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Netflix

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A lot has been going on at Netflix as of late. First they raise prices by up to 60% in some cases. Now, they’ve come out and said “oops, our bad, we raised prices because we’re splitting the company into two orgs, one for streaming (Netflix), and one for DVD-by-mail (Qwikster ((Let’s not even get into the fact that the name is an abomination of English))).

Excerpt from email sent to all Netflix subscribers:

For the past five years, my greatest fear at Netflix has been that we wouldn’t make the leap from success in DVDs to success in streaming. Most companies that are great at something – like AOL dialup or Borders bookstores – do not become great at new things people want (streaming for us). So we moved quickly into streaming, but I should have personally given you a full explanation of why we are splitting the services and thereby increasing prices. It wouldn’t have changed the price increase, but it would have been the right thing to do.

So here is what we are doing and why.

Many members love our DVD service, as I do, because nearly every movie ever made is published on DVD. DVD is a great option for those who want the huge and comprehensive selection of movies.

I also love our streaming service because it is integrated into my TV, and I can watch anytime I want. The benefits of our streaming service are really quite different from the benefits of DVD by mail. We need to focus on rapid improvement as streaming technology and the market evolves, without maintaining compatibility with our DVD by mail service.

So we realized that streaming and DVD by mail are really becoming two different businesses, with very different cost structures, that need to be marketed differently, and we need to let each grow and operate independently.

It’s hard to write this after over 10 years of mailing DVDs with pride, but we think it is necessary: In a few weeks, we will rename our DVD by mail service to “Qwikster”. We chose the name Qwikster because it refers to quick delivery. We will keep the name “Netflix” for streaming.

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Two sets of tires

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This is going to be a rather long post, so first, some backstory: We picked up our ’07 Prius Touring in December of 2006. It came stock with 16″ (P195/55R16) Bridgestone Turanza EL400 tires. As usual, stock OEM tires are generally low wearing (they’re cheaper, and they tend to be quieter). They lasted us about 26k miles. At that point (Sept 2008), we purchased Bridgestone Potenza G019 Grid’s, which was one of the few options available for the car at the time. There were no real low rolling resistance (LRR from here-on) available at that time. These were decent tires, for a while. We lost some MPGs with them, but that’s normal for new tires (new tires have higher rolling resistance than worn ones). What we didn’t expect was that they became exceedingly noisy (by the time we put 40k miles on them, they sounded like mudding tires on a truck). Turns out, they were cupping quite badly on the inside edge. Speaking with the local Firestone manager, he said it was pretty common with those tires, partly because they’re unidirectional (when you rotate them, you basically have to keep them on the same side of the car). But that should only explain one side cupping… all four were cupped significantly. Reading online, this seems to be a common complaint, so I’d imagine it’s something with the design.

Anyway, we just bought some real LRR tires to replace the Potenza’s (as the shop said they were getting near the end of their life, and the cupping noise was beyond bearable): Bridgestone Ecopia EP422’s (review of them in the coming months). And man oh man, are they sweet. The car feels like it’s floating, and it’s as silent as can be. Anyway, now that I’m done with the Potenzas, I figured I’d do some comparisons on mileage, and in a way, how rolling resistance really can matter.

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Mail.app and 32-bit signed integers

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Mail.app does not like it when a mail server reports the NEXTUID to be greater than 2^31 (which is the limit for signed 32-bit integers). I could end this post here, but it’s worth explaining how I got here, and how I fixed it… just incase.

A few weeks back, a faculty member hit quota for his email. This isn’t unheard of, but for some reason, this faculty member hit quota in such a way as to cause Dovecot (the central mail server’s mail service) to rapidly increase the UIDs for his email. I’m guessing something like the following happened.

  1. User is near quota, and receives message
  2. Dovecot writes out message to Inbox, but lazily updates dovecot-uidlist
  3. Delivery of message causes quota full
  4. Dovecot goes to update uidlist, but can’t since the quota is full. Which causes a race condition where it tries repeatedly to write it out, and in the process, increasing the base UID each time
  5. After this repeats a few thousand times, the user gets below quota again, and we end up with a NEXTUID of 3829200751 (yes, 3.8 Billion).

Now, there are two things you can think about this. One, is “this is a dovecot problem”. Well, yes, but… they’ve warned users not to store the uidlist files on quota enforced volumes:

Dovecot can’t currently handle not being able to write the control files, so it will cause problems with filesystem quota. To avoid problems with this, you should place control files into a partition where quota isn’t checked. ((http://wiki2.dovecot.org/MailLocation/Maildir))

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