Having a Google account is sometimes useful in ways you hadn’t planned for. For example, at a few different employers I’ve been at, I’ve had to prepare for reviews by providing a list of accomplishments to my supervisor. One decent tool for generating this list is email, though it can take some time. Another useful…
Category: Database
Cloud computing hype overload
I’ve been working with what I used to call “utility computing” tools for about 6-9 months. However, for about the past 2 months, I’ve been seeing the term “cloud computing” all over the place, and there is so much buzz surrounding it that it’s reaching that magical point best described using Alan Greenspan’s words: “Irrational…
Plug-ins: isn’t there a better way?
If there’s one thing that bothers me about using a ready-made solution like wordpress for my blog, it’s plug-ins. I hate software plug-ins. The first question every support engineer for any software product that supports plugins asks in response to a trouble report is “are you using any plugins?” And when you say “yep, I’m…
Why should I pay for this AWS design decision?
I was writing a utility in Python (using boto) to test/play with Amazon’s SQS service. As boto isn’t particularly well documented where SQS specifically is concerned, I also plan to post some examples (either here or on Linuxlaboratory.org, or both). When I had some trouble getting a message that was sent to a queue, I…
O’Reilly: Give your authors Safari access!
UPDATE – 2008-06-23 – A member of O’Reilly’s editing team commented that this privilege has *NOT* been discontinued, and all O’Reilly authors should receive a free Safari account. Thanks a bunch, Mary, for the clarification (see comments for more). I learned from one of the authors of the recently released second (read: first, squared) edition…
High Performance MySQL on Safari!
All right! In the past, some books seem to be delayed in getting into O’Reilly’s Safari site, but on the day that Baron announces the book’s arrival, I find that I’m able to access it in Safari right now! Sweet!
For anyone flying to a conference – flyer beware
I’m going to OSCON in July, and I know that just about everyone I know who is a participant in this crazy life we call IT (or web 2.0, or whatever it’s called now), is flying to a conference or something in 2008. I’m starting to notice more and more posts like this one, so…
MySQL Data Sharding Toolkit in Python
This rocks. It’s not complete, but Pyshards is the closest thing I’ve seen to a real attempt at making a more or less generic sharding toolkit, written in Python. This is not just great because it’s written in Python or because it helps people who need sharding capabilities in MySQL. It’s great because having a…
Notes on Book Shopping from a Tech Bibliophile
Hi. My name is Brian, and I’m a tech bibliophile. I have owned more books covering more technologies than I care to admit. Some of my more technical friends have stood in awe of the number of tech books I own. I am also constantly rotating old books that almost *can’t* be useful anymore out…
Simple S3 Log Archival
UPDATE: if anyone knows of a non-broken syntax highlighting plugin for wordpress that supports bash or some other shell syntax, let me know :-/ Apache logs, database backups, etc., on busy web sites, can get large. If you rotate logs or perform backups regularly, they can get large and numerous, and as we all know,…