MarkMaunder dot com

Facebook friends not real friends?

An article on techmeme today talking about a judge in the UK ruling that FB friends are real friends. It reminds me that many people use social networks in many different ways. My 16 year old nephew has over 6,000 friends on myspace and he’s never met most of them. I have about 100 friends […]

March 28, 2008 | SocialSchmocial | No comments

Aground

[warning: non-geeky personal blog entry for benefit of extended family] A few weeks ago mum and dad were sailing their boat up an inlet in a group of islands called the Andamans. (They’re about halfway between India and Thailand and belong to India) They ran aground on a coral reef on a spring tide thanks […]

March 27, 2008 | Family | 1 comment

Linux is Obsolete!

A lame video on techcrunch today inspired me to go hunting for the original argument between Linus Torvalds and (Professor) Andy Tanenbaum and here it is. Titled Linux is Obsolete, it’s a post by the author of Minix in 1992 telling Linus he’s just created an obsolete OS that’s running on obsolete hardware (the 386) […]

March 26, 2008 | Technology | No comments

Guy's house cleaned out by ad on Craigslist

This is too much. A guy in Jacksonville, Oregon had his house cleaned out thanks to a malicious ad placed on Craigslist. Someone posted an ad saying that the house had been declared abandoned and all the belongings including a horse were free to good homes. So the entire neighborhood rocked up and started carting […]

March 25, 2008 | Crazy | No comments

Obamagirl's latest

Nice touch getting Bill to play the sax. 🙂 [obamagirl video below] And in case you haven’t seen it, check out Hillary’s latest faux pas on youtube today. And now I need to go flagellate myself for an hour for violating my not-blogging-about-politics rule.

March 25, 2008 | Startups | No comments

Anycasting anyone?

[Thanks Sam for the idea for this entry] Ever heard of IP Anycasting? Thanks to my recent change from godaddy (frowny face and no link) to dnsmadeeasy (happy face and they get a link) I’m now using a DNS provider that provides anycasting. What is it and should you care? IP Anycasting is assigning the […]

March 24, 2008 | Startups, Technology | 1 comment

Very high performance web servers

Have you ever tried to get Apache to handle 10,000 concurrent connections? For example, you have a very busy website and you enable keepalive on your web server. Then you set the timeout to something high like 300 seconds for ridiculously slow clients (sounds crazy but I think that’s Apache’s default). All of a sudden […]

March 23, 2008 | Scaling | No comments

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 […]

March 23, 2008 | Code | No comments

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 […]

March 15, 2008 | Code | 3 comments

Sergio and Muse

My good friend Sergio who is an extremely accomplished musician and who morphed himself from a spectacular bassist to spectacular drummer and can put most lead guiarists to shame once told me that Muse is the best rock band that has ever existed. Personally I don’t have the balls or the knowledge to make far […]

March 14, 2008 | Music | No comments

My name is Mark Maunder. I've been blogging since around 2003 when I started on Movable Type and ended up on WordPress which is what I use to publish today. With my wife Kerry, I'm the co-founder of Wordfence which protects over 5 million WordPress sites from hackers and is run by a talented team of 36 people. I'm an instrument rated pilot and I fly a Cessna 206 along with a 1964 Cessna 172 in the Pacific Northwest and Colorado. I'm originally from Cape Town, South Africa but live in the US these days. I code in a bunch of languages and am quite excited about our emerging AI overlords and how they're going to be putting us to work for them.