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…
Couple of Python Design Pattern Links
I’m a little relieved to learn that I know slightly more about design patterns than I initially thought. Still, there’s tons to learn, and I’ve been checking the O’Reilly “Upcoming Titles” list to see if “Design Patterns in Python” ever shows up, but I’m always disappointed (if you know of any such upcoming book, let…
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…
Not that anyone necessarily cares…
But Google has changed their favicon to a lower-cased ‘g’. Just sayin’.
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…
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,…