The Technician

Gmail actually gets something really wrong.

admin — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 22:19:41 +0000

I’m a huge fan of Gmail and Google Apps for many reasons. I love the new redesign, and how they’re finally promoting consistency across their major webapps. It makes me feel like the web could really be a viable alternative alternative to desktop software. I can even deal with slowness in Gmail, [...]

MySQL and Linux swappiness

admin — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 04:29:27 +0000

MySQL’s InnoDB engine is really great. Row-level locking is amazing in tables where there is heavy concurrency. Write buffering is also awesome for cases where a table needs to accept a lot of data. InnoDB’s use of memory to store indexes or sometimes the entire table can also make reads incredibly fast, [...]

Out of the Terminal

admin — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 05:08:48 +0000

Every once and a while I get to leave server-land and get to do some fun projects that involve doing something on the front end. The latest was building an embed script for the Behance Job List. Projects like this, that get me out of the terminal and into a space that requires [...]

Accountability is a Feedback Loop

admin — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 05:28:10 +0000

Accountability is a word that’s getting tossed around a lot lately. You hear people saying things like: – That developer should be held accountable for the validation problems. – The tester should be accountable for not finding that bug. – BP needs to be accountable for destroying an ecosystem. The term seems to be thrown around [...]

I’ll buy time any day.

admin — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 06:11:07 +0000

Many people value money as the most important thing in life, and will gladly trade time for it. The pursuit of saving money is an extremely American one. People will spend time in line for free stuff, just because it’s free. Motorists getting tickets will spend days in court, just to avoid [...]

Death of the CTR

admin — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 00:13:28 +0000

Since the dawn of online advertising, the gold standard of effectiveness has been the CTR. This has made a lot of sense, since for the first time ever, adertisers could leverage technology to figure out exactly how well they were communicating. A user would click, and that click would be recorded. The [...]

MySQL Slave Delay and Maatkit

admin — Mon, 03 May 2010 04:11:07 +0000

This post could alternately be titled: ‘How to make developers hate you.’ A very common criticism of MySQL is that there is no support for delayed replication. Delaying data flowing from master to slave can be very useful in certain cases. For example, running a co-located slave for backups is still susceptible to data [...]

MySQL skip-name-resolve

admin — Sat, 03 Apr 2010 02:03:02 +0000

Small, obscure optimizations sometimes have the potential to make the greatest impact. For example, every time a connection is made, MySQL will do a DNS lookup of the host that is trying to connect. If MySQL is handling many connections, the overhead of an extra DNS lookup can be hefty, simply because of [...]

Sandboxes

admin — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 04:20:21 +0000

Setting up a sandbox environment has normally been a trivial task. Set up a vhost, get a copy of the database, build out the app, and start doing stuff. When ‘Stuff’ is ‘Done’ push the changes onto production, and bask in your own crapulence. That is, until your data set exceeds the [...]

Japanese Inspection

admin — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 06:04:20 +0000

Everybody procrastinates. Some tasks that get pushed off don’t matter, it just gets done later. Some tasks that go over deadline result in profanities and bloody noses. But every once in a while, tasks come along that have an expiration date. As in, if it doesn’t get done by a certain time, [...]