Intro

In part one, I discussed some of the shortcomings of the English language and how we might be able to fix them by using a phonetic alphabet. There are a few problems with that approach:

1. Heterographs are impossible to distinguish in written text.
2. Frankly, it looks stupid.
3. It requires more letters per word on average.
4. There is not a one-to-one correspondence between letters and sounds.
5. It doesn’t fix any problems that are inherent to the language itself.

Now I want to discuss some other changes we could make to address the problems above. These ideas are a bit more extreme.

·𐑲𐑛𐑰𐑩   2:   ·𐑕𐑱𐑥   ·𐑤𐑱𐑙𐑢𐑧𐑡,   ·𐑛𐑦𐑓𐑮𐑧𐑯𐑑   ·𐑨𐑤𐑓𐑩𐑚𐑧𐑑

The above reads: “Idea 2: Same Language, Different Alphabet.” Depending on your browser and operating system, it might not render correctly.

As much as I would lov…

The Problems

The problems with the English language are many. Why do we have silent letters? Why are read and read, and lead and lead spelled exactly the same way but pronounced differently. Why do to, two, and too sound exactly the same even though they are spelled differently? Why does the letter A have so many different pronuncations? Why does the letter X exist? Why do we sometimes use “ph” instead of the letter F? Why does the letter G sometimes sound like the letter J?

I could go on, but this 102 year old man does a better job than I could at illustrating why English (particularly the way we spell it) is ridiculous. And I mean that in the extremely literal sense of the word– it is worthy of being ridiculed.

In short, the answer to all the questions above is that English is a macabre, hodge-podge combination of several other languages constructed and contorted by not-very-forward-thinking common folk.

And now I endeavor to ans…

Just wanted to let you know that all the source code for my blog is now available on github. Feel free to use/copy/modify any part of it. And if you think my code sucks, let me know how I could make it better.

Recently, I changed the homepage to show truncated versions of longer posts instead of the whole thing. You can click a “read more” link to see the entire post. I also added next and previous links at the bottom of each post. In addition, I made some improvements to the image compression technique which will slightly increase performance.

More posts coming soon!

tl;dr: I converted my blog to a static site using Jekyll/Octopress and am now hosting it on Amazon CloudFront. It is much faster. There are tons of benchmarks and charts near the bottom of this post.

Before

• Ruby on Rails framework
• Hosted on Heroku (single dyno)
• Unicorn as a server
• Memcached + Dalli (5MB tier Heroku add-on)
• Images hosted on CloudFront
• No image compression or gzipping

Before I made the switch, my blog was a small Ruby on Rails app hosted on Heroku. I was using Unicorn as a server, which meant I could run multiple server processes on a single Heroku dyno. After some tweaking, I determined that 6 running processes was the sweet spot. I was also using Memcached and the Dalli gem for in-memory caching. Because my pockets were (and are) empty, I was on the free 5MB teir add-on from Heroku. I was also hosting images on CloudFront, but nothing else. This costed me only pennies a month.

Before I go any further, I want to emphasize that this setup was performing great. I wasn’t noticing any serious performance issues. I was motivated by curiosity and a drive to try and create something even better, not by any shortcomings in Heroku or the Rails fra…

The Context

A little more than a week ago, I reached out to a local entrepreneur and Duke alumnus for some feedback on business ideas and general advice. In response, he invited me and my two friends to fly with him and his wife (also an entrepreneur and Duke alumnus) to NYC for the weekend. In spite of the fact that finals were just around the corner and we had a lot of work to do, we agreed to go with little hesitation. We couldn’t pass up the opportunity to chat intimately with two phenomenal entrepreneurs!

My hometown has around 2,500 residents. Durham isn’t really a big city, and I spend most of my time isolated on campus. Even though I visited New York when I was (much) younger, I forgot a lot of the details and didn’t understand certain things back then anyways. Needless to say, while we were hanging out in The Big Apple, I noticed a few things.

New York is Big

This one is obvious. I knew this before our visit. But it didn’t really hit me un…