Bufflhooligans at Neal Smith

Only saw three of them. The first guy walking along the fence near western end of the Bison area, and then two more north eastern corner. They were a couple hundred yards away from me and I was shooting at high zoom. I ccaught one of them rolling around.

The Great Derecho of 2020 and my Internet Provider

 

As you may have heard, the Great Derecho of 2020 knocked out our power, this was on Monday 8/10/2020. I was at work and didn't see the storm, but felt it effects as I saw many Midwestern Financial Institutions loose power. By the time I got home, the power was back on in my direct neighborhood. What we didn't have was Internet.

Our source of internet became my phone where I would use it as a hotspot and then connect my laptop to it. By Thursday, the internet came back on, but it was spotty and slow. It would still drop for hours at a time and the bandwidth we were getting was terrible. Linux has a tool to estimate your band width, so I did put some statistics together:

	Upload (Megabits)	Download (Megabits)
Min	1.46	0.08
Max	3.76	1.71
Average	2.56	0.58
Std. Dev.	0.99	0.65

Just for the record, the Download speed is supposed to be much higher then upload speed. We knew Mediacom was having trouble and I figured it was them. I didn't see any point in calling them because they have lied to me before. They will always tell me it is my modem, that way they don't have to refund any money.

Cheryl's employer lost their modem with the storm or right before. I thought we should wait a few days and see returns to normal. By Saturday it had not. Cheryl wanted to know if we should buy a new modem, but I wasn't convinced it was our modem yet. So after dinner Saturday night, I googled “How to check your cable modem” or something like that. I found the following page:

https://www.wikihow.com/Diagnose-Cable-Modem-Issues

It turns out all I had to do was point my web browser to 192.168.100.1 and enter a user and password found on the modem and I could see the condition of the router. The above web page had what the good values were and what the power ranges needed to be. I went over the stats for a good twenty minutes and realized there was nothing wrong with our modem.

After going over all the stats, I decided to run the Linux Command to test the speed. The upload speed was over 3 megabits, but the download speed was now over 78 megabits. Hmm, I wonder if my big brother Mediacom was watching me. That improvement happened awfully close to me checking the modem state and now it was normal. I know they are talking to my modem all of the time. It is possible they can watch to see when the internal web page is accessed.

MariaDB Database Engines

I wrote some simple programs to hit MariaDB and compare the performance of the different database engines.  The programs were written in Free Pascal.  These numbers are just for comparing the approximate performance of each engine.

Database Engine		Insert	Key Update	Non Key Update	Key Delete	Non Key Delete
Desktop	i7-8700 with relative fast HD
Memory		15151.52	13513.51	10869.57	12195.12	12195.12
MyISAM		12195.12	8771.93	1340.48	10416.67	8196.72
Aria		359.97	319.49	320.51	364.96	375.38
InnoDB		114.31	98.60	94.75	97.81	96.28
Laptop	i7-3470QM with a slow laptop HD
Memory		9090.91	5494.51	6410.26	6410.26	6944.44
MyISAM		7575.76	5747.13	963.39	7142.86	4716.98
Aria		81.10	84.70	83.88	83.22	83.84
InnoDB		18.68	17.03	16.90	15.65	15.00

The numbers listed for Insert, are inserts per second. Updates and deletes are Updates/Deletes per second. I guess I was dumbfounded at the speed MyISAM performs at. Ok, it has the low feature set.  But it's feature set is similar to Aria and it is giving performance almost as good as the Memory Engine!!!  For home use or playing around with data on a laptop, MyISAM seems like a good choice.  I know InnoDB has a lot of features and is the best choice for a production database.

Star Neighborhoods

I was talking to a friend about the distance of stars. He stated that he knew or could look up the distance from Earth to some star, but he had never seen published the distance from Star_x to its neighboring stars. I said I have a list of stars in a MySQL table and I think one of them has the x, y, z coordinates.

Well, I was wrong, I do not have them recorded in the x, y, z coordinate system. But I do have Right Ascension, Declination and distance. The best table I have has 46,000 nearby stars and their RA, Dec and distance in Parsecs. Guess what, if One has RA, Dec. and distance, One can convert to the x, y and z coordinate system.

x = Sin(Dec) * Sin(RA) * Dist

y = Sin(Dec) * Cos(RA) * Dist

z = Cos(Dec) * Dist

With any two stars in an x, y, z coordinate, the distance between them can be calculated by:

Distance = ((x₁-x₂)² + (y₁-y₂)^{2 +} (z₁-z₂)²)^.5

The computer Language I like is Lazarus, which is an Object Pascal based “Rapid Application Development” or RAD System. It involves placing forms on the screen and then objects on those forms, One can then attach source code to each object. Lazarus itself and the Free Pascal it is based on generates relatively fast programs.

Lazarus can pull data out of MySQL tables using using ZeosDBO, all one has to do is put in the Database Name, your user and password and the table you want to access. So I wrote a little program to grab one star, like Vega, calculate it's x, y, z coordinates. select all the data out of the database table and load it into an array while calculating their x, y, z coordinates and distance from the primary star. Sort the output and display the nearest 50 or so stars.

This takes about 20 seconds to calculate, most of that is the sort. I used the ShellSort algorithm, I know the Quick Sort is the fastest, but with this amount of data the Shell Sort does as well, the Quick Sort algorithm doesn't start to out perform the Shell Sort until it reaches about 75,000 items to be sorted.

This all became a fun diversion during the Pandemic.

Here is an image of my program after calculating the star distances from Vega.  Well it turns out that one can have even more fun with this data.  It is possible to graph it.  Unfortunatly, I don't know how to graph it to a 3rd plane conventionally.  But it is possible to use color to represent distance on the x plane.  The following list maps color to distance with red being closest and purple being the furthest:

1. Red
2. Fuschia
3. Maroon
4. Yellow
5. Olive
6. Green
7. Lime
8. Mint
9. Teal
10. Aqua
11. Sky Blue
12. Blue
13. Purple

The star catalog I am using only has 46,000 stars in it when we know there are over 1.0e+8 stars in our galaxy, so many stars aren't there.  The data I have is also less then perfect, so please be forgiving. The larger the dataset, the harder this will be to do. You may note that most stars name's begin with GL, well the Gliese names are the most populated of star names in my catalog.  The Poper and Bayer names are mostly blank. The distances very based on the neighborhood selected, I am seeing ranges on the low side of +/- 1LY and on the high side of +/-4LY. Here are a few of my graphs:

The Vega Neighborhood

The Sirius Neighborhood

Arcturus