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michal frackowiak
cold_blood3d
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What is the record of inserts per second with Couchdb? I think I have hardware and motivation to break it today.
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Just got new cool 2-way in-ear headphones. They revealed that half of my mp3/aac music collection has poor quality, the rest sounds great!
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More infrastructure optimization at Wikidot.com today. Fast. Fast. Ultra-fast.
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No more Slony1 at Wikidot.com - long live Skytools and Londiste (aka setting up replication in 5 minutes)
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Performance of Wikidot.com improved A LOT, much space to scale: bit.ly/TEqSu
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Skytools with Londiste is like Slony. Best advantage so far: no Slony anymore.
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Piotr Gabryjeluk's blog (Gabrys on Wikidot)
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Welcome to my blog — place for ideas, comments, interesting hacks and boring personal stuff. Enjoy!
Amazon uses Xeon servers for EC2 m1.large instances - please confirm
1243407942|%e %b, %H:%M (%O ago)
I was surprised today to launch a new EC2 instance, type m1.large (64-bit, 7.5 GB RAM), which usually runs on Opteron CPUs, but to my surprise cat /proc/cpuinfo produces:
Tags: amazon ec2 xeon
Top Twitter links are not what you might expect
1240821094|%e %b, %H:%M (%O ago)
My weekend project involved some Twitter datamining and link analysis (i.e. links that people tweet about). The results we gathered during the weekend were… at least surprising.
By looking at popular Twitter link aggregators like Tweetmeme.com or twitt(url)y you might get the impression that Twitter is full of useful news, links to interesting stuff, a truly user-driven next-level communication.
Below is the result of one-day data analysis, and it lists top links people were tweeting about on Friday:
Tags:
Redis Performance on EC2 (aka weekend project coming)
1240568763|%e %b, %H:%M (%O ago)
Weekend is coming and I have a very small pet-project for it. I would still keep the idea non-public, but it involves processing hundreds of entries per second, analyzing data from multiple sources. It would have a dead-simple web interface.
The nature of the project requires really fast data backend, capable of storing and retrieving a few thousand items per second. The dataset would be approximately 5GB, average item size: 0.5KB.
When it came to tools selection, after short considerations I have chosen Sinatra for web interface, and Redis as a memory-only (with disk dumps) key-value datastore. It should be capable of handling 100 000 requests per second and deal well with large datasets, so fits perfectly. It also differs from Memcached or MemcachedDB because it has great higher-level structures like Lists and Sets, basic sorting and selection commands.
Tags: amazon ec2 redis sinatra
Wikidot Gadgets
1237895815|%e %b, %H:%M (%O ago)
Honestly I do not care that much about widgets, gadgets, being eye-candy… But sometimes we find cool things that we can put on our wikis and they can give some little joy.
Tags: fun gadgets useless wikidot
Wikidot on Cloud - part 2
1236595122|%e %b, %H:%M (%O ago)
So as you have probably already read on my previous blog post, we are thinking about re-designing the Wikidot infrastructure to make it more failure-proof, elastic and more efficient. One of the concepts have is to use one of the "cloud solutions", e.g. Amazon AWS (i.e. EC2 + S3).
Tags: aws cloud testtag wikidot
Wikidot on Cloud
1236332915|%e %b, %H:%M (%O ago)
Everytime we have an emergency situation at Wikidot (as yesterday with our webserver) we try to stop and think how well protected we are from different kind of hardware and software failures, network problems and even larger disasters (like our datacenter being destroyed). Also yesterday we stepped down from our daily tasks and looked at the situation.
Tags: cloud virtualization wikidot
Black Wednesday
1236244883|%e %b, %H:%M (%O ago)
There are weeks that nothing exciting (or fatal) happens. But there are days that a lot happens that make you think if this is really a coincidence. Yesterday was one of such days, and it was not even Friday 13th. So here is what happened:
Tags:
Canvas-based editor (in your browser)
1234514448|%e %b, %H:%M (%O ago)
Today Developer Tools Lab at Mozilla announced the tech-preview of a new, in-browser, canvas-based concept editor that tries to resemble native desktop-based editing software.
After looking at the screenshots, watching short introductory video, I dashed to http://bespin.mozilla.com to try this out. I do not say this very often, but this is quite an excellent and amazing piece of work. Although I have been following the web development and new technologies and trends quite closely for the last couple of years, this is something that really convinces me that browser-based applications can once replace the native ones. Simply great.
Tags: canvas javascript mozilla
Some PHP thoughts
1234428834|%e %b, %H:%M (%O ago)
For several years now I have been using PHP for building several projects and web applications, including Wikidot. I dare say I know PHP very well, I was also one of the few first people in Poland to get the Zend Certified Engineer certification (which nicely sits next to my Sun Certified Java Programmer cert).
