Over at Solfo I play sysadmin in between being a programmer and DBA. Between real hardware, xen boxes and network equipment we have a few dozen devices. One of the really neat tools we use for monitoring is Munin. It's (yet another) tool to graph system stats and anything else you can write a plugin for.

One of the default plugins is memory use. In this graph you can see the memory usage for one of our application servers. Last week we changed some configuration so the application won't grow to eat a ton of memory every few hours.

Other similar tools are Cacti and Ganglia. I've played with both but they didn't hook me like Munin did. I never really liked …

Over at Solfo I play sysadmin in between being a programmer and DBA. Between real hardware, xen boxes and network equipment we have a few dozen devices. One of the really neat tools we use for monitoring is Munin. It's (yet another) tool to graph system stats and anything else you can write a plugin for.

One of the default plugins is memory use. In this graph you can see the memory usage for one of our application servers. Last week we changed some configuration so the application won't grow to eat a ton of memory every few hours.

Other similar tools are Cacti and Ganglia. I've played with both but they didn't hook me like Munin did. I never really liked …

Ever since we switched out build process from Java 1.4 to Java 5 (1.5.0_09) we have seen FindBugs crash with an OutOfMemoryError when started from ant. The whole thing is running under RedHat Enterprise Linux 4. The output is always the same:

[findbugs] Running FindBugs...
[findbugs] Exception in thread "CompilerThread0" java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: requested 134217736 bytes for Chunk::new. Out of swap space?

Our first attempts to increase the heap size with the -Xmx VM parameter did not help. We suspected the newer FindBugs release we had installed roughly at the same time, but this turned out to be wrong, because newer and older versions showed the same behaviour.

Armed with the fresh knowledge about the SAP Memory Analyzer just learned at jax.07 I …

Ever since we switched out build process from Java 1.4 to Java 5 (1.5.0_09) we have seen FindBugs crash with an OutOfMemoryError when started from ant. The whole thing is running under RedHat Enterprise Linux 4. The output is always the same:

[findbugs] Running FindBugs...
[findbugs] Exception in thread "CompilerThread0" java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: requested 134217736 bytes for Chunk::new. Out of swap space?

Our first attempts to increase the heap size with the -Xmx VM parameter did not help. We suspected the newer FindBugs release we had installed roughly at the same time, but this turned out to be wrong, because newer and older versions showed the same behaviour.

Armed with the fresh knowledge about the SAP Memory Analyzer just learned at jax.07 I …

Nokia has been making great strides in developing a family of small, pocket sized multimedia devices.  There's the Nokia N800 wi-fi enabled Internet Tablet as well as the recent N95 multimedia phone (though not yet available in the US.)  I wouldn't quite call them computers yet --at least until they add a proper keyboard, but they are interesting multi-function devices.

Nokia recently launched the quite humorous www.greatpockets.com web site, which features a mythical Saville Row tailor Henry Needle & Sons who designs men's and women's clothing with, ah, great big pockets in which they can load all their bulky …

MySQL Users Conference was a great success.
Oh, screw that.
I don't actually think it was. I just keep hearing this sentence in announcements and press-releases year after year and my structure-seeking brain classified the sentence as a set phrase. But the conference was okay. Good tracks, decent food, a lot of new engineers from our new and numerous storage engine building partners. I don't know if it was good value for the money, since I didn't have pay a dime - I was a speaker, and the conference organizers paid the admission fee for me, while the company covered the expenses. But it certainly was a good use of time.

I've had a very good day today.
I don't stop and think and say that to myself very often.

Despite all the driving, sitting, bad spicy food and me voluntarily suffering while pretending I can be a vegetarian, I feel that it was a day worth to live.

In the morning we had to drive over 90 miles to Linuxfest Northwest 2007 and despite long distance and apparent unimportance of the conference it was just the right kind of American experience I like to have.

People were coming there with their kids to listen to talks about Zope and Python and find out more about basics of the General Public License. Presenters whose profile seemed to be too high for this conference, like BrianA and BradFitz seemed to be at home and at ease. Seeing these two kinds together is part of the American society I've always been pleased with.

Nothing …

Domas Mituzas (who works for MySQL AB and works with Wikipedia) has published a workbook (pdf) about about the design and architecture of Wikipedia.

Expect to see lots of common infrastructure tools used in common across sites like Livejournal, Digg, etc.

Basically, everyone is using about the same core technology:

Started as Perl CGI script running on single server in 2001, site has grown into distributed platform, containing multiple technologies, all of them open. The principle of openness forced all operation to use free & open-source software only. Having commercial alterna- tives out of question, Wikipedia had the challenging task to build efficient platform of freely available components.