I've used Safari (the O'Reilly version) for a number of years now and it is a resource I often recommend to coworkers. Basically, it's an on-line library of technical books (since expanded to include video) from a group of publishers. O'Reilly, Microsoft Press, Cisco Press, Syngress, and many others have books and resources on-line at Safari. It came into being in 2001 but I remember a predecessor version back in the late 90s from Que Publishing/Macmillan Computer Publishing called Personal Bookshelf, which I also used. Back in those days I was in the Air Force and that provided some of the technical books I couldn't afford on an Air Force salary.

Subscribing to Safari gives one the ability to put a certain number of books onto a "bookshelf" and the books …

MySpace and Google partner on open social platform. Federal Open Source Alliance shares survey findings. South African software market boosted by open source mandates, says IT consulting firm. (and more)

MySpace and Google Join Forces to Launch Open Platform for Social Application Development, Google / MySpace (Press Release)

Federal Government Votes for Open Source, Federal Open Source Alliance (Press Release)

South Africa’s Open Source Software Market Builds on the Government’s Adoption of FOSS Policy, Frost & Sulivan (Press Release)

…

Today I was developing one small merb application for one of our projects and needed to see ActiveRecord logging on console like I do in Rails. After a short research I’ve found out that merb_active_record plugin passes its MERB_LOGGER to AR by default so I decided to try to change merb log level and here they are - my pretty colored AR logs!

So, if you want to see ActiveRecord logs in your application in development mode, then you need to add one line to your conf/environments/development.rb file:

puts "Loaded DEVELOPMENT Environment..."

MERB_LOGGER.level = Merb::Logger::DEBUG

That’s it for now. Long live merb!

Look at this post recently published on TechCrunch - It is ugly standard 404 error message, but what is interesting is the server line which shows nginx 0.5.32

I have checked and indeed images served from assets.hulu.com have nginx server in response header.

This would be the first site of this (planned) scale to run Nginx. So far even though Nginx was used by many major companies in Russia, the rest of the world preferred lighttpd often due to better documentation and more active development community.

Entry posted by peter | 6 comments

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I was trying to use the PHP calendar API and immediately received this error message, “Fatal error: Call to undefined function cal_days_in_month()”. This error message means PHP was not compiled with the calendar extension.

Solution

The only solution to this error message and other similar error messages relating to the PHP calendar API requires PHP to be compiled with the calendar extension by adding “–enable-calendar” to the “configure command” as stated in the PHP documentation on the Calendar functions page.

How to Tell if the Calendar Extension is Installed

You can verify weather or not the PHP Calendar extension was compiled at install by using the phpinfo() function. When viewing the output of phpinfo() look under “Configure Command” just below “Build Date” and if you do not see “–enable-calendar” present then all PHP …

Interviewing people for our Job Openings I like to ask them a basic question - if you have a server with 16GB of RAM which will be dedicated for MySQL with large Innodb database using typical Web workload what settings you would adjust and interestingly enough most people fail to come up with anything reasonable. So I decided to publish the answer I would like to hear extending it with basics of Hardware OS And Application optimization.
I call this Innodb Performance Optimization Basics so these are general guidelines which work well for wide range of applications, though the optimal settings of course depend on the workload.

Hardware
If you have large Innodb database size Memory is paramount. 16G-32G is the cost efficient value these days. From CPU standpoint 2*Dual Core CPUs seems to do very well, while with even just …

I’ve made slight changes to the site should it interest anyone. The link to mysqlsniffer has been removed (though the page is still there). The links to Optimize and Intricacies have been consolidated into Documents. And the Feedback link is now Contact. Tragically exciting.