components,
which got evident during the Guild Wars 2 event and forced us to restart a
subsystem a few times.

All in all it was a nice (if a bit stressful) experience, hope you guys
enjoyed it a bit yourselves too :)

~~~
endianswap
Thanks for the details. I'm not going to say it was awesome, but it was pretty
cool to see our fans accidentally DDOS a service just by sheer excitement. I
mostly felt bad after I looked up Ducksboard and saw that you guys are a
pretty small operation; that made me feel a little bad. ;)

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kiba
Hmm, I wonder how much does it cost for cars to have security camera with
batteries and wireless capability to upload video. That's probably a costly
and ineffective solution considering the scale of it.

It's better to have parking lot cameras anyway?

Or how about a vibration sensor that trigger a picture capture? Smart thieves
would probably get around it but it probably will capture some of the dumb
ones, providing deterrence.

~~~
adamjernst
Security cameras are everywhere. And soon every car will have a cell radio.

What would be neat is a cross-linked solution: when a window is broken,
instead of a noisy useless car alarm, inform the police immediately with a
geographic location. Have their systems automatically pull up the nearest
security cameras in real-time. Dispatch immediately, and record all of it for
later analysis.

All opt-in, of course, so if you don't want the cops knowing about your car
you can choose accordingly.

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pvillega
Blog down, cache copy:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://blog.ducksboard.com/2012/03/websockets-
erlang-and-shattered-glass/)

PS: ironic that I saw it was down after reading endianswap's comment :P

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icebraining
About the theft: when traveling, keeping an USB flash drive to where you sync
your code/docs (possibly with encryption) and then slip into your pocket is
very useful. Unfortunately, I always forget to bring mine along ;)

~~~
beagle3
Don't you have a keychain? There are some really small but sturdy flash drives
that are 1/4th the area of the average key, of comparable depth.

And while you're at it, add a smartcard or yubikey to your keychain, and
improve your security by not typing passwords....

