Cleveland News

There is a reason why they say that dogs are man’s best friend – they are always there for you when you need them, providing companionship, love, and a lot of laughter. When you own a dog, they find their way into your heart and become an essential part of your family. That is why it is so frightening when you discover that they are missing.

Losing a dog is something that no one should ever have to go through. Unfortunately, it happens all too often. Dogs often get curious and wander away or run off chasing after something interesting. Once they are gone, they sometimes can’t find their way home, becoming hopelessly lost. They might get taken in by a kind stranger, picked up by animal control, or simply wander the streets searching for a way home.

It is hard not to feel a deep sense of dread and panic when you lose your dog. The good news is, a large percentage of the dogs that are lost each year do find their way home. To improve your chances of success, check out these tips on how to find your lost dog:

1. Contact local animal shelters. When people find lost dogs, they usually drop them off at a nearby shelter. Accurately describe your dog, including any important features or characteristics. If possible, provide the shelter with a photo of your pet. With any luck, your dog will be there waiting to get picked up.

2. Contact animal control. Most cities have an animal control department that is responsible for picking up free-roaming dogs, cats, and other pets. Reach out to animal control in your area to see if they recently found your dog. If they did, they can tell you where they took him and can provide you with instructions on how to get him back.

3. Reach out to local veterinarians. If someone happens upon your dog, they might take it to a local veterinarian to have it scanned for a microchip. Contact vets in your area to let them know that your dog is missing. That way, if someone does bring them in, they can contact you right away.

4. Print up flyers. Find a clear, close-up photo of your pet. Use it to put together a missing pet flyer. Decide whether or not you want to offer a reward to the person who finds them. Include your contact details so that people can easily reach you. Post the fliers everywhere you can think of.

5. Post ads on local classified sites and in your newspaper. Include a clear photo of your pet. Leave out one unique characteristic or feature that can be used to identify them. When people respond to your ad, ask them to describe your pet in detail. If they don’t mention the characteristic that you left out of your ad, they could be trying to scam you.

The most important thing to keep in mind when trying to find your lost dog is that you should never give up hope. As long as you are diligent and stick with your search, you should eventually be reunited with your best friend.

Python is a great tool for processing data. Unfortunately, if you are dealing with large datasets, then you may find that your applications perform rather slowly. Using a cache to avoid having to reperform calculations or access a slow database repeatedly could massively improve the performance of your apps.

There are some useful caching tools built-in to python, but their use is limited to local datasets. If you are working with cloud data, then you may need something more powerful, such as memcached.

Memcached and Distributed Data

Memcached is an open source tool which is available for Linux, Windows and macOS. To make use of memcached, you will need to install it and then also install the client library for Python.

Once you have set it up, using memcached is quite easy. In essence, memcached works like a dictionary. It has keys and values, which are set when you update the cache, and that will expire after a pre-defined time (to ensure that the data in the cache is current). You can set the expiration time, in seconds, for the data in memcached to stay valid. After that time expires, the old data is removed from the cache. Depending on the nature of the data that you ar working with the expiration time could be as short as a few seconds, or it could be several hours. The important thing to remember is that the data should not be allowed to become stale. If the cache can hold data for longer than it takes to perform the calculations, then you should see a performance increase.

Why Flush Memcached?

Caches should be flushed for two reasons. Firstly, if the data becomes stale then the application won’t provide users with accurate information. The cache should be a relatively recent reflection of what is in the main database. Secondly, the cache cannot continue to grow and grow because eventually, the server will run out of memory.

Canonical vs Cache

The data in the main database in the cloud is known as the canonical data source. The data in the cache is simply a reflection of that. Sometimes, when you go to query the cache you might find that keys are missing because they have been flushed, and you will need to query the cache to update that. Your Python Memcache client will have a class that can do that. If you are using pyememcache, for example, there is a fallback class that allows you to refresh your cached data if the cache is empty.

Caching and Scalability

Caching is just one element of scaling your Python applications. If you have a database on a remote server, multiple cloud instances, and are working with distributed computing then you will need to optimize your code for that. The simple scripts you used while learning Python may not be robust enough to handle huge cloud applications. Caching is at the cornerstone of scalability, however, and can greatly speed up data-intensive web applications or apps that work over the Internet.