PHP is extremely popular. Zend is putting a lot of money and effort to move PHP from the commodity market into enterprise and… it seems to work. PHP has very nice learning curve, although to produce good code in PHP it takes as long time and effort as in other languages. PHP is easy to deploy, runs well on commodity hardware…
Tags: dev php programming
Getting Things Done
1234220681|%e %b, %H:%M (%O ago)
Every now and then I hear about people following the Getting Things Done methodology to manage their time and tasks. And this includes a friend of mine, Michal from Nozbe, who has been creating GTD toolkits for at least 2 years now.
A few days ago I was listening to some 43folders podcasts, I decided to give GTD a try. Although there are countless resources and tutorials for GTD, I decided the best way to start is the David Allen's book itself. So here I have it.
Tags: gtd productivity
I dropped IE6 - not yet :-(
1233821546|%e %b, %H:%M (%O ago)
If there is a single thing that web developers hate most, it is probably Internet Explorer 6. It is buggy, it is outdated, it does not follow most of web standards and the most important thing is that… people still use it.
From my estimate, when creating initial version of Wikidot, making it work in IE 6 took extra 30% of total development time. Today, when adding functionality to Wikidot, special care must be taken to make sure it works with outdated browsers like IE6.
Tags: ie6 web
Working on email notifications
1233652328|%e %b, %H:%M (%O ago)
As we hinted in several places, including the discussion at Pro tracker, we are currently working on email notifications, so that you can follow (watch) activity at Wikidot by receiving emails directly into your Inbox.
The feature is really great (we have it enabled for a few testing accounts) and allows you to be instantly notified about page edits, forum discussions, page comments etc. for pages, categories or whole sites.
Tags: activity email notifications rss wikidot
Wikidot Not Available
1233616401|%e %b, %H:%M (%O ago)
Today in the very morning we had a small problem with one of our Wikidot servers, which manifested in "service unavailable" message between 2 AM and 5 AM UTC. The problem was easy to fix, but unfortunately because it was the middle of the night for us, we could not respond quickly enough and SMSes from our monitoring systems did not wake us up.
Tags: outage wikidot
One post per day - will it work?
1233568239|%e %b, %H:%M (%O ago)
Habits are important for bloggers. And being a perfectionist is certainly a non-welcome for everyone who wish to publish a blog. Honestly, because I often like things to be perfect, this makes writing particularly difficult. But here is the thing - I am going to change it.
Tags: blogging
More pages than Wikipedia
1231753776|%e %b, %H:%M (%O ago)
Yesterday I noticed a significant milestone of Wikidot.com compared to Wikipedia.org:
Wikidot has more pages than the english version of Wikipedia!
Tags: wikidot wikipedia
Pro accounts and a few ideas
1229600843|%e %b, %H:%M (%O ago)
I was too busy and then too tired to write a post yesterday — but yes, we did manage to introduce Pro accounts at Wikidot.com yesterday. And even more — have already had a few sales. Also we have received very positive feedback from our Users, Friends and Customers.
Tags: ideas pro wikidot
Pro accounts tomorrow - will shave my beard
1229463335|%e %b, %H:%M (%O ago)
Tomorrow is the big day for Wikidot.com and our Team — we will officially make Pro accounts available to our users.
So far Wikidot has been free and our revenue came mostly from online advertising. But obviously there are a few problems associated with the model of "provide free service, monetize the traffic":
Tags: free pro wikidot
Using FeedBurner for RSS feeds.
1228182118|%e %b, %H:%M (%O ago)
Since today this blog is using FeedBurner for (re)distributing RSS feeds. If you have already subscribed to my RSS feeds, please update your feed reader to use the new location of my RSS:
Tags:
7 apps that make jailbreaking the iPhone (still) worth it
1228088423|%e %b, %H:%M (%O ago)
It looks like there are about 10 000 apps in the App Store now. But there are still a few very good reasons to jailbreak your iPhone. There are at least 7 applications that will never make it into the official App Store and available only through the jailbreaking process.
In the "old times" users of the firmware 1.x could only use either applications bundled by Apple (not too many, mostly Safari, Mail, Calendar, Calculator) or use "web apps" through the mobile Safari browser. Of course clever developers (hackers) found a way to install 3rd party apps on iPhones. It required the user to "jailbreak" the phone, often also combined with "unlocking" (making cellular network-independent). It is being estimated that about 10% of 1st generation iPhones were unlocked in the pre-3G era.
Tags: iphone jailbreak
Would you send your kids to this preschool?
1227860431|%e %b, %H:%M (%O ago)
The big sign says PRESCHOOL in Polish. Surely safe for kids ;-)
(If you do not get it yet, check out what Happy Tree Friends are)
Tags: funny kids picture
