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Category Archives: Code

What a successful release looks like

I thought I’d share a little moment I had recently. We rolled out a new version of Feedjit a few days ago. Nothing changed on the user interface – so no new user features. It was mostly performance enhancements on the back-end servers.
The new code was the results of many weeks of research and testing [...]

The irrelevance of microsoft’s search

I put some cross-cluster traffic throttling in place yesterday using memcached – which rocks btw. In the last 12 hours I’ve blocked three sources – two were rogue crawlers from broadband ISP’s. The other was MSN’s live search crawler which is requesting more than 1 page per second sustained over 30 seconds. If it was [...]

How to fix munin’s netstat passive connections increasing constantly

Another thing I googled until I was all googled out and couldn’t find an answer, so for future explorers who pass by here, here’s the fix…
If you’re running munin and you suddenly notice the number of netstat passive connections is constantly increasing in a linear fashion, rest assured it’s not your server that’s busy beating [...]

Why I’m so glad I didn’t use Rails

I’ve been uncool for some time now. In 2000 when Java was really beginning to kick ass I grabbed a Java book and wrote some code. And I decided I was getting stuff done faster in Perl so I stuck with it. I felt like a dork who was playing with his bigwheels while the [...]

QOTD

From the nginx docs under Known Problems:
3. Nginx may laugh at your Perl code and hit on your girlfriend.

Avoiding cross site request forgery in your web apps

Google recently fixed a glaring vulnerability in gmail that allows an attacker to forward copies of all or some of your email to themselves by adding a filter to your gmail account. But not before someone lost their domain name to an attacker who then proceeded to try to sell it back to them for [...]

The importance of not knowing what isn’t possible

A Microsoft quote from an NY Times article I’ve already cited has been bugging the crap out of me. It bugged me when I first blogged about this article and it bugged me as I wandered around B&N last night doing the last of my xmass shopping. I wound up in the management section and [...]

Smart Image Resizing – Liquid Rescale

Phil Bogle wrote recently about an awesome image resizing algorithm. I found out via a welsh view what happened to it. It’s been launched as a website called RSizr.com and is also available as a Gimp plugin called Liquid Rescale. It’s really really cool to see this amazing algo take the open source route.
It’s an [...]

The perils of high traffic

I have this little 64 bit dual core opteron that I’m busy torturing with way more traffic than it’s creators intended. I sometimes edit code on my live servers – only when I’m sure it’s not going to break anything and only when I’m wide-awake and fully caffeinated.  Today I tried to edit a file [...]

Live arrival/departure info for your blog

I started work on this at 4pm and it’s now 2am. It’s called FEEDJIT and it’s a little experiment. If you like it go ahead and install it. A few minutes after I post this it should be in the sidebar of this blog.
Mark.