Apr 30, 2009
At this year's Efficient Data Center Summit, held April 1st 2009 at Google's Mountain View, CA campus, Ben Jai, Google Server Platform Architect, displayed one of the servers they deploy in all of their global datacenters:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J139Aelaf0g&hl=de&fs=1]
While there probably are many other well-known ISPs that use custom-built servers, I find it interesting that Google goes as far as to add a 12V battery to every server to replace the traditional large UPS systems normally used in datacenters.
Apr 29, 2009
This statement corrects all the comment count in WP posts by querying every posts actual comments:
UPDATE wp_posts p SET p.comment_count = (
SELECT count(*) FROM wp_comments
WHERE comment_post_id = p.id AND
comment_approved = 1 );
Apr 29, 2009
This statement corrects all the comment count in WP posts by querying every posts actual comments:
UPDATE wp_posts p SET p.comment_count = (
SELECT count(*) FROM wp_comments
WHERE comment_post_id = p.id AND
comment_approved = 1 );
Apr 20, 2009
[www.techcrunch.com/2009/04/1...](http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/04/15/apple-your-mighty-mouse-sucks-please-fix...)
The Mighty Mouse is in my opinion the proof that even great hardware manufacturers have product failures.
Apr 14, 2009
All those sick days (of the last three weeks, I've spent two in bed) had one advantage: I had time to tackle some things.
One of those things was consolidating my old Serendipity blog and the current one, running on Drupal, into one Wordpress blog. I wanted to switch from Drupal to Wordpress because WP is more focused on blogging and there are some features (e.g. trackbacks, remote blogging via XML-RPC) that Drupal doesn't do as well.
It took me about 12 hours of Perl hacking to write a converter that reads posts and comments from a source database (Drupal or S9Y) and writes them into a destination database (WP). So, all posts since 2004 including their comments should have made their way into the new blog!
Let's see if the new possibilities help me in writing posts in shorter intervals. Of course, that's what I've been telling myself for weeks now. ;-)
Apr 12, 2009
[feedproxy.google.com/~r/oreill...](http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/oreilly/radar/atom/~3/YpcjizorWqo/tweenbots-cu...)
Sometimes, cute and simple trumps expensive and sophisticated.
I’d like to have this experiment myself. Those robots are just too cute.
Apr 7, 2009
On Friday the FriendFeed founders Bret Taylor and Paul Buchheit debuted a radical redesign of the product for about 15 journalists, technologists, and Robert Scoble.
Steve Gillmor on TechCrunch
Apr 6, 2009
Installed my first NAS system over the weekend. The Buffalo Linkstation Live 1TB seems nice, it even comes with TimeMachine support. WiFi instead of USB seems sluggish, though.
Apr 6, 2009
From time to time, there are some random things I'd like to point my friends to. So far, I've either posted them on Twitter or in a short entry on my blog here.
A few days ago, I took a look at Tumblr and decided to start my own seperate tumblelog. That way, I can focus my blog here on the more elaborate entries.
So, if you're so inclined, take a look and subscribe to the feed of Associative Disarray. It should be fun!
Apr 6, 2009
Communication is (finally) one of my most important topics at work. Steve Roesler recommends to “add these four thoughts to your leadership communication kit”, and I can’t emphasize his points enough:
- Never assume that anyone knows anything.
- The larger the group, the more attention needs to be given to communicating.
- When left in the dark, people will fantasize their own reality. Do you want their fantasy to trump your reality?
- Effective leaders are obsessed with accurate, frequent communication.
Apr 6, 2009
You're developing a new web application? You want it to run fast?
The Highscalability Blog tells you what not to do.
Apr 6, 2009
A train station is where the train stops. A bus station is where the bus stops. On my office desk, I have a work station..
Unknown
Apr 5, 2009
Mit Twitter erreicht man die wichtigen Multiplikatoren im Internet. Diejenigen, die das Web gestalten statt nur mitzulesen.
Manager-Magazin: Ratlos, planlos, kein Interesse
Apr 5, 2009
A train station is where the train stops. A bus station is where the bus stops. On my office desk, I have a work station..
