A bunch of you have asked how I've been doing. This blag is my attempt to answer that question. There's so much to say, so I've been writing it out a little bit at a time. I'll start with the summer, and I'll post more when I have time. Consequently, this blag will probably lag behind real-time for a while.

I decided to spend the summer between college and grad school just doing things entirely for myself. I didn't have any work to do (other than finishing up my honors thesis, which I did =) -- I didn't have to come in regularly for classes, research, or any other activities at all. It was idyllic. I felt like I had more freedom this summer than I've ever had before.

First of all, I danced a bunch. At some points in July, I was actually dancing 6 days a week. On Sundays, I went to City Dance SF to take Emerson Aquino's beginning hip hop class (Julie, Steph, and Chris joined me in August!). Emerson is the director of Funkanometry (website, youtube channel) -- he's an awesome, silly, energetic, charismatic instructor, and his choreography is always really groovy and smooth and creative and fun. The class usually consists of warm-ups, and then learning 4 eight-counts of choreography, step-by-step. I tried to take a video of each week's choreography. I've uploaded a few clips so far. Here's an example (it looks better in high quality):

I've got a bunch more, but they're of pretty mixed quality (too far away, obstructed, bad angle, etc.). I'll upload them when I have some free time. (Does anyone know of a video editor that runs on Linux and has a usable interface? Basically, I'd just want to rotate, cut (time-wise), crop (space-wise), and maybe adjust white balance levels.)

Anyway, I'm still not very good at choreo: I get lost fairly often, and I sometimes hesitate, or I won't "complete my movements".  But I'm sorta getting better at it, and there are some "aha!" moments when the music and the moves just fit together in my brain, like a Magic Eye popping into focus. I can feel where my body is without looking in the mirror, and I can really, actually listen to all the little accents and spaces in the music, without counting in my head. It's rare for me, but it's an awesome feeling when it happens. =)

Then I found out about these freestyle sessions in San Jose and Alum Rock, hosted by legendary old-school b-girl Aiko Shirakawa. (She was the first female judge for Battle of the Year! She's also just about the nicest person ever. Top 10, at least.) I started going to these sessions on Wednesdays and Fridays. There would be anywhere from 8 to 20ish people, from all over the South Bay, ranging in age from high-school kids to adults, and ranging in experience from "just starting" to "been dancing for decades". It was mostly b-boys and b-girls, but there were a few poppers and lockers. I loved the session vibe -- people just experimenting, learning from each other, showing each other moves they've been working on. Lady Aiko gave me a few tips on waving and footwork. This one kid, Fabien (dance name: "Junior") also showed me a few sick combos. At one of the sessions, I actually got to meet up with Spacewalker, another OG from San Jose. Here's a clip of him at one of the Alum Rock sessions. He hits hard enough to knock fools unconscious:

He taught me about some of the basic concepts of popping, and he invited me to an informal class that he held on Tuesdays and Thursdays for a few of the kids from the freestyle sessions, including Junior. (Spacewalker had a makeshift studio in his house, with a big square of hardwood flooring, 3 freestanding mirrors, and shelves and shelves full of popping DVDs. It was awesome. =)

Finally, I got in touch with Ceech Hsu in August, and basically my life changed forever. Ceech is the fearless leader of a funkstyles crew called the DS Players. (Steph once asked me what the DS stands for. The answer is, in fact, "Dual Screen.") Here's a clip of Ceech (who starts on the left) and two of the DS Players at Body Rock 2007. DSP took 1st at that competition, beating out some other crews you may have heard of, like Kaba Modern and The Camp:

I posted an introduction on nustudios, and then met Ceech and a bunch of the DS Players in person at Mission College (Romy, Liz, Mike, John, Lawrence, Michelle, Rebecca, Josh, Brian, Allan, Tim, Gary... I'm probably forgetting people). They are definitely some of the best poppers and lockers I've ever seen in real life. They were also super-friendly and encouraging, and welcomed me into their circle even though I'd just met them, and I was (/am) utterly noob-tastic. It was incredible, just watching the poppers: there was all sorts of structure and nuance to their dance, that I didn't even know I didn't know about. I could immediately see that the difference between them and me was qualitative, not quantitative: they'd actually learned the foundations of the dance, while I was mostly just throwing together moves I'd seen in videos.

