Posted by mark.
Results > Posts Filed Under > Code
May
27
Posted by mark.
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 and several weeks of implementation. When we launched this weekend I was cautiously optimistic when I saw the load drop on the servers. And now …
Mar
23
Posted by mark.
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 Google I’d probably care, but Google has polite crawlers and unlike Google, Live search only sends me about 2% of my total search traffic.
Mar
15
Posted by mark.
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 itself into oblivion. It’s a munin bug that’s easily fixed.
If you run netstat and get something like this:
netstat -s|grep passive
3339672 passive connection openings
7574 passive connections …
Mar
11
Posted by mark.
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 other kids had graduated to Ducati’s.
But by and by I discovered that ModPerl kicks Java’s ass as far as performance goes and in fact loosely …
Mar
6
Dec
25
Posted by mark.
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 cash.
The gmail bug was a cross site request forgery exploit. The attack is incredibly simple. If a user is authenticated to a website, an attacker …
Dec
23
Posted by mark.
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 picked up a book on the top 10 mistakes leaders make. Staring at me as I flipped open chapter 5 was confirmation that I wasn’t …
Oct
1
Posted by mark.
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 incredibly smart algo – I tried it on a Google Analytics graph and it shrunk the graph without breaking the line while maintaining the text …
Sep
24
Posted by mark.
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 on a live box. In the time that it took ViM to delete the file and rewrite it to disk during the save operation (about …
Aug
16
Posted by mark.
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.