Unknown
Apr 5, 2009
Mit Twitter erreicht man die wichtigen Multiplikatoren im Internet. Diejenigen, die das Web gestalten statt nur mitzulesen.
Manager-Magazin: Ratlos, planlos, kein Interesse
Apr 4, 2009
You rush a miracle man, you get rotten miracles.
Miracle Max, “The Princess Bride”
Apr 4, 2009
Yep, that’s me.
Apr 3, 2009
An Animation telling the fairytale “Little Red Riding Hood”. Inspired by Röyksopps “Remind me”.
Feb 24, 2009
For a long time now, many websites providing a service to Twitter users had to use those users' credentials to get access to their profile, messages or to post tweets in their name. For example, I've given my credentials to TwitPic, Twitterfeed, Remember the Milk and Skitch.
Many people are quick to give away their username and password -- and as many learn the hard way why that's a bad idea. When Twply, a service emailing your "@name" replies, first promised "Your password is safe with us. No worries." and then sold on eBay for $1200 after one day, a lot of people that had given up their username and password there were left wondering what the new owner would do with those credentials.
In software development, the underlying structures of best practices are called "patterns". Using one's username and password on a service to get access to another service has many bad implications and is therefore called an "antipattern", a practice that should be discouraged.
Finally now, the Twitter crew has done its homework and is testing OAuth, a protocol to give one service access to another service in your name without revealing your password.
I'm sure that this move will make even more Twitter support services appear, and now you don't have to do a multi-day due diligence period until you gather the courage to enter your credentials outside of Twitter any more.
Feb 19, 2009
My birthday cake, made by Carolin with 39 candles and a hand-drawn Tauren.
Feb 14, 2009
Since Rackspace Hosting is running out of floor space in their primary data center, they had to decide between building a new location and to buy or lease existing data center space.
As Data Center Knowledge reports, they chose leasing:
The company considered building additional data center space in its new headquarters facility in a former shopping center in San Antonio, but later indicated that it believed it could save money by buying or leasing instead.
Finally, the company decided on expanding by leasing a data center in Auburn, Virginia, because this "will enable it to serve customer demand more quickly and cost effectively than if Rackspace built its own facility".
Like after the first dot com bubble, there's unused data center space at many places because companies decided (and had to money) to build big. In the current economic situation, though, it seems wise to buy or lease that existing space instead of incurring huge new building costs.
Feb 6, 2009
Hosting provider Liquid Web (Michigan, USA) has been building a new data center to provide 50,000 square feet of data center space and additional office space. Infrastructure director Chris Strandt and marketing director Travis Stoliker give a short look into the facilities:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwHzK6xxQ3I&hl=de&fs=1]
Nothing shocking when you're used to our data center. I'm curious if my employer will let us do a short walk-through when we get a new one somedays.
(via Data Center Knowledge)
Feb 2, 2009
We are able to experience only the three spatial dimensions and often consider time as the fourth one, even if we can't imagine a fourth coordinate axis perpendicular to the other three.
How we can use our grasp on those first four dimensions to extrapolate to up to ten dimensions is explained in this video:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvgwR9ERCBo&hl=de&fs=1]
If you've still got some brain juice left on a sunday evening, enjoy!
And if your head doesn't spin after watching it, visit the corresponding blog Imagining the Tenth Dimension.
Jan 28, 2009
I tried so many email applications, but none could actually beat the productivity I operate my GMail account with the original web interface. My only gripe has been so far that I wasn't able to access my email when there was no internet connection. On the train to and from work, for example.
It's not that Google didn't have the tools to solve that problem. Google Gears is available quite some time and I use it extensively with Mindmeister.
Today I found on the official GMail blog that the Google engineers really are working on an offline mode for GMail. It's still work in progress and only available over the labs menu. This feature enables you to use GMail offline, and it also offers a "flaky connection mode" where it uses the local cache but tries to synchronize in the background.
Who needs a desktop application with internet connection when you can get the internet on your desktop?