I wanted to get the same foundation they had, so when Ceech offered me the opportunity, I decided to take private lessons from him for a month, before I left for grad school. I ended up practicing with him for an hour and a half on Monday and Wednesday afternoons, and then coming to the general practice sessions with the DS Players, et al, on Monday and Wednesday nights. It was intense, but so incredibly helpful. Ceech totally broke everything down to the basics. Not just: which muscles to hit, but: how exactly do you learn to hit harder and relax faster? How you learn to hit on beat? Where should your weight be? All the kinds of things you can't really get from watching a video. Even Spacewalker hadn't taught me in this much detail; a lot of times, I was always thinking, "His hits look different from mine, but I don't exactly know why".

Just one example of something Ceech explained to me: a common newbie mistake is hitting too early. In most other kinds of dance, like hip hop, you want to move before the beat, and then land on the beat. But in popping, the hit is so sharp and so quick that you don't want to have any tension before the beat -- you want to be 100% relaxed before the beat, hit right at the end of the beat, and immediately relax again. We newbies are so used to hitting early, that our brains trick us into thinking that we're on beat; we can only see the difference when we watch a more experienced popper at the same time. Here's me, off beat, and Ceech, on beat (better in high quality):

(I'm still working to correct that bad habit, incidentally.)

The rest of the DS Players are also way awesome. The people I met were totally chill, ranging in age from about my age to mid-30s-ish(?). A lot of them are pretty huge nerds (in a good way!). Apparently, besides busting out some devastatingly creative, funky, mind-blowing shit twice a week at Mission College, they also play MarioKart all the time (sadly, I never got a chance to throw down some blue sparks with them over the summer). Some of them are grad students or network engineers or K-12 teachers, etc. And overall, I felt like they had a really mature perspective on dance: there was less of a "let's battle, I'm totally gonna burn you" kinda attitude, which you sometimes see in the younger kids (or on the internet). They were really humble, and welcoming, and hardworking, and willing to teach.

Anyway, much respect to Ceech, DSP, Aiko, Spacewalker, and everyone else I danced with and learned from over the summer. Hopefully, this is the beginning of me starting to take popping more seriously.

Hi dance lovers! How are you doing’ I’m one of us, Dance is my passion, Dear friends

Let me tell you something before I start, ‘m not a writer, but whatever knowledge I gathered in my research about this unique and exceptional form of dance, I have it for you. Let’s go through the brief…

Hip-Hop is a very intense dance that builds balance, strong muscles, and great figure. There is no age limitation or restriction for learners and dancers. It is also not necessary that the instructor should be a professional dancer. Relax guys! You can even learn it online.

Let’s know the History of this popular Dance form:

Hip Hop dancing is an urban ethnic dance form that has gained popularity in recent days. It is more common than the break dance of modern days. It is a cultural movement which marked its beginning as part of the hip hop culture in the early 1900's, when the youth in and around Bronx, New York started dancing on the streets (primarily among African Americans and Latinos).

When hip hop music began to emerge, it was based around DJs who created rhythmic beats by looping breaks (small’s portions of songs emphasizing a percussive pattern) on two turntables. This was later accompanied by "rapping" (a rhythmic style of chanting). An original form of dancing, and particular styles of dress, arose among followers of this new music. These elements experienced considerable refinement and development over the course of the history of the culture.

