Archive for February, 2008
No good deed goes unpunished: A customer brought the laptop to Leapfrog Computers in Bolton on Monday to have it repaired, sales manager Jonathan Parry said. “A technician had a look at it, opened it up to have a look at the components inside, and when you actually open up the laptop and take off [...]
Process snipers are used to kill errant processes I’ve used process snipers and watchdog’s to handle realistic process management in large clusters in the past but never felt any of them were very elegant in terms of code simplicity. It dawned on me the other day that this would work out perfectly: for proc in [...]
Google has officially jumped the rel=nofollow shark. Google Sites is live and every page on the site uses rel=nofollow. I just created a sample site and linked to my blog only to be presented with the following HTML: <a href=”http://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Ffeedblog.org&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFrqEzc8SrF9mKSuhvVdhS_YMmZ-b6rbdw” rel=”nofollow”>http://feedblog.org</a> Is this the future of the web? Every URL is going to have rel=nofollow? [...]
For the last few years I’ve been playing with a simple configuration system which I call ‘runtime properties’. Runtime properties are similar to Java system properties in concept but differ in a few ways. They’re designed to replace variables during VM initialization with values in a given property file. When you reference a named Java [...]
You’ve got to be kidding me. This is running on CNN right now: The US is occupying two countries, we’re in the middle of a Presidential election – you think maybe they should focus on something more important? CNN is pathetic.
This is exceedingly cool: What would you do if you are modern Muslim women, and you want to flaunt your beauty, but your restricted by the blessed burqa and your religion? You just put on Markus Kison’s CharmingBurka, a Bluetooth enabled garment that sends an image, chosen by the wearer, to those around her. The [...]
I need to give it a bit more thought but it looks like we’re going forward with deploying Spinn3r on SSD. Specifically, machines with 3 SSDs on Linux software RAID. The performance of SSDs is nothing short of astounding. When tuned correctly these drives were nearly 10x the performance of the same box running RAID. [...]
The other day I blogged about running RAID performance tests and being disappointed by random write speeds. The clear loser here is rndwr (random writes). I’m pretty sure this has to with the 64k stripe/chunk size. I’m willing to be the RAID controller is deciding to write the entire chunk for small updates which would [...]
I finally figured out how to run with a custom page size on InnoDB. It looks like there’s a bug with innodb_file_per_table and 8k pages in MySQL 4.1 through 5.1. On a whim I just decided to try a very basic configuration and it worked. Now comes the real fun. It turns out that on [...]
More benchmarks. InnoDB gets SERVED by MyISAM on ext3 running fully random SELECTs. If I could JUST set the page size to 4k this problem would be solved. (The Y axis is seconds)
I just pushed a new release of Log5j (1.2) which fixes a strange VM bug on JDK 1.6. Occasionally the VM would throw a class cast exception during initialization. I think this was some sort of internal race condition in log4j which I haven’t yet wrapped my head around. The fix just involves creating one [...]
Yahoo blogged today about their use of Hadoop on 10k cores: This process is not new (see the AltaVista connectivity server). What is new is the use of Hadoop. Hadoop has allowed us to run the identical processing we ran pre-Hadoop on the same cluster in 66% of the time our previous system took. It [...]
Shark officially jumped: Office Master is a wise and highly decorated veteran warrior. He is a legend in his own time. just the mention of his name will certainly follow with tales of heroism. His wisdom and skills of collaboration are highly sought after. And although Office Master has some years under his belt he [...]
Apparently, the entire computing industry is stumped by the multi-core problem. Specifically, scaling single threaded code to run across multiple cores: Both AMD and Intel have said they will ship processors using a mix of X86 and graphics cores as early as next year, with core counts quickly rising to eight or more per chip. [...]
I just went through and tested WordPress, Pownce, Twitter, MSN Spaces, and they all failed. I wanted to create a username of ‘βυrτοπατοr’ which is my normal username but using the Greek alphabet. Specifically the characters beta, upsilon, tau, omicon, pi, and alpha. However, none of these sites would work with Unicode. There’s one that [...]
The signal to noise at WSDM was great. The only conference I’ve been to in a while where I had to do homework after the talks (which is a good thing). There were some really good highlights from WSDM which I wanted to point out. I’m going to sit down with the papers and read [...]
Digg has lame HTTP error handling. Fetch any Digg page which should 404: Let’s try to fetch http://digg.com/asdfffffffffsdf (which surely won’t exist). HTTP/1.1 302 Found Location: http://digg.com/error FOUND? Are you sure? Let’s check out http://digg.com/error HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found What? Wait. I’m not sure I follow. You just told me you found a page called [...]
Looks like S3 was hit with a major system outage. Placing all this Internet infrastructure in one place is dangerous (though potentially cost effective). A few months back 365 Main was hit with a similar problem which knocked out Six Apart, Technorati, and Craigslist. Update: Well that exploded. Everyone seems to be covering this story [...]
I just spend a few hours today setting up RAID on SSD to see what the performance boost would look like. I’m very happy with the results but they’re not perfect. Here’s the results from comparing a single Mtron SSD vs a RAID 0 array running with a 64k chunk size. Figure 1: Mtron SSD [...]
As an experiment I added the Spinn3r reference client to both Koders and Google Code Search to see how quickly they would index the source code. Boy am I disappointed. It’s been nearly 1.5 months and both Koders and Google Code Search haven’t yet indexed my content. Sad sad sad. Koders promised me they would [...]
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Spinn3r News- Spinn3r Hiring Five new Engineers (and growing rapidly)
- Spinn3r Hiring Support Engineer
- NYTimes, on Memetracker, and Spinn3r
- Spinn3r at Real Time Stream Crunchup, RSS Speedups, and Startup Discounts
- Spinn3r Hiring Crawl Engineer
- Spinn3r 3.1 - Now with Twitter Support and Social Media Ranking
- Blogfa.com (Iranian Blog Network) Down Due to Iranian Protests and Civil Unrest?
- Papers using Spinn3r Data from ICWSM 2009
- Spinn3r talk from ICWSM 2009
- Spinn3r 3.0: New Features, New Architecture, New APIs - More Goodness
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