Jan
27
2007
This week I experimented with DRBD (Distributed Replicated Block Device) which is “a block device which is designed to build high availability clusters. This is done by mirroring a whole block device via (a dedicated) network. You could see it as a network raid-1.”
DRBD can be used for build a “poor man’s SAN”, a RAID [...]
Tags: hardware, linux, postgresql, ubuntu
Jan
20
2007
This description of my “A/B technique for web application deployment” was transcribed from audio, so it less tight, more verbose than my normal prose. I chose to post it in rough form, rather than leave it on the “back burner” until an unknown future date when I have time to rewrite it. I first explained [...]
Tags: concurrency, java, php, programming, rails, sysadmin, www
Jan
19
2007
I’m enjoying my stay this weekend, but the Big Cedar Resort uses click tracking software, which is unethical and unnecessary. Some details of this “superclick” tracking system are on nerdblog and swiK. There is much discussion of the system on SlashDot.
My take on this is that “don’t be evil” is good policy, and not only [...]
Tags: commentary
Jan
14
2007
I apologize for the site downtime today, to my huge audience of loyal readers (er… both of you). It turns out that my new ISP, TextDrive, has been having a lot of downtime on the shared hosting machine my sites are on… frequent freezes/crashes, exacerbated by long delays in noticing and recovering. Apparently it is [...]
Tags: www
Jan
09
2007
iPhone: Wow
It’s a phone. It’s a PDA. It’s an iPod. It’s a widescreen video iPod. It has zero physical buttons, rather the whole front is a multi-touch-screen. I’ll leave the rest of the raving to the many other sites doing a great job of that.
The real innovation of this new device is [...]
Tags: audio, commentary, video, wireless
Jan
05
2007
Here is a simple piece of software I wrote to help my children practice basic arithmetic facts. Of course there are no doubt already a thousand or more similar programs out there; but in a few minutes of searching I didn’t find one that did quite what I wanted. I ended up tinkering with [...]
Tags: children, delphi, downloads