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WebSockets, Erlang and shattered glass

blog.ducksboard.com

53 pointswulczer18 comments

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

http://newyork.areaconnect.com/crime/compare.htm?c1=san+fran...

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

It's very interesting to see hard data that confirms a general feeling I get when comparing walking down the streets of SF and of NY.

That feeling is one of the few things that makes me still prefer New York to San Francisco... I hope that gets fixed soon!

Interestingly, New York saw its car theft rate declare years after years since the 90s. San Francisco's theft rate also declined, but it does so rather unevenly.

Wonder what's the story there?

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=car+theft+statistic+san...

Off-topic: Wolfram Alpha is amazing. Cool find.

per-capita is meaningless, you want per registered car

Alone yes, you might however be able to say that it has meaning if you can show that the registered cars per capita stayed at the same level over that period.

I'm not positive that would be what you'd need to say that but It sounds right in my head, anyone have any better ideas?

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.

Car ownership rate in NYC is under 45%.

Many of us who own cars are too lazy to move them every couple of days for street cleaning, so they are parked in attended garages or lots, which deters (though isn't a guarantee against) theft.

Some parts of NYC have higher theft rates that get lost when blended into the overall city rate. Brooklyn for example has a much higher theft rate than the rest of the city.

> 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 :)

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).

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.

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 :)

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. ;)

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.

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.

Blog down, cache copy: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...

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

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 ;)

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....

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