Chris Page – Software Engineer

Troopers in Lawrenceville

What a strange day! This may be a tad ignorant, but I really don’t know what the G20 is truly all about. I’ve only caught bits and pieces from other people – needless to say, it’s a big event. The office is just a few blocks from the convention center where the meetings are being held, and there are more cops, S.W.A.T. teams, and state troopers marching the streets than a small army.

Driving around, we’ve been behind vehicles tagged “diplomat” more than once, hit a few road blocks, and she had the unfortunate event of protesters banging on the car down Penn Avenue. I’ve caught rumors of tear gas being used, our office building was on lock down towards the end of the day, and on the way home the radio said President Obama was making an appearance in Oakland, just around the area we were staying for the last 2 months!

So, WTF is going on?! Ha… something good better come out of this ( aside of the awesome food Lockerz provided today to keep it’s employees safe during lunch ). We had to drive through Wilkensburg to get home, and that’s just no treat – cab driver once told us that Wilkensburg doesn’t get city funding, so it’s falling apart… crack whores calling out to their suga daddies – no lie. Though, given my ignorance to the world changing event downtown, perhaps I’m no better, ha.

Attached is a picture Drew Zhrodague’s mom took on her way for coffee.

Every once in awhile one has to write a script that is concerned with execution time. Consider the following snippet that utilizes epoch seconds to calculate execution time:

$start_time = microtime(true);
usleep(200000);  // sleep 2 seconds
$end_time = microtime(true);

echo 'Execution time:  ' . ($end_time - $start_time) . "\n";

Pretty straight forward and has many useful applications. By using built in php functions, `microtime` and `usleep`, it’s easy to benchmark operations, and even set time limits on operations. Consider the next snippet which will halt execution after 30 seconds:

$max_execution_time = 30;
$start_time = microtime(true);

while (1) {
    if ((microtime(true) - $start_time) > $max_execution_time)) {
        break;
    }

    //Do something
}

One more clever application, is to pace your scripts. Such may be useful when concerned with load:

while (1) {
     usleep(10000);  // sleep 1/10th of a second
    //Send a request... query a DB... do something
}

You can do quite a bit with these two functions. It never hurts to read up on microtime, and usleep. Enjoy!