MarkMaunder dot com

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

Why Free?

A great article on wired about the free web economy. Interesting quote: “Anything you can consistently convert to cash is a form of currency itself, and Google plays the role of central banker for these new economies.”

March 14, 2008 | Economics | No comments

I'm so dumb

Don’t ever leave a website that starts to get any kind of traffic on the joke that calls itself GoDaddy. As a registrar they’re not bad but their DNS tool is very broken. I won’t bore you with tales of my screaming match at a manager there at 2am when a simple A record IP […]

March 11, 2008 | Rants | 1 comment

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 […]

March 11, 2008 | Code | No comments

Great Movie and Lawrence

If your’e looking for a great crime movie with an excellent script and brilliant actors at the top of their game, go rent “The Brave One”. There are so many great lines in this movie, but I think the D.H. Lawrence quote got me: “The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic – and a […]

March 10, 2008 | Art | No comments

Buffet

CNBC had a 1 hour segment this evening with a collection of Buffet interviews. My favorite quote: “On Wall St we get the innovators then the imitators and then the swarming incompetents.” Buffet is a master at distilling an entire thesis into a sentence.

March 9, 2008 | People I Admire | No comments

Slow lighttpd on Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Server with 200+ hits/sec?

aaaah you say. Finally, after many a Google search finally I found someone who understands my pain. I know you’re in a rush and I can’t stand people who love the sound of their typing either, so here’s how you fix this little problem. If you have a brand new super fast server and a […]

March 9, 2008 | lighttpd | No comments

Things that piss me off about OS X

Whenever I double click on text in a terminal when ssh’ing to another box it either selects a single word or the whole line – it doesn’t select just the text I want it to select. Linux does, windows does, why the hell can’t OS X? When I select text in a terminal I have […]

March 7, 2008 | Why Apple rocks but .. not | 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.