Blue Ball Machine Animation

A very cool piece of GIF animation titled Blue Ball Machine. I found it through Kynan's blog.

A healthy way to attend conference

Small meetings are typically boring and kinda unhealthy as you just sit and wait for something interesting to come up. Now there is a healthy way to have a conference with conference bike.

George Hotz unlock iPhone

Yesterday, at the MySQL Camp II, I heard conversations about George Hotz, a 17 year old New Jersey resident, who has successfully hacked and unlocked iPhone so it can be used on any GSM network. Hotz has now published the meticulous and complex details on his blog. He put the world's second unlocked iPhone on eBay. When the amount of bids got into millions, he apparently considered them fraudulent and canceled the bids. George Hotz ended up trading his iPhone for a frigging cool Nissan 350z and 3 8GB iPhones.

LAX: Los Angeles International Airport Passengers stuck because of NIC

How much havoc could a single failed NIC cause? A lot.

More than 20,000 passengers at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) were stuck in planes and on airport due to a failed NIC.

Memcached and Fotolog

Memcached has been working great for Fotolog for quite some time now. Today I found a quote by our CTO on memcached site.

"I have a new memcached user to add to your list: we here at Fotolog, the world's largest photo blogging community, now use it and we love it. I just rolled our first code to use it into production today and it has been a lifesaver. I can't wait to start using it in places where we had been relying on Berkeley databases to offload some database work. We are not some wimpy million page a day site, either. Fotolog is a billion+ pages/month site (35 to 40 million views/day is pretty typical for us). We had recently overcome some significant DB-related performance issues which allowed our site traffic to explode, and it started to bog down again under the heavy traffic load (getting back up towards 10 seconds for a page to load sometimes during the peak periods). The servers were churning away each recreating a list every time when it could easily be shared in the same form for at least 5 or 10 minutes. So we introduced memcache, creating a distributed 30-server cluster with 4 gigs available in total and made a very minor code mod to use memcache, and our peak period load times dropped back down to the 2 second or so range. It has allowed for continued growth and incredible efficiency. I can't say when I've ever been so pleased with something that worked so simply."

Textpad and WinSCP: Two must have tools for Windows

On every Windows computer I use, I like to have WinSCP and Textpad installed. They both are great pieces of free software.