I’m going to the O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) again this year. I went in 2006 as well, and had a blast, in addition to learning quite a bit, and meeting tons of people whom I’ve been acquainted with online for a long time. That was 2 years ago. Since then I’ve been acquainted with…
Category: Sysadmin
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…
Funny what you learn about yourself when you buy an iPhone
This is *not* a ripoff of xkcd (though I read that regularly, and so should you) – this is seriously the best graphic I can come up with, and it does the job. Yesterday I looked at doing all kinds of stuff to my iPhone. I wanted to see if I could get Python and…
Explosion at The Planet Causes 9000-server Outage
Here’s the email I received on Saturday from The Planet, where I have some dedicated servers hosted: Dear Valued Customers: This evening at 4:55 in our H1 data center, electrical gear shorted, creating an explosion and fire that knocked down three walls surrounding our electrical equipment room Thankfully, no one was injured. In addition, no…
Scalability Best Practices: eBay
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…
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…
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,…
rrdpy – Thanks, Corey!
I have a somewhat unique situation to deal with in terms of monitoring. I need to put a graph a bunch of historical data mined from web server logs. I can get so far with loghetti, which is coming along and is great for certain things, but there’s a bridge missing between it and something…
Ubuntu 8.04 and Python Editors
So I updated one of my laptops to Ubuntu 8.04 pretty much as soon as it was available. I’ve been using my MacBook Pro laptop for everything for probably over a year now, because I grew tired of the hobby that *is* running Linux on a laptop and getting everything to work. I’ll note that…