Hip hop dance Form:

Hip hop dancing is an ideal way to express one's creativeness. It features self impressions and the dances come from the soul. The dancing represents body movements that go with the beat and rhythm of hip hop music. There is breaking, popping, locking, and free styling in hip hop dances. The jumps, breakages, and rotations in the movements are combined in such a way that the dance style becomes an informal and explosive one. The dancers should become familiar with the dancing technique.

Hip Hop helps us keep Fit:

Hip Hop dancing is considered a good exercise for those persons who perform these dances. It helps the dancers to improve flexibility, to develop body balance, and to coordinate the muscles. This dance allows the dancers to improve their own style and to remain in good body shape. It also leads the dancers to a state of spiritual wholeness. In order to achieve the maximum results for you, I suggest you always warm up before you start, just like all professional hip hop dancers do.

SOMENTE PARA QUEM MORA EM SÃO PAULO HÁ MAIS DE DOIS ANOS.

A SECRETARIA DE ESTADO DA CULTURA torna público que fará realizar licitação na modalidade CONCURSO, visando a seleção de projetos de HIP HOP para apoio cultural.

1. Seleção de 14 (quatorze) projetos da cultura hip hop, com prêmio de R$25.000,00 (vinte e cinco mil reais) cada. Os projetos devem contemplar uma ou mais das atividades abaixo descritas:

a) Grafite;

b) Dança (Breaking, Popping e Locking );

c) Rap;

d) D.J. Mix.

2. O valor máximo de apoio aos projetos selecionados neste Concurso será de

R$350.000,00 (trezentos e cinqüenta mil reais).

RETIRADA DO EDITAL: A íntegra do Edital e todas as informações sobre a licitação estão disponíveis no site www.cultura.sp.gov.br ou poderão ser retiradas na Secretaria de Estado da Cultura, Núcleo de Protocolo e Expedição, Rua Mauá nº 51, Bairro Luz, São Paulo - SP, CEP 01028-900.

DATA DA INSCRIÇÃO DOS PROJETOS: A inscrição será efetuada do dia 28 de agosto de 2008 até o dia 15 de outubro de 2008, nos dias úteis, das 10:00 às 17:00 horas.

ENDEREÇO PARA A ENTREGA DOS PROJETOS: Deverão ser entregues diretamente na Secretaria de Estado da Cultura, Núcleo de Protocolo e Expedição, Rua Mauá nº 51, Bairro Luz, São Paulo - SP, CEP 01028-900; ou, encaminhados por meio dos serviços de postagem de correspondência da Empresa Brasileira de Correios e Telégrafos – ECT, nas modalidades correspondência com Aviso de Recebimento (A.R.) ou SEDEX com Aviso de Recebimento (A.R.), para endereço acima indicado.

PREVISÃO PARA A DIVULGAÇÃO DO RESULTADO DEFINITIVO: 15 de dezembro de 2008.

REGULAMENTAÇÃO: A presente licitação, sob a modalidade de CONCURSO e o CONTRATO, regular‑se‑ão por seu Edital, pela Lei Federal nº 8.666, de 21 de junho de 1993, Lei Estadual nº 12.268, de 20 de fevereiro de 2006 e, no que couber, Lei Estadual nº 6.544, de 22 de novembro de 1989, e alterações posteriores, bem como pela Lei Federal nº 9.610, de  19  de fevereiro de 1998 (Lei de Direitos Autorais) e demais normas regulamentares aplicáveis à espécie.

It appears to happen if:

• You have AUTO tracking on your full text indexes; although we changed it to manual and still had this issue.
• You experience Full-text queries taking a long time to execute; normally when updates are happening at the same time so you might only see this in production.
• One or more of your queries are complicated or take some time to complete.

You can check to see if your system is slow due to this by:

• SELECT * FROM sys.dm_os_wait_stats statement , it shows very high wait times some of the locks.
• Running Sp_who2; it should consistently show that the full-text gather is blocking full-text queries and, in turn, is being blocked by the queries.

