Following a link from the High Scalability blog, I found this really great article about scalability practices, as told by Randy Shoup at eBay. Randy is very good at explaining some of the more technical aspects in more or less plain English, and it even helped me find some wording I was looking for to…
Category: PHP
Make old svn revision the current revision
I ran across an issue that my google-foo has had some trouble handling. Maybe what I did is the only way to do it, in which case maybe this will help someone in need… but I rather like to think that someone here will have a much nicer solution. I use Subversion at most of…
Multisourced Production Infrastructure: History, and a stab at the Future
Startups are pretty fascinating. I work for a startup, and one of my good friends works for another startup. I’ve also worked for 2 other startups, one during the first “bubble”, and another one a few years later. Oh my, how the world of web startups has changed in that time! 1999: You must have…
Social Media, The Future of News, and Data Mining
I went to a very good panel discussion yesterday hosted by the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University. There has been a conference going on there that covers a lot of the overlap between technology, law, and journalism, and the panel discussion yesterday, Data Mining, Visualization, and Interactivity was even more enlightening than…
Get a List of Years and Months in a Date Range with PHP
I can’t find the initial inspiration for this to link to – sorry. I came across a forum post or maybe a blog post where someone needed to do something like return an array of the months (or maybe it was days or something) in a given date range. I had a place where I…
A Couple of MySQL Performance Tips
If you’re an advanced MySQL person, you might already know these, in which case, please read anyway, because I still have some questions. On the other hand, f you’re someone who launched an application without a lot of database background, thinking “MySQL Just Works”, you’ll eventually figure out that it doesn’t, and in that case,…
New web host: check!
If you’re reading this post, it means that the DNS entries have propagated, and you’re viewing my blog at it’s new location: WebFaction! Thanks to everyone who left comments in response to my cry for web host recommendations. Almost everyone mentioned webfaction in the comments, and I got a few emails with that recommendation as…
Can’t find the Ruby Kool-aid
I picked up the Apress book about Ruby for Systems Administrators, because I plan on learning enough about Ruby to make it a viable tool that I can use if I have to use it at some point. I still plan on doing that, but in reviewing the first couple of chapters, I don’t think…
Vim messing up indentation on your pasted code?
I’ve had this issue forever. I want to paste in some code from somewhere else into a Vim session on some random box, but I have to remember to do “:set nocindent noautoindent nosmartindent noreallypleasedontindent” all the time. Well, I finally had some time to google for an actual solution to the issue (I knew…
How to Build Your Own MySQL 5 Server in AppLogic
I’m building an infrastructure on a grid using AppLogic, which is a grid OS that provides both GUI and command line interfaces to build your infrastructure. I use both interfaces, depending on the task I’m trying to perform at the time. One thing I have discovered is that there are a lot of somewhat nebulous…