Building simplicidade.org: notes, projects, and occasional rants

Notes

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One of the best things about kids...

... it's Lego. Bought a bunch of them at the online store, but one of the ones I wanted apparently is not available in Portugal. Hey, pfig, can you check out around your town for this and send it to me? Thanks :). Update: I was able to order it from the online Lego shop! Strange, because last week I couldn't but yesterday it worked, at least they accepted my order.

Good stuff coming to a Kernel near you.

Yesterday, Zack Brown (of kernel-traffic fame) posted a patch to run any Linux syscall asynchronously. One of the problems with people doing high-performance event-driven network programming like Lighttpd, Perlbal, or DJabberd was that some syscalls block, and there wasn't a good clean way to do it. One of them mentioned regularly is stat. For kicks, Lighttpd has a patch to move stat to a fcgi app... Good news is that Linus liked it.

RedHat and the RHN Satellite Server

Just saw that RedHat will release RHN Satellite Server source code. Well, too late. I was a more or less happy customer of RHEL for 2 years, with 4 licenses of RHES3. The distribution was rock solid, but the RHN was a mess, rarely worked the way it was supposed to, updating only some of my servers, and the performance was painfully slow. I dropped RHEL and moved over to CentOS, not because of price (I believe they should be payed by their services), but because the software update service was better, '''way''' better than RHN.

Top 3 tools for MySQL

At the moment, my top 3 tools to tune MySQL are: mysqlreport: a friendly report about the status of your MySQL server (or SHOW STATUS for real persons);innotop: a top-like program to see what's going on with your MySQL server (works with multiple servers);mysqlsla: analyses MySQL statement logs (including slow queries).Other tools are also useful sometimes: Duplicate Index Checker: checks your indexes to see if you have multiple indexes covering the same information, in the same order;MySQL Query Profiler: reports on what work MySQL will have to do for a given batch of queries.

Twitter

Twitter.com is becoming a world wide chat-room or IRC channel, where two or three people have a conversation twitting their messages. Crazy. Get a room already!

JQuery Love

I'm not a Javascript guru, I just dabble a bit, and most of the time I would only reuse stuff from other persons. Until I spent a weekend with JQuery. I needed a small JS lib to do some stuff in a application I'm working on. Basic stuff, like edit in place, building HTML live and adding more options to forms. After looking at the tutorials and "how it works"-kind of pages, I started to try it out.

JSF renamed

Yay! The Jabber Software Foundation is now the XMPP Standards Foundation. I think this is great news. Of interest: recently in a mailing list I subscribe to, there was an impromptu exchange of instant messaging addresses. I was very very happy to see that the majority had a Jabber address, mainly using GTalk service. This was not a geek list, by the way.

MacFUSE, by Google

Awesome news: Today Google is releasing MacFUSE, an open-source Mac port of the FUSE mechanism for Linux. Like FUSE, it enables developers to implement a fully functional file system in a user-space program. And since it aims to be API-compliant with the original FUSE (Filesystem in USErspace) for Linux, it makes many existing FUSE file systems readily usable on Mac OS X. The core of MacFUSE consists of a dynamically loadable kernel extension.

Jobs keynote: $60M per minute

With the 100 minute Apple keynote where the iPhone was introduce, Apple market capitalization raise $6B. Thats sixty-million dollars per minute right there. This and much more info on this post.

Apple TV

When I first saw the presentation of this last year, I was not terrible impressed. But I've been looking for a device that would connect to the TV and allow me to play XVid and DivX files. I would upload the files via ethernet or wifi and I would have a small interface on the TV to play them. Right now, the Apple TV does most of what I want. I don't expect support for DivX or XVid anytime soon, so we will need to do some transcoding, but as long as we can do it, I think I found my box.