The current work around for this issue is to use a global trace flag microsoft kindly enabled on the RTM build.  To use this, type the following Transact-SQL statement:

DBCC TRACEON (7646, -1)

This has a minor side-effect.. which may or may not be important in your organisation. Certainly in ours, it is not. Your full text result may be ever so slightly out of date - e.g. you might return or not return a particular document from the index. However, this issue relates to the dirtyness of an index in terms of 10's of milliseconds. Important? Unlikely....

I believe there is a knowledge base article on this.

-Alex

How do we debug this ? Well, the very obvious thing to do is to find out what that error message signifies. A brief search on the net showed a plausible list of issues -

1. You are using a remote server and there is a connectivity issue
2. Your queries are blocking and causing timeouts
3. The query execution is very slow (pure Db design / queries or server performance issues and/or too many results)

We were running our system on a local machine, which ruled out connectivity issues. The queries that were timing out, where heavy ones, but ones that normally work under normal circumstances. However the test being extrememly loaded in nature, how do we pin point the issue to be a load issue vs a blocking issue ?

Well the only thing to do when faced with multiple such options is to try and rule out the options one by one until you are left with the true cause.

So the first thing we tried was to check if lock timeouts exist in the system at all.

Perfmon counters (MSSQL$YourDbname:Locks - Lock Timouts/sec) :  told us that lock timeouts where indeed present in the system.

Now how would you find out what is blocked ? MSDN resources can show you the SQL server process(spid) that blocks other spid's - but it never tells what is getting blocked.

Fortunately for us, Erland Sommarskog has a cool utility that combines both information to show exactly which connection is causing the blocks. It also tells you the resource type, leaving no room for confusion.

All that i had to do to use the tool is to download it and run the sql file which creates the stored procedure to monitor the locking. After that i simplay ran the tool as "EXEC aba_lockinfo"

Next i exported the results as a csv file and imported them into excel, which allowed me to sort the data very easily. The basic thing to look for is, who is blocking whom. This can be checked by looking at the blkby column. This told me which of my spids where being blocked and which resource it was waiting for.

From here it was a short path into finding the actual issue in the code base.

Happy Debugging !!!

Sometimes I feel stupid and wonder if the neighbors can hear my voice, but honestly, who cares if they do? Are they going to come up to me and tell me that they heard me singing? Probably not. I do my best singing when I am all by my lonesome, with only my two dogs and cat to keep me company. They are the only audience that really gets a taste of my voice.

Now, what is it that I sing when I am alone? Well, I belt out whatever meets my fancy. Mostly it's some Paramore, but we musn't forget Evanescence, Flyleaf, 1997, Automatic Loveletter, Hawthorne Heights, t.A.T.u., New Years Day, Garbage, and Autumns Monologue by From Autumn To Ashes. I love singing Paramore songs because Hayley's voice is much like my own, and I love trying to match Amy Lee's voice whenever I sing My Immortal, Hello, or Lithium. I find it challenging to sing Lacey Mosley's parts, but I have fun trying.

One of these days, I want to put videos of me singing on YouTube. I like listening to other girls my age singing some of my favorite songs, but I cannot help but think that I could do a better job than they can. Hopefully someday soon, I will be able to prove myself, but I doubt my mother would approve of it. I will probably have to wait until college to begin videotaping myself singing.

Once they pull out of the driveway, I open my mouth and out comes something not very many people have heard. I sing rather conservatively in public, but when I am in the shower, or home by myself, I let it all out. I love getting home from camping because then I can finally lock myself in the bathroom and get all of the singing out I couldn't do while we were all camping together. I hope to someday make a career out of this little hobby of mine. Only time will tell...

We aim to create about ten minutes of video a month in the form of several mini video clips, currently we are mainly using Poplocking in several styles. We adapted old style locking action, popping, waving, miming, rocking, and fancy footwork. June and July, the first few weeks of my return to street dancing and Bens first couple of months appear to be going well today – Wednesday the 30th July 2008.

