http://markmaunder.com Thu, 04 Mar 2010 19:18:03 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en This technique is great if you have no customers from countryX but are being targeted by a DoS, unwanted crawlers, bots, scrapers and other baddies. Please don't use this to discriminate against less profitable countries. The web should be open for all. Thanks. If you're not already using Nginx, you should ... http://markmaunder.com/2010/how-to-limit-website-visitor-bandwidth-by-country/ Rolling Stone is running an article about the US pig farming industry. The opening paragraph is a beauty! Smithfield Foods, the largest and most profitable pork processor in the world, killed 27 million hogs last year. That's a number worth considering. A slaughter-weight hog is fifty percent heavier than a person. ... http://markmaunder.com/2010/great-piece-of-writing-from-rolling-stone/ Having coffee at 4am after an all-nighter with my co-founder and wife a few days ago we came up with a rather obvious but interesting concept. I'll call it The Sleep Test. Unless your business earns revenue while you are sleeping, it won't scale. If you're an I.T. consultant or lawyer selling ... http://markmaunder.com/2010/does-your-startup-pass-the-sleep-test/ Just caught up with a good friend of mine who's a tech geek and bachelor and needed some cooking advice. I've watched bachelor friends give themselves scurvy by getting home and ordering pizza every night. Being a tech geek makes it worse. Your $badnessOfDiet += $levelOfAlphaGeek**3 So my wife put together the ... http://markmaunder.com/2010/basic-cooking-for-geeks/ Update: The Fabulis story had legs like I've never seen before. When I posted it to Hacker News it shot to number 1 in about 3 minutes and stayed there for 6 to 8 hours. A few hours later Robin Wauters from Techcrunch picked up on the story and since ... http://markmaunder.com/2010/if-your-bank-doesnt-like-your-startups-blog-they-may-freeze-your-funds/ This morning I called in to C-SPAN's Washington Journal to answer the question "Is it fair that the Obama administration has been called anti-business". To give you some context, I consider myself a democrat and I voted for Obama (and attended the rallies, etc) I've been ruminating over the issue for ... http://markmaunder.com/2010/how-a-job-is-created/ At 09:28 on the morning of September 11, 2001, a Lebanese born engineering student named Ziad Jarrah and three "muscle" hijackers started moving the passengers of flight 93 to the rear of the plane and assaulting the cockpit of flight 93.  Flights 11 and 175 had already crashed into the world ... http://markmaunder.com/2009/crowdsourcing-a-solution-to-air-terrorism/ There has been some recent confusion about how much memory you need in a web server to handle a huge number of concurrent requests. I also made a performance claim on the STS list that got me an unusual number of private emails. Here's how you run a highly concurrent website ... http://markmaunder.com/2009/how-to-handle-1000s-of-concurrent-users-on-a-360mb-vps/ My neighbor John Winkler just emailed this to me. He took this while I was fly fishing off our dock on Lake Sammamish earlier this year. http://markmaunder.com/2009/fly-fishing-on-lake-samm/ About a year ago I received two old servers from Snapvine my former neighbors (now acquired by Whitepages). Snapvine got them from another startup in Seattle, I don't recall which. I named them Rex1 and Rex2 and put them to work immediately. The graph below shows the disk activity during ... http://markmaunder.com/2009/a-legend-just-died/