Our Primary Dance Objective. Bognor RDM Dancing Evolution Objective or DEO. The basis of our objective will be the scoring of the following points on a monthly basis; Aim of weekly videos with a point of  advance based on the following criteria point; A point for at least one new style of dance, an adaption, something new to our form and style of dancing. Me and Ben to create a 30 second clip of non stop dancing video, solo or duo. This also applies to guests on videos, using our act. As a Duo to create at least 30 seconds of non stop dancing upon a theme or style. Use of a third or fourth person also collects a bonus point. We will be adding an interview or current progress report every so often as part of a video or summary, IE. Bognor RDM 1-x summary of progress. Any other way that may help mark our progress or be of interest, will be used to create and be displayed, most probably on you tube and our website. Dancing is like evolving, learning to grow into something different. Sharing a happy experience with the crowd, friends, family strngers and dancing buddies is part of the buzz when we hit the floor but it’s the achievement of creating something that is the main driving force. Motivated by the music, friends and achievement in dance training helps us put on a display, time to put to the test our expertise. We practise what drives us and keep developing our own style whilst learning to do some together, we dance together and also do our own solo style, be it traditional or freestyle. Eventually, we should be able to perform a set together and eventually a personal work piece each, of at least 30 seconds which should total 90 seconds at the very least.

In Bognor RDM 4 we have achieved just that, in fact Bognor RDM 5 is ready to go, to be uploaded to you tube this coming Sunday. It is now 30th July 2008, a Wednesday afternoon

http://www.humantank1.me.uk/dancing/index.html

PS:Obrigado Dani, por me ajudar com aquela bendita foto ^^.

But what I want to focus on right now, as the title would suggest, is the optimistic concurrency control model implemented in Aloha. It isn't the easiest or most intuitive mechanism to implement in any multi-threaded application. Most applications tend to go the pessimistic route with some locking mechanism, typically using semaphores or other language constructs such as the synchronized keyword. From my experiences in trying to describe how the optimistic model works to others (typically colleagues joining the Aloha team), developers, even highly experienced and competent ones, have loads of trouble really grasping the concepts behind it. Their first few dabbles at working with the implementation are inherently wrong as they struggle to cope with the intricacies behind the model.

One (un-scientific) way of gauging the effectiveness of the model is to look at other applications that use it. Among databases, Oracle is the only major player which uses such a model. All the others use a pessimistic locking mechanism - it is however hard to pinpoint this as the primary reason (or even one of them) why Oracle outperforms most other RDBMS. Java itself uses this modelin its implementation of the increment() method in AtomicInteger. And just last night, I read a very interesting article that delved into the depths of Transaction Memory (TM).

Transaction Memory attempts to make life easier for programmers who work on concurrent applications. It gives the developer two of the ACID properties that databases give you - atomicity and isolation. Therefore, you get to write code, never worrying about concurrency and synchronicity. TM allows you to work as if you were writing a single-threaded application, not worrying about locks et al. Now, how does TM work under the covers? There are two main flavours - STM and HTM (software and hardware versions). The hardware versions, as always, are better performing but much harder to implement and the more complex functionality is currently implemented in software. So what does TM have to do with the subject of this post? - Apparently, most TM systems are implemented using an optimistic model, using nearly all of the same mechanisms implemented in Aloha. There are two notable differences: its transparency to the developer and the retry mechanism. Let me first describe how the optimistic model itself works and then I will go into a bit more detail about these differences.

Instead of going into the textbook details of an optimistic concurrency model, let me describe the optimistic model as implemented in Aloha and why we chose this path. Since there is no locking in an optimistic model, any thread looking to read shared state can do so instantaneously. Writing is more complicated and can lead to delays and retries - but if the majority of data access is for reading (which is true in most applications), you really have reason to be optimistic. When you read shared state, what you really get is a cloned copy of the state. Any mutations on this state is local; it affects no one else. When you try to write the changes back into the state store, the following happens:

• If no other thread has saved a newer version into the collection since the one you read, your changes are saved and no further action is required.
• If some other thread(s) has saved newer changes, all your changes are rolled back and you get to try your entire "transaction" again.
• If a ConcurrentUpdateBlock has rolled back 10 times, it isn't retried again as it is extremely unlikely it will ever succeed.

The two main differences between optimistic concurrency control as implemented in Aloha and in a TM are:

• In TM, the rollback and re-try mechanisms are done transparently. In Aloha, this is done explicitly by writing code which accesses and changes shared state in ConcurrentUpdateBlocks. Each ConcurrentUpdateBlock is then invoked through the ConcurrentUpdateManager which handles the retry mechanism for you. Therefore, the developer has to be very aware of shared state accesses and has to understand how the model works while writing code.
• The other big difference is the retry mechanism. Aloha retries each ConcurrentUpdateBlock 10 times. The TM system that was described in the article I read implemented a more complex system using priority levels which increased with each failed commit. This is obviously better to guarantee fairness but we didn't see the need to implement it until an issue became apparent.

And finally, Aloha's state and concurrency models are easily extensible such that applications built on top of Aloha can use them with next to no effort.

Para hoy mas que nada actualizar con algo que llevo bailando un tiempecillo, pero no de forma tan entregada como el bboying.
Es el locking.

Me tengo que grabar yo un dia bailando esto jajaja! Es el baile mas antiguo de los funkstyles y los demás bailes que estan dentro de la cultura hiphop (popping, house, krumping, ...) y tiene un rollo completamente distinto al bboying, es mas comico, de poner caras y de pasarselo bien bailando en sentido de buen rollo.

Si subo algun video mio al youtube lo cuelgo por aquí.

I plan on adding tons of links over in that side bar with all the useful information. I was looking for a specific post that has tons of links (I don't want to add them all), but a link to that post would be awesome. I can't remember what it was titled though... I know it was by someone in ETC though, so I am sure I will find it...

*Slowing walking off and sliding into sheets...

Home security is always a matter of extreme concern for people. Nobody wants to loose his or her precious belongings and other objects at home. You implement several locking solutions some traditional, some modern and automatic locks to ensure maximum security of your homes. But a few inputs from your side is very important for your own home security.

It's you only, who has to take initiative and ensure proper security for you. You need to be cautious, prompt and active to make your homes secure for you and your loved ones. First, you have to create a friendly and co-operative environment in your neighborhood. You and your neighbors have to be ready to help each other in case of emergency. It is very important for security of your homes in your absence.

There are following handy and easy tips that can help you in securing your home:

1. Keep Your Locking System updated: Always secure your home with latest locking solution from trusted goldsmiths with proven record of accomplishment.
2. Cross check that every doors and windows are properly locked when you are leaving from your home. If kids or elders are at home, tell them to bolt from inside properly to avoid any kind of security threats.
3. If you are going on a vacation, inform your neighbors that you are leaving for a vacation, so that they can have an eye over your home in your absence.
4. Do proper enquiry before employing any servants, house cleaner, gardener or drivers. Check their past records, if possible take details of their origin and check their criminal records.
5. Always keep important phone numbers like nearest police station, fire brigade, nearest hospital and ambulance with you. They can be of great help in emergency.
6. Loose electric wirings can lead fire, so do proper maintenance of open electric wirings in your home. Check fire alarms on a regular basis. Teach your kids, how to act and whom to contact in emergency.
7. Never keep large sum of money or ornaments at home, keep these things private from your servants.

The most important thing is your own sense of responsibility. Always remember that home is an asset that relates to various memories of your family and life. It's as precious as your loved ones, so keep proper attention towards security.

Check it out:

http://www.break.com/index/i-think-he-can-dance.html

I wonder if popping and locking will arrive on the shores of line dancing too?  That would have been interesting!

(p.s. The video on youtube has been